OTWednesday VIII

Not much for you this week, sorry. I'm busy again.

Have some Email though...

Me: I'm doing restaurant reviews for a local publishing company here. They've even invited me to an April Fools meal on Friday. See, you've been replaced already.

Tom Sharp:
We’ve got a new girl doing freelance for us now – she’s called Lena and is from the Isle of Arran. She’s a bit kooky, likes obscure music, writes a hilarious blog and hacks into Betamax video recorders in her spare time. See, you’ve been replaced already.

The April Fools meal is almost certainly a joke played on the ‘new girl’. Many publishing companies do it. Be wise and don’t go. Perhaps sending a note saying ‘Ha ha, can’t come, cunts!’ They’ll love that ‘publishing’ humour.

You might know this. Is there anyway of filtering blogs from search engine results?

I’m sick of looking for something only to faced with pages and pages of what gothic teenagers in Texas and new parents in Middlesex think.

Me: Ok, try

"whatever you're looking for" - blog
"whatever you're looking for" - weblog

what's wrong with gothic teenagers in texas?

Tom: Oh, I think that works. Aren’t you clever?

Gothic teenagers all over really. It’s a pretty unimaginative form of rebellion isn’t it? It’s basically rebelling by dressing as someone from Leeds in the 1980’s. And that’s rubbish.

Me: The internet is run by gothic teenagers. On every level. Get used to it.

I took your advice and told my new publishing friends I can't come,
but they didn't seem to find it very funny. I guess they're too
sophisticated for me. You were right, I was a fool to try to replace
Stone Soup; I've reserved a seat on the first train back to York in
the morning. Joke's on me alright.

Tom: Modern culture is run by gothic teenagers.

You’d enjoy the fashion shoot in the latest Flock.

Glad you’re coming home. I shall send Lena back to Arran and you can be editor of our new retro code-hack papercast.

Me: I have 200 bounceback emails to individually enter into a database this
afternoon.

Tom: Perhaps to liven your afternoon you should enter the emails in an order which means that the first letter of each spells the name of an obscure Japanese games console. If the emails belong to private individuals a bet at least three have the word "kitty" in them

Me: You need to remember these people are IT professionals, not just goth
teenagers, so all their email addresses consist of are initials and
numbers. Although there was one who almost certainly was a goth of
some sort, called Themagicroundabout@...
it made my day. It's the little things.

Tom: Excellent. I love it when people steadfastly refuse to change their student emails and get something more serious. The equivalent is the middle manager who wears one discrete earring and then turns up in leather trousers at the office party.

Me: Just got all excited about ETboy@... but thinking about it his name's
probably Eric Terence Boy or something

Tom: Or he’s incredibly ugly and pretty relaxed about the fact.

Me: Or a massive fan of Ell--iii--ooottt. Or a young male extraterrestrial.

Tom: Or has a wide head. I was friends with a Californian hacky-sacker at university who broke up Eliot from ET’s garage-band by going out with his girlfriend. As you can imagine, I dine out on that story.

Me: One i just processed: Chelsea.titcumb@.....

Tom: Now I'd give her a job!


Tim: I was playing with my (faulty) mini-safe combination lock when I couldn't
sleep one night. After shutting the door I noticed I'd locked the centre of my duvet cover in it. Needless to say it wouldn't open, so I had to spend about an hour peering through the holes in the back of the safe trying to figure out how to open it before I could go back to bed. If I hadn't removed the case of the lock earlier so I could see the mechanism through the holes, I'd have had to take my whole duvet cover
to a locksmith to get the thing opened. I took a picture (attached).