Things that make you go arghh!
‘I heard that the locals in Derbyshire used to make a paste from woodlice,’ says Monty Wood.
Yes! It’s this week’s sandwich fillings. He fails, however, to suggest how lice are best employed in the world of bread-based lunching, so we leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Which leads us to more practical suggestions, and this week we highlight student food, courtesy of Simon Mountford, at NYK Reefers (which sounds like a student type of company to us). He suggests three sandwiches: mustard on white bread, brown sauce (just brown sauce) and when that gets a bit dull, ‘Weetabix and salad cream. Try it, it’s great.’ Residents of Derbyshire might want to add a few insects.
Meanwhile, in North Yorkshire, 100 jam sandwiches have been hidden in woodland in an attempt to find the pine marten, a rare mammal thought to have been extinct for 100 years. Who came up with this excellent ruse? Biologists at Hull University. The martens should think themselves lucky they didn’t get brown sauce.
Out of memory. Delete previous version to make space?
OK, we simply can’t fail to comment – as have most of you, judging by the size of our postbag – about Steve Ballmer advertising Windows in a US TV ad in ‘the late 1970s’.
‘My memory is that Windows 1.0 was released late in 1985,’ says Alan Brindley, among many others. Those cheeky Microsoft boys.
‘I still have a copy of Windows version 1.03 (and no, I don’t still use it), which I bought when it first came out,’ says Kenneth Spencer. They are naughty scamps indeed.
Windows has been with us for only 20 years. It just feels longer.
Why don’t you just switch off and read Backbytes?
While we’re on the subject of Christmas presents, we’re sorry to be late in spotting this autumn’s new must-have device, the
TV-B-Gone.
Created by inventor Mitch Altman, it sells for just £9, and acts as a universal remote – that simply turns off nearly every TV.
Requests for it have threatened to crash his web site. ‘I thought there would just be a trickle, but we are swamped,’ he says.
It works by simply sending about 200 infra red codes that will turn most TVs off (and on again, don’t panic).
‘There’s just so little time in all of our lives,’ says the inventor, which only leaves us to say, thank you for spending so much of it reading Backbytes. It’s so much better for you than watching TV.
When you just can’t Cope
One of our long-running threads, namely, ‘what I sing when I’m in the office’, contains a pleasant surprise for Ben, at Prospect Mailing.
If you remember, he had taken to singing ‘I hate my life and I want to die’, not because it was an amusing pun on a well-known popular song, but because that’s how his job made him feel.
We can offer some comfort, or more precisely, a tune to sing it to: ‘I think you’ll find that "I hate myself and I want to die" are indeed lyrics; specifically from Queen/Mother by Julian Cope,’ suggests Jason Banyard, at Investmaster.
We assume Prospect Mailing wants can-do achievers in its ranks, and probably dislikes being made fun of in newspaper columns. Our suggestion: Ben should curry favour with the boss by suggesting Mr Cope’s snappy tune as the company song.
The end of the Day...
Now that’s resolved, we can suggest another little song for you to sing. Or maybe we should stop this now, as we’re even beginning to irritate ourselves by singing the songs while we type them in.
Mystery contributor ‘Jon Pertwee’ has a colleague, who he describes as a ‘regular Doris Day’ who contributes this excruciating verse: ‘When I was just a little boy/I asked my mother/What will I be?/Will I be handsome?/Will I be rich?/No son, you’ll work in IT…’
We can’t bear to bring you the chorus.
Thyme to right some poet tree
‘I’m getting tired of songs to sing at work,’ says Terry Davies, who must also be tired of life. Or maybe not.
‘So how about homonym poems to compose at work? The winner would be the poem with the most homonyms that passes the standard Microsoft Word 97, 2000 or XP English spell-checker.’
He encloses a fine example written by Janet E. Byford, entitled An Ode to the Spelling Chequer: ‘Prays the Lord for the spelling chequer/That came with our pea sea!/Mecca mistake and it puts you rite…’ and so on.
We’ll give special credit to the creative use of appropriate regional accents and examples culled from real life. Can you do better? And if you don’t know what a homonym is, luke it up.
Caviar attitudes
To continue in our search for the perfect sandwich. Hang on! What are we saying? We continue in our horrified fascination at your disgusting eating habits.
This week, we start with the ‘Scooby Snack’, an unlikely sandwich created at university (where else?) by Chris Fields, at the Independent Review Service.
‘Nearly impossible to eat, but giving you a meal for a week, it consisted of two slices of thick white bread, Supernoodles, tuna, mushrooms, onion rings, lashings of cheap salad cream and the crowning glory, acting as a centre piece of bread and stabiliser: the Kwik Save mini cheese and tomato pizza.’
After that, it’s a relief to see that David Gray, at Thales Joint Systems, is recommending a Christmas favourite for those of you who have to work the holiday season.
‘Bread, cranberry, mature Cheddar cheese, piccalilli, ham, halved silverskin pickled onions, turkey, stuffing, cranberry (again), bread.’
We assume the order is important, perhaps to stop the onions falling out.
And if you’ve ever asked yourself the question: ‘what sort of sandwich would an IT director order for himself?’, ask no more.
‘Reading your alternative sandwich fillings reminded me of an old favourite of my own – caviar and peanut butter on toast,’ says Johnathan Wootton, who is head IT honcho at Nvesta.
‘Evenly spread the peanut butter, then gently add the caviar on top so that it sinks in. It works best with smooth peanut butter so as not to distract from the texture of the caviar,’ he adds – but then you knew that already.
Rogue elements
And if these delicious recipes weren’t enough to convince you to stick to sausage rolls, then the ingredients list on the prepacked ham, egg mayo and mustard sandwich that Simon Guerrero has just bought might tip the balance. It apparently contains: ‘Mustard, smooth, Ham, premium, Eggs, chicken, boiled, Mayonnaise.’
Off track
More advice on how to come to terms with the annoying habits of mobile phone users on trains.
Greg Evans, at Velindre NHS Trust in Cardiff, has the sort of helpful idea that car drivers tend to offer in these situations.
‘Not being a regular train traveller myself, I’m probably not best placed to offer advice, but surely the best solution for avoiding noisy, irritating people on trains is to travel in one of the empty carriages?’ he says – still charmingly under the impression that empty carriages still exist after 6am and before 11pm.
Extreme bridge, anyone?
If anyone from Serif Software invites you to a game of bridge, be sure to wear some padding. Alan Kimmitt, at Unisys, forwards an email from the company offering him the chance to buy The Times Bridge for only £9.95.
‘This PC version is sure to keep you occupied for hours!’ it says, but then continues: ‘Includes a beginners’ and experts’ bidding system… Saves unfinished games to come back to later... Uses real Newtonian physics for realistic ball collision, side, swerve and backspin.’
Shame about the lyrics
There seem to be few occupations in your lives that aren’t accompanied by a song.
This week, Nigel Watson says: ‘Anyone compiling a C Program who doesn’t get his/her pointers right gets a message: "Superstitious Pointer Conversion at statement nnnn",’ he writes. ‘To which I normally sing: "Very superstitious, The statements in the Code."
We should warn Nigel’s workmates that he is currently rewriting Indian Reservation by Don Fardon: ‘He took the whole mainframe nation and put us on a Sun workstation/ Took away our JCL and made us work with Korn Shell/Took away our VSAM cluster, Now the iNode we must muster/ All the circuits made by hand, are nowadays made in Japan...’
Take a sad song
In case you need cheering up after that, look on the bright side: at least you’re not Ben from Prospect Mailing.
He writes: ‘I find that every morning, when I get into work and turn on my computer, I can’t help but sing: "I hate my life and want to die" repeatedly while looking at the screen. These are not lyrics from any song, as far as I know – the words just come naturally.’
In the middle of a chain reaction
Our recent thread on chemistry humour seems to have hit a chord with all you chemists out there.
Last week, we pointed you to the site that tells us all about the dangers of Dihydrogen monoxide, but as Colin May says, there’s a serious issue here.
‘It’s not the Dihydrogen monoxide that’s the problem,’ he warns. ‘It is the Hydrogen hydroxide (HOH).’ Oh, you chemists.
It’s a dirty sandwich… and you want it
Now you’re just being silly. ‘When I was a student, I had a penchant for chicken and mushroom Pot Noodle, peanut and tomato ketchup sandwiches made with white bread, occasionally with chips for added substance,’ says Rachel Brooks, at Jaguar.
Which is very admirable, but strikes us as a full meal with two slices of bread included.
‘Great to hear there are still some civilised sandwich-eaters out there,’ says Paul Caswell, at Retail Business Solutions, who, to be fair, hadn’t seen Rachel’s recipe. ‘My favourite is a triple decker of cheese, Marmite and peanut butter. Also, Marmite and pilchards.’
A couple more weeks and we’ll be publishing the Backbytes sandwich recipe book email for you to delight your family with
this Christmas.
Clash and grab
More songs to sing at work. ‘In my previous job, I used a Unisys Editor called ROC-I. Every time I used it, I couldn’t stop myself singing the old 1980s XTC song Sgt Rocky’s Going To Help Me,’ says Sue Flower, at Elsevier, whose colleagues must have been devastated when she moved on.
‘Right mouse click while on the Windows "start bar",’ suggests Stu Neville, at KPMG. ‘I simply can’t help but sing "The Shareef don’t like it, lock the taskbar, lock the taskbar".’
Rocky horror
Just as we thought that singing ‘lock the taskbar’ was the limit of odd office behaviour, this arrives.
‘Just wanted to know if any of your readers talk to the Microsoft dog Rocky. I always say thank you when he shows me the disk when I press save, and also when he posts my email. I even animate him sometimes in case he gets bored,’ says Berni Smyth, at the North West Institute of Further and Higher Education.
Do you? You might want to say yes, if only to make Berni feel better. Two Rockys in one Backbytes column. Is this a record?
Troubled waters
Looks like we underestimated both the amount and the quality of chemistry humour available, because someone signing himself ‘Richard’ alerts us to the dangers of a compound called dihydrogen monoxide, which is explained in great detail at www.dhmo.org.
‘Dihydrogen monoxide has been found in our rivers, lakes, oceans and streams. Dihydrogen monoxide is a major component of acid rain. Thousands die each year after inhaling dihydrogen monoxide,’ it warns.
Think about it.
Bit on the inside
A strange, slim volume crosses our desk: The Tale of Billy the Bit, by Don Johnson (not that one), published by Athena Press.
‘His whole life consists of standing up and sitting down on demand without ever understanding why,’ says the blurb. If you want to find out what happens when Billy crouches, it’s only 79 pages long.
‘This may provide an insight for the readers of Computing as to what really goes on inside a PC, instead of perpetuating the
misinformation that everything is controlled by integrated circuits.’
We don’t believe a word of it – but then again, we never do.
In-chair entertainment
‘We’ve just bought a fantastic Gyration wireless mouse,’ says an excited Dean Fairweather, at Bideford College. Why is he excited? Perhaps he followed the instructions that came with it.
’Lean back in your chair and relax. Place your arm comfortably on your armrest or in your lap and casually flex your wrist.’
A little less conversation
Why don’t we like people using mobiles on trains? we asked last week, when there are far more irritating habits that we seem to put up with.
‘Isn’t it that we’re all very nosey naturally and only hearing half the conversation drives us mad?’ asks Nick Sanderson, at the Environment Agency.
‘There’s nothing better to pass the time on a boring train journey than eavesdropping on the couple having a controlled row on the table behind. If the argument is on a phone it takes away half of the fun.’
An alternative suggestion: ‘Whenever a phone rings, I’m conditioned to respond,’ says Ian Philipson. ‘Awareness of the ring interrupts anything else I may be doing, my pulse rate rises, I start to be concerned. I’m convinced that these physiological responses are what really annoy.’
He adds that we should do an experiment to prove this, by asking someone who doesn’t have a phone whether they mind phones ringing on trains – which if he’s correct, they won’t mind at all. Problem is, we can’t ring them up to ask them.
To chav and have not
Tim Robson, at UTT, can shed some light on why putting ‘chav’ into the Argos search engine brings up some very bling chains. He forwards us a letter from b3ta, the bulletin board where this surfaced.
‘I work for the Argos Internet Customer Service team. Yup, you should feel sorry for me,’ it says. ‘The reason "chav" comes up with the chains is because the search engine only uses the first three letters of a word to search with.’
Try it, it’s true.
Only fools and Windows
Can you believe it? Our interview with Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer in last week’s Computing reminded us of a US TV ad from the late 1970s, with a more hirsute Ballmer in Del Boy Trotter mode extolling the virtues of Windows 1.0: ‘yours for not $500, not $1,000, but yours for just $99!’
Don’t delay, go to www.energyradio.fm/anm/templates/ftf.aspx?articleid=101&zoneid=5.
A taste of honey… and apple… Marmite… etc, etc
First to the important stuff: this week’s sandwich filling suggestions. ‘Marmite and honey, or - in the absence of honey – Marmite and golden syrup,’ says Ian Hobbs, at NTL. ‘Incidentally, both honey and golden syrup are great with sliced apple.’
He goes on to say that as a child he ‘used to go through the cupboard putting a different filling on each half of three pieces of bread in alternate directions to maximise the number of different combinations of various jams, honey, golden syrup, marmite, peanut butter and raisins, cheese, apple and glace cherries.’
More childhood memories from Nic Woods: ‘Dairylea cheese on two slices of bread, strawberry jam, sliced pickled onions and HP sauce over the lot. Salt and pepper optional,’ he says. ‘I think it’s the sweet ’n’ sour thing again.’
But we think it’s far more serious than that. Have any of you tried our recipes? Please tell us if you have.
Tell it like it is
Speaking of NTL, some of you offer an opinion on the NTL hacker, who replaced the company’s standard hold message with an alternative. ‘You are through to NTL customer services. We don’t give a **** about you…’ and so on.
The Backbytes readership reacted as one, typified by this comment from Robert Williams, at Infermed, who claims to have suffered at the hands of NTL himself: ‘I wonder if maybe the so-called hacker message was, in fact, a refreshingly honest policy change,’ he says.
Table of the elements
Rarely do we bring you chemistry humour because, well, there isn’t much of it around. Which is why we are delighted to offer you www.chm.bris.ac.uk/sillymolecules/sillymols.htm.
As Miriam Said, the reader who recommends this excellent diversion, adds: you might learn something. Even if the thing you learn is that there’s a mineral called dickite (named after Thomas Dick of Lanarkshire), an anticholinergic called crapinon and a ‘quite ordinary’ ketone called megaphone.
We left out some of the best ones because, even in a foul-mouthed column obsessed with toilet humour like ours, we can’t print them. So we suggest you go and take a look for yourselves. If only chemistry had been like this at school.
Somewhere over the rainbow, weigh a pie
‘It’s not only IT people that hum along to their work,’ says Steve Bowen, at Akzo Nobel Specialist Coatings. What a relief. People might start thinking that techies are weird.
‘We have made several top 40s of product and material-related songs and artists. My favourite is High On Emulsion. We even did a whole load using different species of timber (our division specialises in woodcare products), such as We Don’t Talk Sycamore.’ That’s the sort of quality wood humour we like.
George Tripp, at Northampton Borough Council, suggests: ‘When you’re writing a CD in an external drive: Bruce Springsteen’s Burn in the USB.’
Two wheels bad
Next official policy: which cyclists do we hate the most?
‘I read that you’re planning to name and shame cyclists who ride on the pavement. I’d be far more interested if you were to name and shame cyclists who do use the road, but who think that traffic lights don’t apply to them,’ says Martin Elliott, at Miller Insurance.
‘I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve nearly been hit by cyclists who weave their way through pedestrians who think that when the green man is showing it is safe to cross the road,’ he adds, with a few exclamation marks we removed.
Chain of fools
Some of you have been playing our silly searching for shopping game. Mark Wayt has a search that works: if you go to Argos online and search for ‘chav’, it actually offers what he calls ‘a lovely selection of chav bling, including a fetching Ben Sherman gold chain’. Anyone else have a useful ecommerce search?
I hereby name this child…
Some real place name people: ‘Twenty years ago while I was in the RAF I had the pleasure of working alongside Peter Lee, who was from Peterlee,’ says Geoff Wilkin. We salute the imagination of Peter’s parents, who obviously thought of his name by looking out of the window. So it’s a good job he wasn’t born in Ramsbottom.
