Carnivorous Cow

The Cow was cruising Facebook in search of a long lost friend without success, and succumbed to Facebook's suggestion that Friendfinder do it for her. The trouble, she explained afterward to Gramsci, was that it trawled through her entire contacts list and checked everyone on there for a Facebook profile.

"Gosh!" exclaimed Gramsci. "Everyone you mail from that account! So," there was a mischievous twinkle in his eight eyes, "does the VC have a Vuisboek account, then?"

The Cow sniggered at the thought of poor Deborah having "regularly update VC's status on FB" added to her performance objectives. "Fortunately not," she laughed. But you'll be surprised who all does. Wallace being one!"

Gramsci looked up. "Does Gromit have one too?" he asked, curious.

The Cow chuckled. "I wondered about that, too. And who'd be brownnosing by friending him. So of course I clicked on 'view Wallace's friends'. And the result was, well, tragic - it reported back that Wallace had no friends!"

"Well that explains his recent behaviour," Gramsci sighed.

"Recent behaviour," mused the Cow. "Odd that you mention that. It occurred to me that perhaps he'd just joined yesterday, so hadn't yet mastered the complexities of finding and adding friends, so I went to his profile to view his mini-feed. And..." she shook her head sadly, "it said, 'Wallace has had no recent activity'."

"That explains his absence from the Wednesday Paper," remarked Gramsci. "Though it is rather worrying when people are paid vast salaries for no discernible activity."

"Oh I don't know," chuckled the Cow. "At least if there's no activity, there's no damage being done, either."

The Cow harrumphed into her office clutching her hotwater bottle. "Can you believe," she snorted to Gramsci, "the new levels of transparency they've sought to introduce?"

Gramsci wondered if this was another reference to the myth of "anonymous marking"- a subject near to the Cow's heart given her recent long weekend of bleeding eyeballs and the stern instruction not to write on the scripts anything mean (however true) in the light of students' access on demand. Which, of course, rendered any "anonymity" in marking uni-directional, and made the Cow fear slashed tyres or worse, given that she'd cheated just a little and not written anything mean... but had drawn a couple of hangman's nooses and scrawled a couple of onomatopoeic depictions of exploding eyeballs or braincell suicides in response to the answers she was being required to mark.

He was wrong.

"Gmf!" declared the Cow. "When last were you in the women's oil in Arts? At least, that's what it says on the door. Though most people would recognise them as ablution facilities."

The penny dropped. "Toilets, you mean?" asked Gramsci.

"Quite!" the Cow confirmed. "I understand that men may feel somewhat exposed at those smelly urinal things, particularly in a competitive environment like this, but I thought that that had been adequately addressed by the allocation of an affirmative action urinal in the 4th floor women's toilets in Leslie Social Science decades ago. I really didn't think there was a need to introduce further transparency in the matter!"

Gramsci looked perplexed. "For a discussion on transparency," he muttered, "this is awfully opaque!"

The Cow rolled her eyeballs. "The catches on the toilet doors," she explained patiently, "have been removed. The doors no longer close. It is no longer possible to conduct one's private activities in private."

Gramsci squirmed. "Why would anyone do that?" he asked, genuinely bemused.

The Cow shrugged. "Who can tell? Perhaps they were collecting brass to recast as a brass band? Or perhaps their curiosity just got the better of them."

"Curiosity?" gasped Gramsci. "Surely not!"

The Cow tossed her head. "Remember, these are the toilets whose bins always overflow with used condoms and party debris. Perhaps the door catch thief was hoping to catch a little of the action themself?"

A shudder ran through Gramsci like a Mexican wave. "There's always a catch, somewhere..." he muttered faintly.  

The Cow chuckled softly. "These digital makwerekwere are so funny!" she told Gramsci. "And they worry that the digital homies might compromise themselves in cyberspace!"

Gramsci shuffled closer and peered at the monitor. The Cow's Facebook minifeed displayed such gems as Dave is deleting blog spam and Steve:iPhone 3G which made him wonder if the Cow didn't need a few more friends who had a first life, never mind a second.

But it wasn't those that had given the Cow her chuckle. She pointed a little lower. Transplant-ed! and OpeningScholarship are now friends, it informed the world happily. A couple of lines further it reported that Transplant-ed! and OpeningScholarship were now married.

"Isn't that sweet!" sighed Gramsci. "Perhaps we ought to send them a wedding gift. Do you think they've got their registry on Hotlists or on FreeGifts?"

"Or NaughtyGifts!" chuckled the Cow knowingly. "How about a pair of handcuffs and a whip?"

Gramsci shook his head. "Too work-related!" he decreed. "It's bad enough they work in the same place, they need a little fun now and then too!"

The Cow conceded, then remembered her original point. "But don't you think," she asked Gramsci, "that this was all just a little... quick? I mean, they've only just become friends, and already they're married?"

"You're right," Gramsci nodded. "In the olden days courtship needed to run its course before the big day. Banns read in the church, and everything!"

The Cow sighed. "Perhaps it's not the digital homies we need to caution about how indelibly and transparently they live out their lives in cyberspace, but the digital makwerekwere?"

The Cow shook her head slowly. "Interesting times indeed," she muttered to Gramsci.

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