Apathy Sketchpad

A few weeks ago, a man (I can’t remember his name. For the sake of argument, let’s call him Bernie.) came into our Condensed Matter lecture, with a pack of questionnaires about summer work. I filled mine in and gave it back and that same evening he phoned me up. The next day myself, Adam, and Stavros were sat in a meeting with another guy we’d never met before, and Bernie started explaining that he was looking for students for a scheme of summer work run by Southwestern Company which would involve us “basically running [our] own business for three months”, and earning, on average, £4500. This sounded like quite a good thing to be involved with, but my suspicions were first aroused when he showed us a list of people and their earnings, all of which were around £25000 – £30000, and I began to wonder how many people get nothing to drag the average down to £4500. It turned out to be 30%. I got really puzzled, though, when he announced that if we did a second summer there, it would include valuable management training, which personally I’d have thought would be more useful before we set up our own business. The interesting thing is that during the course of the meeting, the work changed slowly from running our own businesses into selling books door to door, and the only reason we could ever be accused of running a business is because we would technically be independant contractors for legal reasons, the legal reasons in question being that you have to pay actual employees, whereas all we’d get is 35% or so commission.

“But the books are good, aren’t they?”

Oh, yeah, they’re good books, but we don’t want to be selling them. Particularly if it means spending the summer in some random part of the country with a ‘host family’ we’d never have met for a garaunteed income of zero. I feel the fatal flaw in Bernie’s logic was in giving a hard sell. Surely if we’re smart enough to be expected to give a hard sell to people, we’re smart enough to spot one.

At the end of the meeting he handed out applications forms. Stavros was accepted, but is going to Canada and can’t do it, which is a shame, because it would have been fun for him to have had only two jobs ever and for them both to be ones I’d refused. I was totally bored and uninterested, so I flled the form out, because that’s what I do with forms, but I filled it out like I talk, not like I fill out important forms, and Adam excelled himself and got a second round interview (held in the pub) because he’s too polite to say no.

The interview apparently went quite well, from a traditional point of view, but really rather badly from Adam’s rather unique outlook, and he got invited to a third round interview (held in the refectory). Apparently, Bernie was trying to perform ’subtle’ psychometric tests on him, such as monitoring his hand movements and eye contact. This is quite easy to believe, and would certainly explain why he got us to do all that maths in the first meeting. Adam decided to mimic Bernie’s own hand movements, and maintain eye contact at all costs, regardless of whether or not it could be described as a good idea. As far as we know, Bernie never noticed.

Then Bernie made another mistake. He called Adam’s mother to “allay any fears she might have” (or “give her a hard sell too”), and succeeded only in annoying her. As it turned out, Adam’s mother, not being the gullible type, did have a few questions to ask, all perfectly reasonable, and all of which Bernie failed entirely to answer.

Adam eventually told Bernie he didn’t actually want the job after Bernie asked him to write two essays before the third interview. (One was about why he wanted the job, and the other was about why he would be good at it.)

I got an email from my university today which started as follows:

“To all Physics Undergraduates:

“The Department of Physics & Astronomy is holding the World of Work Careers Fair 2003 tomorrow from 2 – 4.30 in the Staff Common Room.”

Unfortunatley, when my mobile forwarding service truncated the message, all I got was this:

“To all Physics Undergraduates:

“The Department of Physics & Astronomy is holding the World”

This was not the most encouraging, or even the most accurate message I was given today by my vast array of personal electronics though. Microsoft, it appears, don’t know the one reason anyone goes into hardware manager. Today it told my my DVD-Drive “is working properly,” which it quite demonstrably was not. Unpeturbed, I clocked Troubleshoot, and got asked a series of irrelevant questions, and told to call my manufacturer.

Now, I think I’ve covered more-or-less what I think of Time Computers’ technical support, but here goes anyway. Without my warranty number (which I think is in Tingley) all I can get is their website. Their website made but one suggestion, which was to insert the boot floppy provided with Windows, and boot from there with CD-ROM support. This was clearly not going to work, for two reasons. The first is rather complicated and not terribly interesting or even amusing, but the second is that I was never given a boot floppy. All Time give you is a reload CD, which allows you to access a pre-installed copy of Windows permanantly stored on your hard drive. And they even had the nerve to try and charge £50 for that. This is clearly not good enough, and if it ever comes to it, I’m going to complain about it. Or just use a copied Windows disc; I have a lisence anyway, so technically, it’s not illegal. Anyway, getting back to my quest for technical support, I knew their suggestion was doomed, so I clicked “No”, and, like last time, they suggested the same thing again, but in a different colour, as if that would make the blindest bit of difference.

Who is it who writes these messages? Why can they never find anyone with a sense of humour? I don’t think many people would mind much if their computers told them “This device appears to be working properly, but then it was Brian who wrote that driver, and personally, I think he’s on the bottle these days.”

According to the Peugeot GTi Autosport Club’s latest newsletter, the European Union have decided, for reasons best known to themselves, that all cars must be named according to their new guidelines. Apparently, they must all be either:
1. A meaningless string of letters and numbers, or
2. A word ending in a vowel.

So to recap: George Bush is trying, quite successfully, to start a war that nobody else wants, pointless litigation cases are costing the government millions, the environment is in its usual state of peril, and the UN is being ignored by most of the major powers in the world, and the EU’s contribution to the mess is to make sure nobody releases the Ford Creation.

I was in Allders recently, and I noticed a product which seemed too random to exist in any reasonable universe. While it has long been common practice for companies to combine existing technologies into one product, quite who decided that a calculator and a baby monitor would combine to make good espionage equipment remains a mystery.

But what I really wanted to talk about is the Personal Attack Alarm most of the girls at Leeds University carry around (the obvious joke to make here being that the alarm will be right at the bottom of their handbag, since they almost never use it, so they’ll take about half an hour to alert anybody). The idea of the Alarm is for women to sound it by pushing something called a Sonic Head when they are being attacked, and the high-pitched, shrill whining noise it makes will disorientate the attacker whilst alerting other people to the incident. All very laudable. The baffling thing about this device, though, is that, for reasons known only to themselves, they have opted to make it look exactly like a dry erase marker pen. It appears that they were trying to disguise it, so attackers wouldn’t know the women had alarms, but it further appears they missed a couple of fairly important points. The first thing they missed is that no women I have ever met carry dry erase pens in their handbags. The second, and probably the most important, is that there is no rhyme or reason why anyone would want to disguise an alarm system. If it was me, I’d want people to know I had an alarm. It might make them think twice about attacking me in the first place. I thought that was what this thing was for. I’d want a t-shirt to come with it saying “Andrew is protected by LUU Personal Attack Alarm Systems”. A dry-erase pen won’t put off any potential attackers, will it? It should look like what it is, or failing that, it should look like a Tommy gun. That would put me off, if I was an attacker.

Another year, another damn Valentine’s day. As far as I’m aware, I got of fairly lightly this year, having spent Valentine’s in Ilkely with the 1224 Wharfdale Squadron, which means a group of my friends, a lot of air cadets who are mostly way too young to even be considered (irritatingly, I seem to be irresistable to fifteen year old girls — four of them have expressed an interest in my MSN profile, and Toni seems to quite like me), and a few important looking people who are too old to be considered as potential girlfriends, and better still, as far as I know Adam never did send Sam a Valentine’s card on my behalf.

Which beats the hell out of Valentine’s 2001, which resulted in Debbie hiding her face for minutes at a time, which is a long time to do nothing at all. I am now under a moral obligation to tell the story, aren’t I?

Oh, well, here goes. I was in sixth form, and it just happened to be Valentine’s — none of this was planned. Not by me, at any rate. I was talking to Fonz, and Debbie was sat next to me, on the table, talking to Cooper. I didn’t hear any of their conversation, until that is she put her arm around me and said to Cooper “Like this?”. This caught me off guard, and I perhaps made an error of judgement — I put my arm round her before asking what was going on — but to be honest, if I could have my time again, I’d do the same exact thing.

So I’m sat with Debbie, our arms around each other’s shoulders, her smiling aimiably and me looking more than a little baffled, and it turns out that Cooper was trying to decide how good a couple we’d make. He seemed impressed with the results. Later on, I asked him about this, and he told me that Debbie fancied me. Now, I’m not stupid, I knew that he was probably not the most reliable of sources, Debbie was nicknamed Double D, and that I was the missing link between geeks and humankind, but the thing is, Debbie seemed to be backing him up on this one. At this time, I was involved in the school debating team (that sounded much less like an innuendo in my head), and I’d been asked to run through my speech in front of the A-Level English class for practice and to get some new questions, since I’d memorised all the ones the rest of the team could come up with. This class included Debbie, and at the end of the speech, when Mr. Boardman asked the class if they’d like to ask me any questions, she asked what type of question. Mr. Boardman said any kind of question would be okay, and Debbie hid her face in her arm for about twenty seconds.

Later that day, having decided after the unfortunate incident with Nicky that I didn’t care anymore what anyone there thought of me any more, I asked Debbie outright whether or not she fancied me (I put it more delicately than that at the time, of course). She hid her face some more, and stopped responding to people talking to her, or prodding her with things. After that, we were pretty good friends until we went to seperate universities, and now I hardly ever see her. Ah, well.