Don’t Go Near the Basement

By Chuck Semenuk

School had finished for the summer. It had been two weeks and Ken Donovan still hadn’t landed a job. The summer was going to suck big time without having a few bucks to spend. Ken would be seventeen years old in a few months. There didn’t seem to be many job opportunities for teenagers this year. As Ken walked back to the garage to get the lawnmower, his buddy Rick Parker pulled into the driveway with his ‘51 Ford. It was a beauty; bull nosed, fender skirts, whitewall tires and ’54 Oldsmobile Starfire wheel covers. The candy apple red paint job sparkled in the sun and the dual exhausts with glass-pack mufflers produced a beautiful rumble as it came to a stop next to him.

“Hey Ken! Did you find a job yet?”

Ken walked over to the car. “No. It looks like a lost cause. Nobody’s hiring this year. Have you had any luck?”

“My aunt works in the office at the old Harris-Jones Paint Company over on the east side. She said that they need a couple of guys for the labor gang. The jobs are ours if we want them,” said Rick.

“Really? I don’t know. That place has a bit of a reputation” exclaimed Ken. “It might be a coincidence but if you remember the newspaper article last year, there have been three kids that turned up missing over the last five years. They all had summer jobs at the paint factory.”

“The cops were never able to make a connection between the paint factory and those guys turning up missing” argued Rick. “They punched out at the end of the day but never got home. You can wimp out if you want to but I need a job.”

“I didn’t say that I wouldn’t take the job. It’s just a little spooky, that’s all. What do we have to do to get the jobs?”

Rick got out of the car. “Let me use your phone to call my aunt and tell her we’re taking the jobs. Then we can run down town and get our work permits.”

…..”Click YES”

By Chuck Semenuk

Milo Farnsworth sat in front of his personal computer scratching his head. 

“Damn those so-called experts at Maggot-Soft! Every time they come out with a new version of operating system, they screw it up more than it was before.”

Years ago, Milo started out with the first PC. The old DOS operating system; now that was something that you could learn and work with. If you took the time to learn a little code, you could make the computer do whatever you wanted. Now, the machine is as dumb as a box of rocks. It thinks that it knows what you want to do and insists on doing what it damn well pleases.

Milo decided to do a bit of house cleaning on his hard drive and delete files that he no longer needed. He selected the files that he didn’t want to keep and clicked “Delete.”

A window came up on his screen. “You are trying to delete ten files. Are you sure that you want to delete these files?”


“Of course, dammit! Why do you think I’m deleting them?” Milo clicked on “Yes.”

“DOORWAY is deleting ten files. They cannot be retrieved once deleted.”

“Yeah, yeah. Do it already!”


Un-needed files deleted, Milo went back to the report that he had been writing for work. After about an hour, he had added another six pages to the long document. Caught up in the process, he had forgotten to periodically save his work. All of a sudden, a message came up on the screen.

“DOORWAY has detected an error and must close this application. Your unsaved data will be lost. Do you want DOORWAY to diagnose the problem?”

Milo let loose with a tirade of expletives. “Damn you. You don’t have a clue and you can’t diagnose your way out of a paper bag!”

Milo grabbed his mouse and jerked the plug out of the computer, flinging it across the room where it hit the wall.


“DOORWAY has detected that your pointing device is disconnected. Please check your connection.”

Having had enough “fun” for one day, Milo retrieved his mouse from the corner, plugged it in and closed down the computer.

“Sure glad I had the pacemaker installed. This thing would probably give me a heart attack.”