Beyond My Door

Stellai’s blog May 2021:

Click on the image above for full size and the gallery

Beyond My Door

For those of you who have been hiding underground to shield yourself from the invisible enemy known as Covid-19, let me give you a brief update....

December last year I have accepted a job offer to become personal star reporter for the famous doll Elon Musk.  But other than I expected it turned out that for this job reporting about stars had to be taken rather literally, meaning that I have to write reports about interesting stellar phenomena for him. Yeah, I know, there has been a slight miscommunication during my job interview. But with a salary three times of what you made before and a promise to get the office with the best view of the company, a custom made office chair and even a bed in the office, anybody will adapt, right?

.... So that’s it? Am I gone? No more star reporter for CoverDoll? Of course not! I have made a tough bargain to keep writing for you dolls as well, which was reluctantly accepted (I left Musk no choice!), but I had to promise not to add pictures to my blog of my work here at SpaceX. Pity! 

As you surely will understand a lot must have happened with me during these last few months, but there is so much more than I can put in this little blog that I better stick to the timeline of my notes and continue the story I started in January  and take you back to what was the fourth day actual working day of my job at SpaceX. If you want to know or recall what happened during the first three days, just click the link below this blog.

Day four...

Never a boring day at SpaceX. I still haven’t made a single report about stars for Elon, but that’s not my fault. Talking about stars, outside of my window there is an abundance of them. Even during the day you can see them, which is nice, but also weird. Looking  down from my window I can see it is daytime, but when I look up, it is night. This office is so high up the building that you look upon the clouds from the other side. They look like sheep dolls way below, flocking and floating over the earth which looks like a gigantic, largely blue painted pancake. Up here the horizon no longer is a straight line, it is curved.

9.30 hrs am

Just have had my briefing with Elon about today’s tasks, but I am going to ignore them for now. As mentioned yesterday, I am first going down with the elevator to have a chat with a colleague, any colleague. Three days without seeing a single doll is more than a girl can handle.

0.30 hrs pm

You are not going to belief this! After having a hefty struggle with the outside door, which took me at least half an hour to open, it turned out that there is no outside beyond my door.  No elevator, no floor, no roof of a skyscraper building, nothing!!!  All you can see is stars and way-way-way down below: the surface of our planet, just as it looks like when I look out of my window, but this time with the certainty that my office is not on top of a skyscraper. It appears that my office is located in the top of a rocket... in space!  It sure explains why my notes keep floating through  my office, as am I when I turn of the electro magnets in my boots. And I thought it was thin air, but more likely there is no air at all in this rocket. It is just vacuum. Good thing that I do not need to breath!!   But but but.... WHY have I been not informed about this? Ok, it was a prank to launch me, office and all, I got that,  but it is already the fourth day that I appear to be in space. I’ve already had several video meetings with Elon, but not a single one about the fact that he launched me in one of his rockets. Or did he tell me, but I misinterpreted it?  Anyway, my next video conference will not be until tomorrow, but this sure will become first thing on the agenda to be discussed! As for the rest of this day, I better make the best of it.

5.15 hrs pm

That was FUN!!

I have decided to take the day off and explore the outside of this rocket.  I am glad to have agreed in keeping the magnetic power boots after rejecting that hideous Star-reporter suite they wanted me to wear, which made me look like some kind of sexy Robocop. Unfortunately the magnetic function in the boots appears to be useless on the outside of the rocket.  Of course, I should have checked this before I jumped out of the door towards what I thought to be a steel plated fin alongside the rocket and from which I bounced off, floating into deep space.... Ok, I admit I got a little bit scared after floating several hundred meters away from the rocket in a straight line away from the rocket, not having a clue how to get back.... But then I remembered having these power packs on my ‘Ironman’ boots! It took me a while to figure out how to turn them on..... and then the fun begun. The power drive of these boots is absolutely AWESOME!! It makes you fly like a swift in the sky at incredible speed. It is FUN beyond compare, but... you better not hit something.

For the official record I will put in this blog that my first couple of landings back onto the rocket were not entirely successful. I have accidently made some scratches, two dents and one of the outside panels has broken loose. But not to worry, I have already taped it back in place with duct tape.

8.45 hrs pm

Knowing now that my office is a space capsule floating in orbit, I now finally understand why the clock above the candy bar vending machine in my office is not consistent with the length of day. I am also starting to suspect that the machine counting down Mars candy bars is not counting down candy bars.

Day 5

3.30 hrs am

I have been trying to sleep now for hours, but I cannot stop thinking that this f*cking machine in the corner is counting down to launch me to Mars and it is giving me the creeps. Gotta do something about that!

4.15 hrs am

Studied the menu of that so called ‘candy bar machine’. It appears that you can change the text in the menu by pressing the buttons on the left side of the display. You can replace Mars by: Venus,  Venus Delight, Venus with sprinkles, Mars with sprinkles or Mars with peanuts, Mercury Magic Ball, Sun Flower Seeds with or without sunglasses, Saturn Rings with onion flavour or sweet chilli pepper flavour, Jupiter Juicy Juice and Pluto.... just Pluto, no idea what kind of candy that is supposed to be. I guess the engineer-comedian responsible for writing this menu run out of humour on the last one.  Interesting is however that with every button you press the rocket engines seem to respond, adjusting the position of the rocket to a different direction to take off.

Anyway, for those of you who have carefully studied the list above, you may have noticed that one is missing....  Right, no ‘Earthly EverGreen’, or similar substitute candy bar in this machine to get you back home!

8.45 hrs am

One thing is for sure, nobody can call me a lazy duck doll. I have been working for four hours straight to fix that candy bar machine, making it sell something that will turn this rocket back to earth. First I tried to rewrite the function for ‘Mars with sprinkles’ ( Not in a million years I will even consider buying such a candy bar. And if I am to go somewhere other than back to Earth, it will be Venus, definitely not Mars!), but when I finally got myself into the system it turned out to be password protected.  So it left me no other option than accessing it from the back, crawl in the machine and get literally behind the operating panel. There I was able to pull the plugs and make cross-connections between the pre-settings. I'll spare you the long list of new candy bar flavors and the associated directions I've seen passing by, but at some point I even had this rocket set to take off towards the Klingon home world.  Anyway, the Gagh Burger (with fried onions) turned out to be the key to get me back home, because reversing this combination made the rocket rotate itself 180 degrees, pointing straight back to earth. All I now have to do is find 50 cents and then press the button.

To be continued…

Stellai

P.S. The photo series  in this blog is  a series we already shot in April 2019, long before the Lockdowns. It is a happy memory of a visit to Elfia, an event in which giants size dolls dress up as fantasy figures.

P.P.S. If you just have left your Covid proof shelter and missed my two previous blogs about SpaceX  then click here:

• January:  “Chance of a lifetime”
• March:    “An Office with a View”