Mr. Thomas part 5

08:07:2006
In which Mr. Thomas takes the first step towards finding out who's been screwing him around...
On his way home that night Chip Thomas stopped by his local PriceSaver supermarket. It wasn’t the place he usually did his food shopping as its fresh produce was a motley collection of bruised tomatoes, blackened plantains and sprouted onions. The packaged foods were mostly of brands he had never seen before. He didn’t know why, but the idea of buying Greek apple juice made him uncomfortable. The saving grace of PriceSaver though, and what Mr Thomas suspected was their main revenue source, was their huge selection of snack foods and scratchcards.

The stacking chips occupied a large section of shelf in the centre aisle next to the toilet cleaning powder. The proximity of the two products seemed to be purely based on the shape of the packaging which was in both cases a foot long cylinder. On closer inspection Mr Thomas realised that not only were the cylinders of toilet cleaning powder exactly the same dimensions as the cylinders of stacking chips but that both products were made by the same company. He dimly remembered his brother who worked in TV telling him that these chips started out as a liquid slurry of starch-based chemicals which was moulded into saddle-shaped chips before being dusted with the appropriate flavourings and stacked in tubes. Evidently the tubes came from the same plant that made the toilet powder tubes but Johanssen had warned him that he would be needing the BBQ flavoured chips if he was to go online undetected.

Once home, he brought the cylinder into his kitchen and set it on the table. He then crouched, his knees cracking, to reach into a low cupboard and hauled out several tins of food. Two tins of tuna steaks in vegetable oil, a tin of kidney beans, a tin of butter beans, a tin of flageolet beans and a tin of peach halves which was badly scaled on the top due to an intermittent leak from a water pipe. Mr Thomas threw out the peaches and carefully removed the tops from the tins, which were the old fashioned ones without ringpulls. He dumped the tuna and beans into a bowl, turned the tins over and removed their bottoms as well. This left him with ten metal discs and the beginnings of a tuna and bean salad.

As he ate the salad garnished with BBQ flavoured processed chips, Mr Thomas cast his eyes over the scrawled instructions from Johanssen. He would need a metal rod and some cable of the type that Cable TV installations use. The cable was no problem; they had installed his Cable TV the previous spring when he had upgraded to fast Internet and had left behind a ten metre drum of the stuff which he had yet to find a use for.

The metal rod was harder to locate. At first he thought to use a poker from an ornamental fireplace set but it was too thick and covered in matt black paint. There was a rod holding up his bathroom curtains which was ideal but he really didn’t want to chop it up and have everyone across the road see into his bathroom. A further search of the house revealed nothing but a big cardboard box his fridge had come in and some hairy string, so Mr Thomas fashioned the cardboard and string into a pair of hanging flaps to replace his bathroom curtains. It ocurred to him as he sawed a length off the curtain rail that he could have waited until morning and gone to a hardware place but by then his momentum would be lost and he wanted to get this ridiculous project finished tonight.

Finally the thing was finished. The tin lids had been cut to size with holes drilled in their centres. Then they had been threaded onto the curtain rail at specifically measured intervals (Johanssen had placed great stress on the importance of getting the spaces between the discs right). Then the rod-and-disks bit had been slid into the sheath of the BBQ chips tin which unlike the sour cream and onion flavour tin had a metallic foil lining.

All that was left was to attach one end of the TV cable to the end of the rod and the other end to the wireless internet card on his laptop. For this final connection he used something called a ‘pigtail’ – a short wire which Johanssen had given him. The ‘pigtail’ had a big chunky screw-in connector at one end and a delicate knob at the other. Johanssen had made it sound like a minute’s work to install the pigtail but this proved to be the hardest job of all. Between the frustration of trying to solder the pigtail in place and the tuna and bean salad, Mr Thomas found himself cursing and farting into the small hours. He finally finished the job at 2.30 am, the proud owner of a home made Yagi-Uda Cantenna

Coffee helped to keep his head going but the residue of the previous nights work weighed heavy in Mr Thomas’ legs. They ached and protested at every step as he hefted himself up the stairs to his office. In his briefcase was his laptop and the fruits of last night’s labour. The next step was to find the residue of some specific chalk markings and set up nearby with his homemade contraption of food containers, a curtain rail and of course, the hated pigtail.


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