November 23, 2006
Mike and the Mechatronics
The year was 2027. The future was now. Michael Strathmore lived in this time. He had no one to turn to, no where to run, by the time he turned 30 and so began a life of solitude funded, mostly, by a rather badly misplaced inheritance bequeathed to him by the passing of a very rich uncle in the business of micro-upping efficiencies and improvements to assembly processes by automation who, after equal apportioning most of his vast estate amongst the family members immediate, had no heirs left to give his vast amounts of money to, gave the rest, to his sole surviving nephew, Mike. Mike deemed himself extremely fortunate and not even a little bit guilty to be thought of as somehow worthy enough to receive such a vast sum at such a time in his life.
Mike’s latest game and the deepest, surely, of his multiple passions, was Mechatronic engineering and he was at the top of his game. He had sensed that economically the world’s center would shift. It did and Mike, being one who easily became bored with his personal advancement in the field of Mechatronic engineering, decided to buy himself rraw baww tii kii LLC, a dynamic, leading company in the Mechatronics industry, which had recently moved to the center of the new world economy, Dubai, UAE.
Raw baw ti ki’s bread and butter came in the form of a massive Dubai Road Transport Authority grant wherewith which to germinate citizens ideas for solving Dubai’s chronic and critical traffic issues. From jams to chock-a-blocks, from rush-hour parking lots to rubber neckers causing tailbacks, this grant was given almost in desperation to Raw baw ti ki LLC in the RTA’s attempts to finally curb the tiring daily mess RTA had made of its own transportation infrastructure.
Solving a traffic problem was not Micheal’s idea of a good time in the workplace. No, he would have rather been doing exactly what he had been given license to do by now owning and operating Raw baw ti ki. That was basically to spawn the new age of personal transport in this ripe for transportational revolution atmosphere. He was driven to this sort of a mandate by fate it would seem for in his passion he found reason finally to give to a community that had given so much to him already in the past years of dwelling in the centre of it all. If it weren’t for the daily raunch of traffic issues, Dubai would be a perfect place to live, thought our man Mike.
One day in November, in the cool 26 degrees of evening winter air in Dubai, on the road that lead to the new, new Garhoud 36-lane bridge while sitting stock still, with the top down, "ready to go", in his convertible, 8-cylinder, 365 hp Infinity “M” classic from the year 2007, in the regular 16:15 chock-a-block, jammed, parking lot style traffic, behind a china great wall pickup truck (A Toyota-like form stamped from toy tin and run by 60 hampsters all blowing blue smoke out the 7/8 inch exhaust pipe straight into mike’s eyes nose and mouth, Mike momentarily lost control of his mental faculties and decided to escape.
Maybe it was the fumes. Maybe it was the cool 26 degree breeze blowing through his close cropped top. Maybe it was his need to escape that very moment from feeling the need to depress fully, the gas pedal of the Infinity “M” and unlease the full fury of 365 horses right up the dog gone 7/8 inch tail pipe of China great wall truck with six persons of at least three different East Asian nationalities in front of him. What ever the motivation was, Mike decided to simply escape his current traffic reality by imagining him self simply, to be elsewhere. Fully and completely, mike escaped from that impulse, lucky for him, lucky for the great wall in front of him, lucky for the three kilometer tail back just snaking around the edge of the Dubai World Trade Center round about snaking. Yes so very lucky. And mike began to day dream help hailed on by the blue smoke blown on down the pipe by sixty of the Great Wall’s wee hamsters.
He dreamed right there and then of how and what could be more satisfying than ridding oneself of the need to remain trapped by an inefficient and strangulating infrastructure when, by gooly and by gosh one could render with a few twists of coat hanger ingenuity a dreamy solution to the problem of being a sitting duck amidst a waiting crowd of idling hamsters. “Toss the infrastructure!” he thought blithely to himself, being brought back to reality by a fleeting thought of what his wfe might think of his crazy idea. Then just as fleeting, the meandering Mike-mode was in full swing. His silent rationalizing, analytical monologue began again, as it had day after day after day while being repetedly strangulated along with ten thousand other driver car combinations down in this same spot in the infrastructure that demanded so much of its users but gave so dang little every day.
“The time is ripe for this.” He thought again to himself. “Surely the time is ripe for this thing that I have in my head. Rid ourselves of this bloody inefficient infrastructure that’s what’s gotta happen!” Dubai RTA simply can not see and plan and build infrastructure upon infrastructure and expect that this huge, seething mass of too many cars per minute will NOT but bottle neck if the infrastructure is flawed at the outset!” Feeling quite smug with him self for having condemned this day yet again in one, self-righteous, selfish sentence, yet another whole bleeding sector of the Entity that governed him, Mike and mind meandered on. “What if we focused wholly on the vehicle rather than the silly infrastructure?” And in this moment of truth Mike’s eyes lit up a smile began in the corners of his crooked left side slightly down mouth and became a wide grin and he yelped: “Eureeka!!! I’ve found it!!!” just for the hell of it, really, he’d always wanted to do that.
Just then, an ML 350 van/car/truck/4by4/grocery getter with 50% black tinted windows revealing nothing but seeming blackness with Dubai plate number A44 edged the bloody corner of his bloody fender just a few millimeters in front of the Infinity M’s Bumper just as the Hamster-powered great wall moved ahead. Mike’s foot moved before his brain had a chance to tell it not to and GRAUNCH! There he was. In the middle of 10,000 trapped souls. 18 lanes on either side of him an ML 350’s Fender copulating unceremoniously the M’s bumper. Mike resorted to English language profanity at high volume for about a minute, for it was the only outlet he had at this point.
Continued in tomorrow’s edition of Might Mike and his Magubious Murano. I know, I know, there’s narry a mention yet of any sort of a Murano but hang tight me wee ones and you’ll begin to see where the tale will wag ya to. Tally ho!
Mike’s latest game and the deepest, surely, of his multiple passions, was Mechatronic engineering and he was at the top of his game. He had sensed that economically the world’s center would shift. It did and Mike, being one who easily became bored with his personal advancement in the field of Mechatronic engineering, decided to buy himself rraw baww tii kii LLC, a dynamic, leading company in the Mechatronics industry, which had recently moved to the center of the new world economy, Dubai, UAE.
Raw baw ti ki’s bread and butter came in the form of a massive Dubai Road Transport Authority grant wherewith which to germinate citizens ideas for solving Dubai’s chronic and critical traffic issues. From jams to chock-a-blocks, from rush-hour parking lots to rubber neckers causing tailbacks, this grant was given almost in desperation to Raw baw ti ki LLC in the RTA’s attempts to finally curb the tiring daily mess RTA had made of its own transportation infrastructure.
Solving a traffic problem was not Micheal’s idea of a good time in the workplace. No, he would have rather been doing exactly what he had been given license to do by now owning and operating Raw baw ti ki. That was basically to spawn the new age of personal transport in this ripe for transportational revolution atmosphere. He was driven to this sort of a mandate by fate it would seem for in his passion he found reason finally to give to a community that had given so much to him already in the past years of dwelling in the centre of it all. If it weren’t for the daily raunch of traffic issues, Dubai would be a perfect place to live, thought our man Mike.
One day in November, in the cool 26 degrees of evening winter air in Dubai, on the road that lead to the new, new Garhoud 36-lane bridge while sitting stock still, with the top down, "ready to go", in his convertible, 8-cylinder, 365 hp Infinity “M” classic from the year 2007, in the regular 16:15 chock-a-block, jammed, parking lot style traffic, behind a china great wall pickup truck (A Toyota-like form stamped from toy tin and run by 60 hampsters all blowing blue smoke out the 7/8 inch exhaust pipe straight into mike’s eyes nose and mouth, Mike momentarily lost control of his mental faculties and decided to escape.
Maybe it was the fumes. Maybe it was the cool 26 degree breeze blowing through his close cropped top. Maybe it was his need to escape that very moment from feeling the need to depress fully, the gas pedal of the Infinity “M” and unlease the full fury of 365 horses right up the dog gone 7/8 inch tail pipe of China great wall truck with six persons of at least three different East Asian nationalities in front of him. What ever the motivation was, Mike decided to simply escape his current traffic reality by imagining him self simply, to be elsewhere. Fully and completely, mike escaped from that impulse, lucky for him, lucky for the great wall in front of him, lucky for the three kilometer tail back just snaking around the edge of the Dubai World Trade Center round about snaking. Yes so very lucky. And mike began to day dream help hailed on by the blue smoke blown on down the pipe by sixty of the Great Wall’s wee hamsters.
He dreamed right there and then of how and what could be more satisfying than ridding oneself of the need to remain trapped by an inefficient and strangulating infrastructure when, by gooly and by gosh one could render with a few twists of coat hanger ingenuity a dreamy solution to the problem of being a sitting duck amidst a waiting crowd of idling hamsters. “Toss the infrastructure!” he thought blithely to himself, being brought back to reality by a fleeting thought of what his wfe might think of his crazy idea. Then just as fleeting, the meandering Mike-mode was in full swing. His silent rationalizing, analytical monologue began again, as it had day after day after day while being repetedly strangulated along with ten thousand other driver car combinations down in this same spot in the infrastructure that demanded so much of its users but gave so dang little every day.
“The time is ripe for this.” He thought again to himself. “Surely the time is ripe for this thing that I have in my head. Rid ourselves of this bloody inefficient infrastructure that’s what’s gotta happen!” Dubai RTA simply can not see and plan and build infrastructure upon infrastructure and expect that this huge, seething mass of too many cars per minute will NOT but bottle neck if the infrastructure is flawed at the outset!” Feeling quite smug with him self for having condemned this day yet again in one, self-righteous, selfish sentence, yet another whole bleeding sector of the Entity that governed him, Mike and mind meandered on. “What if we focused wholly on the vehicle rather than the silly infrastructure?” And in this moment of truth Mike’s eyes lit up a smile began in the corners of his crooked left side slightly down mouth and became a wide grin and he yelped: “Eureeka!!! I’ve found it!!!” just for the hell of it, really, he’d always wanted to do that.
Just then, an ML 350 van/car/truck/4by4/grocery getter with 50% black tinted windows revealing nothing but seeming blackness with Dubai plate number A44 edged the bloody corner of his bloody fender just a few millimeters in front of the Infinity M’s Bumper just as the Hamster-powered great wall moved ahead. Mike’s foot moved before his brain had a chance to tell it not to and GRAUNCH! There he was. In the middle of 10,000 trapped souls. 18 lanes on either side of him an ML 350’s Fender copulating unceremoniously the M’s bumper. Mike resorted to English language profanity at high volume for about a minute, for it was the only outlet he had at this point.
Continued in tomorrow’s edition of Might Mike and his Magubious Murano. I know, I know, there’s narry a mention yet of any sort of a Murano but hang tight me wee ones and you’ll begin to see where the tale will wag ya to. Tally ho!
