Ambedo. My morning fugue. I rarely talk about my job; people tend to act rather strangely if I explain who my employer is.
Working for the eminent Mr. mirg repaer makes me acutely aware of the thin permeable wall between life and death; of how quickly it can crumble.
And, that fact created far more correspondence than you might think. Correspondence scribed on clay tablets and papyrus to 3-D lasered missives all stacked in voracious teetering piles; a hoarder’s dream maze. Great care was needed just to manoeuver to my desk. Usually out of the office, Mr. R. left notes scrawled in horrific handwriting. Self-combusting upon reading (he’d picked up 10,000 reams when a certain branch office went bust during one economic downturn or other), I spent my mornings sweeping up ashes, and fanning smoke detectors.
I had to bring Mr. r and the millenniums old office into at least the 20th century. The letters needed to be digitized, for a start, to say nothing of the archives. Filing the paperwork after a large natural disaster, for example, was a logistical nightmare.
Jacob, from the other side, materialized one evening to help with the switch. Once known as an infant terrible and cyberverse wunderkid, he liked to dazzle me with his technological prowess. Sipping his signature blackberry tea, he brokered deals for genius phones with infinite GPS (Mr. r can be a hard person to find), internet connections zippity-do-dah fast, dealing in mega-trilla-gazillion bytes of information in a flash, 50 inch hi-def flat screen monitors, hand-held scanners and Holmes* computing systems. My personal techogremlins dared not misbehave; they took the first flight out of town after Jacob installed a real firewall. I left all the training to Jacob; Mr. r is not known for his patience.
I try not to read the correspondence closely; just scan and prep for storage in the cloud. Then consider conservation or shredding. Otherwise, a tide of emotions overwhelms me. Now, added to the mix are emails, texts and tweets. Every thing from death threats to thank yous. Pleas, promises, and forewarnings. Comedic, tragic, ironic, satirical, serious. Folks bare their soul (and their bodies); often not a pretty sight. Identities of some correspondents would amaze you; but we keep the names private – locked in a virtual vault.
I’m working on a “Letters to Death for Dummies” book while Jacob monitors all our social media. Mr. r’s tweeter followers are in the millions. Not as many “likes” for his face book page, however.
Each morning though, as I stir rich cream into my deep black coffee, ambedo washes over me. Working for Mr. mirg repaer does that. And one thing for sure, no pink slip; if he comes for me, I know I’m fired.
© Lorraine
image: Tomb of Wayfaring Souls
I combined mlmm writing prompt #203: Letters to Death with mlmm wordle #151 A story fragment detached and shuffled from a longer mind piece. Pretty much writing in the raw.
The wordle words are in italics within the text. Two words came with definitions: ambedo – “a kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details—raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee—which leads to a dawning awareness of the haunting fragility of life;” and eminent – “high in station, rank, or repute; prominent; distinguished: conspicuous, signal, or noteworthy: lofty; high: prominent; projecting; protruding.”
* a nod to IBM’s Watson.
August 2, 2017 at 10:23 am
. Then the prompt .
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July 28, 2017 at 6:34 am
. Then the prompt .
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July 22, 2017 at 9:16 am
. Then the prompt .
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July 22, 2017 at 8:55 am
. Then the prompt .
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April 18, 2017 at 5:52 pm
Nicely done combining the two! They tally most wonderfully!
Hank
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April 19, 2017 at 7:17 am
Thanks, Hank.
Crazy thing having remembered a mind story from several years ago a bit before the prompt about letters to death . . . One of those serindips, I guess. I find sometimes the wordle words meld with another prompt — written or visual — especially when I’m stumbling over one or the other.
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April 18, 2017 at 11:22 am
Brilliant! Oh I loved this, even if it’s a bit of one and part of something, you would say, freer and unpolished, something that had been “waiting in the wings” as it were ….. for certainly, there is wonderful, creative and whacky genius here …. what a great (well maybe not so much) job – the description and use of the wordle and the characters etc. really had me chuckling along …. the undercurrent of slight “sarcasm” and yet, walking the line of “appropriate” in tone, whose voice, I won’t name, but this works …. love the idea and the concept and the word play and how clever some of the phrasing …. a dash of pepper here and there, definitely makes the salad more interesting :)
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April 18, 2017 at 3:42 pm
Thanks. I had a longer version playing in my head several years ago. Just remembered recently, and was seeing what remenents I could recall. Then the prompt . . .
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April 18, 2017 at 5:47 pm
works out sometimes, in the oddest ways ;)
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April 18, 2017 at 7:15 am
Very clever, and a great word – ambedo.
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April 18, 2017 at 3:36 pm
Isn’t ambedo a wonderful word! Wordles increase my vocabulary. Yves finds exceptional rich and vivid ones to include in her wordles.
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