My parents have spent a good deal of their adult lives looking after lodgers and foreign students, so that they now generally remember a student by whether they hung the towels properly or if they had too much milk on their cereal at breakfast. In some ways they've rewritten Dr Martin Luther King. Whereas he believed in judging people based, "not on the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character", my folks couldn’t care less for colour or character, as long as they spend less than 10 minutes in the shower and remember to give the bathtub a going over with the shower nozzle, then you’re all right by their standards and are more than welcome to rent a room and indulge in a spot of light genocide. As far as the delineation of what is good and evil by moral standards goes, my house is a brave new world of gas-bill related divine wrath.
What they fail to realise is that whilst someone like Jesus would probably end up cluttering up the bathroom with different brands of conditioner, clogging up the sink with prostitute hair and leaving miraculous but unsightly wine stains around the bath tub, this doesn’t make him a worse individual than say, Mussolini, who would probably be a slightly more considerate lodger – only needing a dab of polish for the jackboots and a shammy to give the bald spot a good buffing of a Tuesday.
But logical protests fall on deaf ears. For, in their mind, hot water consumption is intrinsically linked to moral fibre. If you start the day with a 5-10 minute shower, you’ll go off and lead a productive, wholesome and fulfilling day.
If you’re there for between 10-12 minutes, watch out ethnic Kurds!
Tuesday, 23 June 2009
Monday, 22 June 2009
Jurassic Disappointment
Scientists have discovered that the original statistical model used to calculate dinosaur mass is flawed, suggesting dinosaurs have been oversized, with dinosaurs like the Tyrannosaurus Rex only half the size previously thought....which is just typical! The only thing that’s kept me going all these years in this grim, boring, scaled-down world is the fact that there used to be these massive, monster fire-breathing lizards that went around fighting each other and sort of ripping flesh off each other and stuff and eating cavemen...now scientists have taken that away from me too. Do you know what the UK’s biggest predator currently is? Badgers. Crappy badgers... (muttering)
FX:
Jurassic Park style music. Roars of dinosaurs, bird song, the crashing of waves.
KEEPER:
Welcome to Dinosaur Park. The place where you can see real life dinosaurs thanks to dangerously frivolous genetic meddling.
TOURIST:
Wow! Look at the size of that dinosaur! How far away is that?
KEEPER:
No, it’s right in front of you. It’s really quite small.
TOURIST:
Is there some way we can get closer?
KEEPER:
Put your hand out. You can literally touch it.
TOURIST:
We’re going to have to take a jeep to get to that one. Must be MILES away.
KEEPER:
Look, dinosaurs weren’t that big ok? We miscalculated, and it seems that we’ve been overestimating for years to sensationalist effect. Happy?
TOURIST:
Well, not really. As an exclusive visitor to this resort, I don’t feel like I’m getting my money’s worth.
KEEPER:
Oh piss off. All our rich clients have pulled out. The only reason you’re here is that you got the two-for-one offer when you bought a 12 pack of toilet paper, just like everyone else.
TOURIST:
I thought this was meant to be ‘Dinosaur Park’.
KEEPER:
Yeah, but we’re going to rename it due to a Trading Standards complaint. It’ll soon be called ‘Medium Sized Lizard Island’.
CUT TO:
FX:
Chilling music and the thudding footsteps and terrifying roar of a T-Rex a la Jurassic Park.
LAURA DERN:
Oh my God...Oh my God, it’s...tiny.
FX:
Squeaky mouse type noises.
JEFF GOLDBLUM:
Yeah, I think we left the PA on and it got close to the microphone. Sounded bigger than it was.
LAURA DERN:
Oh, I see. Yeah.
JEFF GOLDBLUM:
Does anyone have a cat basket we could put it in?
Wednesday, 17 June 2009
Auto-mate-ic?
Recently, I’ve heard a lot of middle-aged people bemoaning automated services as ‘you don’t get to talk to a proper person’ or ‘A machine never smiles at you’.
This is the latest major gripe. The gripe before this one was ‘I don’t want to talk to someone in a call centre in INDIA, I want to talk to someone I can understand’. A lot of companies buckled and moved call centre operations back to the UK. Some companies cunningly renamed Talan or Anjalli ‘Darren’ or ‘Stacey’ to give their customers the impression that they were phoning a call centre in the UK. For the cannier caller, knowing that someone called ‘Darren’ probably didn’t spend his childhood learning English in Lahore kind of gave the ruse away. Frankly, I had no problems with call centres in India. I’d rather have my mobile phone topped up by someone with a PhD in nuclear physics than a reject of the McDonalds training programme. In that respect, global inequality worked very much to my favour.
The new complaint is about supermarket self-service kiosks, an older one is about ATMs. The problem with these technologies (apparently) is that the customer is denied a smiling face and the personal touch. Frankly, they can keep it. I don’t know what country people think they’re suddenly living in but the chances of getting a cashier to give you a cheery smile and the benefit of their years or scanning experience are very slim indeed. Not being a particularly organised child, I generally do my food shopping 25 minutes before I cut my purchase up or poke holes in it and shove it in a hot place. I don’t need po-faced incompetence to be yet another step between me and eating. I’d rather not wait behind a woman who has bought an army standard year’s supply of toilet paper and pizzas whilst I queue patiently with my £4.27 worth of sub-luxury goods. Furthermore a machine will never judge me for buying economy tuna or a sensitive brand of condom (during my bi-annual contraceptive purchase).
I am by no means a misanthrope (not by UK standards anyway), it’s just there are too many people to deal with in everyday life, and (this being 2009 after all) surprisingly few robots. I say let’s even up the balance. As we all know, the place of robots in society has been a constant pant-wetting controversy since a Tomorrow's World presenter was stabbed in the knee by a suddenly self-aware kitchen helper robot in 1971. Thus I've tried to rationalise the automaton's role in society:
Robots dispensing cash – GOOD THING.
Robots totalling up my shopping – GOOD THING.
Robots with guns – BAD THING (see Terminator).
Robots driving taxis – BAD THING (see Total Recall).
Robot prostitutes – DECISION PENDING (see Blade Runner and AI...but only if you're really out of options at Blockbusters).
This is the latest major gripe. The gripe before this one was ‘I don’t want to talk to someone in a call centre in INDIA, I want to talk to someone I can understand’. A lot of companies buckled and moved call centre operations back to the UK. Some companies cunningly renamed Talan or Anjalli ‘Darren’ or ‘Stacey’ to give their customers the impression that they were phoning a call centre in the UK. For the cannier caller, knowing that someone called ‘Darren’ probably didn’t spend his childhood learning English in Lahore kind of gave the ruse away. Frankly, I had no problems with call centres in India. I’d rather have my mobile phone topped up by someone with a PhD in nuclear physics than a reject of the McDonalds training programme. In that respect, global inequality worked very much to my favour.
The new complaint is about supermarket self-service kiosks, an older one is about ATMs. The problem with these technologies (apparently) is that the customer is denied a smiling face and the personal touch. Frankly, they can keep it. I don’t know what country people think they’re suddenly living in but the chances of getting a cashier to give you a cheery smile and the benefit of their years or scanning experience are very slim indeed. Not being a particularly organised child, I generally do my food shopping 25 minutes before I cut my purchase up or poke holes in it and shove it in a hot place. I don’t need po-faced incompetence to be yet another step between me and eating. I’d rather not wait behind a woman who has bought an army standard year’s supply of toilet paper and pizzas whilst I queue patiently with my £4.27 worth of sub-luxury goods. Furthermore a machine will never judge me for buying economy tuna or a sensitive brand of condom (during my bi-annual contraceptive purchase).
I am by no means a misanthrope (not by UK standards anyway), it’s just there are too many people to deal with in everyday life, and (this being 2009 after all) surprisingly few robots. I say let’s even up the balance. As we all know, the place of robots in society has been a constant pant-wetting controversy since a Tomorrow's World presenter was stabbed in the knee by a suddenly self-aware kitchen helper robot in 1971. Thus I've tried to rationalise the automaton's role in society:
Robots dispensing cash – GOOD THING.
Robots totalling up my shopping – GOOD THING.
Robots with guns – BAD THING (see Terminator).
Robots driving taxis – BAD THING (see Total Recall).
Robot prostitutes – DECISION PENDING (see Blade Runner and AI...but only if you're really out of options at Blockbusters).
Saturday, 13 June 2009
When Pigs Dry
I noticed that we have some of those swanky hand driers installed in the toilets - the 'air blade' type. They look a bit like paper shredders for hands. Although perfectly positioned on the wall, I don't think I'd trust them with the demoistification of my testiclays.
Apparently their installation in toilets across the land has something to do with the Swine Flu scare, in that they leave your hands a few percent cleaner. Sure, this global pandemic is a bitch for human life on earth as we know it, but it's party time for the hand-dryer boys. It's almost tempting to believe that manufacturers have cooked up this little flu themselves, using a bath tub, some sparkles and PVA glue and lots of sneezing.
"Well John, I admire your thrusting presentation and…yes…the new X340 Airblade IS a hand drying revolution…but cooking up a global pandemic in a bath tub...is that the direction that we want to be taking at Global Wetness Solutions?"
All dissenters probably had their bollocks fed into the n
ew model.
Apparently their installation in toilets across the land has something to do with the Swine Flu scare, in that they leave your hands a few percent cleaner. Sure, this global pandemic is a bitch for human life on earth as we know it, but it's party time for the hand-dryer boys. It's almost tempting to believe that manufacturers have cooked up this little flu themselves, using a bath tub, some sparkles and PVA glue and lots of sneezing.
"Well John, I admire your thrusting presentation and…yes…the new X340 Airblade IS a hand drying revolution…but cooking up a global pandemic in a bath tub...is that the direction that we want to be taking at Global Wetness Solutions?"
All dissenters probably had their bollocks fed into the n
ew model.
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