One Framistat Short

Flashlight. Anti-static wrist band. Screwdriver. Vise-grips. Oscillator. Got everything... except the part we're installing. Mitch!

Oh, hello. I do apologize. Seems like every time you drop by, I'm hollering something at someone in our motley entourage, and typically that someone is Mitch Macaphee, our resident mad scientist. Sad that Big Green has fallen to such a base level of discourse. I remember the days when... when... excuse me... What the fuck is that noise? Can't you fucking morons keep quiet for five seconds? Jesus jumping Christ on a bike!! Ahem. Yes... where was I? Ah, yeah. I've tried to keep us on a civil track here at the Cheney Hammer Mill, honestly I have. But it's almost as though an evil spirit has taken hold — the spirit of Cheneys past. It's nearly... just a minute... I'm telling our valued readers about how much we regret our recent resort to harsh words, you ass-munching dick-head!

All right. What is the bone of contention this week? Well, we're back to maintenance on Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Mitch Macaphee, Marvin's inventor, is still nominally on strike over our failure to, well, pay him for his efforts on our behalf. Ergo, we are forced to perform routine and extraordinary repairs on our automatonic cohort without adequate counsel from Marvin's designer. Well, the shit has definitely hit the fan on this little dispute — Marvin is having serious issues (i.e. problems). I mentioned the thing about watering our mixing desk. Just lately, he's taken to repointing the bricks on the north side of the mill. This wouldn't be a problem, except that he thinks "repointing" means ripping the bricks out and filing them into spike-like objects with his atomic hand. Clearly, it was time to operate.

Left to our own devices, Matt, John, and I resorted to what we know best — stealth. We waited until nightfall yesterday, then broke into Mitch's laboratory and turned up what appeared to be his notebook on the construction of Marvin. It was a little yellowed and dog-eared, but still readable. We paged through the sucker by candlelight, making rough sketches of his diagrams, then studying them at our leisure between mixing sessions. Even a blind man could see that Marvin was suffering from a dysfunctional framastatic conversion unit — it was right there in front of us! So we booked the conference room upstairs (no reservations necessary, since it's abandoned like the rest of this dump) and prepared to open Marvin up like a pull-tab can of pacific salmon. (Actually, that's sort of what he looks like inside. Strange. Very strange...)

Of course, now that we have our robot friend sedated, broken open, and laid out on a table, we are confronting our somewhat shameful failure to procure the replacement part necessary to perform this procedure successfully. You see... this is why we need scientists! We know no method! We have no skills! Mitch — get your sorry ass down here, you bugger!