my life monitor bracelet

still had about fours hours left on it when I at last went through an environment force field out of alien slug jurisdiction and into the human-support deck of a galactic liner, signed on as a third-class utility hand in the hospitality service branch of TransTimeTransport and Shipping. Good old TTT&S, where would we be without them.....still stuck out in the sticks, I guess.....no other human enterprise had ever managed to wrangle a contract with a starship cartel, thus gaining access to a market beyond imagination .....Hell, you didn't even need much decent product to ship....Humanity was a novelty much in vogue down towards the busy cosmopolitan center of the galaxy....you could sell just about anything "Human" to the alien consumer masses eager for the new and exotic. The general wisdom was that we had better get what we could while the getting was good....while we were still a nine-day wonder, before some other strange little species turned up to catch the public fancy....So I found myself pulling duty as the grave-yard shift host in a 24 hour grill bar, riding herd on the robots, and presenting the traditional human face to the customers.....a delightful crowd of hucksters and shucksters who were intent upon riding out to the stars to diddle the natives, and make a fast buck by presenting to our new-found neighbors a quick song-and-dance and medicine show, before they found out what a useless pack of yahoos we really were, compared to the ancient sophisticate societies that had been stirring Galactic Culture for ages beyond reckoning.....those were heady days.....