SHALLOWS AND AMAZON

We started this week by examining some of my shallowness and, as the week draws to a close, I feel that I should probably continue in much the same vein. It does, after all, give us all some kind of thematic closure as these little observations lurch over the line and we reach this, my 200th contribution to the incessant babble of cyberspace (blows once and rather half-heartedly on a metaphorical cardboard trumpet in ‘celebration’). Two hundred seems a good, honest and round number even though I am choosing to include the bits and pieces in the ‘other’ place (that dare not speak its name) in that total. Two hundred: an even number starting with an even number - for me, at least, the world seems more in order this morning.

I wonder how long that will last...?

Regular visitors to us here in Lesser Blogfordshire (and there are at least two of you left...) will know that I have on occasion been known to get terrifically over-excited by numbers, and rather disturbed by any proliferation of those of the odd kind. Somehow it can be slightly more difficult for me to relax when the quantities of these postings I’ve written are sitting uneasily upon an odd number or indeed if any of the many other statistics which I seem to fret over (despite the rest of the world really not being at all troubled by them) are. For, rather sadly, I am indeed that shallow, and even though I’m not proud of the fact, it’s something I’m trying to come to terms with having to live with.

Dropping off a cliff 

Nevertheless, numbers have been much on my mind in recent weeks for various, rather pointless, reasons. Not only have the numbers been flying thick and fast due to my listening to the World Cup Cricket, and the usual proliferation of bills at the end of the final quarter of the financial year, but in ways much more personal to my little life here at home. For example, that sudden recent spurt of interest (if I dare to even call it that...) due to my own misjudged arrogance propelled the page views hereabouts through the 3000 barrier way sooner than expected, and they were hightailing towards the 4000 mark before I really knew what was happening, although very quickly, things returned to normal and dropped off a cliff back to their usual ‘barely troubling the scorers’ state of normality.

The ‘bearded wonder’, the late great Bill Frindall, who used to be the ‘number one’ scorer on Test Match Special used to get quite grumpy over that expression anyway. Just because a batsman got naught didn’t mean that his job as a statistician was made any easier for it, he would say. In fact, a swift turnaround of batsmen could make things rather more frantic and hectic for a scorer for a few minutes than anyone who was well set and cruising along nicely to an innings that was allegedly ‘troubling’ the scorers would.

It’s a shame really, all those numbers careering down that steeply sloping incline. I hadn’t got so excited about the possibility of finally achieving some kind of progression since I learned how a Fibonacci sequence worked. You know the one, where the next number is the sum of the previous two. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 etc. which is terrifically useful in all sorts of ways but mostly seems to make people happy because of its relationship with the so-called “Golden ratio”. Fascinating stuff, but now those numbers are flatlining again, in fact even more so because there’s a bloody great spike in the middle that requires the graph to be drawn to a smaller scale to accommodate it, and which now makes all the ‘normal’ stuff look like the whole thing is bordering upon the braindead, which might be a good word for it, I know, but it can leave me feeling just a tad defeated by the failure of my very best efforts to entertain to actually do so.

Once upon a time the most that these musings had ever been looked at in one single day was 55, and I know that one of that 55 was me checking a security issue via another PC, so even that was a figure inflated above and beyond the actual notice there actually might have been. I also know that at least two of them every morning are just ‘pings’ which are some kind of technical thingumajig which happens when you post the data onto Twitworld, so I can claw even those less than monumental numbers right back down to zero without any help from anyone else should I need to persuade myself once more of the cruel world and its heartless lack of interest in these rantings and ravings.

So, having successfully discovered the secret of boring a tiny proportion of the world to tears on a daily basis, where do we go from here? Has a crossroads been reached? Is a rubicon in the vicinity of having to be crossed? Is it indeed make-or-break time for the good folk of Lesser Blogfordshire or are we about to go into a terminal economic tailspin that even the most copious number of clichés cannot rescue it from? Well, I am still grinding the gears to churn out something for you every morning, but it is getting tougher to actually do whenever I start to consider whether there really is any real point to it all.

Meanwhile, the statistics and numbers over on Amazon stagger ever onwards towards the 1000 mark in the  ‘number of people who found this helpful’ tally after a less-than-solid run dating back to September 2009, when a sudden desire to share a tiny bit of information that had been unclear when I made one of my purchases transformed into another doomed and ultimately short-lived obsessive desire to share my opinions with the big wide world whilst lurking in my dark little cave from which I seldom emerge. I did recently renew this particular relationship briefly by contributing review number 118 in order to finally get it off that troubling and horribly odd number of 117 that it had been stuck on since last August which was the last time I’d felt able to be bothered with actually writing one.

It might seem the strangest of reasons for reviewing something, but that odd number had niggled at the back of my mind for eight months without me feeling able to compose anything of substance to change it. Strange as it might seem to you, whilst I felt perfectly content to post these babblings in Lesser Blogfordshire during that time, for some peculiar reason I was completely unable to compose any kind of rational or useful opinion on any of the tat that I had acquired in the meantime.

I think I know why, of course. There had been a couple of comments written under one or two of the reviews which implied that I had somehow managed to “cheat” the statistics and improve my position in the charts, and I think I rather took it personally that someone should think that I was either (1) that shallow or (2) that bothered by such a thing. I suppose that I should, of course, have been flattered that they considered me capable of engineering such a feat (I really wouldn’t have known how…) or indeed by the suggestion that I could motivate people to do such things, or indeed that I had enough friends and acquaintances whom I could organise in such a way to do my bidding. It did of course prove to me once again that the world is full of strange people with even stranger priorities and that, as usual, when you are accused of such shenanigans it tells you much more about the mind of the accuser than the person that they accuse.

Review number 118 was a strange one as it was basically a slimmed down version of something I intended to publish as a posting here – and eventually did - but because it was about a book I thought to myself “hang on…” and realised that I had that elusive number 118 pretty much written and (as they say) good to go. Two birds, same stone. Strangely, due to the wibbly-wobbliness of my typing habits, the review got zapped into cyberspace first, a mere seven months after the last one (no-one could accuse me of shirking my responsibilities…) and I started to wonder whether I would now get somebody accusing me of plagiarism instead (even though I was only plagiarising myself), because, unless you knew who I was, you might never realise the connection…

Rather naturally, of course, and as is always the way with these things that I fret and worry about, nobody else even noticed, which rather brings us neatly back to my earlier point and that now rather sad, age old question that also made up the last recorded lines in the life of the late Kenneth Williams:

“Oh, what’s the bloody point?”

SMALL SURPRISES (BOTH NASTY & NICE)

I spent a lot of Monday feeling quite angry, and it was all my fault, because I took my eyes off the ball for a moment and dropped it and then got a unpleasant surprise. Now, I’ve never been a big fan of surprises, and I’m more likely than anything to try and skip the country if there is even the most unlikely chance of having to attend a surprise party because that sort of thing just makes me feel uncomfortable for the recipient and just plain awkward in myself. This would become even more likely if I was the person getting the surprise, but even the small surprises that life can sometimes throw at you are not something I enjoy, probably because, in general, I tend to find they are of the “nasty” kind.

Without going into too much detail, during my mother’s recent three month hospitalisation, I paid little attention to her finances because I knew that they were all being paid by Direct Debit and so they were nothing to worry about. What loose bills that I did find got paid, and, to be honest, I genuinely thought everything was “hunky-dory”. However, when mum finally got home this weekend, she and my sister went through all her accumulated post and emails and found, to everyone’s surprise, that there had been an unpaid bill for some clothing which amounted to about £25 and, not to put too fine a point to it, there were some rather stroppy follow-up communications that mentioned legal action and brought to mind (not without reason) images of leg-breaking burly men standing upon doorsteps and making threatening noises towards a rather befuddled 78 year-old woman. Hopefully, it has been sorted now, and such things will not become necessary (if they ever were…) but the thing that got me annoyed wasn’t that aspect of it, they are after all just people doing a job, but the lack of opportunity that was given to my sister to explain when she tried to ring up and sort it out.

Maybe you’ve had one of these conversations before, but they are rather a new experience to me, even though I didn’t do the actual “experiencing” myself (which was probably for the best). According to what I was told later (“Objection! Hearsay!” as Jack McCoy would undoubtedly have bellowed...), it went something along these lines…

“It’s about my mother and this unpaid bill…”

“If you are not the actual customer, then I cannot talk to you about it!”

“Yes, but she had a stroke three months ago…”

“I cannot talk to you!”

“She’s been in hospital for the last three months…”

“I cannot talk to you!” and so on…

You get the picture…

So, when faced with someone being totally bloody-minded, I suspect that it was just as well that it was my sister making that particular call, because I think I might very well have burst a blood vessel if it had been me. Now, believe it or not, I am prepared to see things from the company’s point of view, and I’m sure they spend all day having to listen to hard-luck stories, especially during the current economic climate, and I’m sure that it’s a very frustrating job to have to do, but that sense that someone isn’t even prepared to listen to what you’re trying to say to them must eventually bring even the most mild-mannered of customers to the brink of a meltdown if they try to ring up with the most reasonable of explanations and get faced with that kind of response... (“Mr. Magee, don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry!”)

I’m told that this person really shouldn’t have made it a “data protection” issue and it was quite within their powers to give general advice but instead they chose to make an already difficult situation into a very, very stressful one. I suppose my sister could have asked to be transferred to a supervisor or something, but when you’re up against such an immovable object, even the unstoppable force that my sister is capable of being is sometimes left holding on to a telephone in disbelief.

There does also seem to be a slight modern corporate sense that just because they've sent out a letter or email, then the matter has been sufficiently dealt with, despite the fact that they have not got any way of knowing whether the intended recipient ever actually got it. Their large hammers go crashing about to crack such tiny nuts as we all seem to be when faced with all their might, but might isn’t always right in much the same way as the customer can sometimes be wrong, too.

Hopefully the matter has now resolved itself, although the bank were equally tricky when it became obvious that my mum had also, over the course of three months and a stroke, rather naturally forgotten all her various banking PIN codes, and, because she had wisely not written any of them down for security reasons, had no access to her own money. Again, I can’t really blame them for not just handing them out to anyone who rang up to ask for them, after all, the security of our money should be their primary concern (Hah!), but it’s these tiny little unpleasant surprises that make life just that little bit more infuriating for everyone as they try to get on with their own lives.

Then, sometimes, it’s the little things that take you nicely by surprise. Those little details that you’ve forgotten all about. A couple of years ago, before I found this blog as an outlet for what, for the sake of argument, we’ll still refer to as my “creativity”, I used to write Amazon reviews. I mentioned those here once before and my favourite example (“Morse Lives!”) still lurks over on The Writers’ Blog pages. What I’d forgotten, however, is the Amazon “comments” section, where, much like in Blogland, the great unknown masses of customers are invited to tell you, in no uncertain terms, what they think of your humble thoughts. Luckily for me, the comments on that particular timeless piece of prose were generally favourable and I was able to add my own reply to one of them, which went like this:-

Thank you for your kind words, and for finally confirming to me something that I'd hoped - that such an 'offbeat' style of review might (at the very least) just amuse somebody somewhere and still fulfill its purpose. I'm so glad you "got" it and hope that things have now warmed up in your part of the world.

Morse purists might, of course, question the whole "urn scenario" given his ultimate fate, but I hope my little joke still works*. After watching all 33 films in fairly rapid succession, the voices seemed very vivid to me, which I think is testament to their sheer quality.

*"Kit, tell me joy" (anag) (2,6,4)

So, imagine my surprise when someone, on this damp weekend we’ve just endured, eighteen months after the review was posted and long, long after the product itself had become unavailable added:-

Anagram answer - my little joke - Morse would be proud of you!

I try to play my little games with the world, and for most of the time, the world simply isn’t at all interested, but, just occasionally, my faith is restored.

You throw your little pebbles out into the pond of life and you never know where the ripples are going to end up, and, despite what I might choose to believe, some surprises can occasionally turn out to be pleasant ones.