Mr. Ant

Mr. Ant

How do you find a man that that just isn’t there? I suppose the only place you can start to try to find him is when he was there. So when was Mr. Ant there?

He moved quickly past the small group of people that had stopped to chat by the copying machine. He couldn’t do the “buddy group” thing with others so he always managed to look in a bit of hurry, like he had to do something that had to be done now. But that’s much later on, that’s when he stopped liking the story. Your right.

The corridor was slowly filling up with people who had no idea where they should be so they just started to generally mill about in corridors. About nine o’clock some older more grown up looking people turned up and started to inform everyone as to where the assemble points where for the options that they had taken, which they had with them on the letter they had received and so on. He dug around in his coat pocket and managed to find the folded, bent and creased letter informing him that he should go to the Main assemble room for new “A” level students. He followed the steady stream of 16 to 20 year olds that all seemed to be general going in one direction, he figured this was the way he probable should be heading.

The main assemble room turned out to be a big classroom with tables and chairs set out in rows, slightly curved rows that curved around a big table on a slight podium. The large central table was not really in the middle of the room, but a bit more to the right of the room than center, giving a general sense of imbalance to the entire classroom. There was a large open space toward the opposite end of the room, but there weren’t any tables and chairs there, so everyone and you ended up more on the side of the room where people kept walking in through the doors. Just behind where you had sat down.

He was always early. He hated being late and he hated people who were late. He thought that it was rude to be late, but that was only because he took things personally in a way that other people never understood about him. So he had been waiting to know where he should go and what he should be doing for ages. As he got through the doors into main assemble point, he headed straight for nearest chair to sit down on, he had been waiting forever. He had smoked a few cigarettes and felt a bit more relaxed but still his pulse was high.

Hello and welcome to the new “A” level students of further education, blah blah, and the whole thing just kicks off, “bang”, straight into the “adult bullshit mode”. That particular adult mind mode that always causes teenagers’ heads to short-circuit. All functions just shut down as the fuse inside your head goes pop. That is why boring adults think that all teenagers are all mad or plain rude, they just forgot what it was like to get “zapped with the crap”. You mind just blanks out. Zap. And then you hear nothing of what the adult in question is saying to you at all.

He would have stayed in the blank “zap” of his short circuit, if hadn’t been for the punk girl who literarily fell into the room. Her entire being came crashing through the doors of the main assemble point for new “A” level students with such force that the entire room just all woke up out of their dazes and turned to see what “thing” could make such as noise, as was being made. She half screamed half laughed and generally started to have an open dialog with the world around her. The dialog had no direction as such, more a series of sounds that might just be questions, or apologies, or just exclamations of surprise, which got expressed at everyone. After some time making these exotic noises she found herself a chair and started putting bags, and other accessories, loudly all over the table in front of her, trying to cover as large an area of space as her belongings allowed. Paper and pens were produced to show keenness to push on into the new “A” level student world. The world just stopped and waited to see how much she could produce from the bags that she was digging into with great intensity. There seemed to be room for a lot of objects, each of which was spoken to or commented on out loud, produced like rabbit out of some magical top hat.

He couldn’t help himself; he always took being late as a personal affront. However hard he tried to stop it, lateness always made him go into replay mode of his obsessive patterns. He was 18 now and more able to control some of the worst feelings of fear and loathing, but that was only on a quite a superficial level, more like not showing it than actually not doing it. The smoking had helped a lot. The abuse of Nicotine was a dear and welcomed part of the armor that had begun to grow round the Mr. Ants body. He sat sulking as more and more people wondered in and out of the room and the woman trying to explain the whole deal with the “A” level subject name lists and rooms got more and more flustered and agitated.

She started over and over again to explain the same thing. The general idea was you looked at subject lists, with names of students and the timetable of these classes stuck on the wall, at the back of the room to the left. Where there were no tables and chairs dear, over there, yes on the wall over there are the lists where is says what timetable your class has and what room it is in. She pointed to an empty area to the end of the room. You see your timetable and class teacher for the subject you have chosen. This is the blah blah blah. The noise of the room was getting louder as the people who got the idea started to move over to the lists and just stopped listening to the woman. The people who kept walking in during the middle of her explanation didn’t know what going on. So they started to ask her questions that inevitable set her off again, one notch higher on Judith’s nervous break down scale.

Because he had sat down as far as possible in the right hand corner of the room, so as not to have to sit next to bunch of people he didn’t know, he was now in the worst possible position to get up and get to the timetables. The area over the other end of the classroom that was now rapidly filling up with people. Everyone was trying to get to the same lists. So he folded his arms and sunk a bit deeper into plastic chair that he was sat on. He would wait until he could walk up to the lists and not have to jostle with all those kids. He got up and made his way out to the dinner room where you could still smoke indoors, this was way back then. He fished out his 20 Red Marlborough hard pack from his flannel shirt pocket and got out a cigarette, he only had a couple left in the pack, shit. He used a lighter because matches are for the kids, people who don’t really smoke, but just think they smoke.

So he never liked the story. No he did, he did like the story once things started to happen. Once things started to be about him or rather have him involved, he liked those bits. In the beginning. You see what he didn’t like was being just nobody. He had felt like nobody for years. Like he just wasn’t anyone. At secondary school things didn’t really work out, well not at the end. The other kids were different, they tried to be someone, they all tried to get personalities of some sort, mainly copies of other people like football players. He just didn’t have an idea of who to be, so he just faded into the wall and in the end faded out the back door. He was a bright kid, brighter than most, but personality wise he was like angry and everything just got inverted. He would get wound up and angry for no real reason as such, it always got personal. Like being late. Like it was because he wasn’t worth turning up on time for, that’s why people were late and that’s what made him feel angry. Which is really odd because time has so many different factors involved in being late, so to focus on just one, is downright pointless. But that was the big difference with him; mentally he was 100% rational, to the point of being over intelligent, but emotionally he couldn’t jump over a box of matches.

Well, the story started to get quite funny; a group of cooler people began to form. It is the way of the world; large groups splinter quickly down into units of definition. People who think they belong together hang out with each other, especially if they knew each other from before. Other people end up sticking together in groups of external definition, which in turn ends up sticking to them, for example, “the ones doing “A” level sociology with Silvia”. And a few people seem to be drawn into a ring of flame, that burns brighter in some strange way. More colorful than the rest, a bit more attractive and before anyone really knows why it is this group, it has already become a force that attracts attention. Mr. Ant managed to get sucked into this group when he ran out of cigarettes one day and now he was in, he liked it there. He could shine there. He was bright kid, brighter than most, better to hang out with people who shine, than just sit in corner on your own, smoking endless cigarettes.

Colorful people do colorful things, it didn’t take long for this group to start doing the most colorful thing they could think of which was go down to the pub for lunch and have a drink. When you’re 16 and dressed in normal clothes you can get into a pub without too much aggravation. As long as you don’t make a fuss or cause havoc you can sit quietly in the corner and drink a pint or two. This was going to make education much more fun to start with. Most of the group of people were actually over 18 so it was legal and all above board, a couple of them were 16.

He stood waiting at the bus stop under the rounded plastic shelter. He knew the buses out here never went after the timetables that they printed on the sign poles. But he always looked at the time when the next bus was due and written down on the timetable. Who made these arbitrary lists of times? Did they bother to calculate the amount of time it took to drive between two points of space or did they just write a series of times because they had to? He knew the buses never came on time out here but still he looked at the timetable and then he looked at his watch. He lit a Red Marlborough cigarette with the Zippo lighter he had bought for £5.99. They probably divided the time it took to drive from where the bus started to where it ended with the amount of stops that were specified on the route. Like that was a timetable. They might as well just write down ten minutes between every stop and make it that much simpler for themselves. 11: 45. The time was already five minutes past twelve; he had just looked at his watch. They might have just as well written, Timetable; buses come past this place at some time. They will stop if you happen to be standing there at such times as the pass by where you are standing. The drizzle was turning more to rain. The smoke calmed him as he stood staring at the empty road that ran along the southern English coastline.

By the time the first act had ended, Mr. Ant should have all the pre-orders prepared, poured and ready for the patrons of the Arts to spill into the bar and restaurant area. The tables that had been reserved were taken care of by the lobby staff and the cloakroom staff. They made sure that the sandwiches and anything else on the order was checked and double-checked again. Things didn’t go wrong between Acts because if they did go wrong, people could get caught up in things that have nothing to do the play. The Play being the center for the evening until diner or a club started and then the Social event took over center. Cultural events are never to be disturbed by mistakes in Orders, be they just the simplest of drink orders, all the way up to the Half Grilled lobster, Cesar’s salad and bottle of the Don menu. He worked the bar. He had mainly the “sparkling white wine for four, Hamilton-Jones”, type of orders that were to be poured and grouped onto round black trays with nametags and placed on the Pre-ordered left hand section of the bar. Once all the pre-orders had been picked up or distributed, Mr. Ant would help the “drop in” orders; those people who suddenly realized that alcohol could be bought at theaters. He wore a white double-breasted jacket that was a mix between bellboy, military and kitchen worker. An old fashion costume of an important slave, not because the slave was important, it was the people the slave would serve that were important, important enough to clothe the slave in something semi respectable. For some reason the design of these kinds of outfits had a strange imagery of some semi-military parade outfit. He felt like an arsehole in the jacket, he got to wear normal black slacks but with proper black leather shoes. The show went on; sometimes there was a second act break, but not that often anymore. He stayed until the last orders in the bar was taken. Some thirsty patron of the Arts always fancied a swift double before starting the creative processes of absorbing the holistic view of the entire opus.

The basic package includes all your requirements for the network you need to move into the next dimension of information technology. Networks are the series of links and cross-links that gives you and your company the chance to access not only information but to keep all lines of communication open at all times. Today’s electronic expansion demands faster and much more efficient ants to keep up with the competition. Because that is the edge that great Networks are giving the “other fellow”. Goods and products might stay the same, but a great Network can cut your order to delivery time by 50 % and reduce the administration costs of OTD (order to delivery) with the same amount, then you will see who is the top dog in this show.

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He sat in the chair by the window so he could stare down at the road outside. The noise of the discussion / argument going off in the other room was just doing his head in, the same endless rounds of whys and wherefores. It made him tired. It wasn’t his kid but he had spent a few years living together, maybe not as a family as such but as a group of people who shared the same space. She had got the house from her previous relationship, with the guy who was the biological father to the 12-year-old kid. The kid that was at this particular moment in time was getting grief from his mother for just not being part of his mothers’ gameplan. What ever that plan was, he didn’t know what the plan was, how should a 12 year old have a clue. What he did know was that after those “warm up arguments” with Nigel the 12 year-old, he could well end up being the “main attraction of this evenings emotional wrestling” if he wasn’t careful. He really couldn’t be bothered to be in the ring right now. He thought about going out for a walk but where would he go. Going to the local pubs was about as exciting as sticking a sharp stick into your own leg. You either knew everyone in the pub or felt like you just strolled in from Mars, into their private pub, and they weren’t impressed by your little green man look. Or on the other side it was a pub for small groups and couples, out to be together and not looking to be bumped into for surprisingly nice chat with someone down the pub. Bar staff are no longer required to have any social skill beyond the pressing of buttons, buttons on pints of beer, fizzy drinks and pre-programmed tills, £7.56 please. Cheers.

He didn’t want to be part of that plan; in fact he wanted out of that plane now and big time. He didn’t want to get sucked deeper and deeper until he just drowned in the boredom of regularity. He needed more funds; he needed someone to believe in him, someone who believed he could do it. It wasn’t like it was millions of English pounds; a hundred thousand would do it. One hundred thousand pounds. It may just as well be millions; no banks or new business deal would give him that backing. He hadn’t a clue how to get private backing beyond trying to get family and friends involved. The people he know didn’t have that investment cash and if they did they had other plan, they had their own plans, he stared out on to the street, some old lady with her dog was making her way from tree to tree in oral ecstasy of urine from other dogs.

The door closed quietly behind him just clicking loud enough to say shut but not to draw any attention. And Mr. Ant had left the story behind him forever, never to return.

The group around the coffee machine began to talk about some banal load of rubbish that seemed to be more pleasurable than do any thing like work. The supervisor sat staring at the monthly report he was about to send in. He always felt a certain sense of pride in the report because he had suggested the entire new format of the rapport. It had been in a bit of a pickle before he got his hands on it. In fact it was just a bunch of meaningless words and numbers that people wrote without having a clue why they wrote it in the first place; every month and every three months and you got to write “a year’s report” at the end of the year. Those rapports must have been gems to read. The head manager of the division ended writing the whole thing herself. Making the numbers somehow not look as bad as they were and making the right sounds of change and efficiency that would happen in the near future, but telephones and new techniques aren’t always easy to control, blah blah blah. I suppose it sounded good enough so the crap everyone else produced just got washed away with the bath water.

He had changed the whole image of the monthly rapport into a shape like a hexagram. That’s six-pointed star. And made it into a beehive image, like in honeycomb, which is an image of everyone working together but working in separate self-sufficient cells. Quality, Result, People & Analyses (if you had spelt these words in Swedish, you would get the word “Kupa” that means “Beehive”. (Kvalitet, Utfall, Personal, Analys, KUPA). So the “KUPA” rapport (as it got called) was split into four parts; the first three were “number rapports” showing the progression “toward” or “away” from the goals set over next three month period (with rolling numbers from month to month, so you always saw long term tendency). The fourth part, the final part and most important part, was the analyses of these numbers in terms of what are you as the supervisor or manager “are going to do” about those numbers. Activity equals change, which can lead to things becoming better. A new thought is born.

So you can’t just say it didn’t work last month without saying how you plan to change it that / this month. You might not get it right the first time but if you don’t, do something different, the result will always be the same. So you should always report numbers separately from analyses, otherwise people don’t do jack shit to ever make a difference. That’s why the report was beautiful to him because it severed both his ideal form and function. But did anyone care about it, no, and that was what obvious.

The End.