On Friday night I got back to work after a week in Galiwin'ku to discover that not only had I missed the first decent cyclone to come through Darwin in years, but in my absence the roof in my new room had continued to leek during said cyclone and my floor was completely flooded. Again. It was still raining heavily, so for most of the weekend my front wall resembled less a wall with a bad leak and more a waterfall with a nasty case of bricks.

Yesterday I got into my office to discover that the central database program on my computer had stopped working. I tried turning it off and on again, but that failed to fix the problem so, having exhausted my technical knowledge, I called IT. Apparently it was a problem everyone had had the week before, and it hadn’t been fixed on my computer yet. It was a simple job to fix it.

Five hours later the network administrator was still trying to fix the simple problem. Apparently the data program had got into a fight with Microsoft office, and the conflict had escalated to such an extent that they could not both be present on the same hard drive anymore. Both the bickering programs were summarily sent to their rooms for re-installation, which didn’t solve anything, they still kept crashing each other.

The IT lady at work says I have an aura of destruction, and I think she might be right. Computers, roofs, cars, aeroplanes, relationships, job applications or chicken enchiladas; there’s no limit to the things I can render a complete train wreck simply by looking at them the wrong way.

Anyone who has watched me at work in the kitchen will be able to confirm this for you. I could find a creative and astonishing way to boil water wrong. It’s not just that I’m a bad cook. I can follow the instructions for food preparation to the letter and still manage to ruin it. My old housemate once described me as “a force of nature” after seeing me take an instant meal out of the oven, where it had been for thirty minutes at 180 degrees as instructed, only to discover it was still frozen. I also managed to burn my dinner to a crisp last night because I was unaware that I was using an oven with a hyperdrive setting.

The usual protocol in these situations is to swear to use one's powers for good and not for evil. Stuff that, I’m using my powers for AWESOME. I’ve applied for a number of jobs with the public service, just to see if I can use my aura to bring down the government. If it works, I’m going to England. If I can get in.

Meanwhile, my computer seems to be working just fine this morning. No-one knows why. Or for how long. Make of that what you will.

Garry with 2 Rs

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