ON A CALL WITH THE BORG

I was on a call with Borg HQ today. At one point, they showed a slide with only one block paragraph written on it, in large, unironic letters.

"A picture is worth a thousand words" is an English language adage meaning that complex and sometimes multiple ideas can be conveyed by a single still image, which conveys its meaning or essence more effectively than a mere verbal description."

It passed by without the batting of an eyelid. You've got to love the Borg sometimes.

Meanwhile, I figured that the one picture that didn't give me the thousand words I needed, was the one from Hermes. In fact, scrap that - I didn't need a thousand; I needed two numbers, like a 24 or a 22 or a 27 - just to let me know which house my trainers had been delivered to on Sunday. Instead, you'll remember, I got a picture of  just the parcel itself and a pair of someone else's feet.

I stood outside my front door, squinting at the photo in the sunlight. Perhaps if I could make out any distinguishing features in the concrete, I could work out whose house it was near? There was indeed a small drain with a piece of grass sticking out of it, right in the corner of the picture.

Just as I realised where it was in real life, a door creaked opened from number 24 (near the grassy drain) and my neighbour (we'll call him Ben) popped out with a familiar looking package.

"Ah!" I said, "Is that my parcel?"

"Sure," said Ben, "Here you go."

And that was that. He'd seen me trying to sleuth the photo and had come outside to help me out. So, in a weird way, the picture had led me to the package after all.

The Borg continued to go through the assimilation strategy, word by word. I've always wondered how they manage to acquire so many different civilisations, yet remain essentially the same - always with the laser-eyes and cybernetic body armour. You'd have thought they'd integrate the plus points of all the worlds they'd taken over, like wings, jokes, poetry, language, culture? Nope. Just a big old metal cube with some soulless robots.

Hmm. Don't read too much into that.