The Trouble with Servers

The Trouble with Servers

"What the..." I mumble, my brow furrowing so hard a headache immediately develops.

I press Alt/Tab and move the mouse down to the network connection icon. Connection Status: Very Good. I rush down the stairs to the desktop in my den, click on that network icon and the same results.

"Uh oh."

I rush back upstairs and pick up my laptop and Alt/Tab and World of Infinite Trouble pops up. There's my character, maxed out levels, best gear possible-as researched by my small guild. We spent a full night with basic math equations figuring out the best proc.'s for our different classes. We spent 18 hours straight in a dungeon camping one creature for a trinket with a .1% drop rate. That means we would have had to kill him on average 10x100 times to get what we cabYme for. We only had to kill him half that amount and it was totally worth it. The Bell of Izkanbel'th. I've only seen it on one other player and the noob had it on the entirely wrong proc. This bell has a cool down time of three minutes and it makes you immune to all status ailments for one and a half minutes and, and it restores all cool down time limits (with the exception of its own, to zero minutes). Now, there is another innate ability rogues can use every five minutes that does exactly what that bell does, except it applies to the bell's cool down as well! The benefits are obvious...

"What is going on." I whine.

Double clicking the Begin World of Infinite Trouble icon, an error message pops up,

"World of Infinite

Trouble is experiencing

Unforeseen issues concerning

Its servers..."

"What the Hell!"

"...expected ETA of servers

96 hours."

* * *

"I pay you $12.50 a month for this shit!" I shout into the cell phone.

"We apologize for the inconvenience, sire, but the servers, all servers, have been... well, they've been destroyed. That is all I can say, we have a very high call rate right now and I have to go. On behalf of Forever Games we apologize for the inconvenience."

And she hangs up.

"Fuck this!" I shout and hurl my cordless mouse off my loft and it lands on the sofa downstairs.

The sound of wind and a faint rustling of leaves emanates from the two the two tiny speakers on my laptop. I press enter and I swear my character laughs mockingly at me when the pop up appears with the same error message as before.

I lean back in my chair and look at the book shelf. All the novels I've bought and only read half of. Now would be a good time to pick one of those up, maybe finally finish a Dostoyevsky.

I cringe and get up, Kipper meows when I nearly step on her and I walk downstairs. I slap the print screen on my wall on the way down of my one hundred-thousandth player kill and walk into the kitchen. There's a full pot of coffee on the counter and I pour a big glass, black and hot and sip at it. The living room is so quiet, the television blank and indifferent, as appealing as a novel.

It's funny, but I repeatedly hear a sound in my mind from WIT. The Mutilate sound effect. The sound is the same noise it would make if you were to bite into one inch of goo sandwiched between two burnt pieces of toast. It's difficult to tell which noise comes first: the distinctive crunch of the toast, or the sloppy smack of goo. Either way it's the muddled noise of three thousand hit points of sheer murdering damage.