Reminiscence Ric Stories

The Ringmaster called the Chief Clown into his office.
     “We’ve got a problem,” he said.
     The Chief Clown nodded. “I know, I hold my hands up, I should never have struck that match.”
     “What?”
     “What?”
     “I was on about the website crashing, we can’t take advance bookings,” the Ringmaster said, then added cautiously, “what are you on about?”
     “Oh, the same thing, same thing,” the Chief Clown said quickly, “Just that, nothing else, no, no.”
     The Ringmaster sat in his chair and stared at the blank computer screen.
     “Do you know how many bookings come from the website, how many tickets we sell?”
     “Twelve?”
     “Eighty percent.” He tapped the keyboard several times. “Eighty percent of our ticket sales come through there!”
     “What about the other twenty, surely that can keep us afloat?” asked the Chief Clown.
     “Just, for the next month or so,” said the Ringmaster, “but it would be great, it really would, if the number of people in the audience was greater than the number on stage.”
     “Last Sunday night was a low point,” agreed the Chief Clown, “one old woman and her dog. Can’t believe you didn’t charge the dog.”
     “Animals aren’t allowed,” said the Ringmaster, “if I’d made her buy it a ticket, then I’d have been setting a precedent and then before you know it six year old boys would be bringing their turtles!”
     “What’s wrong with that?”
     “With our track record of animal safety?”
     “That was only those on stage, not in the audience.”
     There was a knock on the door, then Branchet the singer entered. She had a white doctor’s coat over her usual sideshow outfit. “Hello,” she said.
     “Great, Branchet, hi,” the Ringmaster vacated his chair and ushered Branchet into it, “the website’s down, every second that passes we lose another customer!”
     “We’re not that popular,” said the Chief Clown, “somedays we don’t sell a single ticket!”
     “This may be one the days we do!” snapped the Ringmaster, “but if they can’t get on the site then we’ve lost them!”
     “Lot of fuss and nonsense,” the Chief Clown sat in the chair in the corner and watched as Branchet started clicking the mouse. “How does a singer get to be a computer expert too?”
     Without looking up, Branchet replied, “When I was touring through Turkmenistan and all those other countries where I had a number one album,” she paused to briefly look up and smile, then returned to the task in hand, “more often than not I had to organise my own tours. Design the website, book the venues, get the ticketing system up and running. I wouldn’t say I’m an expert, but I know how to create a multilingual multi-currency booking form.”
     “I’ve always thought it odd,” said the Chief Clown, “that all your triumphs, all your successes, have come in non-English speaking territories. Never had a hit album in England, have you? Or America or Australia. You were a hit in Japan for six weeks once. No, home soil, that’s where the real success counts. Me? I’m English, through and through, I’ve only been abroad once and that was just for a photoshoot. It doesn’t matter if someone in Germany knows who I am or not, I’m never going to go there. No here is where it counts. Right here and now.”
     “There!” Branchet pressed one key on the keyboard. “All done, give it three minutes to reboot and that will be working again.”
     “What was wrong with it?” asked the Ringmaster.
     The Chief Clown stood up hurriedly, “Never mind that, wait until you see what happened when I struck that match, you may need a new washing machine.”
     “It looked like it had been hacked,” said Branchet, “someone could be using the booking system to look through the webcams of whoever’s on our site. There’s even sixteen folders attached there,” she pointed to the screen. The Ringmaster nodded, pretending he was following everything.
     “Now the computer’s fixed, we can order a new washing machine,” said the Chief Clown. At that point, Marvo the memory man, the Tattooed Lady and the Tall Lady entered, a mixture of singed hair and clothing, dripping wet and covered in soap suds.
     Branchet ignored the intrusion, “Either someone wants a picture of everyone visiting our site to look at or something more bizarre and dodgy is going on, maybe even identity theft.”
     The Chief Clown was in a quandary. Whichever way she turned, what she had been up to was staring right back at her. Should she use the washing machine incident to cover up her computer hacking or vice versa? For all her talents, her insecurity and greed made her do daft things. Mostly they went unnoticed, but three burnt people covered in water and sixteen folders of webcam images are hard to brush under the carpet.
     So she opted for her standy technique. Blame someone else.
     “Marvo, what have you been up to?”
     “Me?” Marvo spluttered, “I was just washing my shirt when all of a sudden…!”
     Everyone started talking at once. The Chief Clown took the opportunity to melt into the shadows and get back out into the corridor. Once there she marched briskly away, as if nothing had happened. She vowed there and then never to do anything underhand ever again.
     Then she walked past the out-of-order vending machine.
     She was later found in the woods outside carrying 46 chocolate bars and eighteen cans of cola, which she claimed had been stashed inside a tree.