» Gyms

Gyms, eh?
I didn't mind the gym too much.

The huge mound of cars outside all queuing (or, on more interesting days, fighting) for the five parking spaces right outside the front door was more amusing and dismaying. The primpers and preeners were more tragic than annoying. I could even cope with the weird people who seem to do an entire sixty-minute workout on one of the machines I wanted to use as part of my routine.

What got me was the changing room.

Or more accurately, the changing room predators.

Picture the scene. You've gone to the gym when it's nice and quiet. The changing room is almost empty, plenty of space for anyone who wants to change in it. So you wander in, and use whatever combination of randomness, numerology or eastern interior management arts you like to pick a locker and bench.

It was almost guaranteed that, just at the point you'd got your shirt and tie off, the fattest, ugliest and SWEATIEST middle-aged man you'd ever seen in your life would walk into that near-empty changing room and decide, that of all the wonderfully empty places to change that it offered, the place he wanted was the one right next to you.

Having already picked a locker, and thinking that huffily grabbing your stuff and walking across the changing room to another bench would look a bit - well - odd, you sort of shuffle to one side, hoping the man with the world's worst grasp of personal hygeine (and personal space, for that matter) will get the point.

This is the point at which his friend, or associate, or lover, or whatever, will decide to arrive, and the place *he* would like to change is right on the other side of you. In this empty changing room.

It's said that birds of a feather flock together, and indeed, the sweatiest man in the world's friend is the second sweatiest man in the world.

So imagine the situation. You've got about as much personal space as you'd get at rush hour on the Northern Line. You're between the world's sweatiest, ugliest, fattest middle-aged men.

And then they start stripping off.

...

I like the idea of keeping fit, but I'd rather not choose between having to change before going then have to get home before I can have a shower, or being traumatised twice every visit.
(Fri 10th Jul 2009, 22:12, More)

» IT Support

But it disappeared!
Many years past I spent two summers in a half-development, half-support job to help build the University beer^W education fund.

My favourite call came through one afternoon, when one of our users made an urgent and somewhat panicked telephone call.

"My mail. It's just gone. All of it."

Getting ready for a long afternoon ahead, I wandered out of the IT office and on to the work floor. Said user was staring at a desktop, looking confused and worried. All of the applications were minimised to the taskbar. (The desktops being Win98 PCs of varying vintages.)

"I don't know where it's gone," she said. "It just all disappeared."
"Okay," says I. "Open the mail program back up, and I'll take a look."
"But it's GONE!"

I decided it would be quicker for me to re-open the minimised mail application than to ask her (now in some state of distress) to open it for me. Click, and the window opens.

"Oh, it's back. How did you do that?"

...
(Mon 28th Sep 2009, 19:31, More)

» The Credit Crunch

Developing an entirely unjustifiable superiority complex.
Up until about midway through last year, I'd always had a reasonable sort of acceptance of financial pundits. They mostly said things would go on the same way forever, and credit could just increase to match, and even though my failing Earth logic disagreed with these views as a long-term bet, stuff mostly kept going up in price or getting cheaper as appropriate, so y'know, I figured the blokes with economics degrees and that sort of thing knew what they were talking about.

Plus their columns were always buried away deep within a paper's online presence about 95 clicks from the main page, so you didn't see many of them anyway.

Then things got a little bit less stable. And every single blathering by an economic commentator or pundit is front-page or near front-page news.

Crikey. I don't think I've ever seen a more hopeless rain of bastards actually manage to get their dribblings in print. They all seem to ping-pong wildly between "worst crisis EVAR!" and "recovery by Tuesday" and generally display about as much grip on what's going on as I have on the Lebanese language.

What is genuinely depressing is that there are potentially people reading newspapers who actually trust and believe this extended family of economic Chuckle brothers. And right now are probably spending all their savings on building a gigantic bunker for the end of capitalism as we know it, except on alternate Wednesdays when we have a "recovery is just around the corner" party.

Honestly. If you can't create a rational, sane and non-sensationalist piece, then just slap together an article saying, "I don't know" and chuck a few graphs at the bottom of it, please?
(Fri 23rd Jan 2009, 0:20, More)