Leaving aside for now the question of why anyone would be influenced in their choice of vehicle purchase by something they’d heard on the radio – essentially as valid as overhearing someone talking about how good their car is in the pub, only instead of people who genuinely held that opinion you’re listening to people who are being paid to make specific claims – the bit that slapped me in the face as if to indicate the ludicrousness of the situation was the nature of the claim made rapidly at the end by The Voice.

The Voice is the thing customarily heard at the end of any commercial which makes a claim about a product.  It’s usually someone speaking incredibly fast listing all of the caveats and reasons why what you’ve just heard may sound better than it actually is.  When my parents talk about having been “fast talked”, I immediately think of The Voice.  I guess the idea is that they gloss over the potential pitfalls of taking the prior claims at face value so quickly that you’re not supposed to hear what they are, and the only reason they’re doing this is because the advertisers are legally required to make some mention of the fact that the claims they’ve made in the advertisement may not be strictly what you might interpret them as.  Words read out by The Voice sound as if they’re being spoken in 4-point italic greyed out font. Fans of The Simpsons would immediately be able to give examples of The Voice such as “Cheques-will-not-be-honoured” or “Real-institute-may-not-match-photo”.

In this particular case The Voice rattled out, like a road train thundering past over a cattle grid:

Maintenancecostreductionachievedbyenlargingserviceinterval.

As I said: I’m pretty good at deciphering this sort of thing, because I immediately instinctively pay more attention when my bullshit radar switches on, so I’ll translate it into how a normal person would read it:

Maintenance cost reduction achieved by enlarging service interval.

So there you have it folks – you can save money on the maintenance cost of your vehicle by buying this new vehicle, and then having it serviced less often.  If the tedious pricks in charge of this advertising initiative ever turned their deft hand to selling orange juice then they’d probably be extolling the virtues of their amazing New Improved Juice Pack, which lasts TWICE as long as other cartons of juice (longevity-time-of-carton-achieved-by-drinking-one -80-millilitre-serving-once-a-month).  Perhaps we could all enjoy eternal youth next by only celebrating every fourth birthday.

It partially reminded me of the shampoo that my mother used to buy when we were young – it was one of those Amway products, and almost every shower-time was accompanied by the mantra “Only use a little bit – it’s very concentrated, so you’ve only got to use a little bit!”.  What I think was actually going on was that it was just extremely expensive, hence using less of it – whilst not assisting much in the hair-cleaning department – meant that a bottle would last longer.  And it’s only just occurred to me that this may have been a contributing factor in why it was that my brother and I sported buzzcuts for the majority of our pre-teen lives.

I can’t help wondering whether I’ve fallen for whatever ploy this advertisement’s trying to make, however – it seems a bit silly, on the face of it, for a person to make a decision to buy a new van based on a radio ad: probably the furthest form of advertising from the experience of van selection possible.  You can’t see pictures of it, nor gather any useful statistics about the vehicle’s specifications.  You could be listening to the ad whilst in another van, I guess, and sit there wondering about how much nicer the new van is relative to the van you’re currently in.  However surely by making me write this post, and therefore by extension be discussing the brand and the product, I’m now getting the name in front of all of you (yes, you, the millions of people reading this).

Well, to conclude abruptly – I don’t know anything specific about Volkswagen Transporters, but it’s my firm opinion that the people they’ve hired to advertise them are wankers.

The prosecution rests.

For extra added bonus points, there’s also the option of checking the forecast on the BBC website.  Chances are, if you’re not in Australia any more then it might look something like this:

The other fun thing about snow is that it’s one of those ninja weather conditions.  Whereas with rain, you know that it’s going on out there cos you can hear it – snow can merrily drop out of the sky for hours, and if you don’t cast a glance out the window you can be quite startled by the fact that you’re surrounded by it when you open the front door.

More accurately, interchange the word “you” with the word “I” or “my”, or relevant equivalent, in the previous sections of text – essentially I didn’t want to just seem like I was writing about myself again.  But I am/was.

So there’s no chance of hearing in detail about our Friday night festive awesomeness at The Gunmakers (including Jeffrey & I sampling the HIGHLY excellent Ten 20 Commemorative Ale as supplied by Mr P D Baggoley), nor the unexpected bus stop meeting of the mystery beer-carrying girl with the taxidermy duck in one hand.  There also won’t be time to wax enthusiastic about Sue & Ben’s magnificent Christmas Stomach Distension (by effect of Turkey & Aubergine) Event, nor the journey down to Deepest Morden for Gypsy Jazz – whereupon we couldn’t fit our merry motley crew into the pub, and so sought out alternate premises and stumbled on the cosy environs of The Sultan.  And then naturally there’s only time for the barest mention of an epic and masterful roast lunch (with beery accompaniments) at The Old White Lion in the company of Mr D Haste, Ms B Knott, and Mr P Dearing.  I scarcely dare finish with a light brushing over the topic of the magnificent Lamb Shank Extravaganza at Neonwombat & HC’s Maida Vale Palace.

Makes sense why I haven’t bloody packed yet, eh?

But of particularly joyful interest is the wonder of modern technology that is online checkin.  Following a recent temporally unrewarding experience in New York (more on this at some point), I’m now a bit obsessed with the idea of checking in to my flight online, however this particular airline – despite bold claims that online checkin opens 24 hours before departure time – seems to be non-cooperative.

Phoning their Customer Service Team (presumably in Abu Dhabi they mean this in a similarly agricultural context as we do here in Britain) I was told that “checkin for this flight opens 20 hours before departure”, or to put it another way, “Fuck off out of my face – I knock off in 3 hours, so ring back when some other poor schmuck has to deal with it”.

Tenaciously as you’d expect, I phoned them back a few hours later to see if any progress had been made – they said “We’ve had some problems and our website is down”, (although clearly it isn’t, because it’s displaying erroneous error messages – that’s not “down”, that’s just “useless*”), “Please try again after 6:30pm: the web team will fix it by then”.  Cynically, my cruft-translator understood that as “Please don’t phone until everyone else on this flight gets home and starts calling us, meaning that there’s no chance you’ll get a line through to us until at least 8:30pm, which is a shame as we close at 8pm”.

Oooooh boy, if I get bumped from this flight I will not be an amused tent inhabitant.

* This is technical web jargon, yes.

Several days later, you log on to your internet bank and go to make a bill payment.  Your bank has recently sent out a security keypad thing, where you stick your card in the top, type in your PIN, then enter some numbers from the internet banking screen, and finally when the little pad thing shows you some other digits, you type them into the internet banking screen.  This makes the payment happily happen, and we can all assume that we’re all who we say we are and life’s lovely.

Only today for some reason the number confirmationny thing failed.  It’s a bit weird, but not inconceivable that I might’ve mashed one of the wrong buttons… so I try again.  Bzzt.  One more. “Sorry, but your account has now been locked and you have been deregistered from internet banking”.  Hmm.

Phone customer services – dial, dial, dial, hold, hold, hold, explain, explain, explain…  they unlock the account again, and then say before internet banking can be used the card has to be unlocked as well using certain types of ATM.  Convenient.  I briefly floated the suggestion that the card reader might be pooched, but this is apparently so unlikely it’s not worth pursuing.  Anyway, the ATM thing happens, and now we can get on with the business of making that pesky payment.

Type, type, type, ENTER.  Code incorrect.

Type, type, type, ENTER.  Code incorrect.

Having played this game before, I go straight back to dial, dial, dial, hold, hold, hold, and am then afforded a rare but satisfying opportunity to speak with a customer service representative.  After some head scratching and patronising advice, the lady looks on the system and says “Oh, it says here you’ve had a new card issued.  That means the old one won’t be valid for internet banking confirmation any more”.  New card was news to me… “Yeah, a new card’s automatically issued when you upgrade your account”.  Seemed strange that was never mentioned to me… “Oh no, they probably won’t know that.”  But they knew I was getting a new card, right? “No, probably not”.

Rewarding, isn’t it?

It’s one of those ones which you connect a ducting hose to in order to expel the hot air through a window or similar.

Imagine our surprise when we went to fit the supplied hose to the vent on the back of the cooling unit.

Interface FAIL

Lets face it – it’s not worth doing anything if you’re not prepared to make a half-arsed dog’s breakfast of it.  How this country ever built the Empire is still a mystery to me.

I suggested a jury-rigging solution involving prodigious amounts of duct tape and cardboard, but apparently that’s not the way things are done around here.

He reported that today he swung the front door open to go out, and standing there on the mat looking startled was our postman, part-way through filling out a red card.

James glared at him (or at least carried out as close to a glare as he’s capable of) and challenged him with, “I didn’t hear you knock?”.

The postman replied timidly, “Ah.  I may have gotten ahead of myself in this case”.

Good work James – hunch demonstrably proven.

I asked him if he’d given the postman a verbal dressing-down about this, and James said that he didn’t want to give him too much of a hard time, because the guy seemed a bit on the shy side.  There’s a song in that somewhere I think – the postman who wouldn’t knock, because he found it difficult talking to strangers.

After several days of failed attempts to psyche myself up to ask Mystery Sandwich Girl out for a drink, I decided that today was going to be the day, dammit.  A real “GO BACK IN THERE, ARTHUR PEWTEY” moment.  All week something’s been not quite right, like there was a big queue of people standing behind me, or the other sandwich shop lady was standing there next to her.  Today it was not going to happen.  I had a plan.  Not quite on par with The Italian Job, but still involving a good deal more thought than I put into most things.

It was all set – I wandered in at 2:30, after the rush hour.  I was starving.  I ordered my sandwich & espresso from her at the counter, and in a break from routine I went over & sat down at one of the tables.  Perfect – she would come over, and as she dropped the chicken, spinach & bacon bap off I’d smile and say, “Hi, what time do you finish work?  I’d really like to take you out for a drink”.

In my peripheral vision I could see her getting everything together.  Here we go…  Oh bollocks, what’s that?

My phone starts ringing.

I answer the phone, and it’s a guy making enquiries about booking our morris dancing team.  I try to answer his questions as quickly as possible without being abrupt or rude, but as we’re still at about conversational midpoint, Mystery Sandwich Girl appears at my right shoulder with a big smile, a sandwich, and an espresso, which she places on the table along with some serviettes, and then disappears.

Backup plan swings into action.

Having anticipated FAIL on phase 1, I had taken the precaution of ensuring I had a reason to stay at my table – a 60 page printout of tech articles to study intently and take notes all over.  Foolproof – I’d sit there with an obviously empty plate, and she’d come over to collect it, at which point the asking out could take place.

Almost an entire frigging hour I sat there nonchelantly studying this damn printout, and only then did a head & shoulders appear from behind me – it was the other coffee lady.  Mystery Sandwich Girl had disappeared!

Knackers.

Appealing, isn't it? You want to press it... but you don't need to.

I know what this is for. Admittedly, it’s not quite what everybody thinks it’s for. However I refuse to believe that the situation is shrouded in so much mystery that people can misinterpret what is going on.

Yes, it’s a button (and it’s found inside carriages on the London Underground, handily adjacent to the doors), and as long as you don’t put up an “improper use” notice people will happily push buttons just for the sheer joy of it (as previously reported, this is known as “frobnicating”).  Some people seem to think that the more often you push a button, the more chance you’ve got of achieving your outcome (for example at lifts, and pedestrian crossings).

Maybe it’s just intolerance on my part – on the Paris Metro the doors are individually controlled.  It’s not so much the button pushing that gets to me – it’s the impatient repeated stabbing before the train’s stopped moving.  If the button really *did* work, would these people really want the doors to fly open whilst we’re still hurtling along?

The correct answer, by the way, is that the doors operate in 2 modes (individual, or driver-controlled), and by and large the default is the latter.  The only time in 5 years I’ve ever seen it switched over is when it’s hissing down with rain and the platform is one of the above-ground sections which doesn’t have shelter, as there’s no point in pelting all of the passengers with weather if there’s nobody wanting to get on the thing.  Of course this mode only comes into play if the driver’s not a total cock.

Nope, no humorous observations here as it turns out.  Just old fashioned straight out whinging.

For some reason, however (I suspect it was because I was entering a competition) I get The London Paper’s daily midday emailout.  Advantages of this over any other means of transmission are that I can easily dispose of it without having to worry about wasting paper, and as it arrives in precis form it’s easy to skim the handful of banal stories without having to immerse my brain in the childish tedium of it.  I should know better than to read their daily email even, because I already know that it’s going to wind me up into a state of fury before even clicking on the links.  Here’s my list of reasons why:

1. The hyperlinks in their email don’t always work. Quite often I’ll CTRL-click a bunch of links in Firefox to get the pages all open in new tabs then CTRL-tab my way along reading them, but The London Paper’s links quite often just either fail with a gray screen, or take me to the section heading which that story was from, meaning I’ve got to scan their selection of crap again to find out what it was I was supposedly interested in reading about.
2. The mentality of their commenting system. I still can’t figure it out, really – stories generally have an “add your comments” box down the bottom.  It’s not framed quite in the same way as the one on The Sun’s website (heading level font screaming “HAVE YOUR SAY”, as if the opinions of Sun readers would be worth hearing), however every now and again where the editor wants to elicit public outrage (one assumes) the story ends with bold text challenging things like “Do you think it’s a good idea to get rid of check-in? Would you prefer to carry your bags to the plane? Let us know what you think … “.  I can’t be bothered digging up any more example of that.  Equally frutratingly regarding comments though is that there doesn’t appear to be any obvious way of reading what the people have said.
3. The quality and tone of stories. OK, it’s not meant to be The Times, The Independant or The Guardian, but I guess I’d optimistically expect the thing to contain something approaching factual news reports.  Whilst they eschew the word “news” from the title, an example of the sort of thing published in their “news” section is today’s selection of articles:
   • Robbie Williams quizzed by armed robbery cops - probably more one for the Celebrity News category I’d have though?
   • Swarm of bees closes road in Kensington – this is probably news, but if I were in charge it wouldn’t be in the first 3 stories listed.
   • London detective to be sentenced over sex offence – probably news, I guess.
   • Web rental scams are ‘on the rise’ – possibly news, although not 100% sure, as they’ve quote-marked “on the rise”, meaning that it probably can’t be quantified or substantiated.  Still, something to look out for.
   • Return of the mix as Woolworths makes online comeback – yeah, that’s news.
   • Jade’s legacy call snubbed – the story being that doctors have said that Jade Goody’s advice to girls to get cervical cancer tests is in fact medically unsound.  Not exactly topical, and not surprising that Jade was dishing out advice without being fully conversant with the fact.
   • London is the cocaine capital of Europe – could be news, although the statistics mentioned in the story were ropey enough to make the reader wonder if it all hadn’t just been made up.
   • Panic at the Beeb after newsgirl gets swine flu – looks like the “panic” part was subjective headline tweaking, but ultimately it’s close to being news.
   • Wonderbra launch revolutionary bra – seems a thinly veiled excuse to get more pictures of boobs on the website.
4. The casual shoehorning of nudity into as many stories as possible.  Now I’m completely glad that the UK isn’t as prudish as the USA (refer to the Janet Jackson “wardrobe malfunction” if you’re windering what I mean there), however I’m constantly bemused that The London Paper bothers to try to pass itself off as a news source when it seems more intent on ensuring that office workers have their daily helping of boobs to ogle, or a story involving sex in some lurid way.  TLP seems to have also appointed itself some sort of publicnipple watchdog, because it’s building up quite an extensive catalog of pictures of female celebrities who have either had the occasional garment slippage issue, a see-through garment issue, or if it’s a particularly slow news day, a lack-of-support-garment issue.
   • Wonderbra launch revolutionary bra (today)
   • Jennifer Lopez ‘pops out’ for dinner (today)
   • Katy Perry gobbles pizza naked in the bath (today)
   • Women go topless to campaign against Pamplona bull run (yesterday)
   • London’s best life-drawing classes (Tuesday)
   • Corpses having sex go on show at the O2 (Tuesday)
   • Wimbledon babes 2009: A gallery of the finest tennis talent (Monday)
   • Meanwhile Lily Allen has embarrasing nip-slip at charity bash (Friday)
   • Lily Cole and Daisy Lowe go topless for new Pirelli calendar (Friday)
   • Eva Mendes poses in the nude for Calvin Klein (Thursday)
   • Katie Price returns to her old ways (Thursday)
   • Peaches’ boob at Bungalow 8 (Thursday)
5. They put in reactionary stories which I fall for.  I absolutely hate being emotionally manipulated by news stories, because that’s exactly what they’re going for by use of tone and texture.  Occasionally though TLP gets me to swallow the bait, like with today’s startler: Wimbledon church sorry for letting tennis fans park on graves.  The appropriately enraging paragraphs were:
   “The vicar of St Mary’s is sorry for any offence that has been caused.”Yesterday the Rev Mary Bide reportedly admitted the graveyard parking looked “odd” but claimed the cars were stationed only in the oldest part of the graveyard which contained remains from the 18th and 19th centuries, whose descendants could not be traced.

To me what those actually say isn’t “Wimbledon church sorry”, so much as “Wimbledon church embarrassed that they got busted, but otherwise they couldn’t actually give a toss so long as they’re making a few quid out of it”.

6. The main thing prompting my tirade: Bloody ridiculous reporting. TLP published the following headline, in what can only be described as a visible and desperate scramble for a story: Britney gets a McDonald’s burger in Neasden.  But equally infuriatingly, today they had this important & newsworthy piece regarding Harry Potter actress Emma Watson, whose career they seem to be following particuarly closely at the moment (one can only assume that, based on their usual journalistic focus, they’re angling to get a “nip-slip” photo of her too – having waited for years for her to be old enough for them to be able to publish such things).  The story was regarding Watson’s rumoured enrolment at an American university, and featured the paragraph:
   The Harry Potter star, 19, is apparently going to the prestigious Columbia University in New York. But in order to maintain her anonymity she is going to enrol under the name Charlotte E Watson, as opposed to her full name, Emma Charlotte Duerre Watson.

   Well there we go, that’s that secret safe.  And England’s capital is all the more educated for having been told that.  For some reason it reminds me of the infamous 1991 Gulf War amphibious landing, where US troops came ashorewith only the lights from a hundred or so media crews to light their way**.

Bloody hell, and now I’ve written 1200 words on whinging about a newspaper I don’t even read.  Really should have put one and a fifth pictures in there instead, eh?

** Edit : Thanks to Anglico for the correction (see comment below).  I’d remembered it as being Gulf War, but then at the age of 14 or 15 I don’t suppose the intricacies of military activity on the other side of the world were foremost among my interests.  But thankyou very much for that!

It’s impossible to tell whether there’s been a fire drill, or if people have just bunked off early for a pint.

Good job I’m still beavering away in the office in a dedicated way. At blogging, I guess.