Digital Tradition Mirror

Ballad of Compensation

(This score available as ABC, SongWright, PostScript, PNG, or PMW, or a MIDI file)
Pennywhistle notation and Dulcimer tab for this song is also available

Ballad of Compensation
(David Diamond)

 Remember all the lovely projects
 That you didn't get to do?
 All the bugs the other fellow
 Left around to bother you?
 How the card decks came back sorted,
 All the times your patience frayed?
 Say not the struggle naught availeth
 For on Friday we get paid.

 All the times you came at midnight
 Just to find the system down?
 Spent a quarter for a coffee
 And it wasn't even brown?
 While the tape drive tied your source tape
 Up into a kind of braid?
 Say not the struggle naught availeth,
 For on Friday we get paid.

 Do the operators blunder?
 Does the library make you burn?
 Was your input never input?
 Did your output ne'er return?
 Would your troubles stretch to China,
 End to end, if they were laid?
 Say not the struggle naught availeth,
 For on Friday we get paid.

 Prince, I thought I heard you murmur
 That you're aimless and dismayed,
 Saw you join the groaning mourners
 In the corridors arrayed.
 For your sickness there is physic,
 By these words it is conveyed:
 "Say not the struggle naught availeth,
 For on Friday we get paid".

Note: Dave was casting around for a singable tune for this:
 What A Friend We Have in Jesus works jes' fine. So, if you're
interested, does Babylon is Fallen, or Deutschland Uber Alles. RG

DD

Thanks to Mudcat for the Digital Tradition!