Frozen Friends Cryogenics...

…was the name of a virtual company I formed, the name being stolen from a Larson Far Side cartoon. The company was a dummy manufacturing (and cryogenic) outfit that I was using to test MRP software. That’s “Materials Requirements Planning, in fact it was MRP II now that I think about it. As we were struggling to freeze the dead effectively and working against time it meant that there were a lot of refrigeration components in the inventory and just to keep it interesting some bodies. Frozen Friends was used as a training aid, a pilot site and as a place to trial the software repair patches that invariably dog such systems. Now it’s gone, my career (?) has moved on and that’s that. I still have fond but vague and misty, almost frozen memories.

Ready meals are never quite as ready as the name suggests. For one thing I don’t like micro waving them so they get the oven treatment. That takes thirty five minutes, maybe forty five if the meal was mistakenly frozen so there is a lot of waiting attached to a ready meal feast. They do that peculiar shrinking thing also where they shape shift mysteriously in the over, they bubble and blacken at the edges and then form an unexpectedly strong bond with the plastic tub. Hungry and lazy people like me eat them from the tub, this saves on numerous other dull and wasteful processes and gets to the heart of the matter, eating the boiling gloop. That’s a more appropriate name, boiling gloop.

Christmas cards are pointless but I lack the courage and conviction to stop sending them (or giving them to be precise). They seem now like objects from a bygone age, like pigeon post or the pony express, like stone tablets or slate and chalk. They have a life of about five seconds, the time taken to read the names and greetings and then say (either inwardly or outwardly to your partner) “oh it’s from X and Y, nice…” Then the card is made to stand in a geometrically challenging way on a flat surface, forgotten until it’s removed some time later, usually the 2nd of January. Humbug, Extra Strong Mint and Berwick Cockles, must be Christmas time again.