Ignoring blog updates is like skipping class, the more you miss, the harder it is to go back. Of course the same could be said for any endeavor that requires constant attention, I can’t remember the last time I updated my normal web page or, for that matter, watered plants.
It’s not that I have a short attention span, it’s just that I get bored so easily. To the uninitiated that might seem like the same thing but for the practitioner of the art of grazing through life, sampling and then moving on are skills to be lovingly honed.
Being an American by birth I feel an obligation to divert responsibility and deflect blame, thus I will transfer culpability for my lack of entries to the evil thieving bastard who nicked my laptop.
Three computers in four years have grown legs and walked out of my offices- past security guards, through electronically locked doors and off to e-Bay or some computer chop-shop.
It may come as some surprise to those not working in monolithic corporations that most of those expensive looking toys you see the guys in Business Class brandishing have, for all intents and purposes, no insurance on them what-so-ever. Allow me to explain.
Corporations, like most Americans stumping up for personal medical insurance, are only protecting against catastrophic loss: the Hong Kong office gets wiped out by locust or San Francisco falls into Republican hands, that sort of thing. The standard excess (“deductible” to my fellow Americans) is generally around £2500 per item which means that even the most expensive laptop is a write-off if it gets pinched from your bag on the train. Thus, when my top of the line MacBookPro wound up in the slimy hands of a professional scum-bag, my company bent over and took it.
When my notebook walked, so did my ability to update blog pages. Some of you might be saying, “Jesus saves and so should you.” But honestly, if you are saying that, fuck off. I am probably 10 to the 500th power more IT capable than you are and I not only know the benefits of backups I script chron jobs to run them. My computer was backed up, Jack, the problem was the poxy blogging software I was using (out of laziness, not ignorance) didn’t understand the validity of my backed up pages so I was reduced to re-creating the last few entries from scratch- I process I did with reluctance.
Which brings me to today. I’m on yet another Eurostar returning from yet another trip to Paris. We just pulled out of Ashford International. I have lived in the UK for a long time now and I have yet to have anyone tell me why a place like Ashford is deserving the tile of “International.” Having the Eurostar stop there for two minutes four times a day and then branding yourself an international port of call is about like saying you’ve had sex with porn-stars by jerking off to an x-rated movie.
A month ago, Christ, was it really that long? I was in Helsinki. It was a balmy -26 there but I was too foolish in love with all the snow to care. Naturally I spent most of my time inside an office but I did manage to get out and walk across a chunk of frozen ocean which was a first for me.
Helsinki is clean. All of Scandinavia is clean. I was in Finland for five days and the only piece of litter I saw was, believe it or not, an ice-cream cup that had fallen out of a rubbish bin. However, my host did tell me that come Spring all the trash that has been buried under the snow starts popping up like bluebells.
I like the Great White North of Europe quite a lot. The air is clean, the landscapes are beautiful, the people are polite and their social welfare systems are unparalleled in the world. The evil ex-girlfriend (one of many) who dragged me over to this side of the world is Norwegian. One would think that he bitterness and justifiable contempt with which I hold her might have rubbed of, to some degree, on her home country: this is not the case. I adore Norway and, if given the chance, could probably live happily ever after there.
Granted there might be a few stumbling blocks in my relocation plan. For a start, I don’t speak Norwegian. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that everyone there speaks perfect English. I’m not kidding. I have been to Norway about a dozen times and I have yet to meet anyone, from taxi drivers, to waitress in coffee shops to residents in old-age homes, who doesn’t speak English.
They take a very pragmatic approach to language in Norway (and Scandinavia in general) they figure that, with a population of only 4.5 million, no one is going to bother learning their language so they had best learn other people’s. They start with English and move on to German, Dutch and any others that might strike their fancy. The Evil One spoke five languages by the time she was 15. At 15, I was still struggling with the concept of gendered nouns in Spanish.
I did try to learn Norwegian. I took classes at the Norwegian Seaman’s Church in San Francisco (they have a little store where you can buy Norwegian candy- if you value your taste buds, avoid the salt liquorice) and my girlfriend and I would have Norwegian Only weekends but she quickly tired of it. For her it was like trying to speak to a mentally challenged infant and the novelty didn’t take long to wear off.
I should mention that I have absolutely no aptitude for learning foreign languages. I took and failed seven years of Spanish, two years of Italian, a year of Norwegian and one week of French. From the Spanish I remember how to say “shoe” from the Norwegian, “I would like a hot dog” my Italian can get me into trouble but not out of it and I can ask a Frenchman if he is having a good day as long as his name is Guy.
My job, at the moment at least, is to rollout new IT systems to offices throughout Europe. This means that I come in contact with not only the five major European languages but most of the minor ones as well. To my American readers it may come as something of a shock to realize that when a language changes, keyboards do as well. Sitting down at a French Internet café will present you with the problem of navigating an AZERTY keyboard. Go to Brussels from Paris and, even though the language is the same, their flavour of AZERTY is just different enough to mess with your head.
Because I can touch-type it makes the problem worse- since I don’t look at the keys, I invariably hit lots of wrong letters and end up locking out lots of accounts because I enter passwords incorrectly. Yes, after a while I adjust which just makes it all that much harder to switch back to a UK keyboard.
Oh yeah, have you ever tried building and installing a server in German? How about Italian, French or Finnish? Those little warning windows that pop up before you are about to delete the content of your hard drive? What if they are in Greek or Spanish? The only thing that makes my job possible is the fact that, out of either foresight or laziness, software manufacturers simply translate their menus into different languages while leaving the structures of those menus in place. Thus the buttons for setting up Outlook or Entourage clients to connect to an Exchange server are in the same place no matter what language the operating system is in. Of course the possibility for a catastrophic fuckup is still very real but we are, for the most part, able to dumb-luck our way through.
Damn, I was trying to get today off to recover both my sanity and my health but that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. Time to take a shower, scrape my face, put on a clean shirt and go off to the Principal’s office.
No comments:
Post a Comment