Gramsci peeped out from under the keyboard, wondering what the problem was now. "Just when I'm about to leave," the Cow sighed, "things start to get interesting. Sixteen years and eight months," she rolled her bovine eyes dramatically "of boring same old-same old, and then as the door is about to swing shut behind me, all the excitement happens!"
Gramsci was a little puzzled. He'd missed the Special Assignment programme as his eight eyes had been elsewise occupied, but he gathered that the excitement had all happened offstage anyway. "Well," the Cow shrugged, "the entrapment interview did happen at the Baxter, and UCT does now have the dubious honour of being accused of inaction on Wikipedia as a result!"
"So why don't they just edit the entry?" asked Gramsci, perplexed.
"You're kidding, right?" the Cow was incredulous. "It would probably be a tussle between silos - is this a legal matter, ie the domain of the Registrar, or a reputational matter, ie the domain of Communications and Marketing. After six months of meetings finally resolved the matter, the sole remaining member of the Registrar's office would be tasked with finding out what a wiki was, but would resign before that project was complete, leaving the entry unedited."
Gramsci bit the tongue he lacked, and changed the subject instead. "At least that explosion wasn't a physical one," he ventured, "unlike the previous week!"
The Cow smiled at the memory. She'd thought Guy Fawkes had come early, even though the fireworks weren't as spectacular as Symphony of Fire. But she'd been prevented from burning a guy on the fire - despite her protestations of tradition - because, it turned out, there was no fire. Just explosions. 48 of them, to be precise. And not crackers, either, but back up batteries for the UPS. Toxic enough to have the building evicted, but not enough to have claimed any victims. That was left to the following week's explosive event.
On-the-scene footage, linked below, provided kindly by Uncle Set:
video002.3gp |