Blow Jobs

Blow Jobs

  Dusty Yevsky

  Copyright 2011 by Dusty Yevsky

  License Note: This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and events are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Not long after penning “The Penis Mightier Than The Sword” Daniel Ford ignored his own counsel and acquired a new writing tool. For legal reasons, the manufacturer’s name won’t be mentioned here outright, however their brand logo depicts a common fruit, one that is now baked into our collective consciousness. (Hint: it’s the first snack mentioned in the Bible, one a serpent tempted Eve to munch.)

  Today this wildly successful company designs and pumps out new devices at an alarming pace. They announce marginally cooler gadgets and slightly trendier gizmos that mesmerize consumers. Like crazed addicts jonesing for a fix, throngs of strung out, die-hard fans linger in front of retail stores for days in advance. They wait, itching to score the latest doses of digital crack. Through brilliant marketing schemes customers have mutated into a worldwide cult. Their leader is guru Stephen, a charismatic genius.

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  As an author with a largely fictitious fan base, I spend the bulk of my day parked in front of a computer. I write innocuous stories and anecdotes about life and keep abreast of world and national news via the Internet. If I denied gazing at a breast or two during the course of a my so-called working day I’d be lying.

  Be that as it may, my new desktop had a bigger screen, larger hard disk storage space and faster data processing speed than its much-loved predecessor. Performance enhancements aside, as is a familiar pattern in many of my personal relationships, problems started developing after three weeks or so. Little things at first, toothpaste cap not screwed back onto the tube by cohabitant sorts of mild irritations. For example, the computer wouldn’t recognize my iPod for syncing. Simply plugging the music player into a different USB port brought it back to life. A bit later, a folder with roughly 7,000 songs suddenly vanished off the hard drive. Poof! And one time, the built in LED-backlit glossy widescreen TFT active-matrix liquid crystal display screen suddenly went dark. Rebooting restored everything back to normal. I added eight more gigabytes of memory to help the system function more efficiently.

  When something unusual happened I kept notes and placed a call to the customer service department. It generated a case number to reference, should any additional problems develop later on.

  Computers are at times notoriously finicky and unpredictable. These minor hiccups weren’t anything to get overly worked up about. I could live with an occasional quirky distraction. After all, I created them myself now and again. One example is what you’re reading right now.

  A few weeks after hooking up, a fan began to exhibit bizarre behavior. They usually expressed themselves through ranting and raving reviews, but in this case something altogether different was oddly howling in my ear; the internal apparatus with rotating blades that directs a current of air for cooling ventilation inside my computer refused to stop spinning at a tornado’s freakish velocity. The cacophonous whine was continuous and distracting.

  Why bitch about a blowjob? Because this one sucked and yes, it was time to take the gloves off and fight back. While I would’ve much preferred bashing in a nearby nose, none was available so I punched a few numbers instead and entered the ring.

  “Hi, thanks for calling technical support. My name is Jenna Bush. How are you this afternoon?”

  “Mad. You?”

  “I’m doing great, thanks. How may I be of assistance, Mr. Ford?”

  “Call me Daniel. Listen Jenna, I’d like to, but why beat around the bush? I’m a huge fan of your company and joined the cult many years ago. Unfortunately, this last computer you sent me blows, and I mean that literally and figuratively. Someone needs to fix it.”

  I’d already spent countless hours troubleshooting software glitches that might’ve possibly triggered the blaring noise. I gave Jenna the error code generated by the hardware test that failed. After putting me on hold for five minutes her supervisor came on the line and determined a problematic temperature sensor was at fault.

  “Terrific. The fans buzz constantly. They’re driving me nuts. I’m sick of fiddling with this thing. What’s the remedy?”

  “Not to worry. We’ll send a repair technician over right away. Your computer will be up and running good as new in no time. We’re sorry for any inconvenience and do appreciate your patience in helping us get this issue resolved.”

  The same dude who repaired my old computer when it flaked out two years earlier showed up at the house five days later.

  “Weren’t you here before?”

  “Yep. This shouldn’t take long. Okay if I use the dining room table?”

  “You’re the exorcist. Knock yourself out. You can set up there while I go grab the patient. Here, let me move this bowl of apples out of your way.”

  He replaced all three fans as well as their sensors and was in and out of there in less than an hour.

  Six weeks later, the nonstop whirring returned. This time around the hardware test error code pointed to a wonky logic board. A second repair ticket was issued.

  The very next morning the phone rang and took me by surprise. It wasn’t the outfit banging my line for the umpteenth time offering to steal my identity if I gave them the nod to go ahead and lower the interest rate on my credit card.

  “Hey Daniel. It’s Joe. I can be there around noon to fix your computer. That work okay for you?”

  “You? Again? Wow, that was quick! You mean today? Yeah, sure, see you then.”

  With Joe’s third visit to my home it felt like we were old becoming friends. We chatted about our families, pets, current wives, former girlfriends, cars, housing prices and their affect on the overall state of the economy, crony capitalism, politics, music, movies, sports and favorite foods. He swapped out the logic board and left in just over one hour.

  Three weeks later the ghost in the machine was back. The recurring failure was mysterious, but fortunately it wasn’t catastrophic. I could still write stories, monitor the news and easily stay on top of keeping abreast. The computer functioned flawlessly, except for the loud whooshing sound that was hardly noticeable if I were seated aboard a 727 or inside a wind tunnel.

  Joe stopped by to shoot the breeze (literally…I hoped…) and install yet another new logic board. With two logic boards, three service calls, parts and labor, the gadget and gizmo company’s profit margins were shrinking fast. If Wall Street ever got wind of this, the lofty stock price could lead balloon.

  “Hey man. Long time no see. What’s it been, three weeks? So we finally took out OBL. Good news for a change, eh?”

  “Absolutely. Got to hand it to those crack shot Navy Seals. One-eye Been Leadened was a major creep. Everyone’s glad he finally bought the farm. Good riddance.”

  “Speaking of farms, you hear about Osama’s marijuana crop? What a trip. He’s someone I would’ve never pegged as a stoner.”

  “Makes sense though. How else would a guy survive being holed up in one house with three wives for five years? Explains the extensive porn collection he’d stashed away too.”

  “Tell me about it. So what do you think caused this mess?”

  “Who knows? The schism between Christianity and Islam dates back centuries. Not to me
ntion the whole Arab Spring fling thing. The Middle East is in turmoil…dictators or democracy? It’s a never ending conundrum.”

  “Indeed. Wouldn’t want the State Department stepping too hard on those delicate camel toes. But right now I’m more concerned about issues closer to home. For instance, why can’t this fucking computer get fixed? Who’s responsible for blowing this job?”

  “Greedy corporations? Chinese terrorists? Who knows? Is it any secret where all these parts come from? And speaking of blowing jobs, bringing a chunk of those factories back home would solve a lot of our problems, end unemployment and get the American economy out of a ditch and back on the road to recovery.”

  “True, but the odds of that ever happening are zip. Look…all these house calls and transplants are getting beyond ridiculous. Nothing personal, but you turning up around here on a regular basis is really starting to get on my nerves. Shouldn’t they just send me a new computer already?”

  “Nah…I got this. Let’s give it another shot. Look on the bright side. At least I’m getting work out of this deal, right? I got bills and a family to feed like everyone else.”

  “Fine, but this is it. Don’t blow it.”

  “Gotcha. Hand me that screwdriver, will you?”

  “Of course. Hey Joe, did I ever tell you the story of what happened to the same model of computer I bought on eBay before this one?”

  Daniel Ford believed his inadequate equipment woes (easily traced back to the “Penis and Sword” affair…) ended after the two sticks of aftermarket memory he’d installed were removed. Their manufacturer determined it was defective and issued him a Return Merchandise Authorization, or RMA. Instead of refunding cash, they insisted on sending a replacement pair of random access memory modules, or RAM. Ford viewed the process as MAR, or Mildly Annoying Rigmarole.

  The chips were falling where they would, so to speak, and with their cascade, Daniel assumed the ordeal that had lasted many months was finally over.

  “And with that I’d like to wrap up today’s presentation. But before I do…there’s just one more thing…” added the famous cult leader wearing a black long sleeve turtleneck t-shirt and blue jeans before further wowing his enthralled masses.

  Ironically, Ford’s computer exhibited a lasting and permanent blasting, blaring fan the very next day. The manufacturer, who had handled the matter with remarkable grace, genuine humility and unwavering professionalism from day one, stepped up and declared their product defective and offered to replace it free of charge. A similar machine, only two generations newer, with improved performance benchmarks and enhanced features, arrived on his doorstep days later.

  A pair of new RAM chips appeared in Daniel’s mailbox three weeks after that. They no longer matched Ford’s current machine’s required specifications and were therefore useless. Tempting fate, he disposed of them through eBay. They were carefully packed and shipped to the winning bidder in their original, sealed packaging.

  And then Ford realized how James Francisco, having gone through a similar maddening fan experience and thinking he’d run out of options, might’ve deliberately thrown his computer off the back of a pickup truck or down a flight of stairs before opting to insure it at the post office?

  Eventually those scenarios seemed less and less likely and faded into the background altogether, after which Daniel Ford returned to composing semi-silly stories and using the Internet to publish them and keep abreast. Once he’d finally wrangled free of intrusive and troublesome fans, Ford, like many of his contemporaries, labored in quiet desperation, searching for more literary carrots to dangle before millions of asses hungry for a laugh.

  His recollections of having been blown on a regular basis in days gone by were randomly accessed from that point forward, fondly.