More Morris Exploits

Terry Doe

As ever, I swear that every word of this is the Gospel truth. I've toned down the language to spare Herself's blushes, mind. Hope you like it.

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COMPUTER CRASH
Morris goes a byte too far - and even Terry can’t save him this time.

Start with the biggest thing you can think of. Double it. Add a sprinkling of bull elephants, stick on a Wembley Stadium, then increase it by the amount of worry the Queen’s children have caused their mother during the past ten years or so. Now, whichever way you look at it, that’s pretty big isn’t it? Well it isn’t anywhere near as big as the trouble Morris is in right now.

I’m powerless to help him, for his punishment is being dealt with by a much higher authority. This is due to the fact that of all the people Morris chose to commit an atrocity against - he went and did Herself. Got her big-time too, but he’s paying for it now.

It’s painful to watch, and I know what Morris is going through because I’ve had some of it. Herself has a scowl that can strip paint. When she purses those lips and narrows her eyes into slashes of smouldering green, squaring padded shoulders and exhaling forcibly through flared nostrils - Herself looks spookily like a King Cobra. Then, the talon of a finger points to Morris and she hisses, ‘Sssyou! Gettt outtt offf myyy siiiightt!’ Fair makes me shudder to describe it. Morris gets this on every eye-contact, and he’ll keep getting it for at least a month I’m thinking.

So, now you’re wondering what can any one dog do to earn such a punishment. Especially a dog with such an amusing catalogue of calamities to his credit. Here’s what happened.

Because Morris is useless and despite months of alleged training from me (so he’s my fault when it suits Herself), he still tries to climb into the underwear of visiting females, and because we were invaded by Herself’s P.T.A. henchpersons - Morris was banged-up in my office for the duration of their visit.

Hearing peals of wine-inspired laughter, Morris probably felt a tad miffed at doing solitary, while a posse of guffawing grannies had a right good chortle in his house. When Morris sulks, he doesn’t do it passively. He amuses himself.

Next morning, with me gathered safely off to work, Herself planted herself at my computer to make official the piddly outpourings of the previous night’s ‘committee meeting’. Instead of a tasteful portrait of Homer Simpson appearing on the computer screen, surrounded as he usually is by clickable icons - all she got was a swarm of hieroglyphics and a load of electronic blinking, as the screen repeatedly died and was yet re-born.

We’ve had computer trouble before and Herself knew that a swift and highly technical jiggle of the connecting cables sometimes did the trick. She went jiggle, jiggle, jiggle, her jiggling becoming more brisk at the irritating lack of success. Somewhere around the fifth bit of jigglage an explosion rent the office air, to the tune of, ‘BWOPP!’, followed by that sinister smell of electricalness on the melt.

Turned out that Morris had ‘amused himself’ by gnawing-up the main power cable to the computer and all that jiggling had literally blown it. After the cursing and screaming subsided, Morris was condemned to rot in his kennel and Herself popped out to get a new computer cable, a mere 18 miles away. Upon her return, my resourceful partner re-plugged-in the computer and created her vital documents without a hitch - until she tried to print them and discovered that Morris had also mangled the printer cable.

More screaming, this time at a frequency miles above the threshold of pain, had to be followed by another 36-mile visit to PC World. This would be Herself’s last cable replacement, because she’d checked for further damage and had even removed the remaining cables so that Morris couldn’t attack them in her absence - he having been granted a temporary stay in the office on account of rain.

She reached home once more, ushered Morris outside into ‘his bit’, and was plugging away merrily, when the entire computer crashed. No, not a ‘computer crash’, as in software on the blink. This was a real-time crash, as the formerly sturdy pine table which supports the computer and monitor fell to bits and dumped the whole heap of hardware on Herself. She was damn near avalanched to death by Packard Bell she was.

Have a wild guess as to why that table collapsed? Morris had pulled out all six of the wooden wedges which hold it together - that’s why. A heap of incriminating splinters were found behind my desk. Morris is on death row and it will take at least a six-figure Lottery win to cheer Herself up enough to grant a reprieve.

Next issue, don’t be surprised to see an article on flea-control where Morris and I once lived, OK?