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And lo, at approximately 4pm this afternoon the heavens opened and there was wind and rain and even some hail.
The British summer has returned.
At least the good weather was there when it was most needed -- that is, for most of the Olympics. If we could only have a bit of decent weather, then I'm glad it was at the most urgent time.
. . . I'm also very glad, for a different value of "glad", that I paid attention to the weather forecast and wore solid shoes to work rather than open-toed sandals. And had a roll-up umbrella in my bag.
---
The Laundry, like any other government bureaucracy, operates on a 9-to-5 basis—except for those inconvenient bits that don’t. The latter tend to be field operations of the kind where, if something goes wrong, they really don’t want to find themselves listening to the voicemail system saying, “Invasions of supernatural brain-eating monsters can only be dealt with during core business hours. Please leave a message after the beep.” (Supernatural? Why, yes: we’re that part of Her Majesty’s government that deals with occult technologies and threats. Certain abstruse branches of pure mathematics can have drastic consequences in the real world—we call them “magic”—by calling up the gibbering horrors with which we unfortunately share a multiverse [and the platonic realm of mathematical truth]. Given that computers are tools that can be used for performing certain classes of calculation really fast, it should come as no surprise that Applied Computational Demonology has been a growth area in recent years.)
-- Overtime, Charles Stross
The British summer has returned.
At least the good weather was there when it was most needed -- that is, for most of the Olympics. If we could only have a bit of decent weather, then I'm glad it was at the most urgent time.
. . . I'm also very glad, for a different value of "glad", that I paid attention to the weather forecast and wore solid shoes to work rather than open-toed sandals. And had a roll-up umbrella in my bag.
---
The Laundry, like any other government bureaucracy, operates on a 9-to-5 basis—except for those inconvenient bits that don’t. The latter tend to be field operations of the kind where, if something goes wrong, they really don’t want to find themselves listening to the voicemail system saying, “Invasions of supernatural brain-eating monsters can only be dealt with during core business hours. Please leave a message after the beep.” (Supernatural? Why, yes: we’re that part of Her Majesty’s government that deals with occult technologies and threats. Certain abstruse branches of pure mathematics can have drastic consequences in the real world—we call them “magic”—by calling up the gibbering horrors with which we unfortunately share a multiverse [and the platonic realm of mathematical truth]. Given that computers are tools that can be used for performing certain classes of calculation really fast, it should come as no surprise that Applied Computational Demonology has been a growth area in recent years.)
-- Overtime, Charles Stross
