The last gasp of yoof

Exciting times ahead. I've applied for membership of the bafflingly age-restrictive 20 Something Blogger network. I won't deny that my motivation is partially to enrage Webby, who having recently hit 30 is now too ancient and revolting to apply. Apparently, if he visits the site his screen will fill with live feeds to dozens of gorgeous 21 year olds retching and saying "No way, Grandad!" in an exotic variety of languages.

But aside from that, this could be my ticket to an Indian summer in my dying months as a 20 something. I want to lol and rofl and lmao with people who arrange parties in squats through MySpace and take meow meow and put pictures of their bums on Twitter. I'll befriend these dangerous, beautiful youths by never seeming to have the time to type the words "to" or "you" and raving about cutting edge (and entirely fictitious) bands. Hey fella, u clocked the Fridge Handbags yet?  They're like totally spudrocking.

Then this blog will become an enormous youth culture online sensation. I'll be like Belle de Jour but without needing to have it off with strangers in hotels for cash. I'll quit the day job and throw myself into the London celebrity scene, guided by my friends from 20 Something Bloggers on what to wear, where to wear it and what slang to say when I get there. I'll get a job with Channel 4 introducing episodes of Friends on Sunday mornings and appear in a Lady Gaga video dressed like a sexy robot lobster.
 
Then, on 23 May 2011, I'll be expelled from paradise. My 20 Something friends will turn their backs, disgusted by my decrepitude. Peaches Geldof will stop returning my tweets and I'll be replaced on Channel 4 by a talking cartoon syringe. My girlfriend will have left me and I'll die of bitterness and regret by Christmas.

On reflection, maybe I shouldn't mix with the youth of the internet. My membership status is pending, which must mean someone from the network will along soon to make sure I'm not an undercover OAP. 20 Something Blogger representative, I implore you - turn me down. I'm not one of your kind.

Florence ITgales

In my current job I work in earshot of an IT suport team. Forget nurses, firemen and Battersea Dogs Home volunteers - these are the true heroes of the modern age. Beyond the "have you tried turning it on and off?" cliches, the patience with which they manage the daily slew of mundane problems presented as potentially career-ending disasters is unbelievable.

Recent critical issues which have had me running the short distance across the office to their wire-strewn triage area, whimpering all the way, include:

• Paper jam in the printer
• I've forgotten my password so many times I've been locked out of my computer
• The page numbering on my Word document's gone really weird
• Paper jam in the other printer
• I've poured a cup of tea into my keyboard and now it's fizzing

In each case they dry my tears on a discarded Excel doc, stroll to my computer with the unhurried air of someone who has seen this exact problem literally hundreds of times before, and sort it out in seconds while I hop from one foot to the other behind them, biting my nails and squeaking. Most importantly, at no point do they make me feel like the techno-moron that I so plainly am.

But in terms of pecking order, I'm so low down that I barely have a beak. They really earn their money when dealing with insane requests from senior types of a certain age who tend to: not understand technology; not want to understand technology; lose things like Blackberries easily and often; and consider delay of any kind for any reason completely intolerable.

At my last company I asked the IT manager what the most idiotic problem he'd been faced with was. He told me that he took a call from an extremely important and short-tempered person in an absolute fury - his mouse had stopped working overnight. "It's a disgrace, I've got an extremely ugent blah that needs to be done in an hour, get your useless arse over here this instant" and so on.

So the IT chap went over to the empurpled exec's desk in the open plan office to find him furiously tapping and rolling an apparently dead mouse. This was because he'd grabbed the mouse that was connected to the vacant computer next to his. To diagnose this would have publically shamed the exec in the eyes of all those in the vicinity - not likely to improve the career prospects of a young computer specialist. So what did this noble fellow do? He apologised profusely, announced that the central circuitry of the mouse had suffered a fatal combustion, and advised that the exec get a coffee while he found a replacement. When the coast was clear he put the 'dead' mouse back on its original mat and retrieved the correct one from underneath a pile of papers. The exec completed his dull whatever in time and with his public standing unblemished.

IT folk - you are the best of us. Keep up the good work. And ohmygod ohmygod the printer's out of magenta toner and I've got to get this presentation printed by PLEASE HELP ME YOU'VE GO TO HELP ME!

Wuzza wuzza

Instinctively I feel that the imminent closure of BBC 6 Music is a Bad Thing, although as I never listen to anything on it other than the magnificent Adam & Joe Show, which is on sabbatical anyway, it's hard for me to make a compelling case.  They keep poor old crack-addled Craig Charles off the streets but that's about all I can say.  So I'll link instead to this protest song by Adam Buxton, which I fear relies a bit too much on the Adam & Joe "wuzza wuzza" Bowie impression in-joke to truly become the Free Nelson Mandela of its age.

The grief-driven news cycle

Having covered Newsnight recently I avoided writing about the recent Jon Venables-themed Question Time discussion.  There's only so much bragging about watching high-brow TV (albeit while covered in breadcrumbs and flicking through insane Red Dwarf tributes on You Tube) that one blog can sustain.  If I had, I would have mentioned the contrast between Will Self's humane common sense and the soon-to-be Baroness Vorderman's shrill tub-thumping.  As Self twittered shortly afterwards, "I'll have an F and a U please, Carol".

David Mitchell is very good in the Observer today on the public fascination with Venables' crime and the citation of it in any wider debate:

The Venables case is so horrifying, unusual and unrepresentative, such an outlier on the graph, that making it the focus of a discussion about how convicted criminals should be treated not only perilously weights the debate against clemency but is logically absurd.  You may as well cite Adolf Hitler as a reason for not encouraging children to paint.

I concur.  I also think it is alarming that the grief-scrambled pronouncements of Denise Bulger are being treated by the mainstream media (current BBC headline - "James Bulger's mother calls for commissioner's sacking") as proposals worthy of ministerial debate.  As the person whose life has been most forcefully and permanently ruined by James (never Jamie - that was a newspaper invention, as if his victimhood needed any more emphasis) Bulger's death, she is also the least qualified person in the country to have a say in the handling of his killers within a legal system built on impartiality.  Yet whenever the case seeps back into the headlines she is rushed onto breakfast TV to rail against her son's killers, which is then reported as if it should have bearing on judicial process.  Surely it is the greatest kind of cruelty to repeatedly give her such a platform, and so the expectation that her wishes will be carried out, when they can not and should not be?

Anyway, I doubt this sort of thing is what you're here for. Somehow this blog has found its way onto a site called Bloggapedia, where it is disdainfully described as covering "a range of fascinating and essential subjects such as [my] domestic cleaning habits, proudly obscure musical tastes and endless British social hang-ups".  I supposed that's fair enough.  Expect posts in the coming weeks on my dysfunctional relationship with Windolene, the underappreciated genius of Baader Meinhoff and why I find the whole nod/smile/avoid eye contact dynamic tricky when walking towards someone you know down a long stretch of office corridor.

Oh, and the Kennington Park laboratory experiment made an unwelcome return on Friday morning.  I intend to invest in some bolt cutters.