A post which promises, at some point, to be about the NBN.

Imagine a ball. In as much as I would like, in this story, for someone to be picking it up and this to be considered a legal move, imagine it is a rugby ball. Let's make it gray. With a red duck on it¹. Now let us imagine a game of rugby proceeding on a field around the ball. This game has become rather scrappy. So scrappy, in fact, that everyone has pretty much forgotten about the ball's existence in their determination to beat the crap out of anyone wearing different colours from them. Hell, some are even attacking even members of their own team with eye-gouging fury. I suppose I really could have just said it had descended into a brawl. I didn't, though, because I'm trying to be all evocative and shit. You O.K. with that, Mr 'Get the fuck on with the story'? Hey, man, fuck you.

Anyways, into this farcical scene steps a diminutive, bespectacled man in a suit. He makes his way over to the ball, dodging the odd fist, elbow and knee attached to various combatants who appear to be paying little attention to him. He stands over the ball, glances furtively in a number of directions then, tentatively, he picks the ball and holds it wonderingly for a while. He now has the power. He can decide the outcome of the game. With a new-found air of superiority and contempt he looks around him at a field of stupid, narrow-minded neanderthals in rugby uniforms who still haven't noticed that the kind of bespectacled nerd they used to beat up in high school has just taken control of their game. He smiles, shuts his eyes, and runs. So taken with the sheer joy of his situation he fails to notice the single nondescript tree standing just outside the playing field he has inadvertently plotted a course directly at. Again without anyone paying any attention to him, he runs directly into it with a soft, anti-climactic thud and falls unconscious on the ground. The ball rolls quietly away where it lies waiting......