This is CheeseburgerBrown reporting live and direct from somebody else's office, while I sit in the corner and pretend to work. The office is very chic. There is bad art on the dark walls, and more halogen track-lighting than in an Ikea display.

The clock is ticking, and I'm charging them a lot of money. I am very bored.

Welcome to my nonsensical life.


So, I'm on a job downtown. It's an emergency job, a rush job. I'm sitting behind an editor who is madly cutting together beer commercials, and I am periodically shoving my motion-graphics work around on my timeline to synch up with the revisions he's making.

I'm working on my old PowerBook, he's working on a G5.

Some little Eastern European man keeps coming in and jiggling my Ethernet cable. "Vhat is your mac address yes?" he asks me several times in a row, refusing a pen, apparently committed to committing it to memory. But he keeps coming back and asking me again. "You see serwer now?" he asks me. "You see Samba network shares yes?"

"No."

He can't get me on the network so I'm obliged to take my PowerBook downstairs to get a dump of reference material from the Avid suite. I've never seen a Windows-based nonlinear editing system before, and after five minutes downstairs I come to know why. The poor dork keeps getting up and replugging his connections, dickering with control panels, checking his patch bay. "Everything was working an hour ago," he sighs. "Damn it."

I am filling in for the absent chief compositor, who is away enjoying paternity leave. It seems that he may have been the only person around here who knew how anything actually works, because the editors are lost without him.

"How come my alpha channels are premultiplied with black in Final Cut?" asks one editor.

"How do I import your graphics once you make them for me?" asks another.

"Do I need to be on the Internet to download files from your PowerBook?" And on and on.

I sigh, and pour myself a cup of tea in the sunny kitchen overlooking the downtown cool district. No matter how much they might try to dress it up, I can still recognise my peers from three storeys up -- geeks are geeks, even when they try to dress like everyone else around here.

I am not cool, and have never been cool.

I wear loose cotton clothing on all occasions. I despise patterns, so my clothes are always in solid colours -- such as grey or brown. I don't care for buttons or zippers, so my clothes are simple in cut. My haircut and beard are not fancy, either. My accutrements are strictly utilitarian. I do wear a green hat, but it isn't stylish...it's a well-worn security blanket.

In contrast, everyone walking the streets and the halls around here is affected with a profound case of coolitis. Their hair often sticks up purposefully, or has been turned colours. They have pieces of hardware pierced through their faces, or lurid tattoos printed on their arms describing glyphs that are not of their culture. They wear a lot of black, and a lot of faux-retro-kitsch. They have fancy sunglasses.

(My sunglasses are not fancy. They never were. But they're even less fancy now that my one-and-a-half year old daughter has spent some time "making them better." Now they sit skewed on my face, drooping on the left and bent on the right.)

Still -- uniforms or not, I can spot the geeks. They lift their heels when they walk, and don't know where to put their hands when they stop. There's just something about their hunched posture that screams "I am computer literate!"

They're everywhere (we're everywhere), because as much as the ultra cool people would like to pretend they run the show, nothing happens until we make it go. As much as the ultra cool people would like to imagine that they make TV, they don't. We do. They just pay us, and pontificate pointlessly in pre-production meetings. We ignore them, and get the job done.

I want another cup of coffee, but I'm afraid it will make me shit my pants. I don't normally drink coffee.

On the massive television to my right: dancing skenks. The editor is attempting to cut in some footage of men, so that the spot doesn't look like it's taking place in a dyke bar. But the men are filler -- the spot is all about the girl-meat. The editor chooses a shot of someone's heaving cleavage, but the producer nixes it. "The Americans are afraid of sex. Try it in the Canadian cut."

Apparently we're doing a British cut, too, so any of you in UKia who might care to glimpse my work will be able to do so in just a few weeks. You'll be able to elbow the fellow next to you at the pub and point to the screen saying, "Oy, I know the mouthy Canagian idiot what make the words move, I do."

The spots are for Budweiser. First we show the astrological signs of various bimbos, and then we show the astrological sign for the bottle of beer, thus showcasing how Budweiser features a "born on..." date to identify how fresh the brew is or isn't.

It's a work of fucking art, let me tell you.

So taxing is the task, in fact, that I barely have time to sit around typing crap into the Scooposphere. Barely.