Seymour Cumming:

An ex-pat friend of mine had his brain ‘upgraded’ recently. Unfortunately it all went wrong. Overwhelmed by deep thinking, heavy and cumbersome philosophical reasoning and a sense of social conscience that kept launching itself in a fresh window every time he read the Nation, he decided it was time to down-grade to a simpler version. The local operating system simply couldn’t cope with the complex software in his head. Time to go back to basics and re-format. Now he’s installed Thai thinking for ex-pats V1.2 and everything is a bit prozac but dandy. He laughs a lot, even at silly things, but by-and-large he’s happy.

Happy that is, until he realised what had gone wrong. A major syntax error occurred during the diagnostics stage resulting in the most appalling mix-up. Software was confused and hardware substituted. Where once he had a stiffie drive he now has a floppy. He could’ve sworn he mumbled something about organ ‘kamoeys’ as the anaesthetic kicked in but it must have come out all wrong. He’s now a katoey!

His hard drive no longer works quite as it should – it’s in there somewhere but he needs to unzip to find it. Never before has he been so unhappy with ’Micro’soft. The mother board is terribly confused about his gender and the interface looks somewhat different.  The language has remained the same, but it comes out a little different. And it gets worse, he no longer has an anti-virus checker and his e-mail has become fe-male. The instructions in Word are all in Thai and his Outlook (express) isn’t looking too Flash.  His mind now spends quite a bit of time in Dreamweaver, Explorer no longer works, his  PowerPoint looks completely different, and the volume control is now stuck on ‘loud’.

 Poor fella. He came to Thailand with plans to write a book. Now all he wants to do is play games and have ‘sanook’. He particularly likes using his ‘mouse’, and prefers laptop dancing to doing it on a desktop.

Looking on the brighter side however, he no longer needs a UPS (uninterruptible prostitute supply), his ‘software’ no longer ‘hangs’,  pirate programs are abundant, internet pornography doesn’t interests him as much, but he gets terribly depressed every time he reads one of those spam emails promising to ‘enlarge his penis’.

Investigative-journalist-at-large, Seymour Cumming sees things a little differently in life. He has previously been a used car salesman, fruit picker, ‘shock jock’ and newsroom war correspondent. He has written for Farmer’s Weekly, Nyet!, Porn Unlimited, Chessworld and  Cross-stitching Magazine.

He’s been to more than 50 countries, some for less than a day, and is currently working on a travel novel, but he’s written the author’s biog, and not progressed much beyond that.

Seymour Cumming archive is here...