I am not in a good mood. With this in mind, sitting at my computer is probably not the best thing to be doing, what with it being crap and all. There are also the reasons behind this griping, most of which are down to my own canon of deficiencies as a man. One small and non-contentious example is how just now as I was driving into my street, someone else came the other way in one of those big, silver fuck-you type Mercedes coupés. and we were both blocked. My reaction wasn't to give way gracefully or even wait a second or two for him to move, but to pull a sarcastic face at the other car. And scowl. I know this because when I did reverse, the guy stopped next to me, opened his window and said “I'd have moved, but you pulled a face at me, so I stayed put. Think about it”, and he was exactly right. Sorry, man in the Mercedes. It was more instinct than anything, and I didn't realise I'd done it, didn't really mean it and like I said, I am in a bad mood.
One of the other, non-my own stupid self drivers of my ill-cheer is Facebook. Not because it's in itself rubbish or anything like that. No, it's fine. The crisp blues and sans serif fonts work just as well as they have ever done. It's a whole house's worth of better than MySpace ever was, a site designed by the naïve for the brainless to make unusable for the normal. HTML is a dangerous thing in the wrong hands, and when nine-tenths of those hands are under 16, man are those some dangerous hands. Who among us has not at some point been stuck on an MS page as it loads 231 photographs of Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro and a sparkly background in hot pink, unable to move until its finished because for some reason the Stop button doesn't work? Yes, it's everyone. It was that (plus an even crapper computer than I have now) which drove me to Facebook in the first place.
So, nice interface aside, what is it about FB (as it's known to no-one apart from me) that is so riling me? Well, for a start, it's trouble. See, at work one of my jobs is to monitor the internet use logs. When I am not replacing spent print cartridges, fixing network points or repeatedly installing the printer in room 38A (six times so far and counting), I am watching the kids surf the net, basically. And our policy at the school is fairly liberal, certainly compared to many. We have Firefox for the IT nerds to play with, Notepad++ for the same nerds to write viruses for their A2 coursework on and finally MySpace, Bebo and Facebook etc for the media gang to integrate into their lessons on the digital age.
This is the theory. The only real flaw in that setup is 1500 teenagers. They are ingenious, inexhaustibly distracted and devious as snakes. Also their spelling is atrocious. But principally, it's the deviousness and distraction.
I mean, think about it. You are 15 and sat in a lesson on how to create a spreadsheet. This lesson is probably fairly boring to begin with. Mr. Teacher is droning on about cells, say, or tabs, or formulas. Your mind begins to wander. It's only natural that it does. I read somewhere that a teenager can only cope with two stimuli at once (bad news for a being with five senses to begin with) and has an attention span of, at best, ten minutes. If you are being boring, and Mr. Teacher is, cut that down to three.
But you are in an ICT lesson. There's a computer in front of you. Sure, the rules say that you are being monitored, but this is so boooring, and if old Teacher goes on much longer, you will most likely die, actually die, of boredom. The crushing weight of his droning voice and combover and gay looking goatee will kill you if you don't do something and fast. So maybe the answer is a little spin on Facebook. I mean, who's to know?
Me. I'm gonna know, because your computer is connected to mine, and I can see you. You, 06CunninghamL, room 18, station 15, looking at pictures of a party on MySpace since 11:34:19. Get back to work. At least, that's how it could work. In reality I don't have the time, or the job description, to do this. What I do is look through the log the next day, seeing who's typed the word fuck into Google. It records absolutely everything. And therein lies the trouble. It takes screengrabs of everything it's programmed to spot – meaning that we not only get the swearword in question but also everything else that's lurking nearby. And it does not discriminate between some harmless banter or the more private. So if you, for example, decide to candidly confess all about your boyf's stature in bed, or engage in a spot of text sex during a maths lesson, I will read about it, because you are going to use some fairly hefty trigger words. It also means I get lots of essays about either reproductive biology, demographics or Shakespeare.
I feel somewhat conflicted about this. On the one hand, I used to be a teacher, and there is nothing more irritating that someone not listening, or even worse, quite blatantly doing something else. I got very good at spotting the word Bebo in people's system trays, people who seemed to think that because I was over 18 I was unaware that you can keep one window behind another. Now, when I was 18 this was in fact largely true, what with Windows being still fairly novel in schools and the average teacher being something like a thousand years old. But now, it's old news. So for that, fuck 'em. Get back to work. But at the same time, for a lifelong socialist libertarian, actually being Big Brother is not a nice feeling. I am violating their privacy in some way, even though they really know full well that we can see what they're doing. And yet still they do it. I have seen arguments, confessions, heartbreak and a very detailed account of someone losing their virginity in a car. It's not a nice feeling, as I said.
And I am pretty sure it's trouble anyway, especially with the aforementioned 1500 teenagers glued to it from 8:45am to 3:15pm, five days a week. This is my second reason to dislike Facebook. It reminds me too much of internet dating.It's neurosis on a plate. See, I was not always the happy go lucky type I appear to be. It was a while ago, but I was once a customer of Match.com. I was single, miserable and vulnerable to the promise of a promise. I signed on the dotted line. What came of it was... nothing. What a surprise.
But one thing it did have was an email function. This was the main engine of the site - read some people's pages, decide who takes your fancy, write off to them and then away you go, on the winding sunlit road to the evergreen uplands of the Valley of Happiness. For this, read if you are a woman, get swamped by messages from forty-nine men a day who are all utterly, utterly not what you asked for and of you are a man, get nothing. Like I said, happiness. But what was most evil about it was the fact that you could see if the recipient had been online recently, and then if they'd read your message. This I don't like. Because if you are, like me, a trembling wreck of a man, you see that Whatsername has logged in, mooched about and updated her favourite films to include House of 1000 Corpses and Ishtar, but hasn't replied to my fucking email, has she?
This can, unless approached with a depth of maturity which frankly none of us have, lead to stress, ulcers and death. But anyway, look at Facebook. It's exactly the same, does just the same thing. So-and-so has logged in, updated their status and fucked off. Now, imagine that depth of information about your mates, what your mates are doing and precisely what they thing about you (and also remember just how little tact a 16 year old has), at your fingertips. And imagine just how slighted by something entirely normal it was possible to be at 16. It's the odine in the gaping shotgun wound of adolescence. No wonder all they do is argue and hug each other, the precocious, back-stabbing little monsters.
But no longer. Because it's been banned. Enough is enough, and the dark side of networking has led to the rest of it all going away. Bullying, sex, just frittering away of time, it's all led to me having to write a policy for the school to ban it all. They'll moan and complain, try and find ways around it (I've banned them, too) and probably vandalise stuff when they finally give up, but I think they're most likely better off out of it. I bet we get our share of hate mail this week, though. And the spelling is going to be atrocious.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Doug
Friday, April 25, 2008
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Feindishly Addictive Little Sweets
We have a new bag of sweeties in the office, a bag which I reckon won't be there by the end of the week. I am working my way through them at quite a rate between changing toner and putting disc after disc of software onto a laptop for a science teacher. Sugar Land Soft Fruits, they're called. I have no idea where they're from but the bag is enormous, more of a sack, really, and the cherry ones are especially toothsome. I bet I would make a very pleasant snog at the moment, as I have eaten about ten of them today, and that's just cherry ones.
That aside, it's business as usual at work. School is back in and with it comes all the work I had spent the last two weeks forgetting about. Students missing passwords, weird problems that for some reason can't be solved by me but easily by Andy by doing exactly the same things and a printer that I had to totally take apart in order to remove a paper jam. It's all quite fun. Played some bad bass last night, though. Less fun.
In fact, I feel a bit, I dunno, grouchy. The cut in pay is beginning to show a little, and I am wondering about the wisdom of my new car at quite this period in my financial history, but what's done is done. It's very comfy and I like being able to park without knackering myself. Still can't park anywhere, though. I live on one side of a square arrangement of streets, and my corner is literally lousy with cars, all the time. Other side of the square of streets is more often than not empty. Explain that.
Anyway. Bad bass was probably what put me in a poor state of mind, and being in a room whilst the other five members of my bad went on and on and on and on about the bloody football didn't help. Text messages were arriving at a rate of one a minute bearing scores and opinions from other people who were wasting their few precious years on this Earth watching 22 hired hands in matching shirts kick a ball up and down for 90 minutes. I really can't explain what it is I find so annoying about it, apart from the fact that when it is almost everyone I know that goes on about it, the overall effect is a little alienating. I say a little. I mean very, very, very alienating.
Because it means I can't join in. Football and cars are the subjects men bond over, and although I was quite the petrolhead in my youth, I now have no interest in cars beyond their ability to get me from point A to point B, possibly stopping at C on the way for a cup of tea and to stretch the legs. And football has never interested me, never. It never will, either. I didn't grow up with it, and the ephemera (shouting mostly, but also the deployment of half the county's police for every home game, which I have to pay for despite having never been, not going this time and having no intention to ever go in the future) hack me off, too. I can think of little I care less about. Maybe gardening. Perhaps I am jealous of how enthusiastic people can be over something like that, where I have no such object for my enthusiasms. Perhaps, but my friends and I used to talk about music, films, general rubbish. It was nice. Now they talk about football whilst I read a book, chew my fingernails and leave.
Not liking football makes me a social leper. It's the first question almost all men (except me) ask of all other men (except me) - 'What's your team?' Say 'ain't got one', and the look at you like you have admitted to being Martin Bormann, or not using toilets on principle. I dread it. This is why I mostly prefer to talk to women, I think. They have their own social canards, canards far more cannardy than football ever can hope to be, but I am exempt from them to begin with. Unlike this new orthodoxy.
Imagine a world where the biggest leisure pursuit was embroidery. People would embroider at home, buy the latest needles and threads and talk with their colleagues and peers about it. Professional embroiderers would compete for speed and neatness as millions watch and many more pass expert judgement on the needlework and style. It would be the prime catalyst of human interaction, talked about in pubs and houses across the land. Whole channels are dedicated to the latest embroidery news, and commercials are themed to catch the interest and buying ambitions of those embroidery fans. Of course, there would be a dark side, and embroidery clubs would foster great rivalries spanning hundreds of years which could so readily spill over into animosity, unkind works and even violence based solely on a person's preference of embroiderers. Despite the tragedies and the loss, no-one would ultimately question the wisdom of embroidery being a channel for society's innate violence; after all, so many people love embroidery that if a politician is to be taken seriousl as a real person (and that's terribly important these days) they have to express a dedication to their local embroidery team. Embroidery, Britain's national pastime.
Sounds stupid, right? Gah! Gah! Well, I am just grouchy. Besides, I have a dental appointment to attend, and I just know I'm gonna be drilled. Again.
Gah!
Again.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Doug
That aside, it's business as usual at work. School is back in and with it comes all the work I had spent the last two weeks forgetting about. Students missing passwords, weird problems that for some reason can't be solved by me but easily by Andy by doing exactly the same things and a printer that I had to totally take apart in order to remove a paper jam. It's all quite fun. Played some bad bass last night, though. Less fun.
In fact, I feel a bit, I dunno, grouchy. The cut in pay is beginning to show a little, and I am wondering about the wisdom of my new car at quite this period in my financial history, but what's done is done. It's very comfy and I like being able to park without knackering myself. Still can't park anywhere, though. I live on one side of a square arrangement of streets, and my corner is literally lousy with cars, all the time. Other side of the square of streets is more often than not empty. Explain that.
Anyway. Bad bass was probably what put me in a poor state of mind, and being in a room whilst the other five members of my bad went on and on and on and on about the bloody football didn't help. Text messages were arriving at a rate of one a minute bearing scores and opinions from other people who were wasting their few precious years on this Earth watching 22 hired hands in matching shirts kick a ball up and down for 90 minutes. I really can't explain what it is I find so annoying about it, apart from the fact that when it is almost everyone I know that goes on about it, the overall effect is a little alienating. I say a little. I mean very, very, very alienating.
Because it means I can't join in. Football and cars are the subjects men bond over, and although I was quite the petrolhead in my youth, I now have no interest in cars beyond their ability to get me from point A to point B, possibly stopping at C on the way for a cup of tea and to stretch the legs. And football has never interested me, never. It never will, either. I didn't grow up with it, and the ephemera (shouting mostly, but also the deployment of half the county's police for every home game, which I have to pay for despite having never been, not going this time and having no intention to ever go in the future) hack me off, too. I can think of little I care less about. Maybe gardening. Perhaps I am jealous of how enthusiastic people can be over something like that, where I have no such object for my enthusiasms. Perhaps, but my friends and I used to talk about music, films, general rubbish. It was nice. Now they talk about football whilst I read a book, chew my fingernails and leave.
Not liking football makes me a social leper. It's the first question almost all men (except me) ask of all other men (except me) - 'What's your team?' Say 'ain't got one', and the look at you like you have admitted to being Martin Bormann, or not using toilets on principle. I dread it. This is why I mostly prefer to talk to women, I think. They have their own social canards, canards far more cannardy than football ever can hope to be, but I am exempt from them to begin with. Unlike this new orthodoxy.
Imagine a world where the biggest leisure pursuit was embroidery. People would embroider at home, buy the latest needles and threads and talk with their colleagues and peers about it. Professional embroiderers would compete for speed and neatness as millions watch and many more pass expert judgement on the needlework and style. It would be the prime catalyst of human interaction, talked about in pubs and houses across the land. Whole channels are dedicated to the latest embroidery news, and commercials are themed to catch the interest and buying ambitions of those embroidery fans. Of course, there would be a dark side, and embroidery clubs would foster great rivalries spanning hundreds of years which could so readily spill over into animosity, unkind works and even violence based solely on a person's preference of embroiderers. Despite the tragedies and the loss, no-one would ultimately question the wisdom of embroidery being a channel for society's innate violence; after all, so many people love embroidery that if a politician is to be taken seriousl as a real person (and that's terribly important these days) they have to express a dedication to their local embroidery team. Embroidery, Britain's national pastime.
Sounds stupid, right? Gah! Gah! Well, I am just grouchy. Besides, I have a dental appointment to attend, and I just know I'm gonna be drilled. Again.
Gah!
Again.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Doug
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Lunch in Market Harborough
A question - how long do you have to use an umbrella to have had maximum return for your investment? Because I have bought one and I want to know whether it was worth it.
You see, it's the Easter Holidays and school is very quiet. It's quite relaxing, actually, and the humming of servers behind me in the office is very soothing. I have done some good physical exercise today as well, sorting through the stores and boxing up some 200 kettle leads that we have and don't need. Of course, I will never be able to lift the box they are in as it weighs some ninety tons. Just like books, one might only weigh a few grams, but 200 of them will leave you with a back like a painful accordion, oozing cerebrospinal fluid with every tottering step.
However, even though life without kids and teachers is as close to the Good Life as you can get without Felicity kendal (the 1970's edition Felicity Kendal, hot hot hot) it is my custom to walk into town to get lunch at one of Harborough's fabulous choice of three places to get a sandwich. One of those is a Subway, described by Radio 6's normally unbearable George Lamb as a 'torrent of Hell smell', and he's right. So really, two. Today's choice was Emerson's, a slightly posh tea room-cum-bakery. They sell a dizzying range of cheeses, sauces from Japan and all manner of whatnots and geegaws to do with posh nosh. They also do hot turkey rolls. This was my main aim for the day.
I like modern lunch. As a weedy middle-class arts degree holder it gives me a sense that the testosterone and macho of the 20th Century is finally beginning to fade. I hate football, I hate lager and I hate shouting. For many years I have felt something of a pariah. But seeing the big, burly builders, who ten years ago would murder you on the spot if you suggested they eat anything for lunch other than bacon, asking for a prawn and rocket ciabatta and a half-shot cauppucino is a lovely thing.
When I left the school, it was sort of drizzling. But I am a hardy man. I laugh in the face of drizzle and scoff at the prospect of breezes. Inevitably by the time I was halfway along Burnmill Road though it had turned into a torrent, and I was thoroughly soaked. So I resolved to buy an umbrella, although by then it was getting on to being a moot point as I was so drenched. But, I thought, where?
The thing is, depsite the general decrying of our towns all being reduced to identikit Guilfords by chainstores and Starbucks and traffic calming and immigrants and all the other horrors of the Daily Express reading classes, Harborough still has its share of small, local shops. Hooray, you might think, but wait. Hold on. Think about it. Think about the last time you tried to buy an umbrella, for a start.
Is it an item of clothing? An accessory? A piece of outdoor equipment? Misc? All of these are plausible, and when you are in a welter of wet uncertainty on a rainy lunchtime, you don't want to have to seek one out in four different shops only to find they don't have them at all. And also, let it never be forgotten that we are British. A nation of shopkeepers, Napoleon called us, and proud we are of that. However, he missed one word, which was 'surly'.
See, little shops are fine, admirable and shiny, provided you (a) know exactly what you want, (b) know exactly which shop to buy it in and (c) know the person behind the counter. It does not encourage browsing. And we are not made to browse, nor are we made to be interrupted. We feel nothing but the laser death-stare of the proprietor on the back of our foolish, pathetic little necks as soon as we cross the threshold. So for me to amble into someone's personal territory with no idea of what it is I am looking for is a disaster of etiquette waiting to happen. I get panicked, the shopkeeper gets narky and we are no further along the road to actually getting this umbrella than we were five minutes before. It's the British version of customer service - "What do you want, there it is, now fuck off."
In the end I bought one in Woolworths. Four quid. It kept me dry as I walked back up the big, big hill to school. But then I thought, how long do I have to keep it before I have had four pounds' worth of dryness from it? Four pounds will buy you a magazine, which will last about twenty minutes. But it will also buy you a spindle of 50 CD-Rs that will last forever. And also, it's an umbrella. It either works, or it doesn't. You can buy a pair of jeans for four pounds and they will fit badly for two weeks and then fall apart. You don't get an umbrella that only keeps you sort of dry. It will work as long as I keep it in one piece.
So I ask again, how much is a £4 umbrella really worth? And is it worth some 1200 words trying to work it out? The answer to at least one of these questions is obviously a big, fat no.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Doug
You see, it's the Easter Holidays and school is very quiet. It's quite relaxing, actually, and the humming of servers behind me in the office is very soothing. I have done some good physical exercise today as well, sorting through the stores and boxing up some 200 kettle leads that we have and don't need. Of course, I will never be able to lift the box they are in as it weighs some ninety tons. Just like books, one might only weigh a few grams, but 200 of them will leave you with a back like a painful accordion, oozing cerebrospinal fluid with every tottering step.
However, even though life without kids and teachers is as close to the Good Life as you can get without Felicity kendal (the 1970's edition Felicity Kendal, hot hot hot) it is my custom to walk into town to get lunch at one of Harborough's fabulous choice of three places to get a sandwich. One of those is a Subway, described by Radio 6's normally unbearable George Lamb as a 'torrent of Hell smell', and he's right. So really, two. Today's choice was Emerson's, a slightly posh tea room-cum-bakery. They sell a dizzying range of cheeses, sauces from Japan and all manner of whatnots and geegaws to do with posh nosh. They also do hot turkey rolls. This was my main aim for the day.
I like modern lunch. As a weedy middle-class arts degree holder it gives me a sense that the testosterone and macho of the 20th Century is finally beginning to fade. I hate football, I hate lager and I hate shouting. For many years I have felt something of a pariah. But seeing the big, burly builders, who ten years ago would murder you on the spot if you suggested they eat anything for lunch other than bacon, asking for a prawn and rocket ciabatta and a half-shot cauppucino is a lovely thing.
When I left the school, it was sort of drizzling. But I am a hardy man. I laugh in the face of drizzle and scoff at the prospect of breezes. Inevitably by the time I was halfway along Burnmill Road though it had turned into a torrent, and I was thoroughly soaked. So I resolved to buy an umbrella, although by then it was getting on to being a moot point as I was so drenched. But, I thought, where?
The thing is, depsite the general decrying of our towns all being reduced to identikit Guilfords by chainstores and Starbucks and traffic calming and immigrants and all the other horrors of the Daily Express reading classes, Harborough still has its share of small, local shops. Hooray, you might think, but wait. Hold on. Think about it. Think about the last time you tried to buy an umbrella, for a start.
Is it an item of clothing? An accessory? A piece of outdoor equipment? Misc? All of these are plausible, and when you are in a welter of wet uncertainty on a rainy lunchtime, you don't want to have to seek one out in four different shops only to find they don't have them at all. And also, let it never be forgotten that we are British. A nation of shopkeepers, Napoleon called us, and proud we are of that. However, he missed one word, which was 'surly'.
See, little shops are fine, admirable and shiny, provided you (a) know exactly what you want, (b) know exactly which shop to buy it in and (c) know the person behind the counter. It does not encourage browsing. And we are not made to browse, nor are we made to be interrupted. We feel nothing but the laser death-stare of the proprietor on the back of our foolish, pathetic little necks as soon as we cross the threshold. So for me to amble into someone's personal territory with no idea of what it is I am looking for is a disaster of etiquette waiting to happen. I get panicked, the shopkeeper gets narky and we are no further along the road to actually getting this umbrella than we were five minutes before. It's the British version of customer service - "What do you want, there it is, now fuck off."
In the end I bought one in Woolworths. Four quid. It kept me dry as I walked back up the big, big hill to school. But then I thought, how long do I have to keep it before I have had four pounds' worth of dryness from it? Four pounds will buy you a magazine, which will last about twenty minutes. But it will also buy you a spindle of 50 CD-Rs that will last forever. And also, it's an umbrella. It either works, or it doesn't. You can buy a pair of jeans for four pounds and they will fit badly for two weeks and then fall apart. You don't get an umbrella that only keeps you sort of dry. It will work as long as I keep it in one piece.
So I ask again, how much is a £4 umbrella really worth? And is it worth some 1200 words trying to work it out? The answer to at least one of these questions is obviously a big, fat no.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Doug
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