Mavis the Fuck-Up Fairy

I love Mavis. In that certain, teeth-grinding, fist-clenching, white-knuckled way that I love rabies jabs; I know she's ultimately beneficial to my health and sanity, but the here and now of a throbbing purple arm swollen to twice its normal size makes it difficult to maintain that perspective.

Mavis is my Fuck-up Fairy. Now I know that many of you [1] are thinking of that small pink fat thing from "Will-O-The-Wisp", and how the heck she ever got airborne, I'll never know. JATO rockets? Anyway, I digress. Forget Will-O-The-Wisp. If you can. I've spent ten years trying to forget, and still wake up sweating in the early morning after a nightmare involving Evil Edna. Must eat less strong cheese.

Think of Anya from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", Patron Saint of All Women Scorned. That slightly-out-of-reality look, a personality oscillating between bemused banality and psychotic homicidality. The sort of mind that dresses as a 6-foot rabbit at Hallowe'en. The sort of mind that would sleep with Xander to get over him. Now shrink her by a scaling factor of, oh, 1:85 let's say, dress her in a pink tutu and make her invisible [2] That's the fairy I know and, according to literary tradition, love.

Mavis dances in front of my monitor, at work and at home. Occasionally she flits down to the keyboard and skips along the keys for a change. Y seems to be her favourite. My eyes have typically got halfway along the line:

Delete all files in the filesystem, vaporise the backup CDs and inflict a plague of boils on your unmentionables (Y/N)?

when Mavis jumps onto Y with a cheery "Whoopee!". My finger was nowhere near the key, I swear.

Mavis likes the Unix filesystem. She goes into a sulk whenever I use Windows. Those of you who believe that this is because Mr. Gates' opus protects the user from accidents need to put down the crack pipe and open the windows [3]. Poor little Mavis doesn't get a chance to do anything interesting before NT hiccups and falls over in a twitching Blue Screen of Death. Now whether Mr. Gates has his own flock of frenetic Fuck-Up Fairy Folk is open to debate, but I'd advise against it after more than two pints.

Mavis likes Unix because problems are almost always my own fault. Yes, I really did intend to do an rm -rf tmp. No, I didn't intend to do it in the root directory. But two entries up the history list, there's the evidence: cd /. I didn't type it. There's no reason on this earth that I'd have typed it. What am I, stupid?

Mavis likes Unix because it makes it easier to play with networks. An interesting, and sadly understudied, theory about IP is that the packets are not actually formed of electrons; they are formed of very small fairy cakes which are borne between routers by Mavis's cousins. Sometimes a fairy gets hungry and eats some of her payload, but IP is carefully designed to cope with this by baking and sending out a fresh batch.

I've spend half a morning wondering why the hell my RiscPC can't FTP to my Linux box, despite a perfectly formed Ethernet connection existing between them. I've checked file permissions, checked the system logs, satisfied myself that ping works bilaterally, all to no avail. Meanwhile, Mavis is sitting on the front edge of my monitor, swinging her legs back and forward and laughing her little sparkly socks off [4]. Finally she takes pity [5] on me, and draws my attention to the # before the ftp line in /etc/inetd.conf.

For some bizarre reason, Mavis doesn't seem to like games. I can go through an hour-long Delta Force mission without jumping in front of a bunker and screaming "Shoot me please!" I reckon it's because war games bore her. Were I playing something more feminine [6] she'd be waving her little wand around enough to give her RSI [7].

Mavis likes email. Oh boy, does Mavis like email. A user interface where, once a message is sent, the only way of getting it back is to hope that its first hop MTA is Exchange and be quick enough in taking the machine down that the mail never gets saved. "Send in haste, repent at leisure". And Mavis always ensures that you know what you've done. That little niggling at the back of your head, the feeling that you really ought to go back and take a look at what you just sent? That's little Mavis, kicking your skull with her steel toe-caps [8].

1. At least those who are over 25, under 40, Brits with an astoundingly poor television sense
2. So why does her size matter if she's invisible? If you've ever had a 14-stone fairy in heels dancing on the tips of your fingers, you'll know why.
3. Unless that annoying canvas jacket is limiting your movement too much.
4. The continuity fans among you will wonder how I can see this if Mavis is invisible. Simple really; after that many cups of black coffee, I could see dancing yodelling unicorns if I wanted to.
5. For values of pity including Schadenfreude.
6. And how likely is that? Come to that, what sort of games are feminine? Answers to the usual place.
7. Although she'd go blind if she did it too much, of course.
8. There is no law of physics or society which forbids covering kicking boots with spray-on glitter.