Give us this day our daily spread
The story of the Toast Shop’s assault on ecommerce toast delivery takes an unexpected turn as reader Chris Harris, at STL, reports with disappointment the Toast Shop’s concept of added value. ‘I am interested to know if you can supply toast pre-spread with butter and marmalade? And if so, what choices of these do you offer?’ he asked. Came the reply: ‘Dear customer, the Toast Shop thanks you for your recent enquiry. The Toast Shop is currently unable to supply any toast spreads or toppings. This is an emerging market and our customer base may be assured that, as soon as the demand for spreads and toppings reaches a sustainable level, we will respond accordingly.’ Chris asks that more of you request the service so that he can get his toast pre-spread. We think that, frankly, this is the minimum level of service that would prevent the Toast Shop’s offering from becoming commoditised in a matter of weeks. As it claims to be ‘the UK’s number one online toast retailer’, it merely goes to show how underdeveloped the market is.
Toast innovation declared null and Freud
Not that we’re obsessed with toast or anything, but Ivan Wainewright, at IT for Charities, points out: ‘There’s nothing new about delivering toast to your front door.’ He refers us to Grimble, Clement Freud’s book for children, which features home toast delivery. ‘Indeed, ecommerce companies could learn a lot from Grimble’s supply chain problems,’ adds Ivan. Prospective entrepreneurs should consult www.robindey.com/grimble.htm
Stubble trouble
You see, this is what happens when you start encouraging beards. ‘I have been encouraged to send in this hideous picture of my boy-beard by my manager, Mike,’ says Neil Jones, at Harvey Nash. ‘It’s been a bone of contention for some time now but it will remain as long as I have a chin to grow it on. I feel that having a bad beard enables me to connect more effectively with the techies I recruit. Long live beards.’ When recruiters are growing inadequate beards, it’s time to consider a change in the law.
Is the message getting through?
We’ve actually been quite worried, because our old mates at BAE Systems haven’t been in touch for a while. So we’re delighted to hear from John Gilliver. He even has a partial explanation. ‘Some of us are having problems with our Outlook email system,’ he says. Luckily, a helpful techie stepped in. ‘Someone sent round an email explaining how to access the server via the web. You’ve guessed it: only those whose email was working could receive it.’ How did we manage before email was invented?
Caller, you’re on the air (if not the web)
Chris Rayers has been listening to Radio Berkshire, to save the rest of us from the job. Which meant he heard the following advice last week: ‘If you want to find out more about our ‘Getting started with computers’ sessions, phone… ; that number is also on our web page.’
‘It just come off in my hand’
Yet another reader admits to driving tanks, or at least, tank-like things, for a living in the past.
‘In the Artillery we had tracked Rapiers, which isn’t strictly speaking a tank, but does have tracks,’ says Martin Amos, now an accountant. ‘We were on exercise once in Germany and the commander screamed to the driver to “track right”: you turn to the right by pulling the right tiller lever. ‘The vehicle kept going forward, so once again the commander angrily screamed “track right“. That’s when the tiller was passed up through the commander’s hatch – it had come off in the driver’s hand.’ We’re enjoying hearing form our ex-military readers. Please keep writing, so we can live vicariously through your anecdotes.
Unforgettable – that’s what you are
Oh, we are a careless lot. Our attention was drawn to an article on the BBC’s web site reporting that in the past six months alone, more than 63,000 mobile phones, nearly 5,000 laptops and 5,800 PDAs have been left in the back of London’s black cabs, making the city the gadget-losing capital of the world.
But there’s more. According to the story, cabbies have also found left on their back seats a dog, a hamster, a harp (a harp?) and even a baby. Which set us thinking: what have you left behind on public transport?
Out of your depth?
Talking of which, it’s time for another set of helpful tips. We have an inkling that many of you have ‘friends’ out there (come on, you know who you are) who could be hanging on in jobs where they clearly have no aptitude at all for the task in hand. Therefore, there must be a substantial body of knowledge that you could pass on.
If you, or indeed ‘your friend’ have ever had to cover for a deep-seated and profound ignorance in the past, please pass on your – sorry, your friend’s – tips on how to look busy and competent at work when you clearly don’t know what you’re doing. Entries from the public sector will be given priority, because we feel that’s where the real expertise lies.
Bread letter office
Every now and then we like to take up the cause of the ordinary consumer, so we are delighted to have communication this week from the Toast Shop, which can be found at www.thetoastshop.co.uk..
‘Your article, in which your columnist levied concerns relating to the value for money offered by The Toast Shop, was brought to our attention by a customer. The Toast Shop firmly believes that its products offer excellent value and we believe that, in the world of online toast sales, The Toast Shop is second to none.’ We can only agree.
And we can’t help but agree with Oluwole Kolawole. ‘Having once done casual work in a Royal Mail sorting office, and seen the way even items marked ‘Fragile’ are tossed around, I suspect the Toast by Post connoisseur will end up with crumbs.’ To avoid this, we suggest having your toast sent by courier
A round that costs an arm and a leg
Previously, we brought you the tale of how GPS was helping us to locate the nearest watering hole.
Now, Neil Morris spots the story in The Observer of the microchip that drinkers can have implanted in their arm.
‘So once you’ve found your way to the next whisky bar, you can buy a round without having to carry cash or a wallet,’ he tells us. ‘They’ll just scan the digital wallet in your arm and take it out of your account that way. Which is OK, provided the chip is in your arm. What if you were legless?’
A bouncing baby Yahoo
Finally this week we salute Nonu and Cornelia Dragoman, the Romanian couple who met online, conducted a virtual relationship for three months, and then got together and produced a lovely bouncing baby.
Sadly for the child, he’s going to be mocked for the rest of his life, now that his proud parents have named him Lucian Yahoo Dragoman, after the online service they were using. Cornelia picked ‘one name after my father and the other from the computer. These were the two elements which guided my life,’ she told the papers. We’ll be scanning the register of births for little MSNs and AOLs.
Last word on lard?
Some of you have questioned whether we should be talking about lardbergs. After all, unlike mobile phones causing petrol forecourts to explode or planes to veer violently off course, lard will never affect shipping. How wrong you are.
‘My grandfather, George Lingard, was MD of the famous Kilvert’s Lard which was based in Trafford Park, Manchester, in the 1940s and 50s,’ says Kevin Lingard, in a story which simply has to be made up, except there really was a Kilvert’s Lard company. ‘Most of the lard was produced in Canada and shipped in tankers. Once in Trafford Park, up the Manchester Ship Canal, the heaters in the tanker would warm the lard and melt it, thus allowing it to be pumped into the factory for processing and packaging.
‘One night the pipe split, pouring thousands of gallons of molten lard into the Ship Canal. People turned up for work the next morning to find most of Manchester Docks under several inches of now-solidified lard.’
Here’s the deal: if anyone can confirm this story, we’ll return to talking about technology.
Contain yourselves, ladies
This week’s bad beard comes with its own chest hair. That’s what we in the IT business call ‘value-add’. ‘This is my line manager, Bleddyn Dudley-Burton, at Buy As You View,’ says Chris Bevan. ‘He now has a full face of hair, but his excuse for this one was that he wanted to look cool on a snowboarding holiday. Do you think it worked?’ That’s a rhetorical question, we assume.
Homophone rhapsody
Is this the rear wife? Is this just Pharisee? Cortina landslide, fire escape from reality. Opener ice, loo cup to the skies and see...
What are we talking about? It seems that the homophone bug has bitten deeper than we thought. We receive this email, forwarded to us by someone who we will refer to only as ‘Michael’, because he received the lyric sheet from his own chief financial officer!
Not only that, but it is lovingly illustrated with pictures of wives, Pharisees, piles of Cortinas, openers and ice. Glad to see that the Backbytes school of work-life balance is taking hold in the boardroom, as well as in the toilets.
Cats? You can stuff ‘em
This week’s lovable cat web site takes a turn for the bizarre, as Vincent Clifford recommends Sarina Brewer’s site, Custom Creature Taxidermy (www.customcreaturetaxidermy.com).
At this point, we can only apologise to cat lovers who typed in the URL before reading on. If you’re squeamish, maybe you want to skip the section on ‘carcass art’.
On the other hand, there’s plenty of interesting cat-stuffery elsewhere to admire. ‘This artist’s story begins as an unassuming science nerd who attended art school to study painting and sculpture,’ the site says. Let that be a lesson.
It was 20 years ago today – well, last week, actually
We know how you all like to wallow in nostalgia, so Terry
Richardson reminds us that last week was the 20th anniversary
of that technology breakthrough – the Sinclair C5. Go to
www.sinclairc5.com for a slow trundle down memory lane.
Ad it up to here
Top job this week was discovered by Chris Ayers. ‘A leading software house is looking for an Architect Evangelist,’ it says. ‘Your responsibilities will include Driving Broad Customer Connection [their capital letters] across the Developer, Architect and IT Pro audiences through an integrated approach to evangelism, communities and intelligent audience marketing.’
It’s worth £75,000 a year if you can understand what they’re asking for.
However, it was run close by Gerald Oakham’s discovery of an excellent opportunity in Berkshire. ‘Helpdesk Administrator: DESCRIPTION: Take and log service calls on the magic helpdesk through several methods including phone, intranet and email…’ It must be magic: ‘Salary: £1.’
Yes, but will it take a message?
If you’re visiting Japan and have a spare £1,000, conditions which we know eliminate many of our loyal readers, you might want to spend it on the world’s first mobile phone-controlled robot, a little critter operated by Bluetooth with a range of about 10 metres.
It’s the creation of a company called KDDI, and you buy it as a kit. If you’re asking yourself: ‘Yes, but what’s the point?’ the manufacturers say that eventually it will become a roving security camera, indicating that they obviously live in very small houses.
Web hosting and web toasting
We’re not publishing any more sandwich recipes. However, that doesn’t mean we have to ignore every bread-based foodstuff, which is why we bring you the URL of the Toast Shop, as helpfully provided by Rosie Banks: www.webhost.plus.com.
‘Toast that is always crisp, never soggy, and yet offers a softness to the tongue as only velvet may afford,’ it says, which doesn’t entirely convince us. From £3.49 per slice. Not a bargain.
Attack – that’s what we lack
We’re fully in favour of the option offered on the support menu of the Prevx (www.prevx.com) web site, as discovered by Stephen Coombes. First option: ‘Contact support’. Second option: ‘Attack support team’.
Lardberg ahoy!
Sometimes we ask ourselves: how did we get here? Specifically, why are we discussing whether a lard iceberg would have sunk the Titanic, or whether a lard/water composite was responsible? We can feel a Discovery Channel special coming on.
‘Lard at zero degrees centigrade or below is rock-hard (or ice-hard if you prefer), so a composite lard-tipped iceberg would not have been required to sink the Titanic,’ says a contributor who, wisely, signs himself only as ‘Peter’.
‘An iceberg stays frozen in warmer conditions due to its mass,’ says Paul Cripps, at ShopRite. ‘Given that the freezing-point of lard is only four degrees less than water, given a sufficient mass of the lard tip it too would also have been largely frozen.
‘This means the Titanic is doomed, as the frozen lardberg would have brushed the side of the ship, causing similar gashes – a fact amplified by the brittleness of the ship’s steel at the given water temperature on the night of about -0.5 degrees.’
Wait, there’s more: ‘Lard is much denser than ice, so the lard tip would extend far down into the water, well below the keel of the Titanic,’ points out John Blenkinsop.
’But then, the lard being heavier than the equivalent volume of ice, it would probably be on the bottom of the iceberg and not the top. This could explain why no submarines were injured by this
iceberg, even if the Titanic was.’
You can’t make an omelette without taking mugs
We ask again: how many of you used to drive tanks?
‘When I was a tank driver we had a gunner who could knock up an omelette on the move with only a boiling vessel to work with,’ says Nigel Smith, at Carland.
‘The guy was amazing, and in great demand by the other crews; it’s lucky there wasn’t a transfer market. He used to serve omelettes in mugs so that we could eat on the go.’
And Nigel asks the question that the MoD would prefer to remain a secret: ‘Did anyone else use baby beakers for drinking on the move?’
If the enemy had ever found out…
Beard-wearers unite
How does one pass the day at Eduserv Internet? Well, if you’re anything like reader Hugh Jones, you might consult the National Beard Registry at www.nationalbeardregistry.org/beards/beards.asp.
Hugh recommends number 69, but there’s plenty of choice. We’d like to point out that it can’t be a coincidence that California, home of the geek, is the largest single contributing region to the beard registry with, at the time of writing, a whopping total of 86 separate beards.
But with only nine beards in total from the whole of the UK, we by comparison are a sad disappointment to the brotherhood of beards.
Please could Backbytes readers rectify this, and give the UK its rightful position in the beard-wearing world?
The early berg catches the stern
Happy new year! We hope you survived unscathed and all that kerfuffle over your behaviour at the annual Christmas party has died down. We start the year, as we intend to proceed, with a pointless correction to a very silly story.
‘Your correspondent John Blenkinsop claims that if lard were the tip of the iceberg, the Titanic would not have sunk. He forgets that the Titanic was holed below the waterline,’ says Jason Mills, at Moorhead High School. ‘Therefore, a composite iceberg with a lard tip certainly could have, and for all we know may have, caused the disaster.’
I’m only here for the beards
We called for bad examples of facial hair, especially moustacheless beards: you answered.
‘Please see attached photos of a bad beard of a work colleague, Neil McComiskey,’ says Chris Wright, at Marconi. ‘It’s much more ginger in real life than it appears in the photo. His excuse was that he was growing it for a ‘Bad Beard’ contest for his little brother’s stag night, but we know he really wants to join an Amish community.’
A big cat stripped of his pride
A couple of weeks ago we asked for amusing cat web sites. We seriously don’t think that anyone will beat this, though of course we are sure you will try. So if you are suffering from post-Christmas malaise and need to laugh at a cat (we find it helps), thank Teresa Lander for sending in www.petebevin.com/archives/2003/02/06/lion_cut.html.
Locks away, chaps
While we occasionally cover improbable hair, we are of course mere amateurs in this field compared to the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists, which comes from the same people who produce the consistently improbable IgNobel awards.
Eleanor Greene directs us to their site at www.improbable.com/ projects/hair/hair-club-top.html with the advice: ‘Have a look at the real experts.’ If you ever thought you had silly hair, wait until you have seen the picture of Professor Patrick J. O’Brien, Chair of Petrology at Universität Potsdam. Go on, look now.
Oil and two sugars, please
How many of you used to drive tanks? ‘As an ex-Royal Engineer Tank Troop commander, my driver’s job was to keep me alive with similar creations to Neil Adamson’s Compo rations,’ says HP’s Tony Molony. ‘What Neil fails to mention is the thin float of diesel on the tea, coffee, or whatever it was, which gave such a colourful edge to the drink.’
We’re delighted to have you all back in civvy street, and we’re sure that your mates could put a little diesel into your coffee. If any other readers have recently left the forces, let us know what else you miss, and we’ll pass it on so your new mates can organise it for you.
Death bet confessions
Almost one year ago we covered the fantastically tasteful betting pool bet2die4.com. Reader Andy Stevens pointed out that the odds included Leslie Grantham at 80-1. ‘If he appears to die this year,
will bet2die4.com hold onto people’s winnings for 15 years, just to be sure?’ he asks. Leslie is still at 80-1 to be the first death in the pool, odds he shares with our own Bill Gates. And Roy Chubby Brown and Jeremy Beadle.
