Search This Blog

29 June 2007

Resistance Was Futile. I Have Been Assimilated.

Not me, but another Borg Implantee in the waiting room.
(She was reading "US News & World Report")

PizzaQ -- what does this image have to do with U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama? Don't hold back or exercise dignity or restraint, I want the smarmiest, sleaziest, tawdriest answer possible. Don't worry about Sen. Obama's feelings, the sleazy parts have nothing to do with him. (3 slices of square pizza with mushrooms and hot peppers.)

Publicke Notice

Please forgive Vleeptron's recent tardiness regarding on-going PizzaQs and other matters.

Earlier this week I realized that Resistance Was Futile, and I Prepared to Be Assimilated. I was subsumed into the Borg Collective, and my formerly all-natural organic body now sports a spiffy new electromechanical Borg Implant of synthetic plastic and metal, with an Energizer (bunny) battery.

The transition from being All-Organic to being Partly Robotic has not been as easy and smooth a transition as I might have hoped for. I am a somewhat anxiety-prone high-strung fellow, and this first week of My Life As a Cyborg has been a Shrieking 4-Alarm Nightmare.

In fact, unlike your Aunt Mathilda, I now have all sorts of little Beep-Beep Alarms going off inside me -- rather like a recent-model automobile with a car alarm that freaks every time a teenage boy gets within 2 meters of it. I also now have a Dead Man's Throttle -- the fucking thing Beep-Beep-Beep-Beeps incessantly if I have failed to press any buttons on it for longer than a pre-set number of hours. Like, if I somehow (heavy drugs) managed to sleep longer than its program permits me to sleep.

Meanwhile -- yes, Mike, you win the Eyeballs Pizza! The Eyeballs are at Williams College!!!

But more about that later. Today I must remove my Borg Impant, re-install my Borg Implant, and then Communicate with the Collective -- by driving to the Copy Store and sending a ##!!*%%% Fax to my new Masters. I hate Faxes and can't even get my free Fax software to work. But my new Masters hate e-mail and demand Faxes. They win. I lose. Resistance is Futile.

Beep. (That wasn't your cell phone or your iPod or your new iPhone. That was me.)

No Pizza, but Guess My Borg Implant. I suppose it's sort of interesting. If you're not the poor schmuck who has to plug it into your anterior lateral descending wazoo.

9 comments:

James J. Olson said...

Shall I recuse myself from this question as well, since I have made the decision myself to reject being assimilated?

James J. Olson said...

Why doesn't the manufacturer of your new device like emails? Do you have to hand-crank your device to power it? Foolishness. Right there would be Reason No. 1 for not having this particular Borg implant.

Sort of like discovering that the Mayor of Boston forbids Voice Mail at city hall. Apparently Mayor Mennino couldn't figure out how to make his voice mail work ten years ago, so he simply banned it for all city offices. Yes, you either reach a Real Live Person when you call city hall, or your call doesn't get answered at all.

Google it, it is true.

Vleeptron Dude said...

Not the manufacturer of the Implant, but my doctors and nurses insist on Fax.

My guess is, where medical information is concerned, they got used to Faxes, with their permanent hardcopy that they can file and refer to. And when the new e-mail culture arose, they were suspicious of its intangible and changeable nature. If a Fax says 44.2, then it stays 44.2 forever. But if an e-mail says 44.2 the first time, maybe you go back to it in a month and suddenly it says 61.3 . And it's not clear how or when or who changed it.

I think it's easier to get sued if you do your medical information with e-mails and computers than if you do your medical information with Fax and hardcopies.

Look at all the trouble Karl Rove is about to get into because of his easy-to-erase e-mails on his Republican National Committee crackberry account. There wouldn't be all this screaming from Congress if the same business had been conducted via Faxes and their hardcopies.

Mainly, my Eyes are on the Prize. And I won't say what the Prize is specifically in case ppl are still trying to Guess My Implant. But for the Prize, this fight between e-mails and Faxes doesn't really matter.

Amy Stone said...

Hmmm...so many things that could be!

At first when I read the post and you mentioned sticking something up the anterior wazoo...I turned to Mike and joked "IUD?"

Okay, all joking aside, that wasn't the first guess...first one (and probably the most obvious) was "pacemaker". That's not anything that goes in a wazoo though...and I seem to recall that my 91 year old grandmother's pacemaker doesn't have pretty lights going off or any sort of beeping noises. Then again, I only see her a couple times a year, and I'm not exactly paying attention to those sorts of things.

So...my next conclusion is...some sort of insulin pump? Beeping and buzzing and all that stuff? You can disconnect and reconnect?

And if it makes you feel any better...Mike and I have already been assimilated by the borg. For real! We can send pictures!

James J. Olson said...

I don't know what this particular Borg Implant has to do with Barak Obama though...

Vleeptron Dude said...

Well, okay, the image ... I'm certainly not revealing National Security information by identifying her as Seven of Nine. So that's a HINT to start you down the path that soon and fairly directly will lead you to US Senator Barack Obama. Like I said, don't worry about embarrassing Senator Obama, the smarmy stuff has nothing to do with him.

=============

Amy! Hiya! You know ... the first Q you ever answered for me was Guess The Mystery Molecule, which you recognized as Insulin. (And I think I asked you to specialize in some bioscience which would hurry the hell up and cure my crummy diabetes.)

If Wal-Mart sold a Discount Plague manufactured by slave and prison laborers in the Third World, it would be diabetes. This disease just don't get no respect. But it's exploded in popularity over the last decade. EVERYBODY wants my disease!

Anyway, Dr. Madame, YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY CORRECT, it's a Medtronics Insulin Pump, and You Win More Pizza!!!

Beep. Beep. Excuse me, my pump is beeping at me, I have to obey its arcane software demands now. I have been Assimilated.

The Revolutionary Breakthrough of the Medtronics Insulin Pump, which will certainly win Medtronics the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology, is that they managed to convince the Health Insurance Industry into covering it on health insurance plans. As I grok it, paying cash for one of these dinguses requires ponying up about U$3000 -- not counting the regular purchase of pricey new supplies.

The Business End of the pump is a plastic tube with a needle (canula) at the end that I *insert* (EEEK! EEEK!) under my skin (subcutaneous I think is the Proper Jargon Mumbo Jumbo), and it just stays in there for up to 3 days before I have to take it out and stick a new one in me somewhere else.

It drips Novolog (a fairly zippy and zingy industrial-source insulin) constantly 24/7 at a Basal Rate, and then every time I eat, or every time a blood test shows my blood glucose (in milligrams per deciliter) Too High, I can beg my implant for a momentary Bolus -- More Insulin, Please! Its software does the math to decide how big or small my Bolus should be. In case of any controversy, the Implant Software wins, I lose. It's like trying to talk an ATM out of more cash after the ATM says TRANSACTION DENIED HAVE A NICE DAY.

Whaddya want on youR Pizza, and how's your Aunt and her non-beeping pacemaker? Maybe we can get together at the Summer Borg Collective Convention.

P.S. No way am I wearing this gizmo to try to get through Homelamp Security at the airport. If ever there was something suspicious strapped to my body to make those dummies freak out, this is it.

Vleeptron Dude said...

PS Amy -- uhhh what's YOUR Borg Implants? Send pictures!

PPS ... Jim had Insider Trading Information about what my Borg Implant was, so he very ethically Recused Hisself from trying to grab the Pizza.

He has chosen to Just Say No to the Borg Pump. Medtronics may have to send their sales personnel (they're not shy!) to Abduct Him like they did Jean-Luc/Locutus.

Amy Stone said...

Man that sounds like one complicated piece of machinery! I'd almost trust ME to stand around and take blood samples at determined intervals, do the math and inject ya myself...(*watches as Mike faints at sight of needles*)

Anyhow...I actually have no borg implants that are as spiffy as that. I once had braces as a kid...those were metallic, but I haven't had those for many years. I wear contact lenses that give me sight! Yay! Sorry to disappoint on the exotic nature of my implants :)

But I do have a picture:

http://www.amyandmikestone.com/amy/WeAreBorg.jpg

Well...in other news...I am currently in search of a new job, and I'm hoping for something to come up at a local company in town here that does things for the big pharmaceutical companies...maybe I'll find some insider secrets on how to cure the diabetes. Now if I could get my hands on some stem cells...that might do the trick too, but thanks to the stem-cells-are-aborted-fetuses-and-that-is-so-very-wrong believers, that might be hard to come by.

Vleeptron Dude said...

okay i'm gonna move this thread to a new post so I can show an image of my Borg Implant ...