C00LeS WaReZ UNiON MeMOiRS: cHApTER #0x91

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0x91  -  Helsinki  -  mR.mEgAsTuFf  -  1997-08  -  296 lines
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Okay, so I moved to Helsinki at the same time as OH7MO (my uncle Osmo). Of course, we were both totally broke, especially since Osmo hadn't even fucking HAD THE GUTS to ask Pielavesi municipality for moving assistance or anything. dArK sTuFfEr's dad at least managed to wrangle some decent assistance for their move, but Osmo is such a fucking wimp, always groveling with that kind of stuff. I was pretty pissed off from day one, like every time Osmo whined about not having any cash and not being able to stop for eating or anything.

Our place was Osmo's older brother Raimo's apartment, a three-room flat in Vuosaari. Besides him, his then-girlfriend (Sirpa) and my cousin Jari (aka dR.cRaXoN slash cYbOgAnG) lived there. We were pretty familiar with the place, as we'd spent X-Mas and autumn holidays there a bunch of times before. But this time was different, and Osmo promised Raimo he'd find an apartment and a job ASAP so we wouldn't have to crash there for too long. I promised to try to find a job too, because I didn't have any educational prospects lined up. My final grades were so bad I was only on the waiting list everywhere.

Right on the first Monday, we drove to Itäkeskus labor office in Osmo's VW beetle and signed up as job seekers. Osmo was totally down in the dumps all day, saying he'd "completely sunk way too deep." He'd never agreed to go to the social services office or apply for benefits back in Lietevesi, because he was of the opinion that you had to fend for yourself, and he didn't want to ask for help now either. But Raimo finally blew up at him after a long argument, saying "Alright, you're going to register yourself or you're going back to your "Lietevvesj", period."

Osmo was so freaked out after that office visit that he couldn't concentrate on anything the rest of the day. But then Tuesday morning, he reluctantly pulled out the Helsingin Sanomat job listings and started dialing numbers. There weren't many ads, so Raimo brought over a pile of older newspapers too.

The results were pretty slim. Most numbers just gave him some clueless summer secretary who told him to send in a written application. So, then it was time to fire up WP51 and start cranking out applications. Raimo was on holiday, so he helped a bit with those and wondered what kind of country bumpkins we were, not even knowing what a CV was. Osmo did know that CW meant something related to Morse code, but CV with the regular V didn't ring any bells.

Naturally, we never heard back from any of those places, so things got increasingly tense. We had arguments, I was pissed off, and I snapped at Raimo, Osmo, and Sirpa, and occasionally at dR.cRaXoN when he happened to be home.

Raimo, fed up, tightened our living conditions: we had to start paying him rent, and he said he'd charge late fees. Plus, we got assigned all the cleaning, laundry, and cooking, and we didn't even get to eat the food we cooked, since we hadn't contributed to the ingredient costs. What a Nazi freak! Then later, Raimo and Sirpa said our cooking was "pure garbage" and started going out to restaurants. And we just cooked some cheap noodles, rice, beans, and tuna for ourselves, adding ketchup every other day so the bottle wouldn't run out. And we'd wash our dishes right after eating so we wouldn't have to pay Raimo's ridiculous mess fee.

Living in that Vuosaari flat was so depressing that we really didn't want to hang around there. Luckily, we'd brought my moped along with the moving stuff, so I started exploring the city on it. Sometimes I'd find empty bottles and return them to the stores to pay for fuel and hang out at the Kirjakaapeli Internet cafe for some IRC.

Then I thought, maybe I should find a bunch of friends to hang out with, so I wouldn't have to spend all my time driving around in traffic. I didn't really have any relevant scene connections besides the cYbOgAnG guys, and they weren't an option, because dR.cRaXoN didn't want to see me any more than he absolutely had to.

Then Schistic popped into my head. She'd been pretty active in CWU for a while. I messaged her on IRC asking if she wanted to meet up, but she just flipped me off. I wonder what kind of sand she had been gathering in her cunt, for the fuck's sake. I also tried hanging out in all the Helsinki-oriented IRC channels, just in case they had any meetups, but they'd always ban me before I even heard about them. What a bunch of arrogant jerks! Then I tried to flirt with all the IRC girls to get them on dates, but no one wanted to go out with me either, even though dArK sTuFfEr let me use his mass-flirting scripts and botnets, so the tech side was totally scene-worthy. But it didn't bring me any luck, so I ended up being totally alone that summer and just collecting fucking bottles damnit!

One weekend in Alppipuisto, I managed to collect bottles from some drunkards worth maybe 200 marks. When I told Osmo about it, he got excited and said we could go through every possible place with his VW beetle and collect the bottles. Well, we didn't find that many more, but we did find some food. One K-Market's backyard was completely full of all sorts of cheese and snacks that hadn't even gone bad. We piled a bunch of that stuff into the front of Osmo's beetle.

Raimo and Sirpa were out at a rented cottage that weekend, so they wouldn't have to look at us all the time. And Jari was at a festival, so we could be pretty much alone. We ate a lot of our dumpster-dived food, but we still had a lot left, and we went dumpster diving again the next night and the night after that. It was actually kind of fun for those couple of days until Raimo and Sirpa came back from the cottage and noticed our activities:

RAIMO: If you have the money to buy that much cheese, shouldn't you also be paying the rent and other expenses?

MEKA: We didn't buy it, you know! Some jerks threw it in the trash and we took it!

RAIMO: Listen here, we don't tolerate any vagrants in our household! We BUY FOOD FROM THE STORE like decent, respectable citizens do!

SIRPA: Not to mention all the germs that are always in those trash cans! Leptospirosis and salmonella...

RAIMO: Exactly! Now, Osmo and Mika, listen carefully: All items taken from trash cans must be returned to the trash IMMEDIATELY! This game stops now!

MEKA: And no way are we fucking booking anything no matter what that paranoid hag says, dammit!

RAIMO: Let me remind you once again that you're living here SOLELY THANKS TO OUR GOODWILL and you have NO RIGHT to criticize us and start fights!

And then we went outside with our food, but I managed to convince Osmo that we should just put it in the front of his VW and go somewhere to eat it. Then we went back inside to scrub that damn fridge clean of those nonexistent leptospirosis bacteria. Raimo and Sirpa, of course, were lecturing us the whole time.

RAIMO: I've been thinking about this situation of yours and I've decided that it's best to kick you out of this household. So tomorrow, your program will be packing your stuff and moving out.

RAIMO: Go back to Lietevesi, goddammit! It's not our problem to solve, for the fuck's sake!

MEKA: I'M NOT FUCKING GOING BACK TO LIETEVESI, DO YOU HEAR ME GOD-FUCKING-DAMMIT!?

SIRPA: There are probably good forests there in the capital region too, if you don't have money for gas...

RAIMO: Right, go build a stick hut there in the woods, if civilized human life doesn't taste good, dammit!

OSMO: Well, we can probably manage well enough in the woods for this summer. It'll be cheaper...

RAIMO: I'll answer, it's for me. ... Raimo Kärkkäinen. ... Oh, Osmo Kärkkäinen? Yes, he's here, one moment. ...

It was some boss from a company Osmo had called. He was at a summer cottage and wanted Osmo to come grill sausages and chat about job prospects, and he even said there would be free booze. Osmo, as usual, hemmed and hawed on the phone for a while, but eventually agreed to go. And I insisted on coming along too, just in case he might consider taking me on as an unpaid intern or something.

The cottage was somewhere near Porvoo and probably as fancy as Jokinen's cottage in Hautataipale. Osmo had dressed to the nines and brought all his documents and his self-built OsmoTron computer. And there was plenty to talk about. Electronics, radio, our life in the countryside, and all that. We grilled our dumpster-dived pork chops and ate cheese and everything before it would go bad. We even brought out the OsmoTron and the boss was really impressed with his schematics, especially since his company was an electronics design firm.

We boozed the whole night and it was actually pretty fun considering that everyone else was well over thirty. And the boss promised us all sorts of things and our future started looking really bright. But then in the morning, hungover, he said Osmo needed to learn C before he could offer him any jobs, because most of their work was about "embedded systems" and coding in C. Osmo tried to convince the boss that he was ready to do everything in Assembly and do a better job than the compilers, but the boss complained about financial realities and whatnot, and that C gets the same coding done ten times faster.

Osmo also tried to negotiate with the boss so we could hang out at the cottage a little longer, but he wouldn't agree. But he did manage to negotiate an agreement with Raimo that we could visit him during the day for "work" (learning C) as long as we ate and slept somewhere in the woods. Sirpa, however, wanted us to at least disinfect ourselves every time so we wouldn't bring any "forest germs" with us, but luckily Raimo managed to reason with her.

I wasn't interested in seeing Raimo or Sirpa or even Osmo anymore, and I told them that I was going to sit somewhere alone for at least the evening. But as I was leaving, I realized that MY MOPED WAS FUCKING GONE! SOME JERK HAD STOLEN IT! DAMMIT FUCKING FUCKING FUCKING FUCK!!!

The next couple of weeks were hell. Osmo was always around, and there was no escaping him. And he snored like crazy in the tent. And sometimes we had to set up the tent in the rain and couldn't get a fire going, so we just had to eat all our dumpster-dived food raw. The only thing that kept me going was that Boozembly was coming up soon. Hopefully, there would be some real scene guys there who would understand my plight.