The kindergarten staff may have taken my dinosaurs back in 1960, but they never tamed my heart or mind.

While it eventually became apparent to me that "not everybody loves interesting things" was one of these rules that everybody else seemed to know, it didn't diminish my love for those things that seemed to have a niche ready-made in the happy part of my mind.

Music came to be the biggest of my Big Interests, but dinosaurs were my first love, and are still the subject most likely to distract me for ages, if I find mention in the news of a recent discovery.

With the confiscation of my plastic dinosaurs, I became one of those who learns what it is to love well, but incautiously. I stopped showing any outward sign of ornithoscelidaphilia (I had to look it up: hopefully it's right). For over thirty years, only a skillful reader of eye movements and other non-verbal signs would have noticed the glance that lingered too long when passing the appropriate area of a bookshop or toy display, or the immediate focus of attention when a juicy piece of palaeontology turned up on the TV or radio.

My "inner dinosaurs" were in the closet, so to speak. We were of vastly different ages, and I had seen what could happen to the love that dared to bellow its name (and could eat about a dozen little Megans, Andrews and Pauls at a bite).

Then, one day, I decided to give in to my passion.

*****

By this time, I had managed to build the second of what I call my "micro-careers": cases of starting as a base-grade droid at a workplace, using my skills to create a fairly well-paid position in a new project of my own invention, and (inevitably) falling from grace with the "palace eunuchs" (colleagues who can't do much, but are more bitter than you can imagine) or simply being ground down to nothing by abrasive office culture.

This time, I'd managed to parlay what little I could do with computers, and a lot of rapid-reading autodidactic skills, into a job looking after a newly-installed LAN of about seventy PCs, and the needs of its users, in a sensitive little hotspot in one of GovCo's head offices.

A couple of weeks into the job, the unexpected had happened in a fairly big way. A Judge, fairly close to the top of things federally, had made a Discovery Order, the nature of which was very broad in scope. Without going into details, let's say the same thing had happened in an insurance office, and the order had said the court wanted anything in head office which mentioned "policy" or "Sydney".

Interpretation of the order would mean that even maps of NSW or Australia on office walls were part of the material to be catalogued and brought before the Court. Oh, did I mention the very short time-frame allocated for compliance?

The blitz occurred in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon. Suddenly, a number of base-grade administrative staff from the mail room turned up, and announced that everybody would need to "stop work and stand by your desks".

No, it wasn't firing-squads next, though we wondered for a moment if that was coming. Eventually, a much higher-paid individual from the same corporate area turned up, and told us what was happening.

A legal team from outside the department would be seconded to oversee the search and cataloguing of material for the entire Head Office. By the way, the contents of all PCs and floppy diskettes were part of the deal.

As the fairly newly-crowned Doer Of Things Computer, I was approached by the outside lawyers. Yes, I was up for this.

Let's tread gently round the rest of the Court Order Saga, except to say I spent a couple of weeks getting by on very little sleep, grabbing a few hours under the desk or in my one-tonne van in the car park, having clothes sent over from home by taxi, and (because I wasn't getting eight hours' break between work-periods) on double-time for sixteen to eighteen hours a day.

Personnel were unhappy, but my Deputy Secretary had put in a word with the Grand Panjandrum, and the job needed doing. Who else did they have with the hack skills to quickly search a diskette or hard drive for files containing the desired keywords or phrases, override the crude passwording, DOS hidden-file attributes and other primitive privacy protection, and get things catalogued as required?

One week, I actually grossed a little more than the Grand Panjandrum, but didn't the income tax bite into that!

Anyway, the job was done, I got my letter of commendation from On High, and a drink in the exec suite, the team wound things up by getting uproarious at a local ethnic restaurant, I wound up playing an exotic stringed instrument that was decorating a wall in the establishment, and bought the thing... all the usual.

*****

So, here I was, actually feeling good about work, myself and the world in general.

Having a few dollars to splash about isn't something I'm used to. I'd treated myself to a few little things since I started a few months back with the department, at base level. Now I had a mid-range salary (acting, unconfirmed) I wasn't going to change some of my thrifty habits.

I'd treat myself to a CD per pay period from OverseasImportShop in town. My kinky music tastes weren't going to be met by the kind of store you'd find in a shopping mall, even a big one such as the mall close by our office.

Still, the two Big Chain Stores in the mall had music departments, and those departments had clearance bins. Stuff I wouldn't pay thirty dollars for looked pretty good for five or ten. Captain Beefheart, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Shadowfax, for example, all turned up on forays into the junk bins.

One trip to find bargain CDs took me past Toys. Did I spot the Triceratops and T Rex, fairly well-detailed, painted, and, at about eight or nine inches, much bigger than the precious things taken away at kindergarten?

Oh, yes, I did, and I bought three or four plastic dinosaurs, and arranged them on top of my workstation.

Over a couple of years the collection grew, by ones and twos. Some I obtained, while yet others (such as the metre-long inflatable Diplodocus) were contributed by workmates.

If somebody was coming into the particular floor of Weird-Honeycomb-Of-Cubicles where I worked, I used to say "Just watch the horizon for dinosaurs". There were over a hundred of them, from little, crude die-cast models to a few of those excellent Carnegie Collection models, plus a tiny ammonite and a nearly-as-small trilobite.

I was busy, I had my collection, and life was good. Of course, a bloke who dares to be openly happy may as well wear a bullseye t-shirt.

*****

Apart from my LAN, I had written a fairly intensive suite of macro routines to accompany WordProcessingProgram, to fill an information access need I'd discovered in my work area. (Oh, it all seems so bloody simple now with HTML and what have you, but this was prior to any serious use of interwebby technologies by GovCo.) Two hats, one pay-packet, and no permanent hold on the job.

The time finally came for the job to be run through the usual GovCo process for permanent filling.

Now, I don't interview terribly well. I've got this thing with eye contact: it makes me want to projectile-puke, and gets all my fight-or-flight stuff keyed up to the point where people either fear me or want to get a few anticipatory blows in first.

Seeing Eustace is the most thorough kind of pacifist (the Totally Unable To Hit People type), such encounters leave me at a disadvantage. Worse yet are job interviews.

By being an incredibly efficient base-grade droid, and inventing improvements, I'd built the LAN job, and the other project as well. (I'd done the same sort of thing once before, at HMAS Korrupt.) In order to bypass the usual run-of-the-mill interviews, which can often skew to favour pretty, personable, or socially-networked people unlike me, I was building jobs which I was uniquely qualified to do. This was the only way I stood a chance of advancement.

If there were actually gods to smite the poor bastards whose anticipation of happiness could be mistaken for hubris, there mightn't need to be office snipers. My excellent direct supervisor had retired about a year into my time as LAN Dude, and "because you've got to have a supervisor on paper" I was assigned to Ms-Knows-No-Technology.

Ms KnowsNoTech had a foreign language in common with Boss-of-boss, the Branch head. It wasn't one of the ones I speak a little, and the pair of them would delight in holding Jolly Exclude-Others Conversations, volubly, in the open, among the cubicles. I didn't care much, as I had lots of work to do anyway.

KnowsNoTech seemed keen to find out what made me tick, even to the point of going through my private bag when I was out of the area, and trying to involve me in baited-hook conversations (more like a polite form of the Inquisition) about politics, feminism, religion, and other subjects which are office-political suicide. I generally said "Oh, I'm too busy to think about that", and carried on.

Interview time came. I was one of two applicants, and the other guy might have equalled me on LAN administration, but nobody else had the macro chops and knowledge of the particular information-base. After all, who built it?

I came out of the interview successful. At that stage, comedic timing would have demanded a shower of vulture shit fall on me from a clear blue sky, even if the evil speakers-in-foreign-tongues hadn't arranged a Nice Surprise for the next morning.

I came in, to find a strange bloke of about sixty, sitting in the far half of my two-cubicle lair. He nodded, exposing bloodshot, yellow eyes, and sat there. It was like having a stranger's muddy dog plonk down in front of your fireplace.

KnowsNoTech bounded up, full of beans, her nose displaying even more broken vein networks than was usual. There may have been Serious Drinkies in her recent past: it is possible her move to Australia was the reason for Europe's "wine lake".

"This is Pete Raffaction, Eustace. You will need to show him all your network admin functions."

So it was, that I was royally shafted. Pete was "surplus due to redundancy" which meant that his old area had no use for him. The arrangements also meant I couldn't appeal him getting slotted into the job I'd been holding since I damned well built it, despite the fact he was obviously as suitable for it as a Vespa scooter would be for the Superbike Series.

"Pete, 'e 'ad, you know, nowheres to go, and you, you are young. You will find anuzzer, you know, position."

(Thinks... I'm over forty, you backstabbing ignoramus, and you've jolly well slotted me. I'm going to need to build something else and hope nobody steals that!)

As a sop, or possibly because they'd be severely embarrassed if I up and quit, I was given Temporary Higher Duties at the same level, to "mentor" Pete and carry on with my project.

In effect, this meant I did all the same work, while trying to keep Pete from doing any damage.

I was annoyed, and depressed to the point where I did think about chucking the whole show in and finding a nice buddhist monastery (which would mean one other than the local one, whose buddha appeared to dislike round-eyed people).

Catharsis was called for. I had a chat with a few of the staff in my area.

Thus came, one afternoon at close of work, The Great Extinction Sale. I wanted my screwing-over to be a thing not readily forgotten.

I designed, and copied at GovCo expense, a few dozen catalogues. Two very eloquent Learned Chums were my auctioneers, and we went through the whole collection, from the "crude roaring maybe-a-stegosaurus, belly stamped 'CHINA IN MADE'" through to my genuine ammonite and trilobite.

With the assistance of some of the mail room droids, I got the catalogues posted in strategic spots through the couple of buildings our department occupied.

Beer was sold, uproarious conduct was done (I don't know where the inflatable sheep came from, nor why it was so obviously equipped for nights of passion, but we sold it as well) and hundreds of dollars were raised.

I gave the lot to a charity for homeless people, and got back to keeping my dinosaurs on the inside, where nobody can do harm.

****

Six weeks later, I arrived to find half the PCs on the network flashing a boot message which had been embedded in a virus.

Pete was at his desk, busily erasing diskettes for some reason. It seems he had been ingratiating himself to the users with shareware of dodgy origin, and had probably vectored the outbreak into my network.

Yes, mine. He spent a year using up all kinds of leave, then pulled the plug. I had all my old work to do, and still no permanent hold on the job.

A bloke could get extincted like that.