Three hours off-line?!?!

[IamtheZombie]

Zombie thinks it must have been serious this time.

Sorry - it was me.

I attempted to post an full emoticon version of Proust's A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu and I broke it.

Overuse of I thought, Talc

Massive gin shortage reported near MN towers. Related?

Yup, BIWI - was Charles Swann. He pops up a fair bit in the story.

Talc, Zombie would love to have seen that.

Zombie has ordered new supplies of gin.

hmmnnn...wonder who had to go back for the office keys

Many many apologies for all the DH/DP interaction/house-cleaning/RL business that will have occurred as a result of all this.

We are working on it, honest

Is it going to happen again? I had important weather stuff to say. well not that important really

I have to say, I'm a bit worried about how long Tech is spending in the pub. Has he, perhaps, developed a bit of a drink problem?

Tech has his head down on the bar, sobbing Phil Mitchell stylee 'I can't do it any more, I just CAN'T' 'tell 'em all to FUGGOFF'

.... and Justine shrieking at him, Babs Windsor style, to man up and gedddonwivit

Techie stuff must be difficult when the server/keyboards are whirling about in a filmy haze of alcohol fumes and you have to keep dashing off to the loo every half-hour or so to either pee or throw up.

Poor buggers deserve a fecking medal, if you ask me.

Oh no, Justine is Dot Cotton in this particular scenario. With a faaaaag and a disdainful look.

I thought that was Carrie?

Meanwhile, Rowan stands in the doorway, wringing her hands and looking Distressed in a vaguely Genteel way.

Whilst Helen rushes in, with her portable Red Button for Bunfights.

<a class="break-all" href="http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=mobile+red+button&um=1&hl=en&qscrl=1&nord=1&rlz=1T4GGLL_en-GBGB379GB379&biw=1024&bih=566&tbm=isch&tbnid=GEgXh87RN_H37M:&imgrefurl=www.matobmobile.co.uk/index.php%3Fid%3Do2_setup_emporia_life&docid=TIaW2AM-lU5NLM&imgurl=www.matobmobile.co.uk/images/empoira_life_in_web.jpg&w=400&h=300&ei=NmWyT-HSH4yr8APOnOGzCQ&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=722&vpy=242&dur=108&hovh=194&hovw=259&tx=153&ty=169&sig=116270070623696165555&page=2&tbnh=169&tbnw=232&start=18&ndsp=12&ved=1t:429,r:11,s:18,i:135" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Helen's Special Equipment

This is superb - and probably the reason why MN keeps breaking.

That chap standing there is the head technician at MNHQ and he has stuck steadfastly by his vision of Computing In The Future to this day.

The massive server he had installed back in the 50s is now held together by duct tape, Araldite and treasury tags. You have to regularly top up the anti-freeze round the back and there's a family of field mice nesting in the modem.

Perhaps, instead of moaning, we should start a fund-raising campaign to buy MN a new computer. We could then upgrade to something like this little beauty.

Here's 10p to get the ball rolling: O

i'm too tight poor to add hard cash but found this in the attic free to good home

Oh wow - a datasette!

We had a C64 - loved it and used to play Bubble Bobble and Tetris until I went boggle-eyed.

Sometimes you'd leave the datasette loading for about 20 minutes - and then come back and find that it had failed after about two minutes and you had to start all over again.

It still felt like cutting-edge technology, though.

Ooh I used to own one of those. It only takes 45 mins to load a game!

Thor - do you remember the alternating colours on some of the loading screens?

Green - brown - red - blue - yellow - grey - round and round; sometimes with a block counter showing the progress of a load.

When we upgraded to an Amiga and it had those little hard-disk jobbies, we thought all our Christmases had come at once.

They keep saying they aint down the pub but somehow I am

I missed it

This means I have a rl . How and when did this happen?

[scared]

ours was shit, we only ever had 1 game - X-Zap - and i never did get it to load

talc no don't remember. I used to go out and play footy for a while instead! I upgraded from the c16 to the c64 and then got the disk drive

Only 15 minutes load time!