Author’s Note:
We need to give credit to this idea to Macy who suggested a holiday story. Without a doubt, two of my favorite Christmas stories are Dickens’ Christmas Carol and the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life”. Both are satisfying in that they reveal how a mere mortal, who is all but lost, receives divine guidance, and through self-evaluation (a Mia term…good by the way!) and overall catharsis, surmounts these difficulties and returns to the fold of humanity.
So sorry about the wordage. Its tough to “ghost” Dickens even when most of the plot is removed!!! In the immortal words of Selene the mortal…”Here ya go..”
Chapter 1 - MarleyMonkey's Ghost
MarleyMonkey was gone: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. He had left the east coast for Lotus Land, and Chatasylum wasn’t the same without him.
The door of Socrooge's office was open that he might keep his eye upon his webmistress Carly Cratchit, who with a dismal little 486 computer with a dismal little 14 inch monitor in a dismal little cell beyond, was working on the corporate website. Socrooge had a very slow dialup, but Carly’s dialup connection was so very much smaller that it looked like the screen was perpetually frozen. But she couldn't upgrade it, for Socrooge kept the password to the account in his own room; and so surely as Carly would come in begging for bandwidth, Socrooge threatened her with termination.
Carly tried once more to get an accommodation from Socrooge. “Please oh master, a pittance of bandwidth. I only have a 14.4K modem, and it takes forever to log into Chatasylum. “Silence” intoned Socrooge “there is no time for chat…for you it will be all werkity werk or you will be out in the street”.
Carly left the room weeping and sat at her cheap secondhand particleboard desk, tears streaming down her lovely face. Hours later, Socrooge finished his work, and headed for the door. “Mind you, I don’t want to see you logging on to my computer, and you’d better have those 30 pages of web updates done by the morrow.”
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