Hooptedoodle #205 - Runner-Up Prize

This morning the doorbell rang, and there was an unexpected delivery to be signed-for. How exciting! - perfect timing, too - a surprise parcel, just as we are starting to feel a bit flat after the greedy excesses of Christmas.

Well, I have to explain that the Contesse occasionally dabbles in online competitions, and (being far smarter than the average bear), has a pretty impressive success rate - I shall not bore you with details, but I promise you would be impressed if I were to do so...

Anyway, it seems that she recently entered a sponsored competition to win an iPad, and this parcel was very obviously just such a thing.

Sadly, it wasn't - she had won a runner-up prize for said competition, which is a self-assembly, punched card doughnut stand - the main purpose of such a device is obviously to further the commercial presence of Krispy Kreme (of whom I have never heard, so it stands to reason they must be market leaders), but I can see it would be pretty useful to have a purpose-built gizmo for keeping one-dozen of KK's splendid products out of the heap of pizza boxes and Coke tins which might be expected to adorn our festive board.

Strangely, my heart is not uplifted. The stand comes without donuts, of course, and I understand that it retails for £4.45. I guess I'm not really a donut man - I feel the device will come in handy for lighting the log stove. However, I was sufficiently intrigued to look up Krispy Kreme on Google. It seems that (of course) they are a very big deal indeed, and are even capable (in the US, at least) of catering for corporate functions or weddings (have a look here). I suddenly have a wonderful vision of crowds of gargantuan rednecks at a wedding, cheering as a convoy of smart Krispy Kreme trucks delivers the high point of the big day.

Now I'm really depressed.

Hooptedoodle #202 - When Technology Goes Bad

Hmmm - one for the laboratory

As a household, we at Chateau Foy seem to have a tendency to collect gizmos - I believe I have referred to this before. Visitors are sometimes surprised to find that, in common with hospitals and the lavatories in motorway service stations, we have hands-free soap dispensers. In two bathrooms and the kitchen there are battery-powered hand-soap machines. I admit that I greeted the arrival of these things with a weary snort, since I was not certain exactly which problem they were intended to solve, but some years later they are still going strong and I have grown to like them. Well, let's say I have found that the positive hygienic aspects of not having to handle a grubby old bar of soap outweigh the occasional hassle of having to address the problem of a flat battery or an empty refill bottle with wet hands. Most surprising of all, Dettol (the purveyors of these devices) have stuck with the original design, and have not taken the obvious step of changing the shape of the refill bottles every few months, which would require replacement of the whole thing - you may know of many other manufacturers of similar gizmology who have failed to rise above commercial temptation in this way - makers of plug-in air fragrancers have famously perfected the art of planned obsolescence, for example.

I almost digressed there - anyway, well and good: the electronic handwashers are OK - chalk another one up for the gizmos, and be grateful - remember that there are people in the Third World who are so poor that they have to wash their hands without the help of such leading-edge technology. No wonder there is so much disease around.

Alas, one of our machines has developed some kind of headache. I have never really thought about how these things work, but a simple experiment has revealed in the past that, while placing a hand under the spout will produce a measured splot of liquid soap, it does not work with, say, a wooden spoon, so anyone with wooden hands is going to be at an unfair disadvantage in our house. Thus I deduce that the device uses some kind of infra-red detecting diode as a switch - as I say, I have not really thought about it, though you may be impressed that I got as far as trying the wooden spoon.

The kitchen machine is misbehaving - there have been embarrassing puddles. At first we wiped them up and did not discuss the matter. However, I have now discovered that switching off the room light activates the soap dispenser - I realised this when I turned off the lights to leave the kitchen and I could hear the idiot soap pump working. So that explains the puddles, but it is an intriguing malfunction. I have been reading about the various adventures of quantum particles of late, so I must be careful not to read too much into this - maybe I should offer a prize for the most unlikely explanation? On the face of it, the dispenser appears to be confused - not only is it activated by detecting infra-red, it has also shifted its attention to the visible spectrum, though it is the removal of the supply of photons which fires it up. It will happily sit quietly in the dark or the light, and switching the light on is met by total indifference.

I am proud to report that I have resisted the temptation to test to see if it is affected by flashlights, or by placing a bucket over the device - though if I had more time I might have, of course.

I have a faintly disappointing suspicion that a fresh battery might cure the headache - I haven't tried it - where would be the fun in fixing it? No doubt we'll fix or replace the soap machine quite soon, because (interesting or not) in its present state it is not much help.

A picture of a defective security light

Infra-red detectors seem to be temperamental - our outside security light has worked pretty well for many years, I am pleased to say - its primary purpose is to switch on a friendly light at the end of the driveway when you step out of your car - our garden is a notably dark place at night, and it would be possible to fall over all sorts of things, or even to disappear forever, without this light. The fault with the security light is that it constantly errs on the side of over-enthusiasm - in addition to welcoming human motorists, it also welcomes small animals (of which there are many), flashes of lightning, bushes waving in the wind and any vague surge in the electricity supply anywhere in the house. That's all OK - we forgive it, because it does its main job reliably and usefully.

I am still in the middle of an open-ended campaign of hospital visiting (my mum appears a lot better in the last few days, I am delighted to note - thanks to all who got in touch - though I don't think she'll be home before Christmas), so don't really have the time to fiddle around with soap dispensers, and especially not with Blogger, but I'd be interested in any proper Professor Stink theories about the deranged soap machine, and would be thrilled to hear of your own favourite gizmo failure - the greater the resultant domestic catastrophe the better.

Hooptedoodle #201 - Mrs Moore's Rice Pudding

Thirty-something years ago, in a small room off the cancer ward in a big Liverpool hospital, my grandmother – who had been unconscious for some days – was breathing her last, surrounded by her grieving family. There was a knock at the door, and a large Irish auxiliary nurse stuck her head in, wondering if Mrs Moore would care for some rice pudding.

My family has treasured this story for years, and somehow it captures something of my feelings about hospitals – they are filled with caring, earnest people – lovely, vocationally motivated people who strive to help the sick and the infirm – but somehow the sum of their efforts is hamstrung by lack of cohesion – they are defeated by the holes in the system.

This week my mother has been admitted to hospital in Edinburgh. I share this story not because I seek sympathy, nor to lay before you a personal tragedy; I have a sense of inevitable disaster – like a canoe at the top of a waterfall – however much frantic paddling we do, I fear we are going over. Mostly I am bewildered, rather than angry.

A little background – just sufficient for the journey. My mum is 90. When she was a small child she had polio. She recovered well, and she has enjoyed very robust health ever since. However, there can be a long-term issue with polio – the repairs which the body makes to the nervous system are astonishing, but they do not have the same warranty length as the original kit. Eight years ago she started to suffer progressive paralysis of her left leg and her hands. She lives on her own, and she now moves about her home with a Zimmer walker and she has a stair lift. She manages well – she enjoys her books and her memories and her Mozart CDs and (especially) her independence, and she has a daily 2-hour visit from a carer, plus whatever support the family can provide. It works, but it only just works – it would require only a small further deterioration in her mobility to render her situation untenable – a fact which is always at the front of my mind.

Last Sunday she had the second of two minor falls within a space of 10 days, but this time she hurt her knee – some kind of muscle sprain – and could not get up. She phoned me, and I went round there to find her sitting on the floor, in some pain but completely sensible and rational. I could not lift her without causing more pain and possibly further damage, so we rang the NHS 24 service. After an hour on the phone, explaining the situation to a series of listeners – starting from the beginning each time – we were sent an ambulance. The ambulance crew were wonderful – I can’t praise them highly enough.

The next step was a no-brainer – they could attempt to sit my mum back in her armchair, where she would be trapped and helpless until further notice, or they could take her to a hospital in Edinburgh, where her injuries could be checked out.

Some times on this: she fell at 11:30am, the ambulance showed up at about 15:30, she arrived in the Accident & Emergency department at around 16:30; she was examined and sent for an X-Ray, and was eventually admitted to an Orthopaedic Trauma ward at around 23:00. That’s a long day when you’re 90. This is not a complicated case – in emergency terms, she was not a high priority, but it is very obvious that the process consists mostly of hand-offs – by the end of the day I had described the incident and her medical situation to about 7 sets of people – each of whom appeared to be starting again from the beginning. Everyone is waiting – waiting for a porter, waiting for an X-Ray to come back, waiting for a doctor to be available.

The A&E doctor explained that the intention would be to check the extent of my mum’s injuries, get her leg rested and better, and set about fitting her with some kind of leg brace, which would be a big help in avoiding further falls at home.

All good. By the next morning, upstairs in Orthopaedics, her temperature was up a bit, and she appeared to be confused. The charge nurse spoke of a suspected urinary infection, which they would treat with antibiotics, and she checked with me for any known allergies.

On each of the next two days (which brings us to yesterday) Mum was even more confused and more agitated – yesterday she was having actual hallucinations. I have yet to see the same member of staff twice – each day I was told that a urine test had been sent away, and it would take two days for the results to come back. Apparently this is another urine test each day – so we are in full Groundhog Day mode. No antibiotics have been prescribed – the latest suggestion was that they might start them last night, but they’ve been saying that for a couple of days.

We are back to Mrs Moore’s rice pudding. The ward is full of friendly nurses who are kind and enthusiastic, who look after the physical needs of the patients and offer them cups of tea (even the unconscious ones), and measure vitals signs and scribble things on charts. Nobody knows anything.

More worryingly, the very junior doctors I have been able to speak to don’t know anything either. They cannot answer any question which is not covered by the particular page of notes they have open in front of them, they are evasive and – in one instance – incorrectly informed. They are waiting for some other department or some remote authority to do something, to make a decision. They don’t make decisions themselves – decisions might involve blame.

So my mother, who hurt herself, painfully but not too seriously, 4 days ago, is now becoming very ill with something which was not a problem when she was admitted. She will certainly not be getting home any time soon, and I have a very bad feeling that she has just become another faceless dementia victim, who will be expected to die and free up a hospital bed. That, I believe, is the correct procedure. It will be nobody’s fault, and no-one will know how it could have happened, and the latest urine test results will arrive back on the charge nurse’s desk two days later.

If no antibiotics have started by this evening I am seriously going to rattle someone’s teeth. Who is in charge of killing off the elderly patients in these places? – that might be the person to speak to.

Hooptedoodle #199 - Back to Business-as-Usual

Exhibit A

Here's an item from my outgoing email this morning:

To: hello@xyzdesign.co.uk                                                  Today     10:57am

Subject: Creativity vs Function

Hi there - yesterday I bought a greetings card published by XYZ Design.

Now that I sit down to write the thing, and open the plastic package, I am surprised to find that the envelope is black. Just plain black.

It doesn't happen often, but I am speechless with admiration. My compliments. Unfortunately, due to a sad lack of foresight on my part, I do not have a white pen with which to address the envelope, so my enthusiasm is not as complete as it might have been.

Whoever thought this one up really should go and have a look at themselves in the mirror - preferably with the light turned off.

Regards

Etc 

Normally I would like to think I can handle a small matter like this without the Victor Meldew impression, but I also believe that the paying customer is entitled to an opinion. What I have done is pinch a spare white envelope of the right size from one of last year's Xmas cards, so all is well. I could also, of course, have applied a label to the black envelope, but I think I would need some preliminary lab study of the likely effect on the adhesive of black paper dye, and time is short. Also, I am not confident just how old my roll of labels is, so this is not a straightforward matter, and the replacement envelope will be fine. In any case, if I 'm going to supply my own label, I might as well knock up my own envelope, with some old pages from a jotter and some selotape, and maybe make up my own card with coloured pasta and old yogurt pots.

I have already nominated the greetings stationery industry for a Donkey Award in a previous post, in recognition of glossy and dark coloured envelopes which will not take a legible address - in consequence, I am not proposing to go to the Full Donkey for today's episode - these awards are not so easy to earn.

While I am enthusing about the retail industry, the Contesse reports that she has been awarded a special gift box by Marks & Spencer, no less, because she has spent a certain amount recently on clothes and suchlike. She has a busy day today, but since she was driving into the city anyway she planned to stop at M&S shortly after 8am to collect her reward for support of the Directors' Pension Fund. 

Problem - it seems the gift box contains a bottle of wine, amongst other comestibles, and it is against the law for UK retail outlets to sell alcohol before 10am. Ah, I hear you protest, but they were not selling this bottle, they were giving it away, and no-one had asked for it. Well, you are correct, but it makes no difference - they may not give away alcohol before 10am either. In consequence, the Contesse had to rearrrange her day slightly so she could call back at the store once the sun was officially above the yardarm.

Cheers!

  

Hooptedoodle #197 - The Joy of Socks

Left to myself, I am a creature of habit and of comfort. I like old sweaters - they are familiar and they are comfortable, reassuring - and I also tend to wear old socks.

Socks, sadly, do not last forever - even I, the Prince of Stinge, must fork out for replacements from time to time. As a sop to some faded concept of smartness, maybe just from a sense of shame, I do try to throw them out when they lose all elasticity, slithering (infuriatingly) down into my boots when I'm walking. I also kill off any that develop holes. The Contesse does an excellent job of replacing the casualties with pairs of new socks, and I have to say that any slight vestige of presentability which I retain is mostly down to her.

Recently we have made a special effort to get rid of some old horrors, and buy in quantities of new ones. I like simple socks - inexpensive, sports-style socks are my traditional choice. Well, I do not wish to spread alarm, but something odd has happened. I have started to find that my legs and ankles are swelling a bit as the day goes on, and I am caused some discomfort by my socks gripping too tightly.

Before you rush (as, I confess, I did myself) to point accusing fingers at the brandy, or my decadent lifestyle, I have to announce a shocking discovery.

Evidence. Here are two of my new socks. They are identical, apart from the fact that the one on the left is fresh from the pack, unworn, and the one on the right has been worn and washed a few times. The socks are badged Slazenger, as you will see, but I am confident they come from the same Far-Eastern factory with a variety of brand logos. What is going on? - some fiendish foreign plot? Little wonder I have been having problems - I am astonished that I haven't spotted this before.

The problem is that the shrinkage is not immediate - it takes a few washes to progress this far. I now see that another wholesale clear-out of socks is required, and soon.

I can't fathom this out at all. Is it possible that, like light bulbs and bananas, the physical properties of the common sock have suddenly changed, for the worse? Surely this can't be down to global warming?

Hooptedoodle #196 – Donkey Award – Rewilding

It seems Anthony Fremont is alive and well.

If you are unfamiliar with Anthony, he is the central character from Jerome Bixby’s marvellous short sci-fi story, It’s a Good Life, dating from 1953, which I read when I was about 12 and which made such a profound impression on me that I have never forgotten it.

If you haven’t read the story, you should – or if you have 50 minutes to spare a nice man can read it to you.

[Very brief spoiler – Anthony is about 4 years old, and was born with supernatural powers which allow him to control the universe and read people’s minds. In the story, his village has been physically separated (by Anthony) from the rest of the Earth – no-one knows how or where – and exists in isolation, in a nightmare world surrounded by a four-year-old’s idea of a perfect environment – anyway, you should read the story, if you haven’t.]

The relevance is that it seems to me that the spirit of Anthony lives on in many present day conservationists – they mean well, but mostly they don’t have a clue. One of the difficulties surrounding environmental topics is that it is hard to find anyone talking sense about them – most of the enthusiasts are banging a personal drum, or quoting a half-article they read in the Daily Mail, or just letting their bellies rumble. Yes, we should be concerned, but we should try to keep a sense of proportion.

It makes me nervous, for example, that discussion of endangered species seems to be distorted by what is cuddly – bush babies and giant pandas get many more votes (and are better on TV) than disappearing strains of bacteria or cockroaches. It seems unlikely that the phone-in audience, unaided, are going spontaneously to come up with a balanced formula for a new, sustainable ecological system [you can help here – join Max Foy’s adopt-a-cockroach scheme – only 15 euros will secure you your very own specimen – yours is in Sumatra, by the way – here’s a picture of it].

The amateurs are mostly harmless, since they are unlikely to have an impact beyond their own Facebook timeline, and would not have the knowledge or the influence to take any real initiative. The professionals are much more scary, since they actually believe they understand what is going on, and what we should do about it.

One such is a chap – to be perverse, let us call him Anthony – who is proposing that we should reintroduce the wolf to the Highlands of Scotland. Yes – that’s right – not some kind of obscure wildflower, but that big, hairy dog-like creature with bloody big teeth. This gentleman manages a large forest estate, so he knows what he is talking about. He and his colleagues plant a great many trees, which are extensively destroyed by herds of wild deer, multiplying out of control, and thus requiring to be culled each year to keep things in some kind of balance.

The problem is that the deer have had no natural enemies (apart from men with guns) since wolves died out in Scotland around 1700. Our hero proposes to reintroduce wolves on the estate and – bingo – we shall be back in a better age. His vision is of a fenced nature park, along African lines, in which the wolves and bears (did I forget to mention the bears?) will keep the deer under control, the forest will prosper, and visitors (don’t tell me I forgot to mention the visitors?) will be able to enjoy the Highlands as they once were.

Monument to the last wolf killed in Sutherland

Ah yes – as they once were – and this will be Anthony’s own favoured snapshot, so they will not be under several hundred metres of ice, neither will they be swimming in lava – it will be just as things might have been on, say, 24^th May 1684 – or some other convenient date when there were still wolves.

As ever, I am disappointed to find that I am reverting to type and distancing myself from this grand scheme. I admit that I never was any fun at all, but I am concerned about the following:

(1) Wolves reappeared in France recently – in the 1990s – and things are not going well there – here’s a BBC article about the topic, and about our Scottish enthusiast, which sets some kind of factual context.

(2) If you were a betting man, how would you rate the chances of a fenced nature park containing the experiment indefinitely, without becoming some kind of Jurassic Park? When I used to live in Edinburgh, there were not-infrequent excitements in the Corstorphine area caused by wolves escaping from the zoo – cunning fellows, wolves – it is said that on one occasion they disguised themselves as cleaning staff.

(3) If the wolves escape (as they eventually must), how would things look for Scottish sheep farmers? – to say nothing of tourism…

(4) How did the rabbit get on in Australia, by the way?

Hooptedoodle #195 – Apologies – Yet More Nature Stuff

European Starling (sturnus vulgaris)

I am actually painting some soldiers at the moment, but progress is so slow that there’s nothing to see, as yet, so I thought I might push my luck one final time and try readers’ patience by sticking with this Nature theme of the last couple of posts (a very broad heading, since Apple Crumble was in there, somehow).

You may well have seen this YouTube clip – I am fascinated by it. Two girls went out in a canoe on the River Shannon, and they saw some starlings.

In fact they saw rather a lot of starlings, and the starlings were doing something which these days is called a murmuration, though as far as I know "murmuration" is really just a collective noun for a bunch of starlings, without any stipulation of activity. These events are spectacular – I’ve seen films of similar behaviour by a cloud of budgerigars in Australia, I’ve witnessed this kind of formation flying by starlings, and I think I’ve heard of knots and fieldfares doing the same thing. Anyway, I’m impressed. I wouldn’t like to be standing underneath them at the time, but there are some well-known locations where starlings do this sort of thing regularly – Brighton is one, I believe, also Rome, and we have a famous site fairly near here at a shopping mall car park at Gretna, in the Borders, which maybe lacks the romance of Rome, but it’s the best we can do, and you can buy a very nice sweater while you are there.

Maybe the requirement is simply a very large number of birds all doing the same thing? Looking at the shapes, it looks like a travelling probability distribution; I realise that this is a dumb thing to say, but my starting point is that the location of each individual bird within the envelope shape must be subject to some kind of probability function. I understandthat some steps have been taken to come up with mathematical models to simulate this behaviour, but success is limited to date. Of course, since I don’t have the tools or the knowledge to stand a chance of getting anywhere, I have become very interested in understanding more of what is going on! [If I succeed, I shall next attempt to fly to the sun with wings made from a Corn Flakes packet.]

Some thoughts:

(1) We see pleasing shapes caused by the forces of Nature all over the place – they are very common – clouds of water droplets in the sky, sand dunes, waves on the sea, snowflakes – you will think of better examples than these. The difference with starlings is that they are intelligent – each individual is trying to do something, not simply being blown about.

(2) Birds don’t seem to do this if they are going somewhere – when migrating, for example, they do form recognisable shapes (skeins), but not like this. Maybe, since the murmurations seem to occur at predictable times of day (at least they do at Gretna), and in particular seasons, the birds are feeding, sweeping a limited area.

(3) Though the cloud of birds looks chaotic from the outside, each bird must have a simpler view – they must be aware of their immediate neighbours, who are travelling in the same direction; apart from this they must be guided by – what? – the light?

(4) Scientists have observed that within the cloud the birds space themselves so that they are grouped not too close to their neighbours (so as not to restrict flight and manoeuvre) but not too far apart (to avoid loss of contact and the “collective” feel). This “just right” spacing is known as the “Goldilocks” distance, and it has been observed that lateral spacing is tighter than are the gaps to the birds in front and behind (which makes sense for safe manoeuvre – this sounds more like the traffic on the M25 all the time - well, maybe not the M25, but on a more sensible road).

(5) If a bird becomes aware of its neighbours turning, it can react very quickly, but the accumulated delay across a large cloud would be expected to cause the effect of elasticity and the waves which we see on the films.

(6) Early attempts at modelling the murmurations on a computer looked at what happens if the birds instinctively fly towards the centre of the cloud (the darkest area) or directly away from it (towards the brightest light); although the centre is moving, and may be moving in a different direction from any individual bird at any particular moment, it is not a surprise to learn that the models showed that in the second case the cloud would simply disintegrate as the birds at the edges flew away, and in the first case they would tend to collapse into a single point, though the Goldilocks effect would limit how far this could progress.

(7) Perhaps, then, the birds are steering towards some intermediate condition of light (and therefore cloud density) which gives optimal feeding?

You will note that I have not progressed very far with this! I do not intend to sign up for a night-school course, neither do I wish to melt my brain (more likely), but I am gently interested in how this works. Nature is wonderful – we don’t really need to understand it, neither should we necessarily expect to be able to understand it, I think – but these bird clouds look like mathematical shapes to me, and I’d be pleased to get a better handle on what’s going on - I have never been a starling, but mathematics is what I was once trained to do.

Hooptedoodle #193 - Koyaanisqatsi

Today was Saturday, and tonight we had an excellent takeaway meal, from the Bengali restaurant in the village, and afterwards my son said, "Shall we watch a film?", which is what often happens after a takeaway on a Saturday.

After some discussion, it transpired that the Contesse had stuff to do, and chose not to watch a film, but was happy that my son and I should do so. We have little to watch that is new, at the moment, so the standard process requires that we choose a film we have seen before.

Eventually we chose Koyaanisqatsi, which we have both seen many times. Since I have some advantages in the time dimension, I can claim to have seen it more often than my son. In fact I have a long history with this movie - I first saw it in the cinema (1982? - I was going to say "can it be so long ago?", but when I see the clothes and the technology and - strangely - the spectacles, it becomes obvious...), then I owned a VHS tape of it, and now I have it on DVD. I must have watched it on some pretty dodgy TVs over the years, I guess. My first wife hated it - I think she felt that it somehow summed up some characteristics of mine with which she had never come to terms. One has to respect these things - water under the bridge; she was almost certainly correct - she was mostly interested in shopping for clothes and staying in expensive Italian hotels, and thus my tastes often appeared strange to her.

So why do I love this film? - no idea. I am not particularly proud of loving it. I accept that it is very dated now, that it is not a particularly smart film to like, that the eco-political themes and imagery are unsubtle and sometimes actually kind of dumb, but it is a trip, man. I like to sit and stare at the screen and think "Wow!" for 90 minutes, or whatever it is. My long-deceased former roadie and lifestyle guru, Rab the Fab, reckoned that it was right up there with 2001 - A Space Odyssey for watching while under the influence of LSD, an experience I would not rush to try, though 3 glasses of Spanish red wine did no harm this evening. Dumb or not, I still find the wackily hypnotic Philip Glass score very effective, I still laugh like a drain at the scene which alternates speeded-up footage of customers on the escalators in the New York subway with a clip of a machine making frankfurter sausages; also, we still play the game where you have to spot the first signs of life in the film, and then the first evidence of mankind.

At the end, we always feel we should discuss what we have seen, but it never gets very profound. Maybe the film is not really subtle enough to generate much debate. Maybe it is just a trip, man. I have never retained any lasting conclusions other than that I would not choose to live in a city in the USA - at least not in 1982. I'll watch it again next year - I'll look forward to it.

Here is the final scene, which seems to me to depict man attempting (unsuccessfully, on this occasion) to carry his stupidity, waste and ugliness beyond the confines of his own planet...

Hooptedoodle #192 - More Critters outside the Kitchen Window

The Contesse was busy with her camera again yesterday - here's a quick view of garden wildlife in September in South East Scotland.

Not necessarily welcome, but a handsome specimen

There was another stationed as lookout - they can eat as much of the
geraniums as they like, as long as they stay off the fruit trees...

Chaffinches on the garage roof

Nothing to do with wildlife, but someone drew my attention to this cover from an American Sci-Fi magazine published in 1939 - gripping stuff - I swear this is genuine.

Hooptedoodle #191 - Ephraim's Photograph

This is a true story told to me by my friend Brandon, who lives in California. The story is set in the late 1990s, when Brandon used to work for a world-famous computer firm, at their very large research facility in Roseville.

These hotshot computing firms at that time were strange compromises – most of the propeller-heads who built them up were ageing hippies, but, as the organisations grew at an almost uncontrollable rate, the pressing need for professionalism and state-of-the-art commercial practice meant that a whole pile of untried management stuff was delivered in huge instalments, complete with fresh staff to implement it. Brandon was an engineer, and felt especially bewildered when the world of perfect Human Resource Management suddenly arrived to take control of his working life.

One unpopular innovation in his building was hot-desking – now there’s an iconic 1990s term; all staff had to be mobile – each employee had only a computer, a security badge and a wheeled pedestal with their belongings in it. Everyone – right up to the highest levels in the firm – was required to be able to start work at any location in the building, with whatever transient group of colleagues was required, with a maximum of 15 minutes notice.

Appropriate measures for phones and computer network access were challenging but could be managed, but some other things caused problems – the old human nature thing kept cropping up, and clashing with the new rules. For example, the workstations next to the windows on the top floor were much in demand, because they commanded rather splendid views (or, at least, because it was possible to see the world outside, which is almost the same thing in a work context) – this meant that staff would compete to grab these locations, and would be reluctant to move away from them. This was observed to interfere with the optimal working of hot-desking, so a new building layout was created, such that the spaces next to the windows were now walkways, and no-one had a window seat any more. That fixed it – everyone was now worse off.

Brandon had a colleague named Ephraim, who was even more nerdy and disorganised than Brandon was himself, and he took great exception to these new restrictions on his personal freedom (as he saw them). Things took a turn for the worse when the Corporation issued new rules to limit the “personalising” clutter which staff amassed on their desks – this was a further impediment to hot-desking, since a computer, a wheeled pedestal and an indefinite number of large cartons full of personal junk for each staff member was not what was envisaged in the new scheme of things. Thus there was a major cutting-back on what would be permitted on desks – this actually got as far as some formal definitions. Ephraim – and a few like him – complained bitterly about this, and diverted some of their effort and personal focus into the challenge of retaining as much junk as they could get away with – more, if possible.

At this point, Brandon and a couple of chums realised there was potential for some fun at Ephraim’s expense, and so Ephraim continued to receive a flow of further rulings from the hated HR, though by this stage HR knew nothing about them, since the stuff was being generated on their behalf by Ephraim’s colleagues, specially for Ephraim.

The next (fake) regulation restricted each member of staff to a single, framed photo of their own family. Ephraim complied, but bitterly and lamentingly. Then the photo was to conform to new maximum dimensions, and only children, partners and up to two family pets were allowed – no grandparents, and no golfing photos or similar. Ephraim was furious, but he became incandescent when HR expressed their unhappiness at the unruly collection of frames which were on display, and actually issued a standard frame, to ensure a more uniform, corporate look.

Brandon briefly considered that his alternative HR operation might ban family photos altogether, but instead he issued a new letter, saying that it had been noticed that some staff members’ families really didn’t match up to the Corporation’s required appearance standards, and that in future a photograph of an idealised corporate family might be substituted in extreme cases.

At this point even Ephraim realised it was a prank, and he sulked like a good chap until it was time to go for a beer, when all was forgiven. Three months of fake HR letters had reaped a handsome reward, but Brandon says that after the chuckles had died away they just had to get on with their wretched hot-desking world, and make the best of it. He lasted another year, and then he set up in business on his own – but that is another story.

So this is just a silly story about a workplace prank, in another century, on another continent. The shine is taken off the joke for me, a bit, by my own experience of HR people who learned about the human race entirely through books. That was one of the trends that eventually took most of the pleasure out of working – certainly out of managing other people – and that persuaded me to retire as early as I could afford. 

Are these beggars still out there?

Death by PowerPoint