Apathy Sketchpad

This column goes out to all the women in the world who have ever asked themselves “why doesn’t he call?”. I am a man, and if you know me at all, then you will believe me when I tell you that I do not pass up that kind of an opportunity for the sake of a phone call (unless, of course, Donna is reading this column. For those of you who don’t already know, Donna is a, shall we say, rather mercenary woman I met on Wednesday night as I walked alone through Leeds, and she obviously doesn’t know me at all, because it should be plain from the quality of hosting this site has had so far that I refuse to pay for anything I think there’s even the slightest chance I could get for free). It took me until this evening to work out the problem, though.

The problem is on your end, girls (and if it isn’t, then the irony hasn’t gone unnoticed). It’s because you all buy phones with “vibrate” features, and then put them in your handbags. Bags, of course, I am in favour of. They allow you to carry many items at once, and without them it would be nigh on impossible to complete Magicland Dizzy. But just as the wheel gave birth to the Fiat Multipla, the humble bag spawned the Woman’s Handbag. Mobile phones do not belong in bags, they belong in pockets with your wallet (or purse). Unfortunately, for a reason which has baffled male scientists since the dawn of mobile telecommunications, these items both end up in the handbag. And the reason is this: nothing else will fit in there. It was commonplace when I was at high school to see girls walking around with a tiny bag containing a phone, a purse, and a key (or sometimes two), and three large carriers containing all their actual stuff.

So next time you wonder why he doesn’t call, take your phone out of your bag (even if this means emptying the contents all over the sofa), and actually listen for the damn thing. I find it a little too hard to believe the number of times I have been able to get trough to a man on his mobile (at least nine out of ten times) compared to the equivalent figure for women (which must be less than one in ten).

Just beneath the ingredients list on Campbell’s tomato soup, is this message:

“Contains 116.5g of tomatoes in every 100g.”

Now, I realise there are rules and conventions about product labels, but that is plainly a lie. By definition, 116.5g of tomato weighs 116.5g, and when you add other things to it it weighs more than that, so logically 100g of soup must contain less that 100g of tomatoes. What is the point of having laws about labelling if companies are bound by these laws to print lies on their products?

Could someone tell me what the point is in Diet Pepsi? Coca Cola is wonderful stuff. It’s a mixer, a hangover cure, it tastes good, and it’s totally ubiquitous so you can get it anywhere and it’s always the same. Pepsi is a sort of cheap, sub-standard version of Coke. It comes in three varieties: Pepsi, Pepsi Max, and Diet Pepsi. Now, I’m not certain what is in Pepsi Max or plain Pepsi, but I know they taste alright. Not as good as Coke, naturally, but alright nonetheless. Diet Pepsi, though, is nothing. Almost literally. The nutritional information states that it contains trace amounts, or none at all, of all listed nutrients, and only 1.2kJ per 100ml. The ingredients list is worse still. The main ingredient is water, as it is with most soft drinks (except Sunny Delight, which is oil based. Oh, how I wish I was joking). The second is colouring, in this case a form of caramel. The third is phosphoric acid, and the remainder of the drink is made up of preservatives, flavourings, and other chemicals listed with vague descriptions and E numbers instead of their name.

All this combines to give a bottle of runny black pointlessness, which turns entirely into foamy beige pointlessness if you make the mistake of trying to pour it anywhere. Now someone tell me why I want to drink that?

I have never been a fan of loyalty cards. I have to carry enough pointless plastic around with me, without having an extra card for every shop I plan to visit. Perhaps it says something that while almost every other supermarket in the country advertises that it has such a scheme, Morison’s make it a selling point that they don’t. From a business point of view, of course, it makes a lot of sense to try and encourage repeat business like this, but if my wallet is too heavy after a trip shopping, I want it to be full of cash, not reward cards. Recently, a group of companies decided I was right, and started Nectar. This meant that you can now carry one card for a number of places, and in principle this is a Good Thing.

What I don’t understand is why Ford joined. Now I realise that some people buy cars for the wrong reasons (for example ‘it is a Fiat Multipla’. They’re so ugly you probably couldn’t get it up in the back seat), but I doubt if many people will say “I’ll buy a Ford Focus for the reward points”. There are 15,000 points up for grabs when you buy a car on your Nectar card, and this will get you a bottle of shampoo from Sainsbury’s on your next visit. Enjoy.

Not that I want to spoil then end of this story, but the fact is that I now own a shiny new mobile phone.

The first store I went to (I wane to most of them; they’re all neatly lined up along one road in the town centre) was the Carphone Warehouse. Just as I predicted, they cater almost exclusively for contract phones, and offer a total of about six phones on O₂ (which all my friends use, and therefore so do I) pay-and-go, the cheapest being an old Nokia model, probably a 3410, which was going for about £85. This was, of course, a highly sensible phone to buy, but I didn’t like it for a number of reasons. I arbitrarily didn’t really to stick with Nokia, and that model would feel like a big step down after using a 7110 for so long, even a defective one. The next shop I looked in was the Nokia shop. The Nokia shop is full of Nokia’s very latest range of dark-grey monsters with Qwerty keyboards (a subject I think I have made my views perfectly clear about, but there’s a funny story I have to tell you which I will attach to the end of this column where you won’t be expecting it) and needlessly large price tags. Personally, I suspect Nokia are going to lose a lot of market share if they don’t just stop making their new phones so gut-wrenchingly ugly. For example, the 3650 has the number buttons laid out in a circle, which is totally impractical for texting, whereas the 6800 has a full unfoldable keyboard, but it’s a Qwerty. Anyhow, I obligingly picked up a price list from both stores, and moved on to the O₂ store. The O₂ store, like the others, had a small range of pay-and-go phone offers, but one of them caught my eye. It was a Sony Ericsson T300 (if that means anything to you) for £75. This, it should be stated, is a fairly new phone, which normally costs a little over £100, with that much again to buy a camera to go with it. I got a camera free in the box.

Naturally, they had sold out, but I went back the next day and got one then. While it did come with a SIM card I didn’t want, I have used its SIM card a little, purely because I get free WAP for a month with it, and that means I can download stupid games with it. This, of course, means my new phone can do all the things I specifically said I didn’t need it to in the last column, but I’m more than willing to put up with some extra functionality if it means I get a cheaper phone.

And now, the Qwerty keyboard story you’d all but forgotten was coming. This takes place a few weeks ago, when Stavros had come back for a few days to pick up some things and leave again (and he left a lot of stuff, which we reclassified as “ours”). We were in the kitchen, and I think I was complaining about the aforementioned Nokias having Qwerty keyboards, and Stavros said “Yes, but the Qwerty keyboard is designed so that all the commonly used letters are closer together,” which is a common misconception, but still a large, important one, since that is precisely what the Qwerty keyboard was designed not to do. I told him the correct story behind the Qwerty keyboard, that is, that it was designed to separate the common keys in order to stop typewriters jamming if you typed too fast, and that everyone was stuck with the stupid things now because it was an idiotic convention. He said I was being very bitter about the whole thing, and considering how much typing I do I think I had every right to be. And then, he said one of very few things which have ever left me speechless. He said “It’s never your fault, is it

Now, I am very aware that one of my failings is that I have a habit of making excuses and blaming other things before myself, but I fail to see, even after lengthy thought on the subject, how it can be in any way my fault that typewriter designers were lazy before I was even born. Personally, I put this down to Stavros being Stavros, and picking an whatever failing he can think of before choosing something relevant to complain about.

I made a mistake today, I think. Partly on a whim, and partly for convenience I bought a new mouse, and considering how wireless and optical it is, and how many buttons it has, it has a suprisingly PS2 based connection. Nevertheless, I have no other use for my PS2 ports, so it seems logical. I have owned the mouse now for a little over seven hours, in which time it has started working arbitrarily, and stopped under equally suspicious circumstances. The trouble is, I get the distinct impression that the people who wrote the instructions have had rather less experience of the device than I have. They appear to have invented at least three switches which patently do not exist, and informed me exactly where they should face. The good news, of course, is that my problem is one (well, in fact two, since for no good reason they wrote it out twice) of only six listed in troubleshooting. The inevitable bad news, of course, is that not one of the four solutions work, and nor does any combination of them. This, combined with the fact that the wheel fails to pop up when you press it in, and the fact that it weighs more than any other mouse I have ever known has left me a little disillusioned with the whole idea, and if it doesn’t pick up and start working before Adam gets back and expects me to give back his optical mouse I’ve borrowed to replace it, then it might have to go back to the shop whence it came. But by far the most interesting point is that while the Microsoft mouse troubleshooter is nigh-on impossible to use with only the keyboard, the installation software from Trust is actually impossible to use if you have followed their instructions and uninstalled your old mouse drivers.

A week ago today we moved into the new house. Naturally, this was not an operation which was performed quickly and smoothly by a team of individuals working like a well oiled machine, or it if was, then said machine was one of the stepper motors we had to use for our electronics project. We were first hampered by a very inconsiderate decision to hold an international cricket match in Headingly Stadium and therefore gridlock several major roads, and then further hampered by the previous tenants almost total faliure to move out, or more accurately, faliure to move any of their stuff out. They arrived later to remove some things, but they left a healthily stocked cupboard of tins and lots of surplus furniture, which combined with our food and furniture, and the food and furniture we stole from Stavros meant that yesterday the landlord had to come to collect some of it, and he’ll be back for more later in the week.

To speed up this operation, Lee offered to move said furniture downstairs. In retrospect that may have been a mistake. The matresses came willingly. The beds put up quite a fight, but don’t actually weigh anything so weren’t much trouble. The sofa was an evil sofa sent by Satan direct to the first floor of our house, to torment us. It is too heavy to be moved more than a few feet by one person, and we had to get it through a doorway narrower than it, along a landing, round two corners, down a flight of stairs, and then somewhere out of the way. While this naturally entailed a lot of fun and games at first manouvering the sofa to the top of the stairs, the fun part came when it got there. We eventually just put an armchair at the base of the staircase and sent the sofa sliding down into that.

The new house came with a strange token meter, which I didn’t think existed any more, and had been run into the red by the previous tenants. The previous tenants, I should mention, included two guys who everybody just called “The Crook Brothers”. At first I assumed that it was just because they were two crooks who hung around together, but it turned out was because they were two crooks who were brothers and whose last name was Crook. Which strikes me as foolish. If your last name is Meadows, then subconsiously people are more likely to trust you than if you’re plainly a crook and your passport says so. It also came with its own tramp (or more correctly a tramp we share with the whole street) who is happy to take anything we don’t want, so must have been delighted when we threw out all of the Messers Crook’s kitchenware after Lizzy declared it kitchenware “of ming”. He also has about three beds and some pillows now, making him officially the third most comfortable tramp in the world.

Meanwhile, the stange token meter was running down very quickly at first, and this turned out to be because the upstairs shower (also of ming) which was left on and refused to be turned off. Eventually I trusted it with enough of my weight that I decided it would either break and kill me, or switch off, if I pulled it hard enough. Incredibly, both these things happened at the same time (it turned off and broke; it plainly didn’t kill me), which is behaviour I haven’t seen from a switch since Fantasy World Dizzy.

There is a major flaw with today’s education system. The flaw is that almost every single thing you are taught at school is either worthless, a lie, or both. I was told lots of interesting lies about electron shells, but know of no way to tell acid from water without tasting it or owning a special type of paper, I can quote several lines of Dickens and Shakespeare, but can’t spell, and I know my way around a glacier like a native, but can’t find my way anywhere. This last one is partly because our political geography teacher was so thoroughly dull, while our physical geography teacher was much more interesting, until he was arrested for serial paedophilia and that was the last anyone saw of him.

This effect, though, I think is because so many subjects basically are pointless. I don’t think my life will be enhanced very far by my knowing the difference between meiosis and mitosis. I think I can survive without an intimate knowledge of the works of Archimboldo. But if it wasn’t enough that so many of the subjects they teach are inherently useless for any purpose other than passing the appropriate exam (by which token, they may as well offer a class in MarioKart Studies), the few subjects which by rights should be very useful concentrate on the most worthless things they can find. For example, here is a list of things you might use mathematics for in day-to-day life:

• Working out how much change you should get.
• Working out if you have time to take a shower before Scrubs is on.
• Working out how much of a bill is Your Share.
• Working out how many tiles you need to cover a wall.

Conversely, here is a list of things you would be taught in school if you chose to study mathematics:

• How to solve a quadratic equation.
• How to convert the sine of an angle into the

cosine of twice that angle.

• How to integrate 2x³+x²+4x+1 with respect to x.
• The entire Greek alphabet.

This, though, is just about acceptable. If I’d launched into this physics degree without A-Level mathematics to fall back on, I don’t think I could have coped, and they can only teach division for so long before it becomes old hat (though having said that, I still haven’t been taught long division).

Similarly, I have an A grade in GCSE French. One might expect this would qualify me to have a polite conversation with someone in French, but one would be wrong and had one bet money on this point, one would be the poorer for it. Our French teacher would begin each lesson by leaving for ten minutes, and upon his return would invariably be very suprised that we had spent the time chatting instead of second guessing his lesson plan and beginning to work. After this brief respite, he would begin to teach us unhelpful French phrases. (I didn’t have this problem in German class, because I didn’t try to learn any German. I only scraped through the exam because they forgot to collect the reading test before the writing test, and I copied all the vocabulary from one to the other. To date the only German phrases I know are “Ich heibe Andrew” and “Ich wille meine Lehrer fur Deutch war gestorben”, and I’m not sure about the second one.) Could somebody tell me what possible use it could be to me to know the French word for ‘rocket’? Might they then explain why I was taught how to tell people on the continent what my favourite number is? They’re numbers. They’re boring. They’re boring in English, they’re boring in French, they’re boring in Swahili. They’re boring. The only thing of any practical value I was taught is how to ask for directions and how to ask for food and drink. And, of course, “Je ne parle pas français. Parlez-vous anglais?”, but beyond that I’m almost completely stuck, since it is nearly impossible to hold a conversation without using the conditional tense or any modal verbs at all. I can only assume my grade was some kind of a mistake.

It would however be wrong of me to criticise a system like this without offering a viable alternative, so I will attempt to do so now. Since the General Studies qualification has been tried, tested, and found more than a little wanting (example: I have exactly no general knowledge, yet I gained an A* in GCSE General Studies. This is in part due to the fact that the languages section was a French article about hotels in space, and as I mentioned, by either astonishing foresight or randomly flicking through a dictionary, my education thus far had included the French words for space travel), I suggest isolating the most common brain defects in modern man and attempting to rectify them in schools. Therefore, I advise dropping some of the more worthless information adding to the curriculum the following useful lessons:

• Never turn a toaster to maximum.
• Lots and lots of people smoke. You are not rebelling. You just smell bad.
• You do not need a mobile phone when you’re eleven.
• You can never have too much Blu Tack.

This would, of course, reduce the number of people with specialist knowledge, but this would alleviate the teacher shortage and reduce the number of lawyers, which can only be a good thing, despite any objections from the owners of Godloves Solicitors, whose sign always makes me laugh.

To finish, look up the word ‘academic’ in a dictionary. You will find two definitions:

1. Pertaining to the education system, and,
2. Pointless.

I would like to buy a new mobile phone, and in today’s society, one would think this would be a relatively straightforward affair, since due to their ware’s almost total ubiquity, mobile phone shops are about the only things that aren’t Starbucks or McDonald’s yet. However, I just know that the first question I would be asked, were I to walk in to such a store and say “I’m looking to buy a phone” is “And what network would you like to be on?”. And I know that while the answer I would like to give is “No, I think you misunderstand me. I want to buy a phone. I do not want a contract, I do not want an E-Top Up Card, and I do not want a SIM card. I want to buy a phone,” I know I would actually say “None, thankyou”. And therein lies the problem, you see: mobile phone shops are not designed for the likes of me. I don’t particularly want a phone with a camera in it, I don’t want to send those terrible black and white picture messages, I don’t want to download new Java games for a pound a time from a WAP connection, and I don’t want to send text messages of 400 characters or more. This, of course, means I could quite happily use a fairly cheap phone, and since I can make a £20 top up last for months on end, I don’t need this purchase to be subsidised by a large phone company with an intriguing name in exchange for my giving them £15 a month for the next year regardless of whether I actually call anybody.

What I actually want from a phone is the ability to make phone calls, send text messages, and store a moderately ridiculous amount of phone numbers, under a much smaller number of names, sort these into a large number of groups (ideally with their own ringtones), and ideally be able to link it to my PC and transfer all the numbers from my current phone into it quickly and easily, but I’m almost certain the sales staff will not know which phones are best at this. They’ve only been shown the same information as me, that is, a big table listing which of the many and various features I will never, ever use each phone has, its battery life, and its price.

Of course, in theory there’s nothing wrong with my current phone. It can do all the things I want it to. It does have some advantages, but unfortunately, the 7110 comes free with a large number of rather basic design flaws. I like that the microphone is next to your mouth when you use it, but the microphone is attached to a large plastic sheet by approximately three cubic millimetres of plastic, which break the first time you drop it, and then slowly works loose for the next year, until nobody can hear a word you say. I like that you can slide it open by pressing a hidden button on the back; this looks very cool, but it’s broken. I like the phone book system, but unfortunately most of the options are in the wrong order, for example, if I want to send a message to a number in my address book, I am forced to scroll through call, edit number, erase number, change type, set as default, view, add number, add text, send card via IR, print card via IR, and send card before I am allowed to text it. After a while of this I decided to try scrolling up instead, and that still forced me to scroll through call, erase, copy, edit name, and speed dial. I like that I can text while talking on the phone, but I don’t like that it transmits a loud beep for every keypress to the person I’m talking to when I do this. I like the profiles system, but I don’t like that it only has five to chose from. But the most bizarre problem with my phone is that if I want to add a reminder on the first of June, it will invariably confuse it with any reminder I have on the 22nd of April. If I then delete the June reminder, the April one will disappear instead.