Internet Chronicle

Fox News blared from the flatscreen as Bill O’Reilly’s visage reflected off the shining simulacra. Stunned and immersed by this Disneyland fantasy, I could hardly decide what to order. “Can I get the double-decker taco with the loco taco shell?” The cashier was completely lost in his smartphone and muttered something in response without making eye contact. I waited until his glazed eyes fell on the register and repeated myself. “Can you guys make double-decker tacos with the loco shells?”

“No, I’m sorry, that’s not on the menu. We can’t do that. There’s no way to ring it up,” he mumbled. So I ordered a pan pizza. The cashier rattled off an inaudible string of annoying questions like some kind of a machine. Cash in hand, I stared blankly at him. “Sorry, I have to say that stuff or they’ll fire me. They send in the fake customers sometimes to make sure.” Embarrassed at being forced into such a contrived excuse for service, he made change and returned his blank stare to the smartphone.

The pan pizza was not ready for over 20 minutes and during this time a ghoulish employee stalked back and forth across the dining room, eyeing customers with a hateful scowl. Highly uncomfortable, I approached the kitchen to inquire about my order. Another cashier was ready and waiting. “What would you like to order?”

“Um, sorry, no. I’m just waiting on my pizza.” With a condescending “Thank you,” another employee slammed the tray of lukewarm pizza and bread sticks onto the counter without making eye contact. According to the timestamps on the boxes, it had been ready for fifteen minutes. I could have demanded a fresh pizza, but I felt the oppressive stare from the dining room employee pacing behind me.

I might have eaten the pizza too fast, but either way it immediately made me sick. On the way home, I considered pulling off the road to vomit, but I didn’t want the six bucks to go to waste. Maybe all the old employees got new jobs somewhere else when they were rebuilding the place. Maybe some new training program backfired. The only one employee who consistently made eye contact was that intimidating demon, stalking around the dining room and wiping off tables mere seconds after customers left. She cleaned my table before I made it out the door.

Do not eat at Taco Bell.

INTERNET–Monday, Google’s popular Gmail e-mailing and chat service was taken down for several hours by the Anarchist Hacking Collective known as Anonymous. Barrett Brown, former spokesperson for the group, retweeted the information necessary to knock Gmail offline and has been detained by Federal Prosecutors.

Anonymous immediately denied responsibility for the attack on Gmail before finding out that no one knew who perpetrated the attack, thus making it a legitimately Anonymous attack. “No one knows who did it,” said Google security executive Angstrom H. Troubador. “It’s totally Anonymous”

Angered Gmail users lashed out at prominent Anonymous Twitter accounts, only to find themselves the target of a bullying campaign unlike anything seen since Amanda Todd was forced to suicide.

[pullquote]”I was like a personal sex slave.”[/pullquote]LONDON–Julian Assange’s former personal assistant, now also a spurned lover, gave the Internet Chronicle exclusive details of her sordid affair with the Wikileaks spokesperson–all of which took place within the Ecuadorean embassy. “We’d do meth all day and all night, mainlining it straight into our thighs so as not to alert the Ecuadorean ambassador. That’s why Assange appears completely collected in some interviews and totally out of it in others,” said the anonymous ex-lover and assistant.

Ecuadorean officials recently stated concern that Assange is suffering medical complications related to his confinement in the embassy, and suggested that this is a human rights issue. The anonymous lover said, “He’s been driven to paranoia and ill-health by all the methamphetamine–he called it the mega sex juice–that I smuggled in to him. We injected all the time and fucked around the clock. Sometimes even while he was tweeting! It was great fun, but then he began to suspect I was part of the conspiracy against him.”

As Assange’s stay in the confining embassy wore on, increasingly he directed his energy in a fight against the concerted smear campaign he believed was being perpetrated by every single newspaper in the western world. This paranoid mindset was too much for the relationship. Said the ex-assistant, “We were both really fucked up on meth, and I made a joke about recording him–like I was wearing a wire. He threw me out in a rage, and we haven’t spoken since. He barely tweeted for well over a week. It was the meth withdrawal.”

When asked about whether the nature of their professional relationship in any way shaped their personal encounters, the anonymous ex-lover said, “At first I was just his assistant. I brought him meth, food, washed his clothes–basically did everything for him. It paid well, and he was definitely my boss. Looking back, I do believe he exploited his position of power for sexual ends. Yes, it was definitely far beyond sexual harassment. I was like a personal sex slave.”