Hooptedoodle #263 - The Airline and the Krell

I was not personally impacted by the dreadful systems failure which hit British Airways and their customers a few days ago - my heartfelt sympathy is extended to anyone whose holiday was destroyed, or who suffered personal discomfort or inconvenience - all of that goes without saying. I am interested to see that there will be an independent enquiry into what went wrong - I fear that there might just be a whitewash job, or that some poor department head somewhere will be the subject of a token beheading, but in principle I look forward to seeing what they come up with. This is something of a hobbyhorse of mine. Certainly the current official explanation that it was all due to a power surge of some sort seems so laughable that it is equivalent to the old catch-all, "the dog ate my homework", though, naturally, it would be unwise to pre-judge. Already, there is sinister mention of software support having been outsourced to India - erm - right...

There was a professor from Glasgow University on BBC Radio 4 this morning, talking about the boring but rather essential matter of system resilience. He talked a lot of sense - there is not much sense around on the radio at the moment (don't get me started on the Election).

If you will forgive me, I'll plead for two quick timeouts at this point; the first is a link to a post I wrote here almost 5 years ago - The Banks and the Krell - about the increasing scope for catastrophic system failures in business, and the implications for society in general. If you care to check that out, it will save me saying a lot of the same things again. If you do not care to, that's fine too.

The Krell's computer installation in The Forbidden Planet

The second is a short story about a car I used to own. It was a 1995 Mercedes - only Mercedes I ever owned, and it was a great car - not very exciting, but dependable, and built to last. The date is significant, because it was a period when cars were starting to be equipped with automatic sensors and systems which were intended to make life simpler for the motorist, but also meant that the family car was becoming more and more of a mystery to both the owner and the supposed mechanics at his local dealership.

After a while, my Mercedes suddenly started suffering frequently from a flat battery - eventually it was every morning. The dealer replaced the battery (at Mercedes prices, of course), and checked the car over - no problems. Well - not so fast. The battery was flat again the following morning - that's the new battery with the clean new labels on it. The car went back to the dealer, who kept it for two days and returned it with a clean bill of health. Battery was flat again the next day. A terse phone call prompted the offer of another replacement battery under the terms of the warranty.

In desperation I took the car to a proper automotive electrical engineer somewhere near Prestonpans, and within an hour he had identified the problem. The car was fitted with a special sensor, the entire purpose of which was to detect if the electric windows had been left open when the vehicle was locked with the remote key. If it found that any one was open, it automatically switched in the motors which closed the windows. Great idea, eh? Unfortunately, the sensor had become faulty, so that when the car was locked the system incorrectly detected an open window, and attempted to shut it. Since the sensor was faulty, of course, the car was never satisfied that the windows were now closed, and it continued to try to close them continuously until next time it was unlocked. This doesn't mean that the motors were grinding away - the motor would not actually run if there was any resistance (another safety feature), but it would keep checking and trying - silently - and by the next morning this would have consumed enough power to flatten the battery.

The engineer rang the workshop at the Mercedes dealer and discussed the options with them; I could pay £370 + VAT for a replacement system - no other possibilities. In fact there was one other possibility, but I'll get to that.

I talked it through with the engineer. I was probably going to sell the car within a year anyway, and I had never left - nor was I likely to leave - the windows open when I locked the car. If I did, the worst result would be an open window - without the keys, the immobiliser system (Ha!) would prevent anyone pinching the vehicle.

Thus my £370 + VAT would provide a complete solution to a problem which I was unlikely to have. The alternative was simply to remove the fuse from the bit of the system wiring which supplied power to the Windows-Open-When-Locked sensor - the cost of this would be zero, of course, though I might be at risk, however unlikely, of leaving the windows open by mistake. No brainer - I went for the cheaper solution.

There are many lessons like this, but that one stuck in my mind - someone had provided a costly, over-the-top, luxurious solution to a problem which did not seem terribly serious, and - after it became defective - had thereby generated a much more significant operational problem in my use of the car. Something wrong there?

This whole industry expanded at a crazy rate - huge cleverness being applied to provide solutions to problems which might or might not exist, in the holy names of convenience and (the ultimate trump card) safety. My wife's current car knows when it's raining, knows when you need to change gear, knows when it needs to switch on the lights, knows the numbers in the phonebook on her mobile, will give you running statistics on things you never even thought of, has a built-in satellite navigation system, has an intelligent cruise control system which can be set to maintain a minimum distance to the car in front and - of course - can park itself without your assistance. It's wonderful that a piece of everyday technology can do all these things, and some of them are definitely useful, but what's going on here? If my wife's car suddenly stops running, or if the doors decide they are not going to let her get in, she is well and truly stuck. There is no question of opening the bonnet and spraying WD40 on the plug leads, or improvising a temporary fanbelt replacement. She is stuck. All she can do is phone up on her mobile, and get a mechanic with a laptop to come when he can, and diagnose what the problem is.

Righto - our cars are very unlikely to conk out, compared with cars we've had in the past - this is the power of technological progress - but if they do then the degree of well-and-truly-stuckness may be of a different order from what we have seen in the past. Not only has our vehicle let us down, an event which we will not have expected and for which we will not have a back-up plan, but our greatly diminished residual experience of coping with emergencies, of applying flexibility and adaptability, of having contingency margins built into our Plan for Today, the unfamiliarity of having to switch on our own lights and wipers, of getting to Lancaster without having a robot tell us what to do - none of these things is going to be a big help.

To sum up - the technology looks after us wonderfully well, but if anything fails we can be more desperately exposed than we used to be.

Consider the mobile phone networks. Presumably your local (or national) service could be impacted by a power surge (surely not?), or a malware attack - it is even possible for natural events like unaccustomed levels of sunspot activity to cause technology headaches. It could happen. If it does, how many kids will be out of touch - lost somewhere on the way home from school? - how many mothers are going to be running around screaming OMG? - how many calls will not be made to rescue sevices in response to genuine emergencies? - how many online banking transactions will fail because the text message to the mobile with the passcode will not work? - how clever is your Apple Pay app going to be in the supermarket? Does any of us have any idea what we could do, in the event of what might be a fairly routine and low-level failure?

Well - you might, quite possibly - but I know that I don't, and I've thought about it - I used to have to think about things like this in my old job. My 2012 post about the Krell was mostly about the fact that we take these advances for granted, and we very quickly forget what it is they are  doing for us, and what it was that we used to do for ourselves before they arrived. We do not understand how the business which employs us works, because normally we do not need to; we do not know how to spell "laughs out loud" in full, nor how to read a map, because we no longer do things like that - there's no demand for that sort of knowledge.

If your airline of choice has a major systems collapse, and they do not seem even to know what it is, or what caused it, you may not find this reassuring. One day, aircraft may be so complex that only the onboard flight systems know how to fly them - with who knows what level of outside communication with global systems. In a world where, to save money, we are trying to achieve UK passenger trains manned by a single individual, how long will it be before the flight crew on a plane are just there to serve the coffee and make sure the computer is happy? At what stage will progress mean that they are no longer able to land the stupid thing without the technology?

Do you feel lucky, punk?

Hooptedoodle #247 - Hmmm

This was passed to me - I have no idea where it came from, and certainly no right to borrow it, but - at the end of a Christmas holiday which seems to have been dominated by arguments about how much time my son might be able to spare from his computer games and his new phone - it does have a certain wistful quality.

Of course, why should we care about the thoughts of an old man, with wrinkly skin and unconditioned hair? [No - I am referring to Albert...]

Hooptedoodle #242 – They Say the Neon Lights are Bright on Broadband

In which a new gizmo arrives, and British Telecom make one last, bravura attempt to be a pain in the backside.

As I mention fairly regularly, I live in a rural area, and one of the consequences of this is that we have had very poor broadband since forever. This in itself is just a fact of life if you choose to live in the middle of nowhere, but things have actually got steadily worse over recent years – for a start, there are more people online out here, so traffic levels are getting further and further beyond the capacity of the available service, and, for another thing, the global assumption that everyone now has fibre-optic connections which blow your hat off has meant that all the resulting add-on claptrap noise of advertising screws up what bandwidth is left by sending you gratuitous video clips of things you didn’t want to see in the first place. In the last couple of years, it has been a feature of my email that I cannot read it until I have seen some advert of the day – frequently this is a completely irrelevant American advert (this because our ISP, BT, provide an email service which is really just a very poor relation of Yahoo’s), and often it could take up to a minute to reach me from a server in Ohio or similar. Your blood pressure can do some surprising things in a minute.

The fundamental problem has been the distance between here and our nearest telephone exchange. We pay BT for a service which is officially 1 Mb/sec, but it is normally about one fifth of that. Not fast. We were, of course, promised by that nice Mr Cameron that everyone in Britain would soon have superfast broadband, and BT have even published some grandiose plans for implementing this, but no-one was holding their breath around here. BT have finally admitted that there will be 5% of the UK population for whom fast broadband is just not going to be available – we are in the 5%. You may imagine us, sitting around a campfire in our animal skins, playing with bones and baying at the moon.

Well, there is a new game in town. As a result of a local government initiative, a private company, Lothian Broadband, has created a new infrastructure which provides broadband by wireless connection. Our hamlet is now connected. Our broadband is transmitted from the hill of Traprain Law, some 10 miles away, a shared receiver/relayer then sends signals to the individual households, via little aerials – ours is shown in the photo. As broadband goes, it is not especially cheap, but for a total outlay similar to what I was paying BT we now get an effortless 12Mb/sec. This may not seem impressive to you, but for us this is a whole new world.

Good.

Very pleased.

I have, of course, taken the opportunity to remove broadband from the services I receive from BT. It was harder to get it sorted out than I expected. As of last month, I was paying BT some £69 per month in total, including a charge for this lamentable broadband service, and – as it happens – my account was some £83 in credit. I spent a fair amount of time on the phone to BT on Thursday, explaining that I wished to keep my telephone services exactly as they were, but to drop the broadband. OK. It was explained to me that my new monthly bill (ignoring any extra call charges that arise) will be £28.74 per month. That seems reasonable – that’s about £40 down on what it was, which compares favourably with the £35 I shall be paying to the new broadband provider.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I received a confirmatory email stating that my new monthly payment to BT from December would be £72. That’s right – though my account is in credit at the moment, and though the broadband will be removed from the service I receive, my monthly payment was to increase by £3. The email stated that if I did not agree with this, or if there was something incorrect about the proposed changes to the service, I should phone 0800 800 150. So I did.

This number puts you in touch with a technical support team (in New Delhi), who do not know anything about the product ranges or the pricing. All they could do was arrange for the Sales people (in Leeds, I think) to phone me back. This was done, and eventually I got confirmation that the revised service will be what I actually asked for, and that the monthly payment will, in fact, be about £30. That’s more like it.

There was a time when I would have been interested to know just why they had been prepared to charge me a completely fraudulent amount, but I no longer care. I don’t get my broadband from them any more. They can, in fact, go to Hell.

Hooptedoodle #237 - Scammers - some good news at last

A few weeks ago, while I was at my mother’s home, waiting for an ambulance to take her into hospital, the phone rang. I was expecting a situation update anyway, so I answered it very quickly. On the other end was a very cheerful gentleman – almost certainly from the Indian subcontinent – who was obviously sitting in a large room full of other busy callers. He told me his name was Ronald (is Ronald a common name in Kolkata?) and that he was calling from the Windows Help Team.

Normally I would just have put the phone down and practised my deep breathing for a few moments, but that was not a good day, so, Ronald, if you ever read this, I apologise for my language, and I sincerely hope you did not attempt to follow my instructions on what you could do with yourself. Nothing personal, mate.

I’ve become a bit detached from phone scammers now – I wouldn’t say I have forgotten them, but we now have a wonderful in-house phone system here which filters out and blocks problem calls so successfully that we have had none for many months – and it used to be a major issue for us, as featured in my previous rants on the subject (see here). At one time, things got so bad that I got a little obsessed with this evil industry, and I even managed to get hold of some names and (unbelievably) Facebook profiles for some of the individuals behind it. Not that I could (or would) do anything about it – just to have a look at the enemy.

These call-centres are often more sophisticated than they sound, and employ good quality
technology - there is a lot of money in this so-called industry

If a scammer cold-calls, of course, the only sensible action is to put the phone down on him, and don’t respond. Occasionally, I admit, I did attempt to be clever, but it was always a waste of time and effort - the callers have heard it all before. My only minor success (debatable) came on another occasion when I was at my mum’s, and, since I had a few minutes, I played along a little. I told the caller that he had got through to a day-centre run by the Church of Latter Day Escapologists, and that we had no computer here. In fact, I told him, we at the CLDE do not believe in technology, so we do not have a telephone, either. Undaunted, he launched into his spiel. When it was obviously my turn to speak, I kept silent for a while. He asked me was I still there, and I asked him, was he a religious man? Yes, he said, he was. And does your mother know what you do for a living, I asked – he hung up. It would be nice to believe that I scored a hit, but I know in my heart that he was either bored or else needed to get on with meeting his quota.

OK, Foy – so why have you dragged this old stuff out of the archives? Do you, perchance, have some kind of point to make?

Well, in fact, maybe I have. I am delighted to learn that the police in Thane, near Mumbai, the chief financial centre in India, have arrested a great many people who were involved in a phone scam which targeted individuals who were on lists of US tax defaulters – at its peak, this scam has been making $150,000 a day. The local police are now working with the FBI, we are told, to progress this through the courts.

Hallelujah.

This may be a false dawn, or a damp squib, or any kind of inappropriate metaphor you wish to suggest – it may come to nothing at all. On the other hand, the mere fact that the Indian police are prepared to get involved in this kind of initiative is a reason to be just a little hopeful – the general view in the past has been that the police and the telecom companies in India have been liberally bunged with backhanders to stop them interfering. A more active role would be a great start.

Interesting press photo of a group arrested in India in connection with a different
phone-based scam - seems to confirm my general feeling that you should never trust
people who wear rectangular eye-shades.

I promise I shall not get obsessed again, but I really do see this kind of scam activity as especially vicious and heartless, and any small steps towards stopping it are most welcome. Having some evidence that at least the Indian police now regard it as a crime is certainly very pleasing.

The BBC news story about this can be found here.

If the link doesn’t work for you, please email me with your credit card details, including the 3-digit security code, and my helpdesk people will be in touch.

Hooptedoodle #223 - Donkey Award - Daily Telegraph

It would be unkind to criticise the Telegraph - that's a bit like criticising someone's senile auntie - but misinformation (a fashionable commodity in these pre-Referendum days in Britain) is always a bit hard to stomach, and I thought I'd speak up on behalf of those poor people in London, who may be being misled again.

I was looking around for details about the construction of the Channel Tunnel, including numerical data - cubic yards of rock shifted, how long it took - all that. I found some interesting stuff, including a couple of good articles on the Telegraph's website. In the middle of one of the articles, up popped the advert at the top of this post. I realise that newspapers have to suck people into things like fake opinion polls, to score some advertising revenue from some completely irrelevant supplier.

However, I thought the questions were kind of interesting - mostly because they made me wonder whether there are any grown-ups working in the marketing area at the Telegraph. I can see that the construction of the Tunnel was quite an achievement, though I'll duck any further discussion about who the Telegraph thinks might be coming through it at the moment; don't get me started on the London Bloody Olympics, which was yet another bulk transfer of funds from the Provinces to the capital, with the odd personal fortune for Lord Snooty and His Pals thrown in; the one which caught my eye was question 3.

Just a minute - Britain won the Rugby World Cup? I didn't think Britain had ever entered the Rugby World Cup, though I do recall England winning it. Don't tell me the Braying Jeremies at Twickers read the Telegraph?

I gather this advert predates the most recent Rugby World Cup. Anyway, no matter.

Hooptedoodle #222 - Donkey Award - SO

As befits one who might be (charitably) described as verbose, I love language – I am entranced by it – fascinated by it. Not in a useful, academic way, but in a more generalised, gosh-just-look-at-that sort of way.

I am besotted with etymology, with connections between languages, ancient and modern, origins of sayings or colloquialisms, dialects, unusual or outmoded words – I even have a great fondness for slang, and children’s verbal traditions,  and where it all comes from. One great, unexpected bonus I got from my reading about the ECW was exposure to the writing and spelling of the 17^th Century – before standardised spellings, people would write what they said, or what they thought others said, which is alarming to the newcomer but gives us an insight into how spoken English must have sounded at that time, and the regional (and, I suppose, class-related) variations in this.

Take a look at the lovely maps of John Speed, from the period around 1610 – check the spellings of the place names – and, of course, the names themselves. Try to imagine where Speed got these names from – from older maps? – Domesday Book? - from local people? – somewhere else?

I have here CS Terry’s book on the life and campaigns of Alexander Leslie – that’s Lord Leven to you and me – sometime Field Marshal in the service of Gustavus Adolphus, later the guiding light of the Covenanter armies. There is much of his correspondence – with the spellings of the day, we can very quickly spot a Scottish speaker from the phonetic way he writes – much of it is still familiar and recognisable.

I understand that language has always changed and evolved, with migration, colonisation, education and religious influences, and – always – with fashion. Obviously, if language never changed, everybody around here in Lowland Scotland would still be speaking Old Brythonic, and I doubt if a single word of that ancient language is still in common use here. And – just a minute – Brythonic must have replaced something older. Like all change, there is a strict limit on the extent to which we can restrict it to what we, subjectively, regard as constructive, or acceptable. We may fight against it or lament it – the educators and the clerics and even the government may try to direct it, but speech is, by its nature, just a flow - the currency of the street, the market, the home, the newspaper (OMG) – it evolves, for the most part, on its own, and the rate of change is accelerating, as the world shrinks and its communications technology moves further into overkill.

Fashions come and go – most of them we probably don’t even notice. To be honest, to offer a couple of examples, I could have managed nicely without the Valley Girls, or the infuriating “Ya?” of the Yuppie Years, or the idiotic fashion for forcing a rising cadence into everyday speech, so that a statement sounds like a question (the usual explanation for this is that it is a sort of running comprehension check – it’s also usually blamed on the Australians, though I’m sure that’s unfair). I am disgusted by the way in which the worthwhile ancient word “like” has been converted into some insane form of punctuation – here’s a commonplace example – this is top model, Jamie Gunns, being interviewed – seems a nice girl, but what on earth is she talking about? Anyone have any observations on educational and cultural decline in the UK?

I am, you must understand, someone who insists on sending text messages which are grammatically correct, solidly punctuated and free of acronyms – I even have the predictive support switched firmly off. Why? I hate to think why – perhaps, in my sad little way, I am fighting some lost cause. Pompous ass. I also have to confess that exposure to US spellcheckers on my Mackintosh has rather dulled my awareness of English vs American spelling – I used to be very sniffy about this, but now I’m no longer sure which version I meant. Perhaps this is progress?

Which brings me – having choked off a whole lot more of the same – to the word “so”.

I have a bad history with “so”. There was a fashion for extended spelling – presumably to denote a lengthened syllable, or an element of gushing – as in “sooooo cute” and similar, seen everywhere (literally ad nauseam) on Facebook. Then there was a bizarre construct which gave us expressions like “that was so fun”, or, as I once heard, “that is so not the right thing to do”. These seem to have calmed down a little – maybe they became So Last Year?

Whatever, “so” is back with a vengeance, though it seems to have become “SO”.

In the mornings, I like to wake up to BBC Radio 4; it maintains some of the better traditions of the BBC – news and comment on current affairs are presented by intelligent, articulate speakers who do not pretend to be my best mates, offer me celeb gossip or update me on what is trending and threatens to leave me behind. So far so good – the problem is the guests. And it’s usually educated, expert guests – spokespersons for action groups, consultants, political mouthpieces, know-alls of every shape and colour.

It’s a formula. When asked a question, the response begins with the word SO, followed by a meaningful pause, and then comes a prepared answer. What are they doing? Does “SO” mean “this is an authoritative reply, so shut up and listen”, or does it mean “I am so intelligent that I recognise that you have asked me a question, and I am now going into Answer Mode”, or does it mean “ah yes – I have a piece of paper here somewhere with the answer written on it”, or what? Why is it infuriating? Why does it make me shout at the radio so early in the morning?

SO - here's a woman in a hat visiting the Radio 4 Studio

Is it because it’s a learned affectation, and because the affectations of others are always more annoying than our own? Do these people get instructed how to do this? – do they go to classes to perfect it? – do they practise in front of the mirror? – did they once hear someone who did this, and were so impressed that they decided to adopt it immediately?

To be honest, I couldn’t care less why they do it, but I sincerely wish the fashion would die out quickly – my blood pressure readings in the morning would benefit. In fact, the way language evolves is sneaky anyway – if SO really is here to stay as a permanent change to protocols of spoken interaction, then presumably I will start doing it myself, and I won’t be annoyed any more. Or should we fight back? At the moment, roaring “SO WHAT?” before the rest of the answer follows is a bit childish, but it serves to remind me that there is a point at stake here, and my radio doesn’t seem to get offended.

 

Hooptedoodle #188 - The Psychopath Test

This note follows from a conversation I had with my wife, and an email I sent to Rod, so I must start by apologising to those individuals for recycling the same material into a blog post. Waste not, want not, my grandmother used to say.

I have recently read Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test – a friend recommended it, and I found it a worthwhile, absorbing read. It is, admittedly, written rather in the style of Bill Bryson (Notes from the World of Psychiatry?), but it is entertaining, informative and thought provoking all at the same time. The big messages for me were the surprising numbers of scary people who make it into positions of power and influence, and the extent to which the psychiatry and pharmaceutical industries have exploited public fear of mental illness, and have (apparently) even invented disorders – especially in childhood – whose very existence is debated, but which produce a very considerable revenue.

I am not going to trot out a full review – my mind doesn’t seem to work like that. I will mention, however, some small disquiet I felt as I was working my way through Bob Hare’s psychopathy checklist, which is an established diagnostic tool, especially in criminal psychiatry – it struck me that it seems remarkably crude, for a resource which is so highly valued and which actually results in people being placed in institutions – but then, what do I know? I also found, as I was going through the checklist, that a fair number of the characteristics described might apply to me. Good heavens, that one sounds like me as well.

No, no - that's a cycle path

Of course, I played it down to myself, but I was really quite relieved when I came to a section which stated that, if the reader was growing concerned that they might themselves have psychopathic tendencies, then they almost certainly did not, since a true psychopath would not have been concerned.

So that’s all right then – now I wasn’t worried at all. Then I started to consider, how would a psychopath have reacted to the news that anyone who was worried was probably not a psychopath? Would they then have become worried, since they had not been concerned about the checklist questions, or are psychopaths unlikely to be worried about something as cerebral as a book anyway? Should I be worried about the exact point at which I ceased being worried? Hmmm.

That's more like it - there's a man who had an accident with the ketchup bottle

By this stage I had finished reading anyway, so I have stopped worrying now. I’ll go back to worrying about my book about quantum mechanics, which was the worry I interrupted with this most recent book, though I am faintly puzzled to learn that The Psychopath Test is to be a film, starring Scarlett Johansson. I shall leave out the obligatory picture of Ms Johansson, since no-one else will.

I drafted this post yesterday, and this morning I find that my timing was inopportune. I am sickened, like everyone else, by the news coverage of the live execution of a TV news team in Virginia – having heard the BBC talking, once again, about “media coverage”, I am keeping the TV switched firmly off until things quieten down. I am upset by the event, the coverage, the reaction and the implications.

Apparently, this is what a TV looks like when it's switched off

Of course, this is a tragedy involving people in the news industry, so the TV people are very focused on that; they happen to have been rather attractive, young people, which makes the story even more interesting – complete with statements from fiancés, tributes from neighbours and former schoolfriends, etc; most obvious of all, the availability of a clip showing someone being killed on live TV is too much to resist – the media will get as close to the boundaries of the law and public decency as they can to outdo each other. I am not going to invite death threats again by lamenting the gun situation in the USA, but I observe that the perpetrator was a black guy, which will have been duly noted by those who keep score and those who support the present gun laws.

I wonder – to give us a context, how many unpublicised fatal shootings take place each day in the US? I also wonder – since I am now a bit of an expert – are the psychopaths the people who:

(1) Kill people on live TV?

(2) Televise the shooting in as explicit a manner as possible, to score viewing figures?

(3) Watch it again and again, to catch new details?

(4) Think about doing something similar?

(5) Keep the TV switched off, to avoid being confronted by it?

The questions are, of course, rhetorical – I do not expect anyone to provide answers. Thanks, anyway – if you are upset by this post, please purchase a bunch of flowers from your local filling station, and place them in front of your TV.

Just out of interest, I thought I’d have a look this morning to see if there are any prominent black members of the NRA. I got depressed before I’d formed a clear opinion, so I’ve done with the subject. Back to quantum mechanics.

Hooptedoodle #183 - The Revenge of The Typing Pool

This morning I have nothing to offer but a brief rant. I shall make some token attempt to pick my words carefully, because it is a subject area where I have little intuitive feel for the expected degree of political correctness, and I fear that I may be guilty of providing insufficient balance in my views. I seek no comfort, and I offer no solutions – I wish merely to let off steam for a moment and then move blithely on, and let us hear no more about it.

When I was a young man, setting out on my professional career, I was required to be courageous and wise – sometimes beyond my years and experience. That in itself was a little stressful, but by far the most terrifying thing I used to have to do was to venture into The Typing Pool. In there, the smoke pollution and noise levels were very high, and the chatter was approximately a musical fifth above the pitch I was used to elsewhere. None of this in itself was too dangerous, but if you had ever caught even a hint of the conversation in there you would have rushed out screaming. If your brain was not actually destroyed on the spot you were still likely to run away to sign up for some silent order or other – preferably on a remote island.

The chatter was completely – and I do mean completely – without any import or redeeming merit. It was talk of shoes, and shampoo, and the trashiest of TV programmes, and endless, outrageous, poisonous gossip about anyone and everyone. I still shudder to think of it.

Well, the years pass, and one writes these things off to experience, and after a while I didn’t have to go in there any more. Rank does have its privileges. Eventually, technology changes actually meant that The Typing Pool was a thing of the past, and I began, in idle moments, to wonder:

(a) could it really have been as bad I remembered?

(b) whatever happened to the people who used to work in there? – what else could they possibly do? – were they all right?

I still ponder this occasionally, but as time passes I have become convinced that the people from The Typing Pool (or their direct descendants) are doing very nicely, thank you, and they now run the newspapers and the TV companies. It is now beginning to dawn on me that they have taken over my Internet Service Provider too.

My new-look email service from BT Internet now opens up with the glories of Yahoo News – there is no escape. If someone put a tabloid newspaper through my letterbox bearing the same trash I would chase them down the path with a garden hoe, but I am expected to grit my teeth and live with this as part of my everyday email presentation. I realise that BT (or Yahoo, or probably both) make advertising money from this garbage, and I’m sure they have some clever marketing people who know exactly how to optimise customer satisfaction and ad revenue, but it is also worth remembering that I do pay rather a lot of money for the service, and their choice of news and adverts does not sit well with me, given that our rural broadband speed is struggling to cope with the things we actually want.

Could you possibly have Schwartzheim’s Disease? – Doctors make shock discovery – that is a damned lie.

See intimate shots of Kate and William at Garden Party – no – give me a break.

This cute kitten was rescued from the Thames – it will probably die anyway.

Guide to 10 things your body language says about you – take our test – no – my body hasn’t said anything for years.

Watch the worst open-goal miss in the history of Egyptian league football – no.

Would you wear this £10 dress to Ascot? – no – bugger off.

See the 20 biggest dress mistakes from the BAFTAs! – no – bugger off.

Watch this video of a motorcyclist falling into a vat of glue – no – bugger off.

See this 50-year-old-woman who has discovered astonishing anti-wrinkle trick – no – bugger off.

And much, much more. You can’t fool me – it was long ago, but I have had glimpses of this level of sophistication and good taste before, in the distant past.

Just out of interest – is there an ISP out there with any class at all? I am very much afraid that mine is one of the better ones. No wonder I get depressed.