Everything stops for tea
In case you take your teapeople for granted, Alan Johnson at BCA Group has a sobering story this week.
‘Until a couple of years ago we had a tea boy, aged in his late seventies, who had served as a merchant seaman in the Mediterranean during the Second World War. The tanker he was serving on was mined off Crete while taking drinking water to the allied invasion force for their cups of tea. The modern tea trolley does not run the risk of being blown up. Or does it?’
It might if the lavishly named Corcoran Smith gets there. ‘It’s only councils and the civil service that employ these people isn’t it?’ he says from experience. ‘The growling, angry “onion and corned beef sandwich with your cuppa” ladies would surely suit other jobs better, such as tech support, perhaps.’
Keep those pictures coming, public sector readers.
PC over a cup of tea
We try to be an inclusive column, but our diversity policy has come unstuck. We refer, of course, to the scandalous use of the phrase ‘tea ladies’.
‘A few years ago, the tea lady at the small company I was working for retired. I was told by the managing director to get on the phone to the local jobcentre and place an ad for her replacement,’ says David Tomlinson, at Data Encryption Systems. ‘The person from the Poole jobcentre told me I could not advertise for a tea lady, as it was sexual discrimination.’ He was allowed to advertise for a teaperson by the people David calls ‘the thought police’. He had one application for the job – from a man.
Words of wisdom on Ctrl-Alt-Delete
Obviously rebooting is much on our minds this week, so the latest Beatles lyric entry, from Andy Cole, comes at an apposite time in this competition, which at this rate could last well into next year.
‘Let me shut you down/Cause I’m going to/Ctrl-Alt-Delete/You’ve got me beat/I’m completely fed up with this/I’m going to Linux forever’. Short, sweet, and you can easily sing along to it.
Meanwhile, Hugh Holt breaks our eight-line rule, but we’re feeling generous this week. ‘When I find my code in tons of trouble/Friends and colleagues come to me/Speaking words of wisdom/Write in C/As the deadline fast approaches/And bugs are all that I can see/Somewhere, someone whispers/Write in C/Write in C (times four)/Logo’s dead and buried/Write in C’. And we’ll allow him one more verse: ‘I used to write a lot of Fortran/For science it worked flawlessly/Try using it for graphics!/Write in C’.
See, we’re full of good advice this week.
Some kind of voodoo medicine man
‘Mike Fleming must have a very old-fashioned doctor’s practice,’ says Rod Baker. ‘My wife is a dispenser in a doctor’s surgery and she assures me that all patients’ records contain a telephone number on the same screen as their address.’ Which is a relief.
‘Perhaps Mike uses a witch doctor?’ Rod speculates.
Information overload
We thank the 200 of you who emailed us to tell us you can type Ctrl-Alt-Del with one hand, either hand, standing on your head, while typing using a Microwriter, and so on. We are delighted with your detailed instructions on how to achieve this important multi-tasking skill.
‘Here at Quanta we do it all the time,’ says Andy Rimell, rather worryingly.
Your keyboard days are numbered
We’ve had a bumper postbag on the AgendA and its chordal keyboard. Why waste time with a five-finger keyboard, suggests Andrew Carpenter, at Cirencester College. ‘I foresee that in the future we shall all use the numeric keypad and type in T9, like a mobile phone. Think of the saving on desk space.’
Has anyone tried this yet? If not, it is only a matter of time.
Reasons to feel grrrr…
Having tortured you with useless keyboard jokes for too long, we bring you this from Mike Sykes.
‘Win-Pause brings up the System Properties dialog box, and Scroll Lock has the effect in Excel of toggling the arrow keys between moving the selected cell and scrolling the worksheet. I discovered this by accident, and wondered what I had done wrong,’ he says.
‘Try Windows key-E to get Explorer, or Windows key-L to switch users in XP,’ says Gary Watson. See, we can be useful. Not for too long, though.
‘In Backbytes on 13 October Peter Slegg mentioned a five-key keyboard, and you wondered which five letters those keys were,’ says Anthony Hawkins, at Sheffield University. ‘Actually, none were letter keys.’ So far, so good. ‘The first three were Control, Alt and Delete; the fourth key was labelled “Any”. No one is quite sure why, but the fifth was Alt-Gr.’
