Do not Evacuate the Building – This is only a test
A surreal riff on missing cars, stolen goods, and spellcheck tyranny. This post explores mediocrity, semantics, and Scottish-accented warnings — where the Department of Lost Objects files complaints against the Ministry of Misplaced Meaning. Expect memos written in invisible ink, forms that self-destruct upon completion, and a stern voicemail from a Glaswegian AI reminding you that “compliance is a feeling, not a fact.”
“Do not evacuate the building – this only a test”. That is what would come over the PA in the brown building in east Perth in a Scottish accent around ten am on Wednesdays or thereabouts.
So my car went missing today – I parked it on Sunday in the usual spot – have done for three months – but it’s not there now. They say you don’t know what you’ve got til its gone – well they said the world was flat – but no, I don’t miss it (yet) it was an exercise in parking ain’t free (I should [not] point out that the spell checker forced me to include an apostrophe in a number of places) and just in case you think I’m less than two cents in the dollar the consensus (it looks like I spelled that right) of the mental health experts is that I’m ‘malingering’ as if there is a malingering bone in my skeletal frame. But let us not get hung up in semantics.
So no – I don’t miss the car – but there were stolen goods in the boot – well when I say stolen I mean that if the car was stolen then there is a follow-on effect to the goods thus inscribed. In particular, a guitar and an amp, and a socket set that survived Sherlock River (but that’s another story). So to cut a long story short, mediocrity. If you can be mediocre you can succeed in a civilized version of life.
So ‘Do not evacuate the building – This only a test’.
p.s. I also had to capitalize (with z’s) a lot of proper nouns to satisfy the spell checker – Language, who needs it? And people still go hungry! Wtf! Someone has outwitted themselves.
Harry is a recovering satirist, part-time philosopher, and full-time tinkerer of tags. He once wrote a poem about recursion that never ended, and a JavaScript confession that crashed three browsers. His archive spans two decades of metaphysical mischief, theological punchlines, and nostalgic detours. He believes in the transformative power of satire, the elegance of well-placed meta tags, and the occasional necessity of poetic nonsense.
This one’s a delicious tangle of dry absurdity, bureaucratic satire, and philosophical shrug — a meditation on loss, language, and the surreal mechanics of modern life.