» My most gullible moment

Order
Not me, but my Missy. She was ordering us a Thai takeaway on the telephone when I scribbled a last minute order on a Post-It note:

"Ask them if they've got any Phat Kok"

The lady on the other end of the phone was laughing so much the call had to be terminated.
(Tue 26th Aug 2008, 15:22, More)

» Cringe!

Jam Sandwiched
I was walking past the local constabulary and two police cars were pulling out of the side road one behind the other. They were driving slowly and fairly close together.

Not one to be intimidated by authority I thought I would be smart and cross the road between the two of them.

I strutted through with head cockily held high so failed to see a length of rope at shin height.

Yes the front car was towing the one behind and I went completely arse over tit.

There was a busy bus stop of people watching too. Brilliant!
(Thu 4th Dec 2008, 10:51, More)

» Get Rich Quick

Affiliate Linkage
My website pulled in quite few bob for a while.

Basically it was an archive of eBay auctions that were in the news but were pulled by the auction site. They were usually people selling stuff that wasn't their’s such as football teams, wives and various DNA related listings. Pretty dull stuff, but it covered by the media so people wanted to see them. Tens of thousands of people a day in fact, it turned out.

Sometimes I would spot a breaking news story about an auction and manage to archive it before it was removed. Most of the time however I would simply have to search "completed listings" and the whole listing would still be sitting there on their servers.

The sneaky bit would be posting a link on eBay to my website using keywords in the heading relevant to the removed auction. People would visit "my auction" and click through to my site to "find the information".

Once on my site they could read a small bit of copy and then "click through to the listing on eBay". Naturally the click back to eBay was an affiliate link.

This paid my mortgage for a couple of years for about half an hour's work a day. Most of my readers were in The States and I ended up on quite a few US radio stations as King Nutter giving the latest from the auction scene. It became cat and mouse with eBay as they kept closing my account and I had to open new ones, but it got to the point where I would open fifty accounts all at once with a new credit card number.

Media interest in eBay faded, but then YouTube came along and started banning vids so I did exactly the same with their keywords. If you entered "Daniella Cicerelli video" (half a million hits one weekend) a short video would play saying "Visit kingnutter.com to see this vid".

Not as lucrative as there was no affiliate incentive, but still good fun. I had Google ads that paid for my server costs at least thrice over. Which may have been the problem...

The site was going really well and about a year ago I had an interview with Google for the position of UK Editor of YouTube.

They seemed very interested about my ingenuity and ability to help users find the content they wanted, so I told them how it all worked.

I soon discovered they were not that impressed. I didn't get the job, YouTube permanently disabled my account and amended their T&Cs to stop people linking to sites containing Google Ads. To be honest it wasn't about the money at this stage and I could have easily dropped the ads. Bypassing their ban by opening any number of accounts was possible too, but it's not as fun without my own username.

I'm not disheartened. I have another idea up my sleeve which will make far bigger bucks if there are any PHP / Data Modellers out there who'd like to lend a hand. And this time no big corporate will be shutting down my accounts.

There was always something fun about getting caught though...
(Wed 6th Aug 2008, 10:42, More)

» Puns

If you're going to the United Arab Emirates...
...don't talk about The Flinstones in Dubai because they don't get the humour.

However the people in Abu Dhabi do.
(Thu 5th Mar 2009, 22:28, More)

» School Naughtiness

Horseing Around
In Sixth Form, one of the school Golden Boys (Prefect, Rugby Team, all that) had painted a very detailed picture of a horse in a field for art class. It had teachers and pupils alike cooing, but I strongly suspected he had copied it off a biscuit tin.

When briefly left alone in the art room with his work my natural response was the same as most schoolboys'. Draw a cock it. Biro outline, human in form but placed in an anatomically correct position. As you can probably tell, I was (and still am) a bit of a Vincent Van Cock and well known for leaving a trail of cockandballs behind me.

The second I had finished the last pube, I realised what I had done and knew it would be instantly obvious who was the culprit, and being in pen it couldn't be erased. There was only one course of action to get away with it...

I signed it.

That's right. I actually signed it. In bold letters. Right beside the offending todge I wrote "by Gary" (for that is my name).

Later on, when the guy turned up for the actual art class he greeted his work with the predicted, horrified reaction. Everyone gathered around him to see what was wrong, laughed and then they all turned to me to see how I was reacting to this near certain confrontation.

Then Golden Boy turned to the assembled group and said "Which one of you twats did this?" They all looked confused, gesturing to me, the obvious vandal. I looked at them as though I had no idea why they were pointing at me.

"No, it's not HIM" our horse-lover continued "Which one of you lot was trying to get him in trouble? He'd never sign his own name"

So I got away with the ultimate speedcock and even managed to leave an autograph.
(Fri 9th Sep 2011, 15:55, More)