I'm contracting for a big firm at the moment, and I've just started there, so have had to do some training courses. I don't mean actually learning to do my job — though I am having to do that, too, yes — but the corporate stuff that everyone has to do, regarding fire escapes and secrecy and so on. They're those online courses with multiple-choice tests at the end.
So one of them's about security and confidentiality and maintaining frankly paranoid levels of suspicion, and, in amongst all the easy stuff ("An evil spy asks for your Windows password. Should you (a) tell him, (b) not tell him, or (c) give him all the company's money?") was a genuinely tricky one. It went something like this.
You've been given a promotion and so will from now on have lots of highly confidential documents. You have therefore been given a filing cabinet. You put the documents in the filing cabinet and lock it. But where do you put the key?Now, since the course has been at pains to point out how easy it is to drop your keys or to have them knicked, this is actually rather a difficult question. You can't put them in your pocket, 'cause of pickpockets. So you can't take them home with you. But neither can you leave them lying around anywhere at work, which would be the equivalent of not locking the filing cabinet in the first place. So what the hell
do you do with them? I don't mind telling you, if it hadn't been multiple-choice, I'd never have figured it out.
The correct answer is:
In a lockable key cabinet.But of course.
It may seem — and, in fact, is — churlish to complain about someone who's been nice enough to link approvingly to this here blog, but honestly, some people. Joanna Higgins of BNET United Kingdom ("The go-to place for management") has included
this post of mine from t'other day in their
Friday Round-Up, and... well, firstly, the link's under their
Insight section. My blog provides insight into business management? I'm not sure whether to be flattered or baffled.
More to the point, though, Joanna's done something quite horrid to my
Achewood quote. Here's the original:
Shrovis-Bishopthorpe lead the pack in considering the Internet a nuisance. To this end we have installed a lock, so that the decision to leave the real world behind and venture into a land of codswallop and hastily documented buggery is anything but a thoughtless one.
And here's Ms Higgins's version:
Shrovis-Bishopthorpe lead the pack in considering the internet a nuisance. To this end we have installed a lock, so that the decision to leave the real world behind... is anything but a thoughtless one.
I don't hold her responsible, much. No doubt BNET have rules about which words their bloggers may use. But I've sat through enough company presentations over the years to know that this is hardly an isolated incident, and so I do have to ask: is there some rule of business management that actually
requires you to suck all the humour out of life?
Oh, looks like I have provided an insight into business management after all. Oops.
Amazon have, I think, finally made a mistake:
New feature! Amazon now allows customers to upload product video reviews. Use a webcam or video camera to record and upload reviews to Amazon.
I'm finding it hard to imagine a worse idea.
Just how far back does British history go, anyway?
From The Telegraph:Home owners and "have-a-go heroes" have for the first time been given the legal right to defend themselves against burglars and muggers free from fear of prosecution.
The first time? What, like, ever?
When journalists get these press releases from Number Ten, don't they question
any of it?
I don't go on about it completely incessantly, but I am a bit of an Apple fan. I prefer their operating system, so buy their computers. Simple.
But there's a new competitor on the scene, and they really do look rather like they might wipe the floor with Apple. And they're British, would you believe?
Yes, it's
Shrovis-Bishopthorpe:THE 2008 SHROVIS-BISHOPTHORPE Envaliant III.
Here is a proper British computer, soberly cased in good Dartmoor tin. Hand-turned brass dials and latches come in high- or low-burnish.
And
look:Shrovis-Bishopthorpe lead the pack in considering the Internet a nuisance. To this end we have installed a lock, so that the decision to leave the real world behind and venture into a land of codswallop and hastily documented buggery is anything but a thoughtless one.
What's not to like?
It's the way you no longer need the tiny minority of people who think the same way you do to be in roughly the same place for you to reach them. No matter how scattered, there they are, a market.
Erfworld is the strangest damn thing I ever did see. I'm not even sure I understand it, but it's superb.
Watched
Idiocracy last night. It's not exactly a masterpiece, but good fun if you fancy a laugh and can't be bothered thinking too hard because your daughter's got tonsillitis and you've therefore had too little sleep all week. For those of you who don't already know, it's set in a future in which the whole of mankind has become absolutely unremittingly stupid.
When it was over, Vic said, "They didn't need to set it five-hundred years in the future."
Daisy has tonsillitis, poor thing.
She gets it quite a lot. The infection responds well to antibiotics, but her taste buds don't. This is because antibiotics for small children have the nasty taste of the drug disguised with the even nastier taste of sickly sugary chemicals with names (but definitely not flavours) like "banana" and "strawberry". They are unforgivably disgusting, and Daisy won't touch the orange stuff, which seems to be full of the same fake migraine-triggering accident-in-a-chemical-lab crap they put into "orange" Revels. They used to put it in orange squash when I was a kid, and I couldn't even smell the stuff without getting a migraine, so I can't say I blame Daisy. (Incidentally, why the hell not use chocolate flavour? Kids love it, and even rather cheap fake chocolate flavour tastes of actual chocolate.)
The first time Daisy had tonsillitis, she was prescribed the orange stuff and Vic and I had one hell of a fight on our hands four times a day. We tried sneaking small amounts of it into food and drink that she liked, and she responded by refusing to touch food or even drink milk from us for two days in case we tried it again. In the end, we had to resort to having one person hold her down while another forced the stuff into her mouth with a syringe and then clamped her mouth shut. Not fun at all — especially since, when your child's ill, what you really want to do is comfort her, not torture her. That method worked that first time, but it doesn't any more, as Daisy has now taken to simply vomiting if anyone succeeds in getting any of the noxious orange crap into her stomach.
We did try asking a doctor at the time if there were any other flavour we could try, and he told us we'd just have to pull our bloody fingers out and get the stuff into her. This was all the more annoying in retrospect when she got tosillitis for the second time and was prescribed the "banana" stuff, which she decided in the end that she actually rather likes, which just goes to show that that bloody doctor, true to the long-standing traditions of his profession and the NHS, could indeed have done something for us but preferred to be rude to us instead.
Anyway, so, now, when she gets prescribed antibiotics, we make a point of telling whichever doctor Daisy sees that she won't touch the orange stuff. Last time, this was good: the doctor knew which drugs were which flavours and so prescribed the banana stuff. This time, however, the doctor we saw didn't know — which is fair enough, as it's not specified by the drug manufacturers for some stupid reason, so it's just one of those things a doctor either happens to know or doesn't. So the doctor, perfectly reasonably, gave us a prescription and advised us to ask the pharmacist before getting it dispensed.
So that's what I did, but the pharmacist apologetically explained to me that the drug manufacturers don't specify the flavour on the outside of the bottle. The stuff comes in dry powder form and the pharmacist adds water when dispensing it. The powder, annoyingly, is just sort of bland grey, so you can't tell by looking at it whether it's going to turn bright yellow or bright orange. This pharmacist even helpfully let me smell the powder, but it smelt of nothing. So I had to just go ahead and try it and see what happened. And, of course, by the time the pharmacist gave me the bottle, its contents were bright orange. By then, the prescription's dispensed and it's too late to change my mind. Bugger.
It was only when we got home that Vic noticed four words on the label of the bottle: "orange colour" and "orange flavour". They had been cunningly hidden in amongst some other words under the heading "Ingredients".
I have to say that I find the idea of a pharmacist who doesn't know that you can find out what's inside stuff by reading the list of ingredients slightly worrying. If you do too, you might want to avoid the Alliance pharmacy in Newtownards.
Some excellent stuff on
Language Log, as ever. Firstly,
the coining of a new word, "nerdview":
Language Log readers may appreciate the following classic example of writing in technical terms from the perspective of the technician or engineer rather than from a standpoint that would seem useful to the customer or reader.
....
The problem I am pointing to, however, is not about web programming or sorting technicalities. It is a simple problem that afflicts us all: people with any kind of technical knowledge of a domain tend to get hopelessly (and unwittingly) stuck in a frame of reference that relates to their view of the issue, and their trade's technical parlance, not that of the ordinary humans with whom they so signally fail to engage. ... The phenomenon — we could call it nerdview — is widespread.
I really hope the word catches on. I'm going to be using it. It's great when a new word comes along for something that you've been talking about for years. And it's great that the word sounds a bit derogatory, 'cause then, if it does catch on, it might discourage that which it describes.
Then there's
this photo of the single greatest IT fuck-up I have ever seen.And finally, following some link or other, I found
this gem in their archives:
Let's be clear (since so many people seem to think the French always have a word for everything): this is a language used by people who are supposed to be the big experts in love and kissing and sexy weekends of ooh-la-la, and they don't have words for "boy", "girl", "warm", "love", "kiss", or "weekend".
....
I know, I'm going to get a whole flood of stupid email defending the beautiful French language and its expressivité: "La langue française, elle est si belle", they'll say, referring to their language as if it were a girl (not that they can say "girl"); Le français, they will say (inexplicably switching their gender decision from feminine to masculine), "est une langue" (O.K., so we're back to feminine again) magnifique, la langue de Racine et de Molière et de Balzac et de Rimbaud... All this from people who think a uvular scraping sound like a cat bringing up a hairball is a perfectly reasonable noise to use instead of an honest "r". From people who simply cannot make their minds up about whether an attributive adjective should precede the modified noun (sensible!) or follow it (silly!): the ever-indecisive French say un bon vin blanc ("a good wine white"), with one before the noun and one after. Get a grip! Pick one or the other!
