For the record I wasn’t the cool girl at school. I never ran with the popular crowd. I was clever. I was bullied. I had few friends, but time heals you and things change. I hate this place. I can’t breathe here. I don’t like it. I don’t like being this old. I didn’t mind so much before, 50, 60, even 70 wasn’t so bad but this elderly decrepit 80 stuff is not so good. Need to use a big font on my screen.
I don’t like this place, I already said that didn’t I. No one cares though, I am over 80, people just expect it. Sometimes before I came here when I was talking to somebody, I’d see how many times I could repeat myself before they started to look at me oddly. Ha Ha. Anyway, I don’t like it. Not the way it smells or sounds. Piped music all the time, well some of the time. Old music for old people. Slow old music for slow old people. ‘Ain’t no Kanye here’-whoever the hell he is or was. I don’t get any visitors. Thank goodness, it saves the endless complaining. Lots of them get visitors, “isn’t it lovely here”- “don’t you love the wall paper”- for the record, nobody loves fuckin’ wallpaper –and being over 80 none of us can see the stupid pattern anyway. It goes on, “how are you dear? come kiss grandma”. Fuck the bloody lot of it. I’m glad my daughter doesn’t come. I hope she has better things to do. I certainly do.
We have human staff once a week. That’s a good thing too. Anymore and this place would riot. None of us like the human staff that much. I much prefer these android, humanoid bot-things, more efficient I say. Less need to dispense with the small talk. The people that run this place are stupid. All of them-stupid. Most of us wouldn’t have another human being in the place if we didn’t have to.
There’s a group of us. Four women, all of us in our 80’s-don’t know how to break it to you honey but by the time you get to your eighties all the good ones are gone –literally-they’ve all popped their clogs. The only ones left are the ones with healthy lifestyles and believe me they are as dull as all hell-always showing off, wanting to talk about Ernie who died because he drank too much and smoked too much weed! I didn’t do that and look at me I’m alive. You might be alive but you’re boring as all hell- let me tell you I’d have banged Ernie in the back of the car bent over double before I so much as unbuttoned your shirt. Them and their vegan righteousness.
Anyway there’s four of us in our 80’s, haha, repetition again- not going to lie to you I am the ring leader. I don’t know what the idiots who run this place were thinking, stuffing it full of bots. I grew up with computers, and I mean literally. I remember when they first started to appear in the office. I literally have seem them evolve from then to now, from advanced typewriters to robots who can wipe my arse. And they think during that time I never mastered a bit of programming, a hack here, a trick there. Idiots I tell you.
Last week they were down here wondering why the morphine supplies are so low. What’s happening to it? Where’s it going? Well its like this, see, Maureen is level 4, that means she needs all kinds of assistance but more importantly she is in pain, and the prescribed morphine dose from the doc-bot is not enough and no matter how much pain she is in the doc-bot won’t prescribe any more. Same as human doctors I reckon, only you can’t hack a human doctor.
Two choices for Maureen’s probs, we hack the doc-bot-which we have done before. Not often anymore though. It went badly wrong. Harold died. Accidentally, because we hacked the doc-bot and he ended up with too many sleeping pills. Who knew. He was a bit gobby Harold and a bit leery. A dirty old man in a decrepit useless shell. He bugged Rosa once too often-going the grope at an inch a minute. He was troublesome, but harmlessly beyond being able to do anything. Sometimes he was even fun Harold – we’d stand just out of his reach and tease him by showing our knickers, I guess it was cruel. Anyway Harold got to Rosa and she wanted it sorted. So we sorted it, but a bit too much. He didn’t wake up and the doc-bot pronounced him dead, D.E.A.D which was bad for us. So we just reprogrammed the results in the doc-bot for a couple of weeks and Harold died –well a few weeks later-when the stench was so bad we couldn’t hold out anymore. He really stunk after a few weeks of decomposing. No one else seemed to notice much. It was a lot of complicated timing and hacking and numbers and stuff. So yeh, we don’t hack the doc-bots much anymore.
We hack the nurse-bots, much easier. This was Maureen’s second option. Maureen, like I said, lots of pain. We’ve upped her dose a bit, keep her happy. Love Maureen when she’s happy, floats about the place with her shirt undone and feeling happy. Morphine baby, most people in their 80s are addicted to it. I could give it up though. Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t, just float out of here on a happy cloud one day.
Technically if we are caught hacking a nurse-bot or any bot really, we will be kicked out. Like in boarding school but in reverse, we get kicked out and sent back to our children’s house and let me tell you my daughter would not be happy about that. We all hate that fucking piped music too, we get rid of that as soon as they are out the door. I am working on subtly changing the smell of the place too.
Just last week the 4 of us hacked the nurse bots and made them give us a tattoo, when in fact they should have been administering dementia medication. I don’t have dementia and it was rude and mean but we are like the smokers in the toilets at school. In fact that is what the tat said-smokin’. I thought one of the actual human nurses was going to notice it but they are thick, those ones, no idea at all. The bots are also meant to do some kind of data dump every night, we’ve hacked that before too. We can hack anything.
There are four of us, did I say that already, ha ha repetition, in our 80’s. We live in a nursing home that has robotic staff. We are elderly and frail and wouldn’t harm anybody, except – when you’re back is turned, we are in control, we are holding your mother, overdosing her on morphine, accidentally killing your father with sleeping tablets and we are now the cool girls hanging in the toilets at school and you- we are laughing at you.
A Tuesday Latte 