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27th February So. An earthquake. Dashed queer business. Still, nice to know it actually WAS an earthquake and not just one of those strange was-it-a-dream episodes. I was in bed and the earth moved. Who knew? I went to the dentists on Monday. I probably say this every time but I don't understand why my hygienist keeps talking to me all the time and waiting for me to answer. She has her hands in my mouth. Literally. Almost literally. She has things in her hands and those things are in my mouth. I can't answer. Even I am without a witty remark when my teeth are being scraped with a small metallic hook - the sort a very small pirate might have instead of a hand. Then the main event - the proper dentist - and he said my teeth are fine (points to me) but he wants me to see a specialist about a lump on my tongue. Not great as he'll probably want to cut it off and that's going to hurt like heck. Bad dentist. Bad tongue. "It's probably not malignant" he added. Thanks - it never occurred to me that it was until then. Do people really have nothing better to do than complain about TV adverts? Apparently not as a bunch of them complained about the Des Lynam Setanta advert with the yellow santa and scantily clad assistant. Thankfully their complaints have been rejected but do we really need (no doubt) well paid people to sit in judgement over these matters? Especially when they burp out nonsense such as
How is this any different from that damned Diet Coke advert which seems to have been around for years where a bunch of women contrive to get together, drink their sugar-free beverage of choice and lust over a half naked maintenance guy? Oh yes - the Setanta one was meant to be funny. The Diet Coke one wasn't. Heaven knows what the people who complained would make of a Carry On film. They would probably burst. With the time it took them to complain about this they could've done something about something which mattered. Instead they made a fuss about a third rate innuendo, gave Setanta a whole bunch of publicity and probably felt extremely pleased with themselves for standing up for their strange and misplaced idea of right. Sidebar, I hate it - really hate it - when people deliberately get Setanta's name wrong. "Have you got that Sultana?" they'll ask a day or two after a match. It isn't funny. It really isn't funny. It really really isn't funny. Here's something which is funny in a tragic sort of a way. We - mainly my sidekick but I've leant a few hands over the last few months - have been migrating the company from a product called CA View to a similar product called HPOS. It basically lets you view mainframe generated reports in a web viewer rather than printing them out. Our freshly rebranded IT Service Desk sent out an email today to let people know that CA View would be switched off next Tuesday. But they took - on the advice of a senior IT manager - the decision not to mention CA View by name. They thought it would "confuse" people to have jargon like the product's name floating around. So instead they DESCRIBED IT~! each time. The email duly arrived and for the next four minutes I kept hearing people all around us say "Do they mean CA View?" Banana has some adorable new slippers. Over the course of an afternoon she not only put on those slippers but found a clip on tie of m'lil nephew's and insisted on walking round waving a sword. She can swing it too. She was like an adorable little berserker. In fluffy lamb slippers. With a tie on.
24th February The government's plans to make ISPs responsible for tackling music and film piracy are of course appalling. They are a classic example of a group of non-technically literate people who take the word of the entertainment industry at face value and - perhaps for economic reasons, perhaps because they want stars at their Party bashes - bend over backwards to do everything the industry wants regardless of whether it makes sense.
Of course they do - they no doubt pitched for everything they could think of and were astonished that the government has so little technical knowledge that they gave them everything and more. I've been over this before so I won't bore you again but the "slump" is a small decline which could be caused by increasing second-hand CD and DVD sales which don't register on the industry's books, a decline in the product so people simply don't want to buy shameless cash in albums from talent contest winners who will have disappeared within six months; and the industry's own stratagem of making music as disposable as possible by selling it as ring tones which will be used for a week and then deleted. Making ISPs responsible for this is like making the Royal Mail responsible for what is sent through the post. It is an unworkable idea because there is no reliable way to tell what internet traffic actually is. Unless the ISP's analyse every bit of data they can't possibly be expected to know what it is. They can't simply rely on traffic stats to pinpoint offenders as high users might be gamers, users of the BBC's iPlayer or other legal video sharing services, people who work from home and are online all the time as a result or members of adult websites downloading DVDs quite lawfully. If you make the ISPs responsible for what is moved across their networks and they can't realistically tell what is moved across their networks then you have two possible outcomes. ONE - the whole thing is a farce and nothing ever happens. TWO - the ISPs panic because they could be prosecuted at any time and so take pre-emptive action at the first hint of suspicion. So they cut people off if they generate a lot of traffic. The ISPs can't take the risk that this person will one day be identified as an illegal file sharer so they cut them off now and live with the consequences. It will also drastically reduce choice in the ISP market as they would suddenly be opened up to massive risk and many would either quit immediately or be driven out of business through increased costs and hoards of disgruntled customers leaving because their service has become unusable. There are also the privacy arguments. This would be legislation to compel - not merely allow but compel - service providers to scrutinise everything you do online. You wouldn't want your postman opening your letters and I'm sure you don't want your ISP opening your data packets. The government are so scared of online file sharing - who knows why - and are determined to be seen to be doing something about it. This despite no one ever having proved anything about file sharing being the cause of a decline in sales. The government should be demanding they offer proof of their allegations before even considering such offensive legislation. Big Finish Productions recently introduced a download service and in their various interviews about it there was a statistic which was quoted twice by two different people. But there was a subtle difference which I think in many ways sums up this debate. The first claim was that 75% of their business is lost to piracy. The second claim was that 75% of their listeners were listening illegally. They sound the same until you realise that the first assumes everyone who listens illegally would otherwise buy the product and the second one doesn't. The record industry tries this one all the time and no one - not the government or the news services - ever calls them on it. Much online file sharing (I refuse to call it "piracy" as this is industry spin designed to put everyone involved on the same level as those who flog hundreds of dodgy copies in the market) is not nasty or evil and does not steal food from the mouths of little children. By all means try and shut the sites down, by all means go after the software makers who allow file sharing, by all means stop people filming movies in cinemas, by all means raid market stalls and warehouses, by all means go after illegal eBay auctions, by all means get things removed from YouTube. But don't go after everyone blindly and risk turning the British internet into a surveillance society where customers have no rights and can be banned at will by scared service providers who are being bullied by a government blinded by celebrity and in the pockets of an industry which seeks to control everything. Instead, the music and movie industries should start to use the internet to disseminate their product in a more imaginative way. Give more away and make friends rather than trying to ruin people's fun. Radiohead and Prince both gave their last albums away in a controlled experiment and both sold hundreds of thousands of physical units once the freebie was over. Think how much they could save in advertising if some free downloads would generate such a buzz that everyone knows about the new album through word of mouth? Free downloads are the new radio airtime. For Big Finish as quoted above, those 75% who listen illegally may then become customers because they wanted to sample the product free of charge and they liked what they heard. £14.99 is a lot to pay for something you are unsure of. Is it better that someone decides they won't bother and never hears it or that they download it, like it and buy some CDs? And I don't think I'm being naive in saying there are plenty of people who view downloading as a try-before-you-buy system. Which brings me on to another possible explanation for the slight fall ("slump") in sales. iTunes lets you buy individual tracks from an album. This is huge - you don't have to buy the full album any more to get the tracks you want. No need to spend £10 for three good songs and eight shite ones. You can spend 79p each and get what you want for £2.37. Now, wouldn't that impact on the industry's bottom line? That's nearly a 75% drop in sales. Must be online piracy. Because it couldn't POSSIBLY be anything else could it? We have to hope that the government's "consultation" will include people who will convince them that their plan is unworkable. Otherwise we can look forward to being cut off, being labelled as undesirable customers and all but black-listed from internet access just for using the iPlayer or being online gamers. All because the ignorant are making decisions based on propaganda from the greedy.
20th February We started UAT on something terribly dull on Monday. Or rather, I spent weeks making sure we could start UAT on Monday morning only to find no system to test. Already our involvement had gone from "co-ordinating" the production of test plans to "producing" test plans - which was a pain in the arse as we were the ones most out of the loop so didn't really know anything more about the project than could be gleaned from the spec (which was untouched since it was last updated in 2005~!) Most people reviewed them and offered no comment at all (something I expect to change in about four weeks just after the project is signed off, at which point they will start mentioning holes), such comment as was received was sweated over. Then came the news that I was expected to manipulate data from mainframe extracts so they could be resubmitted as upload files. I looked at these mainframe extracts and they meant NOTHING AT ALL. So I poured over them, squinted at the seemingly random sequence of numbers at letters for ages and finally (probably) figured out which of the three hundred or so characters in each record meant what. And changed what needed to be changed to convince the cheque production engine that I am in fact a mainframe. I've produced schedules - high level and more detailed - and circulated them to more or less everyone I've ever heard of and all apparently for nothing. The first warning sign should've been that they were resurrecting three year old code which had been written by someone who has since left the company. Never mind - they said - it will be ready by Monday. This project has been off-and-on for five sodding years. You would think they might just get the test system up and running before anyone does the detailed prep work to start UAT. But no - they left everything to the last possible second and it bit them on the ass. It doesn't bother me as such - it's just one of those disrespectful things - everyone harassed us to get our stuff done but no one did the same for IT. Better news on the work front is that I've been using the restaurant. I've been there four years and aside from one team Xmas lunch (a stuffed aubergine - not great) and some cheese on toast on my first morning, I've never used it. I decided to try it this week and so far I've had one nice cheese panini, one quite nice smoked cheese and apple sandwich and one polystyrene cup of spring cabbage soup which was almost nice but not quite. It makes a change from crisps and a chocolate bar. My internet connection is flaky. Fragile. Prone to being a connection in name only. Virgin blame "low signal strength" and won't say what's causing it. I blame the cold weather and the cables snuggling up together and saying "sod the data packets". Though I didn't mention that in case they didn't take me seriously. Thus far this week it has all died about 8pm each evening and not returned until some time during the day when I've not been around to see it. So basically it goes when the temperature drops below zero and comes back when it gets warmer. Snuggling - I tell you - it's all about the snuggling. Better news is that the local Cancer Research shop takes VIDEOS~! So I can give them all my old pre-recorded tapes. "Oh yes" said the lady looking after the shop. "We sell them two for a pound". So that's worth knowing. I'm not pleased with VHS at the moment - CR-UK aside - as copying tapes to disc has shown me what a truly dreadful format it could be. It was fine when it worked but when it doesn't it is awful. I wanted to copy Nick Hancock's football trilogy but the first tape was so flickery and wouldn't track that I literally told it to sod the heck off and spent £3.95 buying them on DVD. My off air recordings are far worse - I've been archiving "Jokers Wild" (about which I might write in more depth another time) and some of them are unwatchable. And I don't just mean because of Lenny Bennett. Still, I've salvaged 59 episodes from the skip and that can't be bad. Last but not least, the Big Show - Floyd Mayweather angle from last Sunday was probably the best thing WWE has done since Mike Tyson and Stone Cold Steve Austin back in 1998. I rarely watch WWE anymore but this was money. Whether they have an actual plan or not I don't know but visually and dramatically it was damn near perfect.
16th February This is a good idea. Let's remove orals from language exams. I'll wait while you snigger about the word "oral". It will undoubtedly make language qualifications mean more if pupils can get by without actually having to - you know - speak the language they are apparently and officially proficient in. The reason? Because orals are "too stressful". Awww - diddums. Well we can't have the little cotton-wool clad little dumplings put under any pressure can we? They won't be under pressure after they've left school so we don't need to prepare them for it during their education. No, lets stick with things they like. Such as downloading essays off the internet and not being marked down for bad spelling because it discriminates against people who can't spell. Education makes me angry and I've probably bored you with this too many times. But here are three things which would make schools more useful places. ONE - pupils need to have more exams not fewer exams. All this balls about putting them under stress or pressure is just crap. For seven years at the Fine Old School I had exams in every subject, twice a year. One lot before Christmas and one lot in June. That's a lot of exams. Did I enjoy that? Hell no. Did it do me any good? Hell yes. It meant that when I sat my first exam that mattered - a GCSE in something I forget now - I'd already done so many exams that the act itself didn't phase me. Yes, the ones that mattered were more important than the ones that didn't but then your first public recital is more important than the years of practice but that doesn't make the practice invalid. Doing lots of exams meant I learned technique, time keeping and pacing. It was second nature to plan and write an essay that was exactly the right length, took exactly the right amount of time and said exactly the right things. Keeping children away from exams because they are stressful is counter productive. That said, the exams should be internal and the results should be used for nothing more than gauging the pupil's performance. Reducing an entire school down to numbers in a league table is equally counter productive because education is (in part at least) about individual children becoming better at something regardless of where they started out. If your measuring system can't tell the difference between a "D" child working his way up to a "B" and an "A" child coasting to an "A" then it is worthless. TWO - in this age of internet cheating, more subjects need to be introducing oral tests. It's not a new idea - just one that has fallen out of use most places. A viva voce is the Latin name for such an exam and basically involves a pupil discussing some piece of work with a teacher. Supposing you've "written" an essay on Henry VII. Not being bothered to do it yourself, you've copied it from Wikipedia and added a few spelling mistakes to make it look more authentic. I on the other hand have written a beautiful and immaculately researched essay on the same subj. Which I did once and everyone enjoyed it. So you and I are given good marks for our essays - the marker not spotting your wickedness - and are called in to have a chat about it. You know little of the shrewish king and stumble around, trying to remember bits from your essay while I effortlessly and wittily toss in asides from my researches which will be available in the director's cut of the essay which will be published shortly. My examiner offers me sherry and membership of his club, yours calls the police. That seems a fairer and more reliable way of marking course work these days. Software to spot cheats isn't half as reliable as a good old chat. THREE - rather than scrapping orals in French and German we should be introducing them in English. I'm regularly appalled by the standard of spoken English around me. Badly written English is bad enough but we're living in an age where "I've wrote it" or "I wasn't doing nothing" are apparently acceptable. No. They aren't. What is the point of GCSE English if it doesn't have an oral element? It seems to have become a qualification in carrying around a few paperbacks by Jane Austen and using them to slap the clever pupils about the head with. English - language not literature - should be the most important subject in schools, especially in this multi-cultural age. Without English you can't communicate and if you can't communicate, how are you prepared for the outside world? English is far more important than secondary languages (which includes French, German, Latin, Welsh, Asian languages, Polish or whatever is spoken at home). Respecting your "heritage" is all fine and large but any child who is born in the country, grows up in this country and isn't taught English as their first language is being abused. It really is that serious - not being able to speak English immediately restricts that child to life in the cultural enclave in which he grew up. No child should ever get any kind of qualification from a British school without being able to speak and write adequate English. A goal which must be supported by more resources to help those who don't speak English at home. My sister in law is fluent in both English and Indian (she just calls it that - I think it's Hindi but I'm not sure) because she grew up speaking one with her parents and the other with her friends and at school. That's how it should be - there weren't any "well meaning" educationalists around who believed it would be racist to make her speak English. So, in conclusion, stop tailoring the education system around what the pupils want and go back to making it about what the pupils need. And finally, two quotes from supporters of the inaccurately names "cash martyr" mentioned below. The first was a woman who said she paid her bills by cheque and wrote on the back of each that she resented paying more. "Whatever happened to freedom of choice?" she added. Well, you have the choice to pay by direct debit and you choose not to. Things are usually there if you bother to look for them. Secondly, another cretin asked why she should subsidise those who were "too lazy" to go to their local PayPoint and pay their bills there. This must be some new meaning of the word "lazy". Is the person making this point "too lazy" to hand deliver her letters and so posts them? Is the person making this point "too lazy" to grow her own coffee beans and so buys jars from the supermarket? Is the person making this point "too lazy" to come up with her own theories about relativity and so relies upon Einstein's? Or is she just misunderstanding the meaning of the word "lazy" because she can't be arsed to look in a dictionary or fill in a direct debit mandate? And finally finally, here is my little Banana dancing with her shadow.
14th February Have we all seen the story of the woman suing BT for offering a discount to direct debit customers? It is infuriating drivel of the worst kind. I heard a bit on Radio 4 about it and people were spouting utter gibberish. Comments like "why should I subsidise people who pay by direct debit?" were trotted out smugly as if they actually meant something. There is of course a difference between a company which offers a discount for DD payment and a company which levies an extra charge for non-DD payment. But anyone dumb enough to do the latter really doesn't deserve to have customers. In what sense are they "subsidising" other people? Collecting by direct debit costs less - both in terms of actual collection and in knowing exactly when money will be coming in. It is therefore perfectly right that they should pass that saving on to customers. If you don't want to pay by DD, don't pay by DD. Just accept that there is an incentive to do so. Do these fucktards wander round supermarkets getting cross because they are only buying one tin of beans and are therefore subsidising people who get three tins of beans for the price of two? And what will be the outcome if this woman wins her case? Will all these companies extend their DD price to all customers? Or will they simply charge everyone the higher sum? I'm guessing the latter. So what has she achieved other than to make everyone pay higher bills? Nothing, obviously, but no one is getting a better deal than her so she'll be happy. And where do they get off calling her the "cash martyr"? Last time I looked, martyr meant something like "a person who is put to death or endures great suffering on behalf of any belief or principle" rather than "a person who gets cross because she chooses not to take advantage of a £1.50 discount". I'm sure all those martyrs who burned to death in the middle ages are delighted that this wealthy woman is getting far too much publicity for being basically a luddite. And (for the third paragraph in a row, much to the eye-scraping delight of pedants and connoisseurs) I'm speaking as someone who has had meetings - literal meetings - to discuss whether our company standard should be to write "direct debit" or "Direct Debit". So I have every reason to hate the things. Not to mention the agonies involved in creating an entire new DD mandate which made people who don't like to be happy happy while still fitting on the right number of pages. So essentially this woman should shut up and accept that people get discounts for things. On this occasion she chooses not to accept it. Fine - that's her choice - just don't fuck things up for everyone else. She may be slightly popular as a latter-day Robin Hood right now but when people start noticing their discounts vanishing from their bills they might come over all Blackadder and think "Robin Hood, my foot. Robin Git more like."
10th February At first glance I thought the Premiership's proposal to play matches abroad was nonsense. But when I saw the various self-appointed fan representatives banging on about how terrible it was I had a sudden revelation. I'm all in favour of it now. I still think it is a terrible idea and it won't actually work because Los Angeles won't be happy to get Wigan vs Reading in the random draw when they were expecting Cristiano and his performing feet. I just think anything which annoys football supporters is a good thing. Let's get one thing clear - football supporters don't have a right to say what should happen in football. They don't need to be consulted about things. They aren't the most important thing in the game. And, with their shirts and scarves, they are nothing more than marks. There is no difference between people who go to Old Trafford (for I'm talking about all supporters, even those with the sense to support a proper team) or Anfield and those Doctor Who fans who supported the programme during the 16 years it was off the air. Russell T Davies has no more obligation to make Doctor Who which fits my idea of what the programme should be than the Premier League should fashion itself to the average scarf-wearing season ticket holder thinks football should be. Football is a business and an entertainment brand. If it does something wrong, people stop paying for it. If people are paying for it then logically they are doing something right. When audiences fall and stadiums are half empty, then football will need to change. They babble about the game losing its "soul". What on earth does that mean? It sounds like the sort of thing people say when desperately clinging to illogical, emotional beliefs because they have nothing intelligent to say. If people don't like what the Premiership has become, don't watch it. Watch the Championship, watch your local non-league team. Watch rugby. There is plenty out there to do. There is a lot of nonsense about loyalty to your team and that switching teams is like leaving the mafia. That's just the arse's arse. If you don't like new Doctor Who, watch old tapes, watch Battlestar Galactica, watch Star Trek. There is no difference. Football fans will tell you there is a difference but there isn't. They like to romanticise that football isn't a matter of life and death (yawn) it's more important than that. Balls - it is an entertainment franchise which you choose to watch or not to watch. If you hate the Premiership's greed, greed and more greed but continue (out of a sense of "loyalty") to pay money to see it then you're no less a moron than the Star Wars fan who pays to see the Phantom Menace 200 times even though he never stops telling people how much he hates it. So - Premier League - play your games around the world. They will fail. But in doing it you will have made another brave step towards reminding the nylon shirted marks who owns football in this country. Also controversial is eBay's announcement that they are to stop sellers leaving negative feedback about buyers. I'm all in favour of this - it should've been done years ago. I know there will be some occasions where buyers deserve negative feedback. But for the most part this is a good thing and the good far outweighs the bad so it should be done. This is how eBay should work. Buyer pays for an item. Seller leaves positive feedback because the buyer has paid promptly. Seller dispatches item (or not). Buyer leaves feedback - positive or negative. What actually happens is: Buyer pays for item. Seller sends item (or not). Buyer leaves feedback - positive or negative. Seller then leaves matching feedback - either a complimentary positive or a spiteful retaliatory negative. So when the buyer acts in good faith and gets lousy service, they end up being accused of not paying or complaining too much or any one of a dozen seller revenge comments. When all that actually happens is the seller was at fault and the buyer dared to complain. So, yes, there are a lot of asshole buyers on eBay but if this protects the good buyers from the bad sellers then I see no problem with it. I know someone who will probably disagree with this and we can discuss it over brunch.
6th February It feels like the end of an era. For years now, mother has been finding homes in sheds, attics, nooks, crannies and garages for boxes of video tapes. Most, I will confess, belonging to me. As an inveterate hoarder of some thirty odd summers I accumulated around two thousand of the things. After eight years of DVD being so much better, eight years of DVD buying, three years of DVD recording and a year downloading all sorts of absurd, rare and obscure items I have finally broken the chord. Two bin bags full of video tapes will be going to the local tip before the end of the week. It doesn't sound like much but it is the first of many. I've tried for years to find some alternative but nowhere wants to recycle old video tapes. There are still some charities who will take pre-recorded tapes and they are more than welcome to them. But with no other way of getting rid of tapes I recorded myself since we got our first top-loading video recorder in what must've been 1985 or 86 (I know I once found a few minutes of Silver Nemesis on a tape of my brother's and that would've been from the original transmission in 1988) the tip is the only alternative. It seems a stupid waste but there is no other way. If you know of another way then let me know - there are hundred more which I've yet to go through (and put aside any which contain something fascinating - such as the Eric Morecambe short film "The Passionate Pilgrim" which I've just unearthed) which will follow their kin to landfill oblivion. While I speak of rare and sought after television, a plug for Replay DVD who have already released series 1 of Steven Moffat's masterpiece "Joking Apart" and who are shortly to release series 2. Replay is one incredibly hard working guy who does a tremendous job and people like Craig Robbins should be supported whole heartedly. The BBC have had 15 years to release Joking Apart and they never bothered. Craig has made it happen and if lots of people buy Joking Apart then maybe one day we'll get Chalk on DVD too. Which is also by Steven Moffat but with the added bonus of Nicola Walker. I've discovered my new favourite online writer. Her name is Anna Pickard and she pops up all over the Guardian's website. She's fairly prolific and writes about pretty much anything. She also writes how I'd like to but never quite manage to consistently pull off. And then, not content with being very good at it for a living, she does it for fun as well. I wish I had her energy as well as her talent.
2nd February So Microsoft want to buy Yahoo, aye. It make sense - off the top of your head can you name Microsoft's much ballyhooed search engine, launched last year amidst big hype and bunting? Neither can I. It has its valuable MSN and Hotmail web presence but neither of those can be said to be as powerful as Google. Both are tarnished brands long since superseded by superior offerings from the aforementioned neologism. Microsoft ballsed up Vista (there should only ever have been one flavour of Vista - ship everyone the Ultimate edition as Apple do with their OSX incarnations - and the price should've been under $150/£80) and are increasingly reliant upon Office to boost their profits. But the thing about office suits is that once you've got one, you don't really need to upgrade to a new one. Office 97 or Office XP may be old (in computing terms) but they are perfectly good for what they are. You can add bells and whistles but a word processor is a word processor. But don't pity Microsoft - they can afford to spend $44 billion on Yahoo and they have mammoth cash reserves set aside to pay off the fines they know they'll incur every time they do anything. So what can Yahoo do for Microsoft that Microsoft can't do themselves? To be honest, I don't know. Google has become so entrenched in public consciousness that it will take something radical to surpass them. I don't know of anything radical that Yahoo has which no one else does. And if there is something radical on the minds of Microsoft's bright little boys and girls then why not simply put it in their own Live engine (I looked it up) and let word spread that Live is better than Google? Vista's built in hard drive search technology is still lagging behind Apple's and using Yahoo's engine within Vista would be an advance. Truly combining desktop and web searching within Windows would be an advance but we know how the courts take a dim view of Microsoft doing things like that. It will be interesting to see what happens over the next few years as a company which has never charged its users a dime keeps pushing the richest company in the world closer and closer to collapse. I don't like to sound my own trumpet but I was quite pleased with the following exchange. Me: We've both got American calendars. TheArtist: How can you tell? Me: American calendars have a 29th of February. It took him a moment to figure that one out. He also CTL+F's this footling web journal for mentions of himself so give him a wave. Hello sidekick. Speaking of my colleague, he and his lady friend have been looking at houses recently. They were being shown round one yesterday when said lady friend asked what a particular door was for. Estate Agent: Um, I don't know. She tried the door and it opened, revealing a blank, empty darkness like something out of Sapphire and Steel. She stepped in to find the light switch. Now, as he was telling this story I was convinced it was going to be a dungeon or otherwise sinister sexual meeting place. Estate Agent: Arhh. She fell down a flight of steps and ended up in a basement she hadn't know was there. She emerged a few moments later, covered in dust and apologising for not being very professional. Apparently it is against the Estate Agent's Code to fall down a flight of stairs while members of the public are present. It reminds me of a classic Fry and Laurie vox pop. Hugh: Do you know how much training it takes to become an estate agent? Hmm? (pause) Practically none. I did an online health assessment questionnaire assessment form thing on Friday. It's a new "initiative" the company are paying for and I had literally nothing better to do. The results won't surprise anyone, least of all me. On the plus side I'm a non-smoking, non-drinking vegetarian who isn't bullied at work. On the negative side I never take any exercise, I'm chronically depressed and my stress levels are through the roof. Basically, I'm going to die soon but it won't be my liver or my lungs which let me down. So yay me. It was, on reflection, a waste of twenty minutes. It came up with all sorts of helpful suggestions but I really don't care. |
 
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