Amsterdam

A weird conversation in the charmingly tatty Smokey’s Coffee Shop on Rembrandtplein:
Me: A coffee – espresso – please.
Barman [puzzled but cunning look]:
How special do you want your coffee?
Me [puzzled but even more cunning look]:
How special can you make it?

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy …

It's snowing still," said Eeyore gloomily.
"So it is."
"And freezing."
"Is it?" "
"Yes," said Eeyore. "However," he said, brightening up a little, "we haven't had an earthquake lately.”

If you wish to preserve any joy in life or any semblance of sanity, never even so much as contemplate helping Athenians with their Macs. I am still recovering from a session last night with my good friend, Yiannis, a man of such implacable moroseness of soul as to drive any would-be Zorba from dancing on the beach to the top of the nearest cliff. The session should have taken no more than 10 minutes as it merely involved adding a printer to my friend’s network; in the event, it seemed to drag on longer than any Greek tragedy.

The evening began with an utterly redundant pre-installation discussion, full of chain smoking, dark prognostications and obscure Hellenic obscenities. Macintosh engineers, it seems, are much given to self-abuse, which is doubtless the result of their dubious parentage. I suspect that the real cause of this bitterness is that one had the temerity to bill my friend for £400 for a visit (remarkably cheap, in my opinion if he had to experience an nth degree of what I went through).

I should have insisted that I be left alone with the machines; instead, not being at all familiar with the Macintosh operating system, I foolishly thought Yiannis might be of some use in finding things like the printers folder. However, as an especially god-cursed Greek, he appears incapable of accepting - far less following - simple instructions. For instance, when asked to print a document, he spent a good quarter of an hour expounding on a) why it probably wouldn’t work and the pointlessness of even trying and on b) his ‘little idea’ about what to do with a spare ethernet wire. Needless to say, after I finally lost patience and gave him a few little suggestions of my own as to what to do with the bloody wire, the document printed perfectly. This made him even gloomier and there was another protracted discussion session before I was allowed to try printing from the other machine. Of course, this worked too.

Instead of expressing any gratitude or the slightest hint of pleasure at my success or – as he would doubtless put it – my failure to fail, Yiannis's despair reached new depths, becoming almost palpable. I left him sitting in a dark despondent miasma examining the printouts for imperfections with the morbid intensity of a forensic scientist; the scene strangely evocative of that in the Oresteia where, to the accompaniment of Agamemnon’s dying screams, Cassandra contemplates her own imminent and exceedingly gruesome murder at the hands of the psychotically vengeful Clytemnestra.

Should any theatre director ever decide to put on an adaptation of Winnie the Pooh in the mode of Aeschylus or of Sophocles’ Oedipus Cycle, I know exactly who should be cast as Eeyore.

Life - A Health Warning

Torbay Council officials said in a letter to Torbay's Chamber of Trade that the trees had sharp leaves which could injure people's eyes or faces.
But the council has denied it was "going health and safety mad"… (BBC Report)

Here is yet more evidence of ‘health and safety’ timidity. Having discovered the potentially lethal dangers posed by palm tree leaves, Torbay council is not even contemplating an outright ban. Nor is it is prepared to face up to the other life-threatening hazards facing unsuspecting visitors to the resort.

First, despite the clear danger of slip-related injuries or of self-induced hypothermia, there are no health notices on ice cream cones. Nor is the ice cream ‘user’ provided with a complete list of its constituents upon purchase. Just as food purveyors are obliged to provide the information that ham sandwiches may contain meat traces, so vanilla ice cream should have a label attached with the advice that it may be unsuitable for people with allergies to vanilla.

Second, there has been absolutely no attempt to address the problem of the large quantities of sand that surround the resort. Moves should be made to immediately set up ‘sand in the eye’ treatment centres on all beaches together with medical personnel trained in the treatment of psychological traumas induced by getting sand in swimsuits. The long term goal should, of course, be the removal of the substance from the beaches. An alternative might be to cover the beaches with a protective layer of concrete or with industrial-grade latex.

As a short-term measure, beach users should be issued with, and required to wear bio-hazard suits. They should also be obliged to sign disclaimers explicitly stating that Torbay Council will not be held liable for sand- or splash-induced injuries.

Finally, signs should be set up on all beaches warning users that if they go in the sea they may die. These signs should be at least 50 feet high and should feature graphic depictions of drowned corpses, bloated body parts and shark-induced injuries.

If Torbay Council shows the courage of its convictions, the resort will be transformed into a healthier, safer and far emptier place.

Post hoc, ergo prompter hoc

After you set up our database, the cat got sick and the fridge stopped working

The above might be a slight exaggeration, but the level of rationality is about the same as that shown in the typical support calls I receive. For example, I came home on Friday after a long, hot day on the road to find an urgent message. It seems that there has been a sudden change on a system which means that whenever they open a database, Word files on a different machine inexplicably vanish. Despite my attempts at an explanation, the poor customer simply couldn’t grasp the fact that there was no possible connection between the system and the missing files.

Another case was a lady who insisted that a programme I had written had adversely affected the volume of her telephone calls. “All I can say is that since you installed that thing, I can’t hear a word anyone says,” she grumbled. This was all the more bizarre because the computer in question was not even connected to the phone line. Fortunately, I was able to avoid a visit by demanding that she had an engineer inspect the plumbing first to see if that had been affected too.