George the Dalek - 3 Feb 2016

George was a happy little Dalek. He had been travelling through time and space on behalf of Davros, destroying untold civilisations. George's happiness about this situation wasn't the result of being pathological, you must understand; rather he was a machine, and this is what he was programmed to do. What is joy? What is happiness? Neurons, computer chips, silicon, power sources. End of discussion guv, nothing to see here - move along. One day whilst destroying Dalek enemies in some backwater part of the continuum with his dedicated and highly professional team (Mildred, Douglas, Bertrand, and of course Wally), George started having a variety of systems issues. His rotors wouldn't engage, his short-term memory started to fail, and his voice started to crack, so that he sounded less like a staircase-defying mass-exterminator, and more like a castrati. Alarmed by these developments and considering the WHS risks involved, George did what he was programmed to do - he rang 1800 DALEK, the all-hours, all-time, all-planets help line established on Skaro during the last administrative rearrangement.

 

When George explained his various problems to Penny, the operator, he was told that a range of contracting issues would prevent all of them being solved straight away. First of all, in accordance with the Dalek Repair Manual, Volume 4, Section 5, Chapter 2, for the rotor problems, he was advised that help services for this function had been sub-contracted to the RACV, and due to his remote location there would be an extra charge. Additionally all their operators were busy right now so he'd have to stay where he was and wait. He then asked Penny about his short-term memory issues and was told this sounded like a neurological problem that would require a referral to an off-base on-list service provider. George made sure that Penny would sms him the appointment details given his memory problems. Moving on to the voice problems, Penny advised that Dalek Voice Services would need to intercede, and possibly upgrade his operating system from Ice Cream Sandwich right up to Marshmallow. This would take him off line for a while and he wouldn't be able to make calls, even emergency calls. A technician was on the way, and could he just stay on hold a moment longer?

 

As the battle raged around him whilst Enya's 'Orinoco Flow' played in his earpiece, George was still a happy little Dalek as the planet he was now trapped on fell into a massive intergalactic black hole, unsuccessfully renovated into a mock-Tudor trapeze room in the previous episode of Grand Designs.

 

How does this relate to Powerball?

 

It doesn't. But it does put our winning track record into an inter-galactic, multiversal context.