Cockroft and Walton may have been the first to split the atom, but if all goes according to plan this week, I'LL be the last.

Some people, when they get frustrated with things, say "I wish I could just die." But they've got it backwards.

You wish that the other person would just die. Same effect on the problem, but you're still there. I'm at a bit of a loss as to how people could misunderstand the application process.

Stuff from the last several weeks:

• Yumpin' Yiminy appears to have some sort of dementia, possibly Alzheimers. One day in three or four he forgets to unlock a major door for employees at the site. He remembers to take the chain off of it, but not to take off the deadbolt. He claims he does, but I wouldn't be getting all the complaints about it if that was the case, would I? The log also shows the people on the outside of the door swiping their cards over and over and unable to get in.

• In addition, he asks me the same questions over and over on successive days, without any indication that we've had a carbon copy of the conversation previously. Here's one: "Question. I hear on the radio that people say 10-0. What does it mean?" "It means they're asking for a radio check. A response of 10-1 from Operations means they have a poor signal, and a response of 10-2 means it's clear." Follow-up: "Ah. Because I don't have that code in my list." "That's because the list (printed in the back of our notebooks) is a generic North American police list of ten codes. We only use a few of those. Our actual list is printed in the newsletter you get with your pay statement." I get this, on average, every three days. Down to the exact wording.

• In a similar vein, he once found some of our daily reports in an office. But he's also found them in the HR department. Note that I said once. So the repeating question is "Question. I found our reports in two place. Over there (waves arm in vaguely the right direction) and over there (waves arm to indicate what seems to be straight up, which is wrong. I might add that these arm wavings happen every time too). Why is that?" "That's because our reports are filed in HR, but the guy who actually reads them has an office elsewhere. So he probably just had a few over there that he hadn't put back yet. I get this question at roughly the same frequency I get the other one, but usually on different nights. It's a sure sign that he's going to do something odd during his shift when I get both questions on the same night.

• Despite the nagging feeling that I require medical attention, I continued to leave the symptoms of schizophrenia untreated after the management of Pixar awarded me with yet another raise for the facility and inventiveness with which I anthropomorphize inanimate objects.

• I met a woman on the SkyTrain (and on the bus after that) one night that started up a conversation concerning the pseudomagical (my choice of word) properties of certain fruit-based drinks. She had some sort of concoction made from blueberries and, I think, asparagus that she said saved her life. She was depressed, unable to even get out of bed following some sort of injury she said. She did the physio, had the operations, and took the prescribed drugs. Nothing helped. Until someone turned her on to "alternative" medicine. (I should hasten to point out that I'm totally uninterested in hearing someone tell me about alternative medicine. It's less about the hearing of some unlikely miraculous results that bugs me, and more about people raving about the results of anything that hasn't been verified in clinical trials.) A week of drinking this stuff and she was out of bed and getting her life back together. That's wonderful. The conversation, except for the magical fruit juice was relatively normal. Then she told me about the medical imaging and treatment system than some guy had invented back in the 1930's that was more precise than anything they have even today (according to her, it could see smaller particles than even physicists admitted exist) and would cure people of cancer. The inventor, she went on to say, we killed by the American Medical Association. Even today, the fragments of his notes that still exist seem to promise technology that could cure practically any medical condition. She wrote down a website (from memory!) that I'm trying to find, but I'm defeated by the sheer volume of paper laying around my desk. I'm guessing that I put it aside so I wouldn't lose it and could post it in the blog, but I have no idea where that place of safety would be. So screw it. And no, before you ask, she didn't grope me in the elevator.

• I've trained a guy to do weekend afternoon shifts at the site. He's crazy. He doesn't understand the concept of a magnetic card (although we use a fob). Watching him hold it against various surfaces (rarely the right ones) was enough to make me despair.
• He's Zoroastrian. He hates all things Islamic. This came out during the training shift, where he would refer to, I think, mullahs as "diaper-wearing devil-beared evil murderers". All without pausing in his narrative of whatever he was talking about. The guard he relieves is Muslim. So far, I've heard of no problems in that area.
• On his first shift alone, he brought a camera to work and took pictures of the inside of the site. That includes of employees and having employees take pictures of him against various backgrounds. That was fun to explain to the client, since they're currently frantically paranoid about employees leaving and taking confidential and proprietary information to the competition. There are lawsuits out against employees for doing just that, and now they hear about someone taking pictures?
• He refuses to wear his uniform. He'll wear the shirt and pants, but not the jacket. He won't carry a notebook. He wears a blue derby from the 1950's, and plans to sew a company patch on it. I've instructed him otherwise, but I know from sureptitious investigation that he just keeps on doing it.
• He doesn't like to touch things, so he wears a pair of white cotton gloves. This, combined with the loose grey vest he affects to wear, kind of makes him look like the shifty older bellhop in some sweaty country in an Indiana Jones movie.
• He doesn't patrol, but says he does. I thought at first that maybe he'd forgotten his training, but when I showed up during his shift and asked him to convey me around, he knew the place well enough. He's just not doing it.
• He called me up at 2200 one Saturday (the same one I had him tour me around the site) to describe his sister's daughter to me. He told me about her education, what she does, that she's intelligent and very good, et cetera. This went on for a considerable length of time. He finally said "If you like what you've heard, I can buy you a five or ten dollar phone card from 7-11 and you could give her a call in Tehran." Yeah, let me jump all over that action.

• Speaking of which, the Philippino couple that clean the second floor of my site have been talking about their daughter coming to Canada. They're nice people, and have invited me out to various parties over the months they've known me. Usually ones when I'm working, but it's the thought that counts. Anyway, the mother especially has been mentioning this daughter with increasing frequency, promising that once she's here I'll meet here. I started to get an uneasy feeling about this when they started bringing in pictures of her, professionally done pictures of a woman that could be a professional model. I'm all for immigration, but I don't think I want to be involved as an anchor point.

• My NationStates country managed to be #1 for "Most out of control youth" out of some 119, 503 nations. A dubious honour, but once again I was flooded by fan mail. This happens on occasion, sometimes from people asking how to get a particular rating in a category, or telling me how awesome I am, or inviting me to their region. That last type is mostly generic, but I often get them personally addressed with particulars about my description in them, often mispelled, so they seem to be individually written. I think I've got some street cred because I've been playing so long, my population is easily within the top 100, and possibly much closer to #1 than that. Check out my nation.

• The client has asked me to remove Yumpin' Yiminy from the site. Far too many complaints about that door, and a few about him being "kind of creepy". I passed that on to Cookie Monster, and he said the client has to talk to him directly about it (which the client won't, since they consider him to be an ineffectual idiot) or else we could be hit with a discrimination suit. "Why" I asked, "because he's from Czechoslovakia?" There was a pause, then "Yeah, maybe because of that." Say WHAT?! That was weeks ago, and there's been no response from Cookie Monster, or any indication he's looked into the matter. I hate him.

You know, this point format just isn't doing it for me. So I'm going to knock it off.

This past Friday, I saw a fair number of police cars around my site. Not actually at my building, but at the ones across the street. They were doing fairly worrying things like zooming around with the lights flashing but not running the siren. Shortly thereafter I got a call from South Park Goth Kid.

"Hey, have you seen any police around the site?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact. What's going on?"

"I don't know, I was walking around and suddenly I was told to FREEZE. I looked and there was a cop with a big dog. He told me not to move because of the dog, then when he went past he told me to leave the area. So I'm coming back to your building."

"Did you ask him what was going on?"

"No, he kept going and went around a corner."

And that, my friends, was the end of it as far as that guard was concerned. Want to know what happened?

Some guy with a gun was being chased by the police. He eventually came to our little area and apparently smashed open a door on one of the buildings (not mine) in a bid for a place to hide, but doesn't appear to have actually entered. The police never caught the guy, but apparently flushed him out and away from our area.

The broken door wasn't spotted by South Park Goth Kid for the rest of his shift, which was about ten more hours. Way to do your job!

Well, at least nobody was hurt. Although in retrospect I kind of wish I'd met up with the guy. Not to be a hero or anything, but just so he could have threatened me a bit with his weapon before running away. Not that he would have actually hurt me. This is Canada, after all. And here's why I'd want that:

Now, my experience of near-death situations - that experience being, as most of you know, more than copious - is that once your adrenaline settles, and you realize you've actually lived through it, you undergo the most incredible high. You're in love with the world, with life itself. All malice flies from your spirit. You want to write, personally, to everyone who was ever slightly mean to you and forgive them. You want to swim with dolphins. You want to run naked on beaches. You want to frolic naked in heather. You want to throw back your head and laugh for forty minutes out of every hour. You want to make love through the night, every night, and you don't care who or what with. You want to be reckless. You want to parachute in blizzards, naked. Fly unpowered gliders, blindfolded and naked. You want to ski down sheer glaciers, blindfolded and naked and without skis. You want to ride untamed horses, possibly blindfolded though probably not naked, and definitely without skis. You're high, but you're not insane. You want to get together all the world leaders, possibly naked, and bang their silly old heads together until they agree that war is a stupid thing and they're definitely going to stop doing it. You're so giddy, you actually think you might pull it off, too.

I'm guessing everyone's experience is reasonably similar, although I'll accept maybe my reaction is overly focused on excessive nakedness. I've no idea why that is.

And I could have used a moment like that. Trying to balance the wants and needs of the client against the hostile apathy of my superior's (bad word that, have to find an alternative) ostrich style of management is wearing me down. I haven't even smiled in far too long. I think I'm going to print up some business cards and hand them to whoever causes me grief.

THIS MAN HAS NO SHORT TERM MEMORY.

PLEASE TRY NOT TO CONFUSE HIM.

Creamy Goodness, M.D.

(Canadian Medical Association)