Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing

So the bike lane comes up the hill on the left of the pedestrian path, but right here at the zebra crossing, it suddenly switches over to the right side. Presumably the people who did this did not for a second think it would make any difference whatsoever.

Ordnung muss sein

I once was demonstrating some VR hardware to a class. They were too many to go all at once so I split them into three groups and decreed:
“You are group 1, you are group B, and you are group Red.”
When I had ran the demo for the first group I yelled:
“OK, time for group B!”
They stepped up and primly declared:
“We are group 2.”

Conventions are practical, but they’re not mandatory.

No sale

A phone number I didn’t recognise called me. It turned to be so-and-so from my ISP calling me.
“Do you have a minute?”
Depends, are you trying to sell me something?
“Eh, no, no, I’m, eh, doing a survey.”
Well, OK.
“So, have you heard of the new TV channels we carry, ch…”
[bluntly] I don’t watch TV.
“Er, uh, you have a TV set, but don’t watch it?”
Have no TV at all.
[baffled] “Why?”
Nothing interesting to watch.
[rallying] “But these new channels…”
No.
“Ah, uh, right, I see that I’m calling you on a mobile phone. What about your home phone?”
This is it.
“Oh, ah. It looked like a mobile on…”
Correct, I have no landline. This is my home phone.
“Oh. Uh, how much do you pay for it a month?”
About a 100 SEK.
“Uh, so you don’t call a lot…”
No, I don’t.
“Ah, uh, well, thank you for help then.”

Lazy!

I just ordered tickets through the web service of the Royal Dramatic Theatre and the mail receipt contains this mess:

Retrieve your booked tickets from the ticket office within ten calendar days, thereafter they will be automatically unbooked.

If your order is for a performance closer in time than nine days from the receipt of this message, the tickets must be retrieved at the latest three days before the performance.

You can also pay your tickets to our postal giro account and have the tickets sent to your home. Give your order number as reference. Note that it normally takes three working days for your payment to reach us.

[…]

Paid tickets are sent to the address you have given, if it is more than six days to the performance. If it is five days or less to the performance, they are in our ticket office.

Now, the web app already knows when I made my booking; on what day the performance is; and that I already paid for the tickets. So some web programmer couldn’t be arsed to write four lines of code to tell me directly that I have to get my tickets in the ticket office, since I booked the tickets on such short notice. Instead I have to work out the difference between calendar days, working days, and unspecified days, and possibly also get confused by whether Wednesday is two or three days before Friday if the performance is in the evening and if that is different if Thursday is a holiday even though they give performances then. That “postal giro” hasn’t been called that for five years just fits in with the rest of it.

A sternly worded letter has been sent.

Charity

With deregulation all over, everybody has to attract clients with something special, often quite aggressively so. Thus, once when I was waiting for a friend on Södermalmstorg I was accosted by a very insistent woman selling electricity subscriptions for GodEl. Their main selling argument was that they donate from their profits to your chosen charity. One would think that they should invest in energy conservation measures, renewable energy sources, or whatever, but charity it was. So, she asked me, what would be my chosen charity? Vulcan to the Sky Trust, said I. She was a bit confused by that, but still professionally cheerful, she wondered what that was. It’s for the operation of a nuclear bomber. What! But that’s awful! So? You said I can choose any charity I want. Her commission on the stake she had to agree, but in the end I still declined to seal the deal, on account of what I pointed out was unsound selling practices, based on opt-out agreements.

Later, much later, I did change my electricity supplier, but using the spreadsheets at Elskling instead. They did not point out GodEl as the best offer I could get.

On the other hand, now I would have to donate to Vulcan to the Sky by myself.

Special people for special baggage

Once we at the lab were going to an important conference to demonstrate some multimodal interaction and thus had to bring quite a bit of Fragile and Expensive Equipment with us. We packed it as carefully as we could, wrapping stuff in layers of our underwear, bubble wrap, foam peanuts and other soft items we could find. Then off we went to Arlanda and as we checked in we explained we had Fragile Things with us, so could they please be extra careful with them?
“Oh, then you must take it to Special Baggage around the corner there. Here’s some FRAGILE tape for you to mark your boxes with.”
We criss-crossed the box with red-and-black FRAGILE markings and then went around the corner to Special Baggage. Nobody there. We looked around a bit and went:
“Ho-hoo! Anybody heere?”
Presently a lady came out, looking very bored and continuing to look bored while she had us put our box on a conveyor belt and supplied it with the necessary bar codes.
Then she started the belt. We looked curiously as the box slowly moved towards a rubber curtain at one end of the room and then started parting the curtain so we could see beyond it. NOOOOOO!!! I threw myself towards the curtain and the π/4 incline beyond it. Too late, we could just watch in dismay as the box tumbled end over end down the seemingly infinite belt. The baggage lady barely bothered to look up at the commotion, but wore an expression of dull incomprehension: what were we going on about?

It was with some trepidation that we unpacked our precious box at our destination, but our careful wrapping had paid off and everything was in fact unharmed.

Now, many years later, I was again at Arlanda (I know, I know, but at least I’ve had planted 80 trees in Africa as an attempt at expiation) and, as usual, belatedly realised that my army knife had somehow returned to my pocket from the big bag that I had already checked in. What to do? Better put the knife in the backpack I had intended to carry on board and check it in. I return to the baggage drop and explain the situation and note I have fragile stuff in the backpack (the work laptop, some stuff supposedly couldn’t wait until after the vacation).
“Oh, then you should take it to Special Baggage over there.”
I take the backpack over to Special Baggage, where the guy at the counter x-rays it and notes I have a knife in the bag. Indeed. All contents of the bag are clearly visible on the display.

Off we fly and when we have arrived, refreshed ourselves and all that, I pick up the laptop to have a look at the latest messages. Oh, foo! The screen is cracked. Somewhat incensed I navigate a number of answering machines until I get hold of a person at SAS Baggage Handling. No, no, computers are not allowed in checked-in baggage, it’s all my own fault if anything got broken, and clearly their check-in staff has no responsibility to inform anyone of anything. Aargh!

Trains it is for the future!

Not even running in circles

I was debugging an application somebody had created in framework X when I ran into a parameter I hadn't seen before so I wondered what it might do and what its legal values might be. I looked up the function in the manual. The entry for the function referred me to the separate manual for command line functions. I retrieved that manual and located the relevant chapter. It referred me to the man page for the function. I typed in man function and the man page referred me to the online help in the function. I typed function help and got the explanation that the parameter does, in fact, exist.

(Names redacted to protect me from the guilty, but their name ends with “pple”…)

Discriminated against, again!

I decided I need an electronic ID. Can I get one? Sure, it doesn't cost anything, except…I have to run Windows, and I have to run Internet Exploder.

I feel very much like kicking someone.

A cultural thing

Not being an alcohol drinker is one of those things that set you apart, others requiring you to explain yourself. (Eh, you purposely ingest an organic solvent that cripples mental and physical performance and you want me to explain myself?)

In many situations you don't even get to explain yourself, your alcohol consumption is just taken for granted. Air transport is one of those situations. In spite of it being common knowledge that alcohol consumption under low air pressure and high mental pressure increases its effects, not to mention makes Molotov cocktails easily accessible, alcohol is considered the solution to all problems:
“In honour of the National Day, we serve champagne to all passengers today.”
“We regret the six-hour delay at departure and in compensation offer free brandy to all passengers.”
“I'm terribly sorry about all the hassle with your seating, here, have a jynnantonix on the house.”
And when I decline the booze, am I then instead offered banana juice, Swiss chocolate or a tour of the cockpit? No, the offer is free alcohol and that alone and if I don't want that then I could just as well not exist. Suzanne Reuter's stewardess in Yrrol is taken directly from reality.

One would imagine that flight crews, who have to contend with air rage, which I dare to predict hardly ever is perpetrated by sober passengers, would want to do something about the serving of alcohol both on the ground and in the planes, but presumably they are just as culturally blind to even see its presence, people just magically get drunk and abusive.

Incredible

My ignorant music teacher, Jim Fiore's likewise weird teachers and Martin R's analysis of secret messages in rock music reminded me of the anti-drugs lecture we got in 9th grade. It was delivered by a very angry policeman, and as this was in the early 1980s in Sweden, an important part of the message was rock music = drugs. Apparently the message to take home was that we should a) not do drugs, b) not listen to rock music, and not necessarily in that order. Let us say that this compromised the credibility of the message from the start.

In order to underscore the perfidity of rock stars, the policeman explained the secret drug messages in a number of popular songs, from “Yellow Submarine” onwards. That made even less sense to me: if there were secret messages that encouraged drug use, didn't explaining them undermine the idea of having us not do drugs?

And the final blow to credibility came when he finished by apologising for his excitability, explaining that he due to illness was on prescription painkillers at the time. Well then!

Igno-rant

The recent trip to Drottningholm reminded me of my 9th grade music teacher, who, in a completely misguided attempt to be pedagogical, explained to us that the strange word ”silleri” in Fredmans Epistel 48 that we ignorant youngsters might take to mean celery in fact referred to herring (”sill”). That herring, being a salt-water fish, would most likely not have been on a vegetable transport from Lovön in Lake Mälaren towards the Baltic, apparently passed her completely by.

As soon as I got hold of a etymological dictionary I double-checked and of course ”silleri” was just an 18th Century alternate spelling of ”selleri”. And what exactly would a ”sill-eri” really have been anyway—a herring preparation establishment?

Every so often I wish I could go back and yell “Bloody idiot!” at some of my teachers.