because some conversations deserve to be immortalized...

My friend and fellow author Jay Smith absolutely kills me with his blog, a perfect example of facing life with a sense of humor. He is also king of geeks, as this entry will attest.

Here's Jay trying to get his car repaired.

Me: “I see smoke.”
Mech: (nods) Well, that’s probably a forest pixie stuck in your flux capacitor.
Me: Make it go with no smoke? How much and when?
Mech: Weeelllllll, about $515 and half a day.
Me: Okay. Make fixed, no smoke.
Mech: Got it. We’ll call your cell when we’re done.
(later)
Mech: Okay, Mr. Smith. We removed the pixie from the flux capacitor, tightened up the transmat conduits and flushed the transwarp antimatter feeds. You should be good to go.
Me: Okay. Make fixed? No smoke?
Mech: That’s the end result, yes, sir.
Me: Good. What if pixie come back?
Mech: Just keep an eye on the front panel every so often, make sure the halogen matrix indicators line up and have the same lamination. If they fire out of sequence and you’re under 88mph, just stop and check to see if there’s a little crispy winged thing inside. It’ll look like a dragonfly almost. If you see one, just give us a call. Somehow forest fairies can get into the capacitors if the front panel is loose. They think the light of the induction manifold is another fairy in heat so they fly right in and, you know, “ZAP”. But the bolts are tight so you shouldn’t see any more problems.
Me: Uh. Okay. Me pay now.

To which I replied, "You mean they didn't set up a neutrino beam inside the Heisenberg Compensator? Those bastards!"

"No," he said. "But they reversed the polarity of the starboard power coupling and it caused a spontaneous plot device to malfunction. That was another $250."