Mind the store, please

Uncle Rabid has left me in charge of the shop again while he sods off on some junket or other. He calls it an important technology convention related to work, but I know he's just going to get trashed again on the tab of whichever vendor is silly enough to leave their credit card behind the bar.

I know vendors like to do this, but Uncle Rabid spoils the fun for everyone, because any vendor who's sponsored one of his sessions never leaves their card behind the bar again. For anyone. Ever.

Anyway, you don't get many genuine excuses to avoid school, and "family emergency" is one such rare event. The doctor only has to be told that Uncle Rabid is off to another convention and he signs the form for my school and immediately gets on the phone to start the search for suitable liver donors.

Nobody ever believes Uncle Rabid can drink several schooners of Tequila. But nobody can ever resist the temptation to call his bluff and order the drinks.

Then again, pretending to run the shop is always fun, and Uncle's hangover usually lasts about a week after he gets back, so he's never able to remember what I told him when he first got back. Which gives me plenty of time to reinvent the story to suit what he wants to believe really happened. If you get my drift, dudes.

One thing I can never fake is how much money we didn't take while he was away. This place never makes any money but Uncle Rabid is somehow convinced it makes a bomb while he's away and that I spend it with my "Sk8er Boi" mates. He is just so out of touch!

For starters, we all gave up skating years ago. But he insists on calling me Sk8er Boi and even introduces me to really hot-looking vendor sales reps that way. Thanks Uncle Rabid.

Not that I'd ever have a chance of dating them anyway but it's nice to be able to fantasise for a while. But after Uncle's intro all I get is this image of me trying to get into a nightclub with this hot babe waiting for me inside, while I'm arguing with the bouncer about dress code.

And he does have a point, since I'm wearing board shorts and trainers and a backward baseball cap. And carrying my skateboard. Dudes, I wouldn't let me in either! Eeeew!

But back to the missing millions. I just don't know how Uncle Rabid sells anything to anyone. Believe me, I've tried giving away the stock he keeps in this shop and nobody will even take it for free.

He's got PCs in here that have disk drive capacity advertised in megabytes. When did they ever make hard disks that small? Does he get special badly-spelled advertising cards made or is this junk really that old?

And what on earth is a dot matrix printer? Have you heard one of these things operate? Are they supposed to sound like the paper is being shredded by an army of crazed cicadas?

Don't get me started on the monitors. Why do they all have only one colour? And why is it green? Did people ever really use these things or has he got in the back with his trusty sonic screwdriver and disabled the red and blue circuits?

Yeah, I know, but he thinks he's really cool like that Doctor Who bloke on TV, so he calls his screwdriver "sonic". As if! The only time it gets sonic is when he sticks it into a faulty power point and then it's him that starts screaming like a banshee.

At least he stopped wearing that three-metre scarf after it got sucked into the cooling vents of one of his ancient file servers. By the way, are they supposed to sound like a jumbo jet all the time? I'm glad he's only gone for a week.

There's such a thing as too much fun and I can't afford the time off school!

Gotta go! Uncle Rabid's returning!