Their choice to assimilate means it’s already too late.

Yet again I had no plans to write today, but one thing led to another and the next thing I knew, I was writing a post anyway. 

Friday late evening, Master and I were feeling cold. I stepped out to put the heating on and… nothing on the thermostat.

No clicks. No lights. Nothing. 

I’m not generally bad at DIY, but thermostats and electrics are something that I’m not allowed to play with. If it’s wallpapering, installing a shelf or building furniture, Master leaves me with that. If it’s gas, water or electric, we call in someone qualified to deal. 

So even if the Admiral is confident that I can handle replacing the thermostat all by myself, Master isn’t willing to let me try. 

Saturday daytime Master called the out-of-hours number. The operator said that if it was safe and we couldn’t smell gas (we couldn’t), there was no emergency. They would log it and someone would come out in the week.

This morning and whilst I was fighting my way into a t-shirt, an engineer called me up. He’d be here about by about 10AM. 

Cool.

The engineer arrives, and he’s young and chatty as they often are.

He checks the thermostat, confirms it’s dead. 

“Where’s your boiler?” he asks. I point to the kitchen.

He checks the boiler, whatever he’s looking for isn’t there. 

“Where’s your control panel?” he asks. I point to the shelf unit next to the boiler. 

“Hidden,” I say grimly, “because space in this kitchen is at a premium”. He nods. 

“Any chance I can access it?” he asks. I nod and pull the shelf unit forward. 

The engineer inspects the panel and solves the problem in five seconds flat. 

“The programme is off,” he says. He presses the button and just like that, the boiler springs into life. I’m in disbelief. 

“Was that it?!” I ask. He laughs. 

“Just like that,” he says. I shake my head. 

“There will be talks tonight!” I say. “My partner works in building maintenance. He should have suggested I check the panel, before we made the bloody call!” 

Really that’s partners, plural, because they both do. But hey, some poor unassuming engineer doesn’t need to know about my kinky polyamorous lifestyle.

After that, the Admiral mentions my good friend, Hannah, who I haven’t heard from lately. Apparently she’s still causing mischief on the Lovehoney forum and I smile. 

The Admiral is frustrated that Hannah hasn’t joined us on our Discord server, but I’m not. You can’t make someone do anything they don’t want to do. 

I tease the Admiral and say that “I know you Borgy boys are into assimilation and stuff, but still”. 

So that is who they are now; that is the Collective. My collective: The Borgy Boys. 

Drones, by any other name.

The Admiral even called me “Borgy Lady” first. He’s wrong of course, it’s “Borgy Queen” really. But hey, assimilation can be a time of learning 😉 

But this talk of assimilation made me think of someone: my old penpal, Chris. 

I cut contact with Chris after a mental health blip, and what I now think was a huge misunderstanding between the pair of us. 

Chris accused me of trying to ‘assimilate’ him, and then he suggested — in a Venn diagram — that meeting him might be dangerous and fun. 

And sure, I might fuck around sometimes — often in fact — but not when it comes to my personal safety. 

So I let him go, and then I learned — through Gemini — what boys are really talking about when they talk about this whole ‘assimilation’ thing.

It’s a romance thing: a nerdy, Star Trek romance thing. 

Well shit! Maybe he’s not a fucking walking red flag after all!

Chris had a lot going for him. In fact, right off the bat Chris was a contradiction: I don’t normally reply to auto-matches, and yet Chris was an auto-match. There was something about his letter, a curiosity. Something that I had to know. 

It seemed Chris felt that way about me, too. 

Chris is also a dog Dad, and I’m a dog Mom. And look, it’s not that I’ve always said Must Love Dogs is practically the movie that best describes my love life, it’s just that cat Dads need not apply.

I was thinking about this the other day actually, and whilst I was mopping the kitchen floor, of all things: bearded, nerdy, dad-bodded dog Dads who are secretly idiots Doms are my ‘type’. 

So I re-added Chris as a penpal, and then I discovered that he’d already written to me. 

Chris had finally caved and read my blog. Unfortunately, he’d also read the post where I said I’d deleted him as a penpal. 

Chris took that as a sign that I was no longer interested in him, and fair enough, that’s not exactly a wrong interpretation when someone deletes you off their contacts. But it was a wrong interpretation of my feelings towards him, now or then.

I wasn’t not interested in Chris, I just wasn’t sure what his intentions were for me. He wasn’t exactly making me feel like I was any safer with him.

I wasn’t not interested in Chris, I just wasn’t particularly keen on being accused of trying to ‘assimilate’ him when he wanted his in. When he wanted to be my latest (and last) “acquisition”.   

I didn’t not want Chris. Back then I didn’t fully understand Chris, but that’s not the same as not wanting him!

Not all of us spent our youth binge-watching Star Trek so we could understand the opposite sex later on in life. Some of us were busy shooting them on the battlefield instead 😉

Also, things in text have a horrible way of getting lost in translation, and humour doesn’t always carry through the way the way it was intended.

I have sent a letter to Chris to try and clarify a few things, but whether or not it reaches him or whether or not it works, only time will tell. It’s nothing ventured, nothing gained. But one thing is for certain: this girl has always had a taste for adventure. 

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