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.

The ghost of Mary Whitehouse

If you didn't see last night's Newsnight discussion on the Gordon Brown bullying uproar, watch it on iPlayer immediately.  It was brilliant TV.  Paxman mediated, and stoked vigorously, a rumble between Andrew Rawnsley (the Observer journo who broke the story), Roy Hattersley (indignantly spraying like a tomcat), David Steel and a Times hack while John Prescott's disembodied blubbery head floated above them all, bellowing incoherently via videolink.

It was a strange discussion - a group of political and media professionals attacking a journalist for not being willing to reveal his confidential sources.  You would have thought the "off the record" concept would be one with which they would be intimately familiar, but apparently not.  Prescott worked himself up into a particuarly petulant tizzy, howling like a wounded bison at one point when he though Rawnsley was being given too much airtime.

There was also a very odd example of the BBC's namby-pamby terror of causing any offence to anyone.  Paxman read out an extract of our poor doomed PM's alleged ravings that included a Bad Word.  I didn't really notice at the time, because I'm an adult who interacts with other adults in the year 2010.  Like literally 100% of the Newsnight audience.  But a few minutes later, under orders from an earpiece minion, Paxo apologised for his dreadful lapse, his big horse face clearly registering his disgust at having to do so.

It was a full 2 hours after the watershed and the Bad Word was important context as part of the discussion.  Any youngsters inexplicably watching would have been more traumatised by the scary melty-faced man on the video screen and his terrible grammar than sweary old Paxman.  A brainless concession that patronised rather than respected the audience.  Harrumph!

Yours,
Disgusted of Oval

Famous wankers

I've been enjoying this Word website discussion on famous people who are abject tools in real life:

/www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/famous-people-you-have-met-who-are-wankers

Being a generally good natured forum it also includes plenty on very nice celebs (for example: "Michael Caine was nice as pie when my son (then 3) wee'd on his shoes in Harrods.  MC said "never mind son" in his very best Alfie voice and wiped his expensive loafers down with some toilet roll"). 

Worth a read if you're bored - given that you're reading this blog you must almost be at the sewing-name-tags-into-your-socks stage already.  A few choice samples:

• I witnessed Jeremy Clarkson reduce a pretty young sales girl to tears when she could not supply him with what he was asking for immediately.  It was awful.  It wasn't so much what he said, but the way he said it. His face contorted in that horrid, condescending, smug little snarl he has.
  
• My colleague Jane was responsible for two Morrissey album campaigns - marketing, promo etc.  She was a lifelong fan, but remained professional and scrupulous about every aspect of the campaign, accompanying him to interviews, attending to his every need - of which there were very many.
  
  Moz appeared on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, his first TV interview for years and years.  This was A Big Deal.  Ross interviews each guest for a good 45 minutes or so, which is then cut down to bitesize for broadcast.  For 35 of his alloted 45, Morrissey, bizarrely, laid in to David Bowie, denouncing him as a fake, a sell-out, a has-been, a charlatan.  This saw to discomfit Ross, he being a lifelong Bowie obsessive.  Indeed, it appeared to be a tactic or strategy on Morrissey's part, for God knows why.  The remaining 10 minutes were full of nothing very much but uncomfortable pauses, ums and ahs.  The resulting broadcast interview, culled solely from those 10 minutes, was an embarrassing disaster.
  
  Returning to the green room, Jane sought to reassure the clearly disturbed Morrissey, offering Don't worries and It'll be fines, etc.
  
  Next morning at the office, Jane received a fax from Morrissey (he communicated mostly via fax) 'Jane, I bombed last night and you weren't man enough to tell me.  I think it would be best if we don't see each other again.'  To say Jane was upset would be something of an understatement.  Nice bloke.
• At a cricket match in Weston Supermare a young boy spots John Cleese sitting in a deck chair enjoying the day's sport apparently unrecognised by those around him.  The boy approaches and asks for an autograph. JC leans in close and whispers "What happens next is not your fault".  JC then stands up and gives the boy two minutes of the full Basil Fawlty righteous indignation and furious anger.  Arm waving, who do you think you are, I only came to watch the cricket in peace, the full package.  Those around watch in stunned silence at this appalling behaviour.  When he had finished JC leant in close to the boy again and whispered "Thanks, no-one will bother me for the rest of the match now", signed the autograph and returned to his seat.

Literary corner

This article on the Guardian website reminded me about one of my favourite books - The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis.  Well worth a read.  The article deals with the plot and so on but suffice to say it's a weird combination of brilliantly funny and horribly sad.

I tend to apply a famine or feast approach to authors, so I haven't read much Kingsley in recent years following a period of a major obsession.  This madness peaked with the purchase of his collected letters, all 1212 pages of them. They sit on my bookcase as the literary equivalent of ordering an enormous cake when you're not even hungry. Selected randomly, I give you the following indispensible classic from 27 May 1964:

Dear Miss Barber

I hereby resign from the Society of Authors.  I was just about prepared to go on paying £2-12-6 a year to an organisation that does nothing for me, but when the price goes up to £5-5-0 I jib.

Yours sincerely etc

I would put it in the bog but I'm not sure how much the missus wants to sprain her wrists wrestling with a gigantic brick just to read racist letters to Philip Larkin.

The recent publicity around Martin son-of-Kingsley's latest pile of pretentious wank-fodder has also made me nostalgic.  One of the happiest days of my life was when I realised that no one was making me read London Fields and its endless turgid sentences, and that I could just stop and read something else instead.  The only Martin Amis worth reading is his autobiography Experience, and that's because it's mainly about Kingsley and Fred West (one of whose victims was Martin's cousin).  Just skip any reference to his teeth or Saul Bellow.

That's also where I got my favourite Fred West fact - that he used to munch onions like anyone else would eat an apple.

Buxton's back

The Adam & Joe 6 Music radio show went on sabbatical at the start of the year and life has been noticeably gloomier since. My spirits lifted a couple of weeks ago when I saw that half of the genius duo, Adam Buxton, was starring a new BBC2 comedy called The Persuasionists. My spirits then simultaneously crashed face-first into the floor when it turned out to be one of the lamest TV shows I have ever seen. A poverty-stricken man's IT Crowd, which isn't that good in the first place.

Being an empathetic sort I wondered how Adam would take the universal raspberries blowing out from every review of the show. I don't need to now as he's posted the brilliant video below on his site. It's career-tainting failure dealt with head-on.

Busy doing nothing

Feeling a bit gruesome. Yesterday a couple of chums and I took advantage of mass missus migration to drink too much beer in the afternoon, having told ourselves we'd earned it with a constitutional around Hampstead Heath. I was a bit concerned about the homosexual 80's pop stars who usually lurk in the bushes, occasionally bursting from the foliage and dragging handsome young men to their doom. Like great white sharks in leather trousers and dog skin caps. Luckily, they were scared off by a meeting of the Southern Counties Running Championship. I almost was too. Hundreds of fit young men and women in alarmingly tight lycra pounding all around me, mud-streaked thighs pumping away like pistons. Meanwhile, having dressed with the customary lack of forethought, I was picking my way through the mud in a pair of brown leather loafers with my jeans tucked into my socks. I was one slip away from a nose dive into the mud and an impromptu black and white minstrel impersonation.

Following these exertions we found a nice pub or two and drank a zillion beers. I came home and covered my kitchen in brown sauce, some of which I presume must have hit a bacon sandwich, fell asleep wearing earphones and almost garotted myself. Fine song though it is, I don't intend to die listening to Big Julie by Jarvis Cocker.

It's now getting on for 5 on Sunday. Time for a nap and then I will eat some cheese. Great weekend.

Cross-species love

Things have been quiet around here recently. I've been working quite hard in the week and drinking too much at the weekends, rendering me even more useless and lazy than usual. But I've been roused from my lethergy by the latest in one of the oddest advert series ever conceived - the bed company ones where a man hippo and a yellow woman duck share a bed and appear to be in a stable relationship.

There are so many problems with the basic concept. Mr Hippo wears pyjamas but Mrs Duck doesn't, the tart. It is never explained why they choose to sleep in a low-quality human bed - perhaps they had the old "I'd be far happier in a nest, darling"/"Shut it you slagbag, I'm sleeping in a big pile of mud and that's that" argument and this was the compromise. The logistics of what goes on after the light goes out (I imagine by the duck pulling the cord with her beak) are too alarming to analyse in detail but would surely be considered to be a bit strong by even the most open minded.

But something has changed in the latest installment. He's always been a lot larger than her, as you'd expect. Now, presumably after extensive market research into how much reality-bending the public can cope with in an onscreen cross-species bunk up, the size difference has been reduced - she seems to have grown in size to about goose proportions. Which is closer to the size of a hippo, but not that close.

So why make the change? One attack of flailing hippo night terrors will still obliterate her. It's still an unacceptably weird set up. But there will have been meetings, conference calls, pie and flip charts, advertising briefings and hundreds of man hours devoted to enlarging the duck. I guarantee that not one extra crappy bed has been sold as a result.

The early morning workings of the lady brain

The missus started a new job this week. I was broadly in favour until she dropped the bombshell that, for no apparent reason, her working day now begins at 8.30am. This means she is furthering her career at the expense of my quality of life.

In her old job she started at 9am, which as a long-standing and indulged member of staff she treated as a nominal estimate of the time she might, under exceptional circumstances, aim to be not too much later than. But now she's new and keen and the new regime is costing me about thirty minutes of sleep every morning. That's about 10 hours a month - this is serious stuff.

So the alarm now goes off at 6.30am. Once she is coaxed or, more often, driven out of bed by a sturdy shove to the lower back, she puts the kettle on and gets in the shower. If I haven't had to pull her out of bed by her feet I may fall back into a light sleep. This lasts until the kettle starts whistling. I stomp downstairs and take the kettle off the heat, bang on the bathroom door and issue her with a 4,879th final warning about sorting her bloody tea out without waking me up.

She breezes past to make the tea, perhaps with a derisive "Alright, Dad", and plonks herself in front of the TV. There she will sit, with a hairbrush in her hair as she clasps her mug of tea, and she will absorb herself in absolutely anything that is on BBC Breakfast. She will give the same attention to an update on the Manchester United defensive injury crisis as she will a feature on the decline of the Norfolk duck population. If the TV shows her an image of a child or any form of cute animal she will grin. If the TV shows her an image of either of these in any kind of sad context she may have a little cry. If an irate boyfriend pokes his head around the door she will feign, feebly, a hair-brushing motion or a peer into a make-up mirror.

Somehow, many hours later, she will have done her hair, make-up and got dressed. Then she will begin drifting from room to room in a listless hunt for the items she has scattered around the flat the night before. She will emerge from the spare room holding a sock, and trudge upstairs to get her glasses from the bedroom. Then into the bathroom for hairclips, the kitchen for shoes and living room for her phone. Then spare room for different shoes, back up to the bedroom for a second sock, the top of the stairs for a coat and the living room for a handbag. After a few more laps she'll reach the door and start rummaging through her handbag. She's got her purse, keys, phone, she's walking out of the d...."Oh shit! Where's my Oyster card?" Then back in the flat for a hunt through every pocket of everything she wore the day before, as the Oyster card sits ignored on the kitchen table.

This all adds up to why an early start time is such a disaster. I accept that boys, who only have to decide which of five pre-ironed shirts to wear, have it a little easier. I also accept that things like long hair and face paint are a factor. But the fundamental disorder of the lady brain is laid bare at times like this. Perhaps there's a morning routine efficiency class I could send her to?