Spare Any Change? (Or: Have You Seen Connie Allyerd?)

The life of a SuperSpy is not all fun and games. Like everything else, there's paperwork. Take right now, for example: I'm supposed to be writing a grant application to get money to fund my covert activities. What, you thought there was some bald guy with an eye patch and a white cat bankrolling this whole thing? Not even close...instead I kick the propaganda machine into motion and don my Marketing Specialist identity, Con-All-Yer-Dollars (Code-name: Con Allyerd). Connie heads up the Crowbar Ministry of Finance and is the queen of spouting meaningless phrases like "target population", "agency networking", and "under-resourced sector". She rolls 'em out into forms, files, applications, appeals, and other forms of legal begging and crosses her fingers. If I'm lucky, the crap she spews is just incomprehensible and jargon-laden enough to convince Dark Side Forces that we're speaking their language, and they may mistakenly shift some of their funds our way. They believe they're investing in spreading their social control and re-education umbrella still further through an unsuspecting populace: it is in our interests to allow them to continue to believe that.

That said, Con Allyerd is fickle and sometimes she doesn't turn up when she's called. We here at Crowbar Headquarters have been attempting to page her all day, but she's off galivanting around, charming nickles out of parking meters and pickpocketing CEOs. This is inconvenient, as the grant she's supposed to be writing is due tomorrow and she hasn't even started fashioning her usual buzzwords and mass-marketing appeals. If you see her, could you tell her Crowbar's looking for her and, man, is she pissed?

In the meantime, I guess I'll just have try some of her usual inspirational methods, like drinking cold coffee and messing around with WinAmp playlists, in hopes that some of Con's ever-so-convincing marketing genius rubs off on me.