(no subject)

News that the USA has moved to ban internet gambling overnight didn’t surprise me one jot after the massive gambling binge on the weekend that was pipistrellus and cornfedpig’s wedding (uniting them as a single entity henceforth to be known as pipipig). It was an example of exactly the kind of excess the Americans are looking to discourage. Spread bets were taken on the length of individual speeches, the number of prepositions in the father of the bride’s speech, how many Portuguese words could be formed without cheating from the letters in the first two paragraphs of the best man’s speech, the number of words the groom would say that would sound a bit like Ian Paisley muttering the word “Samurai”, the combined length of all the speeches, the combined length of all the bouquets, the combined length of all the relatives—and, it was briefly mooted, who the best man would cop off with. “You’ve got the pick of all the women here!” said one of the guests when this was being discussed, which I think would have come as a surprise to most of the happily attached women present. I’m not sure they had consented to him pimping the whole room.

Five years ago betting at weddings was still a hushed, underground affair, designed to take the edge off boring, awkward speeches by people who you didn’t know—or, worse, who you did. Now, though, like gambling generally, it has taken centre stage, so every wedding can feel like it’s in Vegas. On Saturday our MC prefaced each speech by announcing the next speaker, then the time accumulated so far and "the stopwatch starts NOW!". All through the meal beforehand people kept approaching the top table to plead that we keep our speeches really short, or prolong them to incredible lengths. Some people had put money on the speeches lasting well over an hour—what the hell weddings have they been going to? Anyway, I remained deaf to requests, on the grounds that I intended to be neither boring nor awkward, so the whole damn shebang didn’t apply to me in the first place. In the end someone called Stacey won. Well done Stacey.

Well bloody done all round, actually. A good day. pipipig sets off on its trip to the Galapagos, Easter Island, Ultima Thule and the Moon with cheers and merriment ringing in its ears, which is exactly as it should be. Good luck to the pair of them.

(no subject)

I'm at work today. I agreed to come in for a couple of hours to help test a new system. It really isn't working very well. Currently several guys from central IT are clustered around the computers that have the new system installed, disagreeing about why it isn't working.

At a time like this, there's only one place to turn to:

The Mystic Pig
	I asked the mystic pig: Will our new computer system be up and running in time? and the mystic pig said: Not in the way you expect. Ask the Mystic Pig another question created by ixwin

Uh-oh.

(no subject)

I will not allow this journal to become a repository of endless kvetching about my broadband provider, but I just had to commemorate this:

Getting through to TalkTalk is an endless nightmare, more Philip Dick than Kafka, with its cheerful humanesque simulacra feeding you messages of false hope and the pointless button-pushing and then the waiting, God, the waiting... Beware if you get through too soon, though: I’ve found it means the operator you’re speaking to will have even less clue what to do than usual. Recently I [excruciatingly boring detail cut here] on the TalkTalk website, and it didn’t work. Later, when I had eventually got through to a human being in Mumbai or wherever after a half-hour wait, she spent five minutes tapping away and saying “Just a moment”, before she announced the exact same message I had got when I [boring, again]. “Did you just try and do that on the website?” I cried. “I can do that! I just did do that! I thought you had special databases or something in front of you! What the hell’s the point my calling the other side of the world if...”, and so on. She didn’t, it turned out, have a special database in front of her; nothing, in fact, that a trained kitten with an internet connection wouldn't have access to, or indeed a similar strike rate with.

This afternoon, however, in a rare display of wit, they buggered me about in a completely new way. I had reached TalkTalk Nirvana: I had somehow got through to one of their very helpful technical people in Johannesburg. “I’ll sort that out for you,” he said. “I'll get our technical team to call you back.” “Hmm," I said, “they failed to call me back about [boring] before.” “Well, let me take your mobile number too,” he said, so I gave it to him. “Okay, that’s on the computer now,” he said, as my mobile began to ring (I ignored it; I knew I’d only be about a minute more), “so someone from the team should be ringing you some time in the next three days.” The mobile quit ringing. We said goodbye, I hung up, I picked up my mobile, I checked its voicemail, and “this is Graham from TalkTalk’s technical team. This is the first of two callbacks. We will be calling you again within the next 48 hours”. On this occasion they were far too efficient—they had rung me back before I had even got off the phone from the first guy.