rare occurrence

‘Far, far away’ by Slade, from 1974, as the music used to entertain customers placed on hold. Hats off to Vodafone corporate. I was actually a little disappointed to miss the end of the song when my conversation with the agent resumed.

July 24, 2006

Ferguson's mind games

‘He (Ruud van Nistelrooy) is a striker who can score upwards of 20 goals a season and there are not many of those going around.’ So why are we selling him them ? Let’s wait and see if Saha, Rossi, Ronaldo and Ole manage more than 20 goals (between them).

July 22, 2006

so farewell then, NIS

Norton Internet Security Our love affair began back in the days of running a cable across my bedroom for my meagre dialup connection and the protection (Firewall, Virus Checker) you offered. After that. I felt obliged to renew my subscription every July. Each new version looked very similar and you hardly ever notified me of viruses or security breaches. Maybe you eliminated them all ruthlessly and silently but for 35 GBP per year, you need to ‘add value’. ...

July 22, 2006

George Bush covers 'Sunday Bloody Sunday'

What’s weird about this video is that it appears to be culled from the same speech. Oh and that he doesn’t screw up once.

July 22, 2006

P45 for British blogger

Quelle horreur ! A female UK blogger is sacked by a French company, supposedly for ‘gross misconduct’. I went to look at the actual blog to discover what juicy office gossip she had revealed, but the blog is such an incoherent, rambling mess of disjointed thoughts using pseudonyms to conceal her true identity, I simply gave up. Inevitably, Robert Scoble thinks this is very, very important. I don’t.

July 20, 2006

smoke and mirrors

Many years ago, in a parallel universe not far from here, I was involved in a CRM ‘proof of concept’. This involved producing a demonstration of a callcenter application accessing customer and product data from disparate legacy systems in a polished, unified, modern user interface. The scenario was pretty standard fare. A motor insurance company where a customer calls in to renew his motor policy and the callcenter agent walks through a standard ‘question-answer-retort’ guided dialogue. ...

July 20, 2006

what's in a name ?

There’s nothing worse than slaving away all day over a hot keyboard trying to coerce various pieces of software to synchronise a single customer record from one legacy system to another. Of course, the mouth-watering and long awaited climax to a hard days graft (and knowledge transfer) finally arrives at 18.47 when you are tired, irritable and just want to go home. This is it. This is your moment. Seize the day. You are poised of the edge of greatness, about to scale your own personal Everest. ...

July 20, 2006

T-shirt humour

Do not disturb I am disturbed enough already

July 18, 2006

Music nostalgia

Buzzocks - What Do I Get ? The Clash - What’s My Name/Garageland Sex Pistols - EMI Siouxsie And The Banshees - Love In A Void Joy Division - She’s Lost Control The Chameleons - In Shreds The Fall - Smile (John Peel on intro) Nirvana - About A Girl

July 18, 2006

out of sight

My long suffering wife and I celebrate our wedding anniversary every year in July. To mark this momentous milestone, I buy her flowers, chocolate, champagne and book a corner table at our favourite restaurant, the wife takes the kids camping in the New Forest with her girlfriends while I make the annual pilgrimage to the Hook Norton Festival of Fine Ales with my mates. So, if you’d like to read something from me in a different style, full match reports for the 2002 and 2003 festivals are already available online together with photos of a human pyramid. We even have our own stalker. ...

July 18, 2006