#12

After my last post, during the later part of the week, people at work have been recounting the personal horrors of 'redundancy Monday'. A few people have told me about the intense frantic experience of opening and reading their potential redundancy letter -- a few seconds that seemed like an age from what they were saying, they told me how after opening the letter (some people with visibly shaking hands) they tried to rapidly scan the letter looking for phrases like 'we regret' or 'we are pleased to inform you', etc. but apparently there wasn't any common phrase that you could latch onto ... if you were not getting made redundant then within the text of the letter there was the word 'not' in bold print, and their eyes zipped straight to that and they immediately assumed the worst: that 'not' meant that they were not going to be working there any more, whereas infact it meant they were not being made redundant... so they had to endure a few more seconds of agonizing reading before they got the correct good news message. Some people around the office were crying, and some not so lucky were slamming things down on desks and storming about the office shouting. Not fun.

If you managed to forget about these personal horrors taking place earlier in the week there were always small tell-tail signs to remind you: like the comparative hush of the reduced workforce, and the pints of milk accumulating in the fridge due to less cups of tea and coffee being made.



Well, back to trivia. Channel 4 are launching a new Channel 4 '+1' channel. Hmm. I've had experience using '+1' channels before (channels that show the same stuff as the main channel but one hour later) -- normally what happens when I forget, for what ever reason, to switch-on my favorite programme, I remember some time later and switch-on just in time to see the end credits roll-up the screen. Disaster! I've missed the last episode of the series or whatever.... damn! -- I'm all disappointed, and regretful about how stupid I've been to forget it... I mope around for a while, and then do something else.... ah, but then it dawns on me that this channel, that my favorite show was on, has a '+1' channel! Fantastic, I think! Excellent! I rush back to the TV switch it on and flick through the channels until I find the +1 channel... just in time to see the exact same end credits of my favorite program scroll past, again!-- you see it takes me pretty much exactly an hour to remember that there is a +1 channel! So up until now +1 channels have not been any good to me. That is just one example of my brain being out of sync with the world of average folk. Actually, not just out of sync but completely in the opposite phase. Other examples that I can think of, off hand, are the way when I phone someone I take so long to key-in a phone number that I often get that 'number unobtainable tone' before I've finished dialing ... also with phones, but also with fax machines, photocopiers and all sorts of things, when you key-in codes or navigate though a menu there is often an 'inactivity timer' -- i.e. the machine waits for a certain amount of time and if you have not pressed a key in that time is assumes that you have bogged-off and gone to make a cup of tea or whatever and resets itself back to the starting point again... this is infuriating for me because I bloody well haven't gone to make a cup of tea, I'm bloody-well still standing there keying-in stuff but just very slo-o-o-ly. Some of you may be surprised that there are these 'inactivity timers' having never even encountered them yourselves. Over the years I have developed methods to get round them though, for example if I'm navigating through a menu on some kind of 'intelligent' multi function do-it-all photocopier, or some similarly ghastly device, I will constantly flick between two options, back and forth, while I think of where to go next, so that the machine knows I'm still standing there and not gone to make some tea. When using ms windows xp computers, occasionally when pressing the shift key, evidently for too long, I get a dialog box come-up which essentially asks me if I am disabled....well I guess, essentially then, I probably am. Well every cloud hath a silver lining I suppose, and this silver lining is that at least in the computer software I write, I make much more generous 'inactivity timers' (or employ some entirely different strategy)... also I have found when I, or a friend, are developing a video game I make a very useful play-testing benchmark where I represent the slowest, dullest, player that is likely to buy the game -- so basically if I can play the game and progress, all-be it very slowly, and enjoy it, then all my fellow lamos will too hopefully. Lowest common denominator -- that me. But what surprises me is how I can be out of phase with other people over much larger time scales... for example hobbies -- I'll just be getting-into a hobby or the latest fad, just when my friends are just starting to get bored with it. Perhaps it is because I consider things too much.


Also my hat size is: 8 1/2.