Tales from the riverbed...
Once again we are forced by circumstances to bring you a sad tale of our national sat-nav culture, as the Lynn News reports the story of a local minibus driver who followed his sat-nav directions – into a river.
He was on his way to Castle Acre, near King’s Lynn – but he managed to do this via the River Nar, after faithfully following sat-nav instructions which he believed involved driving several hundred yards along the river bed.
His bosses at Streamline Taxis went to the rescue with a tow rope, and pulled him out.
“The vehicle still had its engine running and headlights on, and he was sitting in it with his trousers rolled up round his knees. I shone a torch in the river and there were fish swimming around the headlights,” said Keith Jarvis, one of his employers.
His colleagues have been as sympathetic as you would expect, and have been coming to the office in snorkels.
Foiled you once, foiled you twice
As we pointed out in our “seven deadly sins of Backbytes” recently, the most visible demonstration of pride in your work is to decorate your cubicle. On the other hand, the most visible way to make someone else’s life a misery is to
decorate their cubicle with aluminium foil.
“This is how we avenged a colleague who had the cheek to go on an extended holiday to Australia leaving us to handle her work,” says Iain Hamilton.
“It did take us a month to do it as each item in the desk tidy was wrapped. For the geeks it took five rolls of foil to do it.”
Click on the picture to reveal its true glory. Then tell us: can you do better?
Coldest calling
“As a student I frequently topped up my income by working for various double glazing firms,” admits Sue Stephens of Pagham Technologies, bravely.
“I was quite successful and always tried to make potential clients laugh,” she adds. “I once spoke to one guy who was really enthusiastic and asked me to call in two weeks when he was back from his holidays. I dutifully called only to discover that the people answering the phone were attending his wake.”
At which point, the truly efficient salesperson would have said: “So have you ever thought about replacing the windows in your house?”
Sue passes on a quick cold caller tip when faced with any home improvement salespeople: tell them you live in a council house.
Never too old for insulation
On a similar subject, Joe Higham at Essex County Council points out that “it isn’t illegal to alter listed buildings. You just need consent to do so.”
So when cold callers catch on, you grade II-listed-house dwellers are stuffed. Alastair MacQueen lives in a grade II listed building, but still gets persistent enquiries from people who want to sell him cavity wall insulation (for a 200-year-old property) and plastic windows.
So he tries a different policy. “I have experimented with: ‘As soon as I find any cavity walls in this house – you’ll be the first to know’ with some success,” he says.
Sound of silence
John Loader at DotSix Brailling Services, who is more or less our jobsworthiness correspondent these days, has been complaining to the Telephone Preference Service about unsolicited cold calls.
John’s been having trouble with an 0707 premium rate number that calls, and all he hears is silence.
They have their predictive dialler set wrong, but as long as they don’t actually say anything to John, it’s not the remit of the TPS. Instead, they tell him, there’s a service called “Silent Callguard”.
“If you wish to register with the service you should call 0870 4443969 or visit www.silentguard.co.uk. I trust that the above information is of help to you,” they tell him.
It would, of course, be very dangerous to combine both services in one operation.
Revenge of the Nerds?
We’re always delighted to have self-serving tosh arriving on our desk in survey form. As, it seems by the coverage, are many national newspapers.
“The explosion of technology has created the fastest growing language in Europe, according to research published today,” says our email.
One can only imaging the thigh-slapping and glass-chinking that happened in the marketing department of Pixmania.com (“High tech products at unbelievable prices”) when they concocted this: “Dubbed ‘Nerdic’, this new way of communicating via technological terminology has developed separately to English and become the shared language of Europe.”
It was dubbed Nerdic only by Pixmania.com, and try using it for anything more useful than buying stuff from them, but now we’re splitting hairs.
“Nerdic is evolving faster than the English language, at a rate of more than 100 new words per year,” it continues. What’s new?
“HDMI – the new Scart lead allows you to connect High-Def devices together… Android – think iPhone but with a slightly different interface on phones from Samsung to HTC… DVB-H – newly announced mobile TV standard for Europe that allows you to watch TV on your mobile…Pixmania.com has applied to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to recognise Nerdic as an official language spoken by Europe’s population of over 700 million people,” it concludes, smugly proud to be wasting our tax revenue.
Dirty phone calls
More phone amusement: James Hawkins, one of our NHS readers, is worried that the sales people that call him are unhygienic.
“Dell keeps ringing me up wanting to ‘touch base’ with me. I routinely respond by irately asking them ‘Sorry, you want to touch my what?’”
He recommends the embarrassment suffered by the callers trying to explain their error. If only they had told him that they wanted to reach out to him, and maybe they could have had some “face time”. But probably not.
Registry offence
“We’re a web site design business and our web site is at www.cornwellinternet.co.uk,” writes Roger Cornwell at Cornwell Internet. “We recently received a snail mail letter from the Central Domain Registry of York, advising us that the domain name cornwell-internet.co.uk was available to register.”
Of course, they would register the name for Roger for a price, “to stop any other business from reserving it”. Central Domain Registry has a domain name of centraldomainregistry.co.uk, so Roger checked out central-domainregistry.co.uk, and, of course, it’s not registered. “Tempting, isn’t it?” says Roger.
Keeping them out in the cold...
We asked for any of you who had been cold callers in the past to write to us, and only one has the nerve to invite your ridicule. So well done to Andrew Long, who has seen the error of his ways, and now works as a recruitment consultant for Reed. Give the guy a break, he has information for us from the dark side.
“In my youth I worked briefly for a double glazing company. We were actually given a sheet with comebacks to all the usual reasons people gave for not wanting new windows.
“There is only one reason that a truly pushy salesperson can not come back to, that being that your house is a listed property and as such you are legally unable to make any alterations to the house. Using this reason will have you taken off the call list so you will never get called again.”
This is good advice, and has led him to a life where he now persecutes his former peers. “We receive quite a few calls from salespeople in our office. We have actually started a competition as to how long we can keep a salesperson on the phone purely by asking them if they will hold while we put them through to the correct person.
“We then put them on hold for a minute or so, another one of us picks up the phone, asks the salesperson how we can help, claim they’ve been put through to the wrong person and repeat the process. Our record so far is just over 13 minutes.”
Tudor pose
More interview errors. Keith Appleyard invited someone for interview partly because he had an experience as an English tutor. On further questioning his experience was an interest in English Tudor history.
Join the office sin-dicate
Welcome to a special edition of Backbytes as we enter the summer season.
Many of you will be looking out of the window at the glorious sun or pinging hail, and thinking: how do I amuse myself using my company’s internet access for the next four months? There are only so many times you can check your email or try to find new Facebook friends.
That’s why we’ve created the Seven Deadly Sins of Backbytes.
Lust
If your social life isn’t what it should be, sign up today. But, first, take care of your interior decoration.
We are contacted by a reader, let’s call her C, who recently met a charming young man via internet dating who also worked in the IT business. After an interesting and amusing night out, she agreed to go back to his flat for coffee.
When she walked in, she realised that the entire flat was painted the same colour: black. Not pausing to take off her coat, she left, and sent him an email the next day to explain.
“I wondered why my ex-girlfriends didn’t like coming to my flat,” he said. If you have a similar dating experience, let us know. It will help to educate our less-successful lovers.
Gluttony
Several times we have investigated the phenomenon of the all-you-can-eat buffet. We’re still trying to block out the mental image of Pizza Hut’s lunchtime buffet near reader Simon Cooper’s office, which is known internally as the “stuff-n-chuck”.
So this year we’re collecting nominations for all-you-can-eat lunches: please nominate your local, and the best nomination will get the first annual Backbytes Stuff-n-Chuck Award, while the reader who nominates it will receive a free romantic stuff-n-chuck for two.
Greed
We’re still delighted to see that however low we set our expectations, recruitment consultants can undershoot them. Steve Mansfield at the Impact Partnership had a recruiter call him recently: “He started quizzing me about my programming experience, despite the fact it was all on the CV; he then asked me what experience I had of ‘nought-nought-pea’.”
There’s a man who’s really earning his commission. Pass on your depressing stories please.
Sloth
Imagine if those little letters that you stick on your fridge were stuck on your screen and you had to aimlessly move them around to spell words, but everyone else was also moving them around at the same time and stealing your letters.
This is so much more exciting than whatever you did this morning: this is truly what the internet was created for. Check it out at http://lunchtimers.com.
If you have a timewasting internet game to share, join our party.
Wrath
As many of you realise, the best way to take out your frustration is by taunting cold callers.
“I think I have stumbled upon the ultimate cold-calling deterrent,” says Henry Nichols at TGFS.
“Our parent company has recently announced the complete closure of our site. I state this as soon as I am able. The average time for callers to close the conversation is about three seconds.”
We’re collating your excellent advice into one of our mailouts: send an email to us with the subject “cold call fun” to pick up our readers’ useful tips.
Envy
If you resent your co-workers, don’t come to terms with it. Instead, make their lives a misery by taunting and irritating them.
We favour the Airzooka (Google it), which for a tenner shoots compressed air at increasingly irritated people, but let us know if you have a better idea for excruciating office torture.
Pride
If all else fails, you can fall back on the old standby of decorating your cubicle.
We’re disappointed by the assault on our freedom of expression represented by clean desk policies and LCD monitors that won’t support a row of plastic figures. Therefore we salute those of you who maintain a display of gonks and trolls on your desk.
Show off a little: send us a picture (For our readers in Northern Ireland – we’re informed that gonks are a name for underpants where you live. That’s not the sort of picture we want to see.)
Freezing out cold callers
We are conspicuously lacking contributions from anyone whose job it is to make the cold calls you complain about every week. We would like to know: don’t you hate it when people make smart remarks to you? What happens when you tell people what you do for a living? Does your partner respect you? Because we don’t.
“After several cold calls from the same company, the next time they rang and announced themselves I replied in my most pious voice: ‘I’m so very glad you called… I would like to talk to you about God,’” says Graham Manning at The Stationery Office. “We have not had any more calls from that company.”
Alun Harvey at Open Mind points out, if you want to get rid of salespeople who cold call you, here’s what is considered best practice in the field: http://howtoprankatelemarketer.ytmnd.com.
Google your alibi
Now the dust has settled, we are delighted to bring you some of last week’s most excellent April Fool technology jokes, beginning with Google’s innovation offering a feature that backdates email so you can pretend you sent a message hours or days earlier, getting you off the hook at work.
Also from the US, Duke University released details of research showing that people were more creative when using Lego after subliminal exposure to Apple’s logo, compared to the IBM logo.
But our favourite is the always excellent ThinkGeek web site’s double whammy: a USB pregnancy test, and the Super Pii Pii Brothers urinating game for the Nintendo Wii.
Big is beautiful
On the same theme – possibly – we are delighted to see the Daily Telegraph giving space to Chinese engineer Yuan Tan and his giant mobile phone on 4 April.
Mr Tan of Songyuan City, whose name translates as “New Year”, has apparently built a 3ft 2in phone weighing 48lbs, from which he is able to send text messages and make phone calls.
We would like nothing better than to believe this one, but we are concerned that the original newswire report dates from 1 April.
“The neighbours were always knocking on my door, asking what was going on with all the noise from the apartment,” Mr Tan evidently says.
And we are even more concerned by Mr Tan’s revelation that he and his father were apparently inspired to create the giant red mobile by watching a YouTube clip of Dom Joly yelling “hello!” into his own giant handset on Trigger Happy TV.
We would love to hear from any of our readers in Songyuan City who can confirm or deny this courageous rearguard action against miniaturisation.
The worst hunter gatherer around
Meanwhile, John Rutter sends us his response to one of those completely unsuitable “Please accept my apology if this vacancy is not relevant to your career aspirations as this is the fastest way of contacting candidates” emails (we have all had them, even those of us who so far are not looking for a job).
John’s assailant works at Huntress Technology. “Your opening paragraph is a very poor way of attempting to cover up the poor filtering and job search processing that you apply,” he emails back to them, suggesting an alternative, which includes “…our pathetic knowledge of technology, coupled with our use of unintelligent software, meant that we managed to find at least one of our numerous supplied keywords on your CV… could you please find someone who might be interested in the vacancy and pass on this email to them?”
By the way, it is offering £30k for a Junior ASP.Net/C# developer in central London. We hate to do Huntress’s job for it when it is not doing it properly itself, but you know who to call.
We wonder if we can find, with your help, the most inappropriate “if this vacancy is not relevant…” fish-for-CVs email out there?
Earl-y bath
It has been a while since we had a corking sat nav story, so thanks to The Sun for bringing to our attention the story of Earl Spencer’s daughter, who wanted to watch Chelsea play football.
If you are the daughter of an Earl, you call a taxi to take you the 85 miles from Althorp to Stamford Bridge.
But do not call Northampton-based Mayfair Taxis, or if you do, check the “Stamford Bridge” the driver enters in the sat nav is the one in London, not the village in Yorkshire, 146 miles in the other direction.
Unfortunately, she didn’t.
Snowed under by Gentle reminders
Your hunger for cold caller stories is not satisfied.
“I used to work in IT operations for a vehicle contract hire company and we’d be plagued by cold callers, to the point that we invented an employee called Marmaduke Gentle, giving him an email address and voicemail,” says Rob Bowra.
“Over the following 12 months Marmaduke received mountains of post, emails and countless voicemail messages with people keen to help him with quotes.”
Sadly the imaginary Marmaduke was forced to resign when a persistent salesman tried to reach him through the switchboard.
Someone who pleads to be anonymous recommends cruelty: “I ask them to take a good look at their life and their career prospects,” he says. “I tell them that if their employer is so unethical or incompetent as to ignore the corporate Telephone Preference Service, then I am really worried about their employment future.”
And Terry Lean advises this tactic for financial services calls: “There are few things I look forward to more than a discussion with a telephone cold caller,” he says, which worries us, but when offered something over the phone, he asks: “Could you tell me my account number please?”
When the caller says: “I’m sorry – we don’t know who you are. We need you to confirm that you are Mr X by you telling us some details,” he says: “I’m sorry I can’t do that until I’ve established your identity”, and we start again.
“My record for prolonging the conversation is 20 minutes,” he says.
Summing up
Keep those CV errors coming in. For example, Stuart Peacock writes that: “I once had an applicant whose CV claimed that he had a degree in ‘Mathamatics’. “It’s hard to see how you can get a degree in a subject that you can’t even spell the name of.”
He adds: “I wonder if he went on to get another degree in Inglish?”
Breakfast in America
For anyone who is worried about the future of civilisation, and the internet’s effect on it, we present disturbing news: at the time of writing eBay has five auctions related to cornflakes shaped like the American state of Illinois, including tribute art.
It all started when there was a bidding frenzy on a cornflake in the shape of Illinois discovered by Emily McIntire, a 15-year-old from Virginia, and listed by her older sister.
Yet as bidding predictably reached $2,000, eBay cancelled the auction. Not, we note, because it was silly – but because it violated the site’s policy on selling foodstuffs.
The good news, if indeed there is any good news in all of this, is that the McIntire sisters were able to relist the item with the caveat that it wasn’t edible.
Meanwhile eBay sellers have since offered a crisp shaped like Florida, and one enterprising seller is offering “unaltered corn flakes in the shape of Hawaii, Indiana, and California” as we went to press.
Porn to be wild
Good to see hackers are attacking the really important freedom of speech issues in the world, as last week they defaced the web site of Indonesia’s information ministry.
“Prove that the law has not been made to cover government stupidity,” the message said, accompanied by a picture of a local IT expert. Was the hacker responding to the controversial draft laws on freedom of expression in Indonesia?
Er, sort of. He (we’re guessing it’s a he) was objecting to Indonesia’s plan to ban access to internet pornography – a move that will surely give Indonesia’s businesses a significant and unfair productivity advantage over their Western counterparts.
Big Bang theory
As several of you point out in our recent CV errors story, the guy who claimed to be an “expert in the marital arts” was applying for a job at Bang Communications. Maybe it wasn’t an error after all?
A little off key
Thanks to Terry Lean who points us in the direction of the ever-reliable www.cracked.com, and specifically its collection of spoof error messages at the “Error Messages You Never Want to See” competition. We’ll leave you to discover them.
“My personal favourite occurs during the boot sequence,” he says. “Keyboard error or no keyboard present. Press F1 or DEL to continue.”
