FIC: A Very Small Number of Immortal Beings

Title: A Very Small Number of Immortal Beings
Rating: for grown-ups
Length: 1870 words
Pairing: Jack Harkness/M
Summary: If you're stuck being immortal, you may as well make the most of it.
Notes: Background thanks to Ministars; beta thanks to ellen_fremedon, who owed me, after she planted the idea in my head.

At AO3 here, or read it below.

( A Very Small Number of Immortal Beings )

inventions the world needs

If there isn't one already, someone will someday invent an audio search engine, where you hum a couple of bars of the tune you can't identify and the thing finds it for you (people's bad sense of pitch will be compensated for in the same manner as their spelling mistakes), and that inventor will make a MINT (in advertising, I assume, a la Google).

Because I can't very well ask the internets in their current form, "what is the great opera chorus that goes da da da da da da, da-DUM ...?" (Though I did once ask my dad, by e-mail, "Which dance is it in the Nutrcacker suite that goes (horns) da da da da, da-da?" And he said "Waltz of the Flowers" and I felt better.)

i got nothin'.

There's a grocery store in the same complex as my physical therapists' office, so I popped over after my appointment today to pick up a couple of things I should have thought of when I did a proper grocery run over the weekend. A young man in a yellow shirt - the same color as one of the store's uniforms - was outside talking to a customer as I approached; I assumed he had just helped someone to the car with their bags or finished gathering wayward carts or something. Just as I reached the curb, he finished talking to that customer, and this happened:

him: Miss! Are you a [this county] voter?
me: ... Yes.
him: Then I need your signature on this petition.
me: [sigh] Uh huh. Whose petition?
him: blah blah Fraternal Order of Police blah blah collective bargaining blah blah just need fifty thousand valid signatures to get it on the ballot blah blah union.
me: [flipping pages of signatures to try to find something telling me what it is I'm being asked to sign] Ah - just to get on the ballot, is it?
him: Yes, ma'am. [I start to fill in the information it asks for.] I tell you what, the look on your face when I called you over, I thought you were gonna ...
me: Well, you know, when people approach you with clipboards. How much of this do I fill in?
him: Just your name and address and today's date.
me: Today is September the ...
him: Twentieth. And sign there.
me: It says date of birth here, do you need that?
him: No, we don't need date of birth. And you can put your phone number right there if you want.
me: [filling in the date and signing] I don't, thank you.
him: Yeah, that wasn't for the petition drive, that was just for me.

~blink~

Anyway, I handed him back his clipboard and his pen and wished him good luck. All in all a better clipboard-assault experience than the time a kid in Cornmarket insisted I looked like a vegetarian, and I'm all in favor of labor unions and referenda (particularly when without a referendum the union will suffer) - but not so much of being flirted at when I believe my impatience is obvious. Hrmph.