Thousand Monkey Style

I try to do everything Thousand Monkey Style, pretty much.

Y'know that thing about how a thousand monkeys at a thousand type-writers for a thousand years will eventually write the entire works of Shakespeare?

Well, if that holds true, seems like its better odds than the lotto that one monkey at one type-writer for one-year will write one page of Shakespeare.

And that's good enough fer me, man, 'cause I don't even need anything even half as good as a page of Shakespeare anyways.

And I'm probably a little better than a monkey.

Well okay, maybe not better than a monkey, but I definitely don't need anything even half as good as a page of Shakespeare.

Anyways its pure Chaos Theory, throw enough monkeyshit at the wall and eventually something sticks.

But you gotta keep throwing that monkeyshit, man, and keep throwing it, and keep throwing it.

Yep, you can't stop, that's the whole trick.

Allow me to illustrate.

My brother has two sons that I call Pinky and the Brain 'cause of the way they looked when they were tiny.

But the Brain actually is certifiably super smart and a little creepy nowadays, giving me advice on physics and stuff.

Anyways, like a lot of little kids, the Brain never stops guessing and trying things like a machine gun until he solves everything.

Which is very different from how older people tend to solve problems, slowly drawing on their past experience to come up with a best guess and then getting totally hung up and even a little pissed off if something doesn't behave the way they expect it to.

And then half the time they get so frustrated or they feel so insulted or whatever that they don't even try another guess.

This is not how Computer People tend to be, 'cause none of us would get very far in Computer Life if we acted like that, but you know what I'm saying, a lot of our bosses and the useless scrubs are like that, right?

Heheh.

Anyways, back in the days when the Brain couldn't walk or talk, he kept destroying my brother's computer by turning it on and off over and over again.

Yah the kid couldn't even see the monitor, he just liked turning the thing on and off for the noise of the fans and the little lights on the front or something.

And you know how there's always a chance to totally frag the OS files on the hard drive when you do that, mebbe it aint so bad nowadays with slow loading bios's and stuff, but it was like that six years ago or so, and I think my brother's computer is a helluva lot older than that, anyways.

So whatever, after my stepdad had reformatted and reinstalled everything on their computer for the nine hundredth time ('cause my brother and his wife are basically Computer Illiterate), my brother and his wife asked me if I could do anything to help them.

So I went in the bios and I turned on that thing where you gotta hold in the button for five seconds to get it to turn on and off.

Yah all you Computer Guys out there know what I'm talking about, that trick usually works on impatient executives who keep turning off their computer with the button instead of shutting down properly, I mean, that's why they had to put that damn thing in the bios in the first place heh.

Anyways, as fate would have it, immediately after I finished changing the setting, while my brother and his wife are still standing there looking at me with that "I think I get it" look that only the Computer Illiterate can produce, the kid crawled over in his diaper and started trying to turn the computer on and off.

It took him three tries to figure it out, two quick tries the old way, a pause when it didn't work the way he was used to, and then he holds the button down for five seconds, the whole thing took less than ten seconds total, and then, not even taking his finger off the button, he looked up at me and smiled while turning the computer on and off over and over again the new way, like he was saying, "haha! how you feel now, bitch? nobody! *push* fucks! *push* with! *push* me!"

And of course we all smiled and laughed, which is always the absolute worst thing you can possibly do (and sometimes the goddam hardest thing not to do, which just makes you laugh even harder) around a kid that just did something that you don't want him to do anymore.

So then I had to do my Bill Paxton and tell my brother and his wife, "welp, that's it, we're in some pretty shit, now, man, we're dogmeat, we're catfood, man, there's no way yer gonna stop this kid from doing anything until he gets old enough that we can try to reason with him."

And eventually we all lucked out, 'cause the Brain turned out to be very reasonable, for an evil super genius at least, and he probably won't destroy the Earth more than once or twice unless I ask him to.

I was always a Thousand Monkey Style guy, it was actually an old-old-old boss of mine that coined that phrase while describing the way I was always saving his ass, that I could walk inside an alien spacecraft and figure out how to get the thing off the ground in ten seconds.

But its the way the Brain looked at me after figuring out my crappy bios trick that's burned into my mind and makes me remember.

Keep doing it, keep guessing, keep guessing faster!

Don't sit there and love every little piece of monkey shit you make, monkey shit isn't for loving, monkey shit is for throwing, and throwing and throwing and throwing!

If it don't hurt a little you prolly ain't gettin' any sharper!

Now that I'm getting older and my pattern recognizer is gettin' all rusted-out and crusty and brittle from hardly ever meeting any resistance, I need to remind myself of things like this.

Its frickin' sad, really.

Oh, you'll have to do it too one day, you punkass piece of shit ahaha.