So I was like just sitting there, in front of the computer screen reading Kristin Buxton's web pages and some annoying music was playing in the background and people were milling around and making noise and stuff and some of them smelled more than a little bit booze and since the floor in the Q house is not what it should be it wobbled quite alarmingly under the heavy feet of noisy drunkards and not only that but it was getting a bit warm also probably way over the 30 or so degrees centigrade which I normally consider pleasant and the level of carbon dioxide in the air was steadily increasing and I was getting ever more tired and the level of food in my stomach sank like a stone in five gravities and the level of caffeine in my blood kept pace with it only it was going up instead of down and then it struck me like lightning from a ceiling in bad need of a coat of paint:

"Yo! Bozo!"

something seemed to shout straight into my ears.

"Um, yeah?"

I answered. For some reason I didn't speak out loud but simply thought my answer in the supposed privacy of my partly fur-clad head. For a moment, I vaguely considered asking the voice to identify itself, but before that thought had even been fully formed I realised that it was the voice of my old friend the goddess of confusion, Eris.

"Eris? What are you doing here? I thought you only appeared in my dreams?"

There was a pause perceptible to even my dulled senses before the reply came.

"I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere around the Garden of Frop..."

"That's ok. And if you were to wear that cute little black and red negligé the next time you do visit a dream of mine I'd probably forget all about it,"

I said before I'd thought things through. As soon as the words had formed in my mind I regretted them. Blackmailing goddesses is Not A Good Idea (TM).

"We'll see about that..."

came the answer. Quickly, in a probably hopeless attempt to distract Her from what I had just said although it was not quite as hopeless as if it had been a less confused goddess I had been talking to, I tried to change the subject.

"So, what is my favourite goddess doing here?"

"What?"

"Why are you here?"

"To enjoy the view?"

I looked out through the window. On the other side of it was the same construction site that has been there since last summer or so where they're building the new physics building, and as construction sites tend to be this is no great pleasure to watch.

"Nope."

"To pick up gorgeous guys?"

To my right, a fat hacker. To my left and slightly behind, a balding hacker. Behind, a smelly malnourished hacker. Further behind, an obnoxious hacker.

"Nope."

There was a rather long silence, only interrupted by further noise from the drunk bastards doing hardware hacking in the main computer room and The Sisters of Mercy's Some Kind of Stranger going full blast on the electronic jukebox which was all in all not so bad because there is far less enjoyable music in the electronic pit where that came from like for example that sampling of William Shatner singing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds which is truly a crawling horror in audible form.

"I give up. Why am I here?"

"I don't know, I'm just a stupid human! Maybe you just took a wrong turn and weren't really going this way at all."

And at that she patted me on the head and went away.