Crank Call Ho Ho Ho

The many vagaries of my job means I am pretty much on call 24/7 365 days a year.

Now this isn't as bad as it sounds as there are a quite a few procedural steps and procedural get-out clauses that for 95% of the time means I am saved from a small-hours walk to my place of work and the onerous task falls to a third party who is paid a hell of a lot more to do this element of the job than I am. I won't go into details for security reasons (i.e. I'd have to kill you all).

So. When the telephone rings late at night I have been systemically programmed to awaken and answer it not matter how tired or how previously unconscious I might have been.

I do not do this, as a rule, with any grace or magnanimity. I do, however, do it being of a conscientious mind and bent.

The telephone rang last night at 12.33am. Given the high winds I feared the worst - a smashed window or a blown open door at my place of employ; a 45 minute round dash out of the warm comfort of my own home and into the freezing cold elements just to close an effing door and silence and reset the alarms.

As it was, it was neither of the above scenarios. Neither was it that even more rare event: a genuine break-in.

No. It was a crank call.

And not even a crank call. A crank text / voice message.

Some joker (and I use than moniker very ironically) had decided to sent a text message to my landline which is then recited to me by a computer.

The message was innocuous but subtly malicious; something along the lines of: "Sorry. My mistake. I did not mean to call you. Boo hoo. Boo hoo. Boo hoo. I hope I did not wake you up. Boo hoo."

The voice messaging service is such that, had I not taken the initial call, the phone would have rung out again and again and again until the message was delivered.

I was not amused. I was awake. Awake and pissed enough to check my phone to see if I recognized the originator's number.

Because the cretin obviously did not realise that along with the message, the computer also logs the telephone number of the twat sending it and gives it out to the recipient.

The number was and is unknown to me, mores the pity.

Now, I have developed 2 theories to describe the night's events.

1) This was someone who was drunk, infantile and comedically challenged and who on a whim decided to waste their immorally earned money on a random text message to a random telephone number that they picked out of a phone book by flopping their infinitesimally small penis onto the yellowing page flapping in front of them. In short, I (literally) drew the short straw but may have inadvertently helped this small pewling, emotionally backward baby of a human being feel momentarily like they were king of the world. Or at least king of the bus shelter that they were trying to unsuccessfully masturbate into.

2) This is some lowlife scum who knows me, has got hold of my landline number, knows I am on call and therefore will be primed to answer the clarion call of the telephone and decided it would be funny to wake me and potentially my wife and children via a prank call that only highlights how pathetically passive-aggressive and emotionally stunted their entire existence is. Oh and they may have a have a very small penis too and / or saggy tits that droop down to their toenails.

Either way I don't really care.

But I do want recompense.

I am reliably informed that if you dial 141 before dialling someone's telephone number the call goes through anonymously. They won't be able to see your caller ID. This, alas, does not work for text messages but no mind. Normal voice calls are good enough.

The person who woke me so rudely last night has the following number: 07817 449153.

Now, I am not inciting anyone to do anything. Not anything at all. But should, you know, you feel like making a random late night telephone call or feel like signing the above telephone number up to services both dubious and ridiculous, well, who am I to stop you?

This person plainly has a marvellously over-developed sense of humour (alongside a curiously under-developed sense of personal data security) and would, I like to imagine, be well-up for some jolly japes of a likeminded manner.

Do go and fill yer boots, good people.

It is, after all, Christmas and the season of goodwill to all men.

Ho ho ho.

I’m Gonna Text You Up

So. New phone. Nokia Lumia 510.

My first ever smartphone. Email. Facebook. Twitter. LinkedIn. Skydrive. All in one place. I’m loving the sense of centralized connectedness. All these different ways of communicating with people literally at my fingertips.

Decent contract too given my traditional parsimonious nature when it comes to mobile phones. I get 500 minutes, 750mb of date and 5000 texts all for just £10 a month.

The data I might use – browsing, downloading apps, updating blogs and feeds, etc. The 500 minutes… hmm, doubtful but you never know when you might need to have a long conversation with someone.

But 5000 texts?

I must admit that had me rolling my eyes.

5000 texts per month?!

Who sends 5000 texts a month? That’s (on average) 166 texts a day! What can you possibly find to write about so frequently on a daily basis? Apart from sending someone a novel a line at a time?

“Hello, just sending you a text.”

“Hi again. Just me. Just another text.”

“Did you get my last text?”

“Not my last text but the text before that?”

“This is just a text to check that you’re getting my texts.”

“Please text a reply.”

“If you’re able. If you want to.”

“No pressure.”

“Have you run out of texts? You really ought to go to Tesco. They give you 5000 a month.”

“That’s 5000 texts.”

“Which is a lot of texting.”

“Erm…”

“Actually my finger is really hurting now. Do you mind if I just ring you instead?”

I don’t think I have ever sent 5000 texts in my entire life. Let alone in a month. And now I have an allocation. I kind of feel morally obliged to honour it. To share the minutia of my life with some as yet unnamed other in my address book as frequently as possible until they get so sick of hearing from me that they stop acknowledging my very existence.

Rather akin to blogging.

Look Out Outlook

Back in my younger days, when I was single and had no care to be respectable, I had a joyous relationship with Hotmail.

So much so I had several Hotmail email accounts.

If I wanted to sign up to a web site or a subscription that I wasn’t sure was entirely kosher I would use one of my Hotmail addresses. When I was laundering money for the Triads I put all communications through my Hotmail account Wishywashy@hotmail.com. When I was gun running for Serbian gangsters deals were done via AK47sRUs@hotmail.co.uk. And when I was maintaining several mistresses simultaneously and patronizing a local escort agency I found totalesxclusivityguaranteed@hotmail.com really useful.

*sigh*

Those were the days. I’d log on, log in and frequently be surprised by the various communiques that were often or not waiting for me (frequently not).

And then things changed.

Not so much the getting married, having kids and becoming a 'law abiding citizen' thing. More the Hotmail mutating into Outlook type of thing.

Suddenly me and Hotmail or (if I must use its Snickers name rather than its Marathon name) Outlook (if you insist) became estranged. Suddenly our theme song changed from Dennis Waterman’s “I Could Be So Good For You” to Cliff Richard’s “It’s So Funny How We Don’t Talk Anymore”. We no longer had a thing going on.

Communication between us utterly died until now we barely even make eye contact.

When I try and log in these days all I get is the “I’m sorry, I’m not available right now” brush-off. Sometimes I only have to type the Hotmail address into my browser and I’m cold shouldered to the point where the log in page won’t even load. Outlook just isn’t putting out for me anymore.

See, Hotmail was fine when it was just an email client. When all I wanted was to send crapola and receive spam. We both knew where we stood and neither of us got ideas above our station.

But now Outlook wants to be the conduit through which I CONNECT to the entire effing internet. It wants to hook into my social networks and my own home computer. It wants me to diarize my life solely through its jealous online portal. It wants to store all my contacts and personal information inside its covetous cloud. It wants me to invest more time and energy into it than I’m willing to give. It wants to own me [man] and I didn’t ever come to Hotmail to be owned.

And I could just about cope with all that; I could just about shrug off all the irritation and irksomeness it causes me…

…if just once, just once the damned thing would load up properly first time and allow me to send just a simple sodding email without crashing on me.

Because that’s all I want:

An email account that sends and receives emails.

An email account that works.

Because the Serbs are getting impatient and the pimps are after me for welching on a deal. I’ve got urgent business to attend to Goddamnit!

Is There An App For This?

Is there an app for cack-handedness? Because I need one. Desperately.

I have come to the stark conclusion that somehow the inbuilt ergonomic design of the mobile phone is no longer pandering to my natural abilities.

It could be an old age thing but in my defence (and my kids will back me up on this) when it comes to Lego building I still retain the dexterity of a 7 year old.

But mobile phones I can no longer handle. Literally.

The buttons are too small. Or require a precision of touch that seems beyond me. And what makes it worse is that I have a work mobile as well as my own “home” mobile so the problems are doubled.

Take the automatic keypad locking facility on my work phone. Every phone has one and will employ it within seconds of the phone last registering the caress of your fingers across it’s knobbly little body.

I cannot get my phone to unlock without a deal of hassle and stress. I press a key, any key, and it tells me to press * to unlock the phone. So I do. It tells me to press * again. And again. Seems I’m not pressing it hard enough though the amount of pressure I use seems to be fine for when I’m typing out a death threat. Did I say death threat? I meant text. Three or four attempts later I have finally unlocked the phone but by now I feel like stamping on it and crushing it into oblivion. I have the shape of the * button indelibly imprinted into my finger.

It would be easier to unlock Fort Knox than to unlock my phone.

And then take the touch screen key guard on my home mobile. Oh how I thought it would be marvellously “in” to have a touch screen mobile phone. Something I could smear and flick my thumb across and have it put me in touch with the entire world.

The key guard works fine in a non-urgent situation. I slide it down and my phone becomes instantly touch sensitive. I slide it up again and it becomes as unresponsive as Katie Jordan Price wired up to an MRI scanner. Total key guard protection.

But give it an “urgent” situation. An “urgent” situation being someone calling me on my phone requiring me to operate the touch screen in order to accept the call then the key guard decides not to operate at all. It’s like the phone can’t cope with having to do two things at once. What? Employ the ring tone and enable the key guard function toggle button? No way! This is a mobile phone not a multitasking device! Back and forth I slide the key guard switch and all that happens is that the phone vibrates, continues to ring hysterically and then eventually the caller either calls off or gets diverted to my voicemail.

Major phone answering fail.

This cannot be right. This cannot be in the designer’s remit surely – to sabotage a user from using their own mobile phone in the fair pursuance of the mobile phone’s basic fundamental duties?

Does this happen to everyone or is it just a conspiracy to prevent me personally from talking to other people?

Am I really that dangerous?

Next thing you know they’ll be closing down this here blo...

So How Would You Sign “Another Whisky Please?”

Working Men’s Clubs are funny things. I think I’ve only ever been to about 4 in my entire life and up until last Friday they were solely to attend private parties or functions, hence the patrons stuffing their faces with cake alongside my own were not what anyone would in any way term “regulars”. They were all interlopers like me.

Friday, however, was different.

Friday was set apart by an invitation by my Sign Language tutor that invited us (his class) to come along during the evening and meet some Deaf people in a proper social environment. To be honest, there are a number of such opportunities that we can choose from – some later in the month to attend a proper Deaf Club in Coventry and others in Solihull – but this one attracted me because of (a) the proximity – it was in walking distance from my house – and (b) I have my second formal assessment tomorrow night and I figured the extra practise would be no bad thing.

So I’m walking to the Working Men’s club and I’ll be honest, my vision of the clientele and the whole ambience was of a very quiet snug (akin to the one in The Rovers Return), half full of men and women of a certain age sporting a certain hardy Northern-esque look, a dog or two asleep at the foot of the bar and a barman who spends the entire night giving non-locals pokey looks from his permanent place in front of the optics rack.

But what I got in actual fact was a lounge bar very like something out of Coronation Street, sparsely populated by people of a certain age who could quite easily get roles as extras in Heartbeat, a single dog (a hearing dog for the Deaf funnily enough) and a barman who gave me pokey looks as soon as I stepped foot inside the bar,

In fact his first words to me were, “How did you get in here?”

This made me think that maybe (a) I’d somehow slipped through the minefield and the barbed wire gun emplacements without seeing them or (b) I’d broken both my legs without noticing it or (c) he was confusing me with some bad-ass whippet owner he’d barred from the premises in another life.

As it was I could only answer sheepishly that the guy on the door had let me in after I’d paid a 50p entrance fee (and no sexual favours asked for).

As soon as I explained I’d come to meet the Deaf group though he relaxed, served me my whisky (though he diluted it with unasked for coke – plainly he thought I was a wuss; plainly I was because I accepted it without complaint) and left me alone for the rest of the night.

Naturally, being at heart a saddo, I was the only one from my class who’d bothered to turn up; everyone else is obviously saving themselves for the relative cool of the Deaf club in Coventry.

So it was just me, 5 Deaf people and a hearing dog. And a raffle that I couldn’t enter because I wasn’t a member,

I was at 42 by far the youngest person in the entire building.

As for the Sign Language... seeing it at work in a social context highlighted to me just how little I know and how paltry my level of expertise is. Making Signs is only half of it – having an instant visual recognition of other people’s Signs is the very important other half and that lack of immediacy really tripped me up on several occasions.

Thankfully one of the Deaf people there – a sprightly 84 year old named Billy – could talk (he’d lost his hearing due to being caught in a bomb blast in Glasgow during WWII when he was 10) and though he Signed simultaneously, if it wasn’t for his vocal narrative I would have spent much of the night staring into my whisky and coke feeling that everyone else was talking about me but not to me in a language that was whistling way over my head.

As it was, they were a very friendly group and made generous allowances for my ham-fisted level of expertise. I also learnt what a small world it is: Billy had been a soldier at the barracks during the same period and in the same street in Glasgow where my dad grew up as a boy. A big hello to everybody reading this from Maryhill.

The biggest thing I learnt though was how many different types of Deafness there are, how many different levels and experiences, how people’s Signing is not uniform but is as varied as their handwriting and just how distracting a jukebox can be when you are trying to concentrate and you are the only person who can hear it.

All useful fodder for the novel I am currently writing which features a Deaf character... though whether it will help me pass my formal assessment tomorrow remains to be seen.

And certainly not heard.

Losing Face

Lord knows my relationship with Facebook is strained at the best of times (it’s a mere marriage of convenience; a sham, just for show, there is no intimacy or bedroom relations) but the recent news that Facebook is, to quote the BBC, “a few steps away from trademarking the word face” has left me grimacing with disgust.

They want to trademark Face in the same way that George Lucas has trademarked Star Wars.

Now the latter I can understand. Think what you like about the recent trilogy, George Lucas created a bestselling brand. He has a right to trademark it.

But Face?

How you can trademark Face for God’s sake?

The fallout from such an action with obviously adversely affect other social network sites and services, for e.g. Apple’s Facetime. If Facebook are successful Facetime with have to change to Visagetime or Mugtime or Interfacetime. I’m sure you can think of plenty of your own.

Now, while I can see that Facebook are bristling at the use of the word Face, thinking as they do, that it seeks to emulate or cash-in on their own brand, to trademark it exclusively as their own smacks of greed, unfairness and, yes I am going to say it, big brother style bullying. It also insults the target audience who all to an Emo scarred teen know the difference between Facebook and Facetime and know that one is not interchangeable with or the same as the other. So there is no harm done with other services being named Facepage, Facewad, Faceityou’realoser.

There is no need for Facebook to do this other than to flex its oversized muscles and stamp all over the rest of the social networking market.

Arseholes. Sorry, Faceholes.

But my big question is: where will this end?

Are Boots going to trademark Boots forcing millions of shoe retailers to rebrand all footwear that exceeds the height of the average human shin? Are Ann Summers going to lay claim to summer forcing us to rename the period between June and August as ‘that period of warmer weather where it rains less, the UK excepted’? Could Woolworth’s have saved itself by trademarking the word Wool and reaped millions of pounds in copyright payments from the knit craft industry?

And what about Adult Sex Shops? Are we going to have to come up with another name for human sexual intercourse (for example: human sexual intercourse) should they trademark the word sex? Or should I perhaps get in first (no innuendo intended) and trademark it myself? Force them to pay me to use the word? Force all of you in fact?

Hey, I could be onto a winner here (unless Michael Winner has trademarked that without me knowing about it).

Hmm.

You know, I may have to rename this blog.

Faceblog sounds kind of cool, doesn’t it?

British Sign Language

The loss of our eyesight or our hearing is something most of us only give a cursory thought towards. How would I cope if I was deaf? What would it be like never being able to listen to music? Horrible, we think to ourselves and then we quickly move on, possibly hitting the shuffle function on our iPods with a slightly more piquant sense of gratitude.

Bizarre that the first thing we think about is the loss of music from our lives rather than the question of how the hell we would communicate with other people and the outside world. Maybe because we take our ability to talk so much for granted?

I’m almost ashamed to say that it has taken a writing project to make me bend my thoughts more seriously towards these issues. I’m 25,000 words into my second novel and one of the supporting characters is deaf. The main character has a disabling stutter and hence hates speaking. Through learning sign language though he is able to finally express himself and embark on a more fulfilling lifestyle. Yes, it is something of a rom/com for those of you that are interested but also, hopefully, a gritty piece of social commentary. Anyway, I’m not here to big up the novel. I’ll save that for when it’s finished.

The point is I quickly realized that to write effectively and realistically about Deaf Culture I needed to embark on some serious research. I bought books. I contacted someone at the Deaf Arts Network who very kindly spent weeks answering all of my (no doubt very crass) questions and supplying me with real life anecdotes – Lisa, if you are reading, a big thank you once again. Eventually I realized that to make the deaf character real and believable – not to mention her dialogues with the main character – I would need to learn sign language myself.

Because it is a complete language in itself with its own sense of dialogue and its own idiosyncratic mechanics. It can’t be replicated by guesswork; you have to know it.

Thankfully the local FE College here in Leamington offers the Level 1 course. Depressingly it is very expensive. £450. Level 2 is over £600 and then there is Level 3 and 4. But that’s jumping the gun. I nearly abandoned the idea there and then as there was no way I could afford the best part of £500 on an evening course. But help comes from surprising sources sometimes and my employer stepped up to the plate and is funding Level 1 for me; the idea being that it will be useful for the local authority here to have an employee who can communicate [albeit at a very basic level] with any deaf customers.

I started the course about 6 weeks ago. Without fail I am exhausted before I even get there – I’m not a night person – but every Tuesday I drag myself up to the college and try to make myself as receptive as my lazy brain will allow. And without fail I leave 2 hours later buoyant and buzzing and bouncing with the sheer exhilaration of it all.

It is a wonderful course and a beautiful language to learn. It is as fluid, rich, dynamic, intriguing, and expressive as any spoken voiced language. I’d even venture to say it is more expressive. It has its own set of pictorial semantics which are often as funny as they are clever. There is something organic and interconnected about the language too. The sign for ‘milk’ for example is redolent of milking a cow. Every sign is pregnant with meaning and has an ingenious grace to it that makes you want to master every word and phrase.

And it’s easy to learn. Amazingly easy. The entire class had mastered the finger-spelling alphabet within the first hour. There is something instinctive about it. And now armed with those few rude basics you can at last communicate and make your point known.

So it amazes me that the basics of sign language aren’t taught at all schools. Just the alphabet and a few signs would hardly over burden the current curriculum. The benefits would be enormous both to the Deaf Community and to the hearing community, both in terms of increased accessibility for the former and inclusiveness for both. Because it was not until I embarked on this research that I realized what a closed culture Deafness is. It is very enclosed and self contained. Not because Deaf people want to be separate but because if no-one else speaks your language you have no choice but to be separate and a world apart.

And given that we all share the world and are all human, that seems a very great shame.

Not being able to hear music is actually the smallest loss that Deafness bestows upon you. Not having the ability or the opportunity to make yourself ‘heard’ is far, far worse and deeply, hurtfully isolating. And yet the remedy is so simple.

Come on, Education Minister; put sign language onto our school curriculum! Or for those of you that understandably can’t wait for that great day or are past school attendance age... I know a great way for you to put £450 to very good use. I guarantee you won’t regret it.

Don’t You People Listen?

Rol was right. It is damned annoying when people don’t read things properly. In Rol’s excellent blog post yesterday he described his frustration at sending an email to someone that quite clearly posed 2 questions only to have one of the questions completely ignored in the reply.

I totally understood where he was coming from. Totally understood the growling frustration that you feel afterwards. Because now you have the do-I-send-then-another-email-asking-the-second question-again-or-do-I-just-give-up-on-it-altogether dilemma. Because if you chase it up you inevitably feel like you’re being a nag or just plain anal.

But this innate understanding wasn’t good enough for the universe or life or whatever master-force controls my destiny. Oh no. I had to have my understanding refreshed, updated and made more piquant...

I’ve just sold something on eBay. What isn’t important but whilst emailing the invoice I also added a little paragraph giving my address (the object is to be collected in person), phone number and a list of days and times when I’d be home to hand the object over.

I then had a reply to this email asking me where I lived! What? Didn’t they see my address in the email?

To add insult to confusion the buyer then stated that they worked in Leamington and wanted to know how far away I was because they worked in Cubbington.

Eh?

Now for those of you that don’t know Leamington Spa, Cubbington used to be a neighbouring village some miles away from Leamington proper. Over the last 50 years it’s been swallowed up by Leamington’s expanding waistline and is now a geographical belly-button. So yes, Leamington is Cubbington but Cubbington is not Leamington. There is a difference between the two. Especially if the buyer is planning to walk to my house.

Anyway. I gritted my teeth and replied with another email. I told him he was about a 20 minute drive from my house and politely referred to the fact I’d given him my address in my previous email. I again stated what times and days I’d be free to receive him. After work any day but Thursday – I specifically can’t do Thursday as I have a prior engagement that night that I totally can’t get out of.

I sent it off.

I had another reply. The buyer apologized for not seeing my address in my previous email. He’d now found it; thank you. Now he knew where I lived he’d probably come round on Thursday or Friday but wasn’t sure which yet; he’d ring me to let me know. Did I have a mobile number?

Aaaargh! Yes. Supplied in my original email along with my fecking address and the times and days I was available! And I can’t effing well do Thursday! I quite clearly said that!

Christ, how many emails do I have to write? How many times do I have to give out the same information before it sinks into this guy’s cranium? It’s not like the emails were awash with metaphor and hyperbole... they were the bare skin and bones of necessity. There were no excess words into which the salient facts could have got lost. They stood out like a couple of leylandii in the desert!

How can someone read an email but not actually take on board what the bloody words mean?

Is anybody listening? Ever?