Originally Posted by
Teebonesy
So I went ahead and signed up for this new program, this manned-probe-beta-recon mission. It sounded exciting and would be a great way to expand my horizons and experience while helping out the community to boot. Someone had nominated me for this thing, so why not? I still figured the competition would be stiff, the testing vigorous, and the physical demands incredible. None of my imaginings prepared me for the journey that lay ahead.
I showed up for the application and examinations, and to begin with, the testing laboratory couldn't have been farther from what I had predicted. I imagined a somewhat clean and sterile environment, white walls, fluorescent lights, something like a brand new hospital. Instead it was just some alleyway behind a guy's house. I politely took my seat on a tipped-over garbage can and was asked to please wait. I assumed at the time that the four hours I waited were spent vigorously testing all the other (possibly thousands) of candidates for this prestigious position. Since I had nothing to read, and also since I don't actually know HOW to read, I spent the four hours memorizing the spilled contents of my garbage-pail chair, which I will list now:
• a box of photographs of some fellow, several of which featured him with his presumed girlfriend or wife
• large chunks of plastic and cardboard
• junk mail, envelopes, torn up letters
• milk and juice cartons, waxed
• pizza boxes
• sheets of some sort of paper-board, smeared with grease and multi-colored chunklets of substances both mysterious and wondrous to behold
• about a fortnight's worth of discarded take-out containers, asian food. Some chow mein, uneaten, had turned shades of black and purple.
• a smashed laptop with attached note: "since you love your computer so much more than me, why don't you spend the rest of your li--" the rest was cut off, the note being torn by what looked like teeth marks
• a smattering of clothing - jeans, flannel shirts, boxer shorts
• a broken glass container of glowing ooze
• some sort of small leprechaun, gnome, or gremlin type of creature, small and ravenously hungry, but skittish
• apple cores, banana peels, peach pits, and other miscellaneous compost
these items committed to memory, I was met again by the man in the white coat and a second man drinking from what looked like a beer can. They seemed shocked to see me, laughing incredulously and saying something along the lines of "What in the hell are you still doing here?" I assumed, at this point, that I'm doing so well in the test that they didn't even expect me to make it so far. It was looking really, really good for my chances. He asked me some basic questions, some of them involving mathematical concepts like numbers, and so whenever these came up I just tried to distract him by doing something surprising or amazing, like whistling really loud (though I can't whistle so it usually came out like a spitty blowing). I think this was a good strategy, because he ended up cutting the questioning short - again, I'm thinking at this point, "I've got this in the bag."
So after some more friendly laughing, and calling me some cool nicknames that revealed how impressed they were with me ("Captain Genius," "Albert Einstein over here," "The Brain," etc.), they led me to "the door". I mean, this is big news. This wasn't just a simulation, or a classroom environment or a briefing, or a test, this was the real deal. The door. I was going to be shoved right in there to do the mission, all at once. I mean, I could tell I was doing a really good job in the questioning and testing, but I never dreamed that I was blowing away the competition THAT hard.
The way it worked was, this door was very small, slightly larger than those gremlin-type creatures that I saw rummaging in the trash can, though it was very heavy. So what happened was this: The two gentlemen in lab coats forced the door open and then crammed me inside - I guess I'm a really strong guy and was giving more force than I thought, because they included lots of kicking and even some ear-boxing in the proceedings. But that just told me that these guys were really in it, you know, passionate, making it happen, ready to sacrifice for the team. So that really inspired me, I think, in retrospect. I remember feeling some very strong sensations, and at the time I just let it all out by crying and, you know, sort of riffing with the guys by yelling things like "please don't stick me in there," "stop hitting me", "DON'T!!" etc. But in retrospect I can understand that it was just the overwhelming feeling of being inspired and awed by what I was about to do. So they helped me out a bit with more of the kicking and I think one of them even tried to help calibrate my eyes to the new environment by flicking them really hard. It was interesting, it definitely affected my vision a great deal, I saw all sorts of floating spots that weren't there before. These guys really knew what they were doing.
So now I'm in the door, crammed into the doorway with the weight of the little heavy door itself pressing me into the side. I heard the two gentlemen laughing as they walked off, probably excited about the mission, and one of them must have been so overwhelmingly thrilled about the upcoming results that he lost his grip on his beer can, and it went sailing in my direction, hitting me on the side of the head. With them gone and alone to do my reconnaissance work, I studied my new environment: On the other side of the door was the beta forum - composed of about 3 or 4 people, one of whom was a young child running around showing off as many tricks as he knew. Another guy was asleep on the floor, and another one was sitting at a small table eating peanut butter out of a jar. There was one other person scrawling some arcane symbols on the wall, like ancient runes of some sort, and he was mumbling something about crowns and bug blasters and how "they" are coming for him.
I need to make it very clear at this point that the mission was not panning out quite like I expected. In my head I imagined being something akin to an astronaut, but in reality I felt a little bit more like a piece of gum stuck in a keyhole. Being stuck into a doorway isn't quite as lively or fun as you might expect, and I can break down these unexpected realms into 5 main points.
Firstly, the doorknob was not a round knob, but a handle, like they have in Europe, and its placement behind my right kidney was more than a little uncomfortable. What happened was the edge of the handle was slightly curved, and it hooked into my side and dug itself in real hard. The pressure made me feel like I had to pee, which brings me to my next point.
Secondly, I had to pee. Really bad. I considered my options on this score, and they chiefly consisted of either: A) Wetting my pants, or B) holding it in and risking massive kidney damage. In the end I decided to split the difference between these two extremes, and tried to release small trickles over the course of the ten minutes. This only served to make the kidney angrier. It's one of the prices you pay for being a probe for the greater good, i guess.
Thirdly, the gremlins I saw earlier in the trash can had noticed me, and probably because I was unable to move, they considered I was either a trash can myself, or perhaps some sort of small tree or shrubbery. I couldn't quite see them over my shoulder, but I heard them ("hahee hahee hahee", their grunts sounded), and they had come to the consensus that my pants and general hind-quarters would make a keen nesting ground. They spent the entire ten minutes making several runs between various garbage cans (I sometimes heard the creeeaaak-smash of a new one being tipped over) and myself, vigorously stuffing my back pockets and the interior of my pants with nesting paraphernalia, mainly coffee grounds and filters, mushy materials that felt like cold cream of wheat, and what may or may not have been mango pulp. I'm not 100% sure why someone would throw out perfectly good mango pulp, but this is what it felt like inside my pants, so I had to assume its elemental consistency for the time being. Eventually one of them prized open my back pocket, stretching it to bursting, and forged a type of hammock, which he then treated as a personal sleeping quarters. I tried to open a line of communication to my gremlin friends, at first using speech, and later by twitching as much as I could manage. It seemed to have succeeded, but as I'm unfamiliar with how to properly interpret the physical communication methods these creatures utilize (mainly scratching, poking, biting, snarling - things of this sort), I was unable to continue the conversation for very long.
Fourthly, the act of taking notes about what I was hearing and seeing in the beta forum proved to be nearly impossible considering my physical condition. one arm was physically stuck behind my head, the inside of my arm pressed into my ear making it difficult to both hear and move. My legs felt like a sort of leg pretzel, and the thought of such a thing made me very hungry indeed. My other hand was free, though the arm wasn't, to take notes, which excited me a great deal, and allowed me to focus on my mission. However, I had neglected to bring along a notepad or pen, so instead I wrote the notes down in the air using my fingers, hoping this might suffice. In the end, I'm sorry to say, it didn't hold up. Air writings are far more tenuous than one might expect, and it occurred to me that even if they had worked better than they did, I still didn't know how to read, and so couldn't proofread my notes to check for spelling, accuracy, etc.
Finally, though I have been describing the length of time I spent in that position as "ten minutes", in fact I don't know how long I was there, but it certainly FELT longer than ten minutes. The activities inside the beta forum stayed mostly the same - a child danced about screaming "look at me everybody, i made a airplane boat" and other such fanciful things, the man eating peanut butter actually changed his activity to laying his face in his hands and making sobbing noises (he might have been watching an incredibly tiny tv screen in the palm of his hands, one can never be sure of these things), the standing man continued to scrawl unusual runes into the wall whilst mumbling, and the sleeping man continued to sleep, although at one point he woke up and left and then came back and slept again, and this cycle repeated about thirty or fourty times.
When I eventually got back out, I never did quite determine how long I was there for, but my beard and hair had grown a great deal. I think that if this did in fact occur in the span of ten minutes that there may be something interesting in the science of this doorway, perhaps something that allows hair to grow at high speeds and time itself to seem to go extraordinarily slow. This may be worth checking into, or at least submitting to a scientific journal of high standard.
I learned a lot, and I'm happy to say that the experience did expand my horizons and give me a truly new adventure, and one of those lessons is that things are never quite what you expect. I'm also pleased to announce that I am now engaged to a Miss Grubblegork of the gremlin people, and we are expecting a fertilized laying of eggs in the next few weeks, which they call a "horgling".
But ultimately my thesis here is that being stuck in a door is a pain.
