Ben on a hot tin roof
Filed Under Amusing, Reminiscing
I fondly remember when I first moved out of my parents’ place. It was an exciting time: I could eat nothing but frozen pizzas, drink nothing but beer, and spend my entire weekend doing nothing but watch TV on the couch, and nobody could interfere.
However, the first step when moving into your own place is to actually find and rent a flat. Otherwise, moving day arrives and the guy with the van asks: “Okay, where does all this stuff need to be shipped to?”, and you realise that you have absolutely no idea.
And so, I scanned the newspapers and online ads, and ended up going to see just a single flat that sounded promising. I met with the landlord, who was a very nice guy, and he showed me around the small apartment that I hoped would become my new home. I tried to make a good impression to stand out from all the other applicants, and as we parted ways, he said he’d give me a quick call to let me know whether I could have the flat or not.
Flash forward to a couple days later. I was busy at work when my mobile phone rang. “Gable speaking”, the person at the other end of the line said. And this is when it happened: my most embarrassing misunderstanding to date.
It was my potential landlord on the phone, Mr Gable. As it turns out, he was calling to offer me the flat. However, while being shown around his flat, I was so preoccupied with making a good impression that I hadn’t noticed or remembered what his name was. I just thought of him as “That dude who owns the flat I’d like to live in.” And so it never even occurred to me that the person I was speaking to was my potential landlord.
Unfortunately, an old mate of mine from school days is also called Gable. So naturally, he was the first person who sprung to mind when I heard the name. I deduced that he had heard I was moving to Bavaria, and wanted to wish me luck, or say good riddance, or something along those lines. As was customary at the time, I greeted him by enthusiastically insulting him: “Gable, you old nutter, how are you? Still as thick as two planks? I’m trying to work here, you’d better have a good reason for interrupting me, you old fart.”
To Mr Gable’s credit, he didn’t hang up then and there. “I’m, uh, calling about… the, uh, flat.” I turned a shade of red that could have lit up all of Amsterdam’s red light district. I apologised profusely, telling him that I had mistaken a 55-year-old man in a suit for a 19-year-old beer buddy. To my never-ending surprise, he laughed it off, and I moved into his flat two weeks later. Which just goes to show… erm, something.
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Exhilarating malfunction
Filed Under Amusing
Today, I had an interesting brain malfunction.
As I was rummaging through the attic, I bumped into a box of old 3,5″ diskettes that were full of software I wrote fifteen years ago. Excited and eager to see what my code from back then looked like, I ran to my notebook only to realise that I no longer actually have a 3,5″ disk drive.
“I know what I’ll do!” I triumphantly declared to my startled cat. “I’ll just use VMWare to create a virtual Windows XP installation, and set that virtual machine up to have a disk drive.” Exhilaration, as they say, is that brief but exciting interval between having a brilliant idea and realising why it is actually a stupid idea.
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The food industry must hate me by now
I seem to have a knack for unintentionally confusing and/or offending anyone who tries to serve me food.
Incident 1: Sir Dogs-a-lot
While on vacation in California last year, a waiter in an Italian restaurant overheard my mate and I talking in German; as he had spent a few years in Germany, he came over for a quick chat. He introduced himself as Doig. “What an unusual first name”, I exclaimed in a friendly manner. “Yeah… it’s an old Irish name”, he explained.
This got me pondering: if someone introduced themselves to me as Doig, I would assume their name was Doug, and that they just had a weird accent. “I bet people call you Doug a lot”, I opined. The waiter looked momentarily stunned, politely lied “Oh yes, people call me Dog all the time. Woof.”, and excused himself, never to be seen again.
I can only imagine him retreating to the alley, weeping uncontrollably and over-dramatically asking himself “Am I *that* ugly? Mother was right!” while howling at the moon.
Incident 2: The non-ordered pizza
While on vacation in Florida this year, my chum and I decided it was time for lunch. We chanced upon a Little Caesar’s pizza take-away, a chain of restaurants that neither of us had ever been to, and so naturally we were a little hazy on the required protocol. Furthermore, there was no-one ahead of us in line, so we couldn’t observe and then copy their behaviour. Bravely, I stepped up to the counter.
Pizza guy > Hey guys. Cheese or pepperoni?
Me > Pepperoni, please.
The pizza guy then turned around and got a box of pizza out of the heated cabinet behind him. I pondered: aren’t pizzas normally made to-order? Then why did this guy have one ready and waiting? Uh-oh, somebody must have called in and ordered a pizza, and he assumed I was that person, who had come in to actually pick it up. As I am a nice guy, I didn’t want to take away someone else’s pizza, and so I pointed at the pizza and responded:
Me > Um, I didn’t order that.
Of course, anyone who has ever been to Little Caesar’s before knows that they always have a few pizzas waiting in heated cabinets, so they can serve customers very quickly. So imagine what this whole incident must have looked like to the poor guy behind the counter:
Pizza guy > Cheese or pepperoni?
Me > Pepperoni please.
* Pizza guy puts pizza box on counter
* A couple of awkwardly silent seconds pass
* Ben points at the pizza box
Me > I didn’t order that.
To the guy’s credit, he didn’t start throwing things at me. (For the record: it was an exceedingly decent 14″ pizza considering it only cost five bucks.)
Incident 3: My cup floweth over
Later during the same Florida vacation, we were in a fairly pricey restaurant, intent on eating several metric tons of beef. You could tell it was pricey because I didn’t have to explicitly ask for a chilled glass to go with the beer I ordered. (In less classy places, they will indeed ask if you actually want to bother with a glass. Who on earth drinks beer out of the bottle in a restaurant?!) When the waitress arrived with our drinks, she poured beer from the bottle into my glass; and next to it. Actually, mostly next to it; the table was awash with beer.
As she spread out paper napkins to soak up the spilled beer, she apoligised for making such a mess. “Oh, don’t worry, I’ll just suck it out of the napkins when nobody’s looking.”, I replied, hoping to defuse the situation with a bit of self-deprecating humour.
She didn’t even smirk.
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I want to play a game
I’m not normally one to judge people by their appearance, but somehow, there is something deeply unsettling when you pull up to a mobile food stand to buy something for dinner and suddenly find yourself standing face-to-face with Jigsaw, the villain from Saw.
“I want to play a game”, he said matter-of-factly, with the slightest hint of a psychopathic grin. I recoiled, staring in terror at the man wielding a large Döner knife. “P-pardon?”, I stuttered. “I said… what can I get you?”
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The Daily WTF
Filed Under Amusing, Software development
Sweet Frith on the hills, how did I manage to overlook The Daily WTF for so long? This website is a gold mine chock full of hysterically funny, spine-chilling software development occurrences from real-life projects, all nicely wrapped in deeply sarcastic commentary.
For example, consider the following method:
public bool getIsNull (object obj) {
return (obj==null);
}
Short. Simple. Tells the story.
However, while preparing the release of their product, management brought in a highly-paid consultant to refactor a load of code; during his efforts, he chanced upon the above method (and many like it), and decided to dump the old-fashioned == operator in favour of the much more enterprise-y .Equals method:
public bool getIsNull (object obj) {
return obj.Equals(null);
}
I realise this is deeply, almost ludicrously nerdy, but that change had me weeping with laughter for a good ten minutes. Fellow coders will understand why.
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Concording the digital world
Filed Under Amusing
Normally, I’m not really that bothered which chassis my computers come in, as long as they can take a huge number of large cooling fans, have USB ports on the front, and aren’t made of beige plastic. I expect most people use this approach when shopping for computer cases.
So what can the manufacturers of PC cases do to increase their sales? They have to make their boxes in stores stick out like a sore thumb. They have to give me some reason to believe that this is the case for me, and that I was a fool for even briefly considering any other product.
And so, while recently browsing the seemingly endless selection of cases, I noticed one box that said this on the side:
Armed with “Honor”: Centurion represents quality of Discipline, Honor, Integrity & Loyalty. Now you don’t have to be a Caesar to concord the digital world while feeling safe and proud.
Naturally, this was destined to be my PC case. This kind of shameless Engrish cannot go unrewarded. After all, I can now proudly concord the digital world without having to travel back in time and wear olive branches in my hair. And above all, I do so with a profound sense of safety and pride.
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PawSense
Filed Under Amusing
This has got to be the most significant piece of software developed this decade: PawSense detects when a cat is walking across the keyboard and then makes a sound to scare the feline typist off. The author certainly deserved it when he won the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize award for computer science. Someone, give this man a huge research grant!
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Consumer woes
Filed Under Amusing
Geof Greenleaf once put it very succinctly: “A man is measured by the size of things that anger him.”
If you expand this from a single person to an entire culture, the news provides fascinating insight into the consumer priorities of different countries. Americans tend to get annoyed at the high gas prices. The English are displeased by ever-rising grocery costs. Germans can rant for hours about how expensive beer has become in recent years.
A recent news item provided beautiful insight into the Belgian culture: of all the things in the world that are increasingly unaffordable, they are rebelling against the price for a plate of chips, even using phrases like “potato cartell”. :D
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