Category: Uncategorized

So we’ve been recruiting at work for the last couple of months in an attempt to double the size of my team. Well, perhaps I should clarify that I’m currently a team of one, so that’s just the one extra person we’re looking for, but still it’s proving tricky to find a decent technical author to take on the role.

It’s been a bit of an eye-opener, actually. You’d think, given that one of the key skills of a technical author is the ability to present information clearly, accurately, and concisely, that the candidates who have been thrown in our direction so far would be able to do that on the two pages of their CV, but apparently not… (it’s getting to the point where I’d be happy if some of them just used a spell checker).

Yesterday, though, came the most amusing development of the process so far. I’d just come back from doing an interview and was sitting back at my desk when my mobile rang. It was a withheld number…

Me: Hello?
Woman: Oh hello, is that Matthew? This is Woman from Recruitment Agency. Are you OK to talk?
[Aside: I get these calls from time to time, and still don’t know how these people get my details, given that I couldn’t have uploaded a CV to a job site in nearly 4 years…]
Me: Er, yes.
Woman: It’s just that I’ve got a role here and I was wondering if you’d be interested?
Me: Oh no, I’m quite happy where I am thanks. But just out of interest, what is this role that you’re trying to fill?

Woman: Er…
Me: It wouldn’t be at Software Company would it?
Woman: Yes
Me: It’s just that I work at Software Company, and that’s our vacancy that we’re trying to fill, so I probably won’t apply for that, if it’s ok with you…

Maybe I should have said I’d go for it. I’m pretty sure I would have known what I was looking for in the interview. Maybe I could even have referred myself and picked up the referral bonus. The second salary would definitely come in handy…

So what’s wrong with this timeline of events?

20 September 2007: Someone at the IP address 90.202.68.194 anonymously edits the Wikipedia page for TV theme composer Ronnie Hazlehurst to add the entirely untrue claim that he co-wrote Reach for S Club 7.

2 October 2007: Hazlehurst dies.

2 October 2007: Lazy journalists everywhere (including BBC News 24, the Times, the Guardian, the Indie…) use Wikipedia entry to write his obit.

3 October 2007: Other people repeatedly attempt to add the “fact” that he co-wrote Reach by S Club 7 back to his Wikipedia entry, citing the obituaries in “reputable” newspapers as the reference.

[Reach was written by Cathy Dennis and Andrew Todd.]

I’ve just noticed that my copy of today’s Independent has a banner across the top proclaiming:

FREE INSIDE 16 PAGE GLOSSY BOOKLET: HOW TO WRITE A BLOG

Sadly, this appears to be missing from my copy. So now I’ll never know. Sorry…

Elsewhere, the same paper’s “5 Minute Interview” asks some questions of two people I’ve never heard of (Basso & Brooke anyone?), one of whom answers “I wish people would take more notice of…” with this:

Punctuation. For example, when someone writes “their” instead of “they’re” and vice versa. It’s just one of those basics.

From time to time, Sal has been known to do the occasional bit of market research. This, you understand, is entirely to do with her desire to help the UK’s corporations to better target their consumer offerings, and nothing at all to do with the brown envelope stuffed with used fivers that they offer as an “incentive” for attending one of the sessions.

So she’s signed up to a couple of companies who send out emails from time to time whenever they’re looking for candidates to fill up a focus group, and as she doesn’t sit in front of a computer all day long, she has these emails forwarded to me.

One of them arrived this morning, in which said market research people were looking for candidates to join a group on hair products. At the bottom, though, was this sentence:

“We also have to have a range of types of hair covered for the research – so please advise if your hair is European, Latin/American, Asian, or African”.

What an odd thing to say. All this time I’ve been labouring under the misapprehension that hair can be divided into the categories of “light”, “dark”, “short” and “long”, but apparently hair has a nationality of its own. Who knew? I considered emailing back to ask them how I can find out what nationality my hair is, but I worried that they might think I have illegal immigrant hair and report it to the home office. Perhaps I should arrange for my hair to have a passport of its own.

Sadly, as you may already have spotted, Sal doesn’t fit the criteria for this particular session, as they apparently aren’t interested in marketing their products to those with Australian hair (as I’ll have to assume hers is, until I’m informed otherwise).

I’m confused by some of the other categories, though: I can’t imagine that many of the respondents will have Roman hair. I suppose that explains why they’ve chosen to lump that into an either/or category with American hair. Not sure I can see the connection myself, but what do I know…

Well, it’s over: some of us thought it would never happen, but finally the great Coldplay “silence” of 2007 has been broken. The NME has the exclusive:

I don’t know what you have been doing during this long, difficult period of silence, but I’ve spent most of the year so far just hoping and praying that Chris and those other blokes (whatever they’re called) would speak to us. Christopher. Why did you neglect us for so long?

And now they have spoken. We now know that their new album will contain “nine tracks”. Wow. So many of us would have expected eleven. I predicted twelve, but it was not to be. Nine is truly a radical departure.

Not “At Home” Today,
Book signing down the market:
Jamie Oliver

UPDATE: Photographic evidence. I don’t just make these things up, you know…

So last week we went to see the adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Atonement on another one of our free film previews. Of course, you should never see a film adapted from a book you’ve read and enjoyed, and so, inevitably, I was hugely disappointed.

The first hour of the film–the part set at the Tallis house in 1935–is really effective, but once the action skips forward to the war scenes for the second half, the film loses its way completely. My watch told me that the second half of the film only lasted an hour, but with the direction suddenly so plodding and pedestrian, it could easily have been two… [At one point, Joe Wright devotes about 10 minutes of screen time to an impressive-looking but ultimately pointless sweeping, tracking shot showing the carnage on the beach at Dunkirk. Quite what this has to do with the story, I couldn’t tell–I couldn’t help wondering whether they’d just spent so much money making this that they couldn’t bring themselves to leave any of it on the cutting room floor, even though it doesn’t add anything to the film.]

But apparently we can’t escape this film, because this evening on our way across Leicester Square to get to another free film screening (the Russell Crowe/Christian Bale remake of 3:10 To Yuma, which unexpectedly turned out to be rather good fun), we stumbled across the première of Atonement on the other side of the square, so we stopped to have a look. Clearly a lot of people had come to Leicester Square specifically to see some famous people going to the cinema, and as we peered over the crowds to see what was going on, we could hear occasional squeals of delight from the crowd. You could almost tell how famous the person who’d just got out of the car was by the volume of the squeal. We did get to see James McAvoy and Benedict Cumberbatch standing around while people took their photographs, but missed Keira (although I’m pretty sure we heard the crowd appreciatively whooping at her ability to get out of a car and walk towards a cinema).

Not all the cast arrived by car, though. I almost felt a bit sorry for actor Daniel Mays, who wasn’t apparently important enough for the film company to drive him there. After we’d got bored of trying to spot celebrities, we’d left to get to the Panton Street Odeon where our screening was, and almost bumped into him as he walked past in the other direction, all DJ-ed up.

“He’s famous”, whispered Sal to me, as he passed us.

I knew she was right, but for a second I couldn’t quite place him. And then I realised that he’s actually in the film.

As there’s a tube strike on at the moment, I wonder if he had to get there on the bus? Perhaps that’s why he was late…

So, being the original sorts that we are, for the third year in a row Sal and I went up to Edinburgh again for the bank holiday weekend.

For some reason, this year we seemed to do a lot of rushing about. There barely seemed to be a moment when we weren’t supposed to be somewhere else. On Saturday evening, for example, we decided to grab something to eat before seeing Richard Herring. Knowing how much comedians love it when you are late to their gigs, I did wonder if the hour that we had allowed ourselves would be enough time for what Sal described as a “quick curry”, and my worries were not abated when, 15 or so minutes after we’d first sat down in the restaurant, a third different waiter came over to try to take the order we believed we’d already made. But it turned out that my fretting was unnecessary–our food arrived eventually, and although we had to walk rather briskly to the venue, when we arrived at the Underbelly there was still a queue snaking around the bar waiting to go in. At that point, somebody shouted “Matt!” across the room–which was interesting, because I hadn’t been aware that anyone knew I was there. It turned out to be my old work colleage Angel: of course, I suppose it was inevitable that if we went to see Richard Herring enough times we’d bump into Angel at one of his gigs eventually…

Probably the high point of the weekend for me was Mark Watson at the Pleasance: his faux-Welsh shtick might err on the side of conventional, but it’s very funny nonetheless, and appeals to my silly sense of humour. Unfortunately, the low point of the weekend came just a few hours later on the same evening… We’d been drinking in the bar at the Pleasance after Mark Watson when we were accosted by a Canadian “comic” who was touting for the stand-up show (“Underground Comedy Invasion”) that he was compèring later that night. He told us how they’d already been thrown out of one Fringe venue for being too offensive. He offered us a free “sample joke”. It wasn’t funny, but for some reason we agreed to go to his show anyway. Maybe this was because we were drunk and he offered us the tickets for £2.50 each…

As the time of the show ticked closer, we left ourselves with not quite enough time to get there and ended up rushing to the venue, not quite knowing where it was. We needn’t have worried, though, because as we climbed the stairs of The Green Room, there was our Canadian eating a takeaway pizza out of its box, telling us to keep going all the way up to the top. We also needn’t have worried because it turned out to be just as awful as you would expect a show to be if the compère is forced to tout his own tickets at half price to drunk people in the bars of other venues a few hours before the show.

It started ok, but it got substantially less funny as it went on, and by the time the stage was graced by a Dutch bloke who didn’t appear to have an act, we were ready to leave. [He opened with “Hello. I am a Dutchman and I do not use drugs. [PAUSE] OK. Any Questions?” Which is hilarious, obviously. It wasn’t until the next day that I realised that a good question might have been “Is that it?” or perhaps “Is this the first time you’ve done this?”] And so, with the quality going rapidly downhill, and with tiredness taking over, we were ready to do something we’ve never done before: leave a comedy gig before the end. Unfortunately, at this point the compère took the stage again and said something to the effect of “Right. Normally we’d finish there, but we’re going to carry on. It’s going to get more offensive, though, so if anyone’s easily offended they should leave now.” Damn. Well clearly we couldn’t leave now–it would look like we were just being prudish–so we waited for a bit like cowards. When it didn’t get any better we knew we had to make a break for the exit. There was clearly no way for us to leave the small room unnoticed, and I didn’t know quite how to leave in a way that conveyed the fact that we weren’t leaving because we were offended but mostly because we were tired (and also because it wasn’t really that funny). I made a break for the door and didn’t look back…

We also found ourselves rushing to our final show of the weekend: Andy Zaltzman’s afternoon dose of utopia at The Stand. This was unfortunate, given that, although we didn’t miss the start of the gig, we were too late to get anything other than the seats at the very front of the tiny venue, directly underneath Andy’s nose and close enough to see the sweat on his brow. At any other event I’d be happy to be so close to the front, but of course the reverse rules apply for comedy–luckily Andy isn’t really that sort of comedian, but he does ask the audience for input to help him create his afternoon utopia, and so it was that he asked me a direct question that I struggled to answer in a sufficiently funny way (this was the best I could do: he asked me if I was happy with my life, and what was so great about it, and after a pause all I could come up with was “er… I don’t have to starve to death…?” “Of course”, he responded, “if only they’d tried that in Africa in the 1980s, things would have worked out so much better…”)

Oh and the weekend also included a couple of celeb spots…

Who’s walking away?
Looking short and old and grey?
That was Frank Skinner

[I’m not sure if this one counts, because I realised afterwards that the reason he was leaving the Pleasance Courtyard at that time on the Sunday afternoon was because he’d just done a show there, but I’m claiming it anyway because we hadn’t paid to attend the show and happened to be just sitting on the benches having a beer as he walked past us.]

In the Pleasance bar,
Harassed by Doctor Who fans,
It’s Maureen Lipman

[Poor Maureen Lipman: if there’s a sentence to strike fear in the heart of an actor, then it must surely be the one uttered by the earnest young man who approached her as she stood alone waiting for her friend: “excuse me: I just wanted to say I thought you were wonderful in Doctor Who“.]

Up North for the weekend. Partly this was so that I could see the family (including a sibling who has briefly returned from the other side of the world), but also so that I could exorcise a long-standing demon.

I’ve now been embarrassed about not having a driving licence for over a decade. I took lessons when I was 17, like most people do, but I never really knew what I was doing. And so when I went off to university, where there was no real pressing need to be able to drive, and I had other things on my mind, I basically gave up. When I returned, almost seven years ago, I tried again. This time I actually managed to learn something, but I still managed to do something stupid in my test and fail. Then the test I rebooked in early January 2001 was cancelled due to icy roads, I moved to London to start working, and, with no real pressing need to be able to drive, and other things on my mind, I gave up. Again. Perhaps you can detect a theme developing here.

And so as time passed I gradually changed from being embarrassed about being in my early twenties and not having a licence to being embarrassed about being in my mid twenties and not having a licence, until finally I was embarrassed about being in my late twenties and not having a licence. Whenever the subject of driving would come up in polite conversation I would quietly try to change the subject or hope that I didn’t need to reveal to anyone who didn’t already know that I *gasp* couldn’t drive. I cringed when Dylan Moran’s character in Shaun of the Dead explained how he “didn’t really need to drive in London”. I endured the taunts of Sal’s Australian friends who laughed at me for my inadequacy–the concept of someone of my age not being able to drive being almost as ridiculous to them as it is to the car-obsessed Americans.

So earlier this year (with only a slight push from a girlfriend fed up with doing all the driving whenever we hire a car on holiday) I resolved to do something about it. And despite all the pain and anxiety I’ve associated with the subject of driving for so many years, it turned out to be remarkably straightforward: I took my theory test back in July, which proved to be as stupidly easy as it was the first time (“An old lady is crossing the road in front of you. Do you: a) Speed up, rev your engine and try to take her out, Grand Theft Auto-style; b) Beep your horn, swear at her and gesture for her to get off the road; or c) slow down and wait for her to cross“). After that, it was just a matter of booking in a few refresher lessons and a test, which just happened to be available on a Saturday afternoon in my home town–where I could use my mum’s car and the roads are nice and quiet–on the weekend when I was planning to go home anyway. It was almost like it was meant to be.

By the time I turned back into the test centre at the end of the test, aware that the examiner hadn’t made many marks on his little exam sheet (and that I hadn’t done anything really stupid this time) I was feeling fairly confident, but it was still a shock to hear him say the fateful words “I’m pleased to tell you that you’ve passed”. He might have said these words with no emotion whatsoever, conveying the sense that he was in fact in no way pleased to have unleashed another driver onto the roads, but he said them nonetheless. And I have a piece of paper to prove it.

So there you go. Something that has been such a big deal for me for so long suddenly isn’t. Feels like a bit of an anticlimax really.

So somehow I’ve ended up on some kind of official mailing list for former University of Bristol students. From time to time they email me with desperately dull missives about recent events at the university.

When they’re not doing that, they’re spamming me with promotional bumf about “The Big Bristol Reunion”, which they like to pretend is something organised by a few ex-students who fancied a get-together.

Thing is, I’ve looked at the website for The Big Bristol Reunion and I can’t help thinking that it looks rather familiar…

Oh yeah, that’s because there’s also The Big Birmingham Reunion, The Big Durham Renuion, The Big Bath Reunion, and The Big Reading Reunion. I wonder how many other unique reunion events these people are also organising?

Anyway. The latest email tells me that they’ll be recreating Wedgies. I can’t think of a worse way to spend my time.

The best thing about these events, though, is that their website has a sign-up form for you to register your interest. If you fill it in, then your details will be automatically added to the list of who’s coming that appears on the site (linked from the bottom right corner of the main page). Let’s ignore for a second the fact that this is probably a breach of the Data Protection Act (and isn’t something that they bother to mention in their privacy statement) and just think about the fact that the names are automatically added to the list: there’s no attempt to verify the specified email address, for example. If you have a look at the list then you can see that there are some interesting names on there: “Adolf Hitler”, “Joseph Stalin”, and “Anne Widdecombe” are all planning to attend, apparently. (Actually, that sounds like one hell of a party–maybe I will pop along after all.)

They weren’t even all mine. Perhaps you know a few people who might be going too…

[Oh, and it looks like they’ve forgotten to strip out any HTML tags that might happen to appear in your “name”…]