Pet Hates

When you are as contrary as I tend to be, ‘Pet hates’ as a title is far too wide-ranging to be meaningful.  So much irritates and annoys me that one has to compartmentalize the discomfort.  So, today I will be concentrating on those elements which disturb my enjoyment of the swimming pool.  Here is the first dozen or so that spring to mind!

My Swimming Pool Hatreds

1     People who do not put their clothes away in lockers in the changing room, but leave them hanging up on hooks over the benches.  These people have what amounts to an ostentatiously proprietorial attitude to a public space.  And they limit space for changing too.

2     Other swimmers in my lane.  I know that it is inevitable that a pool with five lanes, is going to have more than five swimmers are popular times – especially when the two outer lanes are taken up with older folk doing exercises for their health or families with babies and therefore the lanes are not available for real swimming.

3      Children.

4   Single long hairs in the water.  In our pool it is obligatory for all swimmers to wear caps, except for some extraordinary reason in the summer time when the roof of the pool is open to the elements, but it is easy for the hairs to escape.  This is not resentment because I am follically challenged, and I do not really blame anyone for the hairs, it is just the disgust at feeling a hair wrap itself along your face or find its way between your fingers.  Not really logical, but the revulsion is real.

5      Clumsy swimmers splashing me.  I loathe this in a way I find difficult to explain.  The spray from another lane is a constant irritation.  This morning was a more than appalling example, where the swimmer appeared to be digging his way through the water and flinging handfuls on me!  Ugh!

6      Children.

7     Taking up too much of the bench on which towels are place before your swim.  This is a simple case of selfishness and poor consideration.

8     Children (of all ages) hanging on to and pushing the lane float line.  If you have an energetic stroke having your fingers hit the plastic floats is actually painful.  My nail ends are in a parlous enough state as it is without having the abrasion of floating plastic making them worse.  There is also the effect of clunking the buttons of your smartwatch and therefore negating the information being collected on your swim.  Information, I might add, that I do nothing whatsoever with when it is collected – but that is not the point.

9    Invading my lane.  This is mostly having to deal with people who have no idea whatsoever about when to make a move if they want to pass through a lane.  They do not seem to be able to judge speed and proximity.  They should learn!

10   Ambient music.  I am more than content with the sound of the bubbles breaking against my ears and the music of my own thoughts!

11  Men peeing with the door of the toilet open.  Do women do this in their changing room?  I think probably not.  Is this a macho sort of thing?  Whatever.  Stop it!

12  Over equipped swimmers.  Unless you are a professional (in which case you probably shouldn’t be doing your training at our pool) the only equipment you need is: costume, goggles, cap, slip-ons, towel, ear plugs.  Anything else is mere ostentation.  Some people have water bottles, plasticised sheets of their regime, flippers or fins, hand thingies and other bits and pieces.  No.

13  Cold showers.  I’ve done the exercise, I deserve the pleasure of a warm shower not the punishment of something more befitting one of the more vicious old English public schools.

14    Children 

15    Swimmers chatting in the pool at the lane end.  Pools are for swimming not talking.

16    Men who wear anything other than brief swimming costumes.  That sounds more overtly sexual than I meant it to sound.  I was only making a practical point about practical swimwear for serious swimming.  One person this morning was wearing shorts that came down to mid shin!  What next?  Full dress costume and the re-emergence of Victorian bathing machines?

And I better stop there (though there’s more, much more) because you probably get the idea!  And probably too clear an idea of my character!

Far more pressing and disturbing is the fact that our select class of language students was hit with the unwelcome news that we have an examination a week today.  That did not go down well.  Our attendance is patchy.  There should be as many as twenty students in the class, but we have never had more than a dozen at best.  I can’t imagine that the examination will encourage them to creep out of the woodwork for the ritual humiliation that attempting to speak a language you do not know brings.

To be fair our examination is only (sic.) on the first two units of the course book and has some fairly basic stuff in it – but it confuses the hell out of us anyway.  Today, for example we were doing an exercise where we had to add the ‘from’ bits to show where someone was, well, from – and we were hit with the definite article scam.  It is always amusing to hear those of a foreign inclination refer to The Big Ben having been seen on their trip to London.  In our explanations we tell the hapless non-English speakers that “We don’t say that.”  We then explain that The Houses of Parliament but Buckingham Palace; The London Eye and The Tower of London, but Piccadilly Circus and Wembley Stadium.  And we hope that clears things up!

I have now been paid back in my own coin as we have been told that India, in Catalan is actually The India and therefore the way you write things like, “He is from India” in Catalan has to include the definite article, so it becomes “He is from the India”.  O Dear!

 

Well, we have a week to get things organized in our minds before the sudden onset of bits of paper with other bits to fill in is suddenly upon us.  As I always say at this point, this week should be one of revision, of bringing to the surface those elements of language that have been drilled into my subconscious.  Real life is not like that.  There will be a week of frantic learning so that the devastation of the red marker pen is not scrawled too thoroughly on my tear-sodden paper.

-oOo-

In an act of nasty minded viciousness, someone or other has thrown a black plastic bag of rubbish into our neighbour’s front garden.  Cats and other vermin have been at the debris and it looks unsightly and insanitary.

We have no access to the garden, and our neighbours are not in residence, so I took the extreme measure of phoning the rental company to Do Something About It, as they own the building and they must have something like a duty of care.  I was assured that they would at 10.00 am this morning.  It is now 5.00 pm and the rubbish is still there.  I will keep track.

-oOo-

I feel as if I am in an R D Laing poem, where there is something I should know that I have forgotten.  I am fairly sure that there is a part of the domestic shopping list that I have not filled, but I am damned if I can remember what it is.  And there is nothing worse that endlessly going through the litany that my mother used when she was trying to remember what groceries she needed.  She always started the list with “Butter, lard, marge, sugar, eggs . . .”  And that has stayed with me. 

Its usefulness is limited as we don’t buy the first four items on the list and Toni is fully paranoid about eggs and checks the dates and is scrupulous about staying within the time limits.  I, on the other hand, am probably more flexible that I should be with sell by dates and best by dates.  Toni has never really recovered from going through my cupboards and finding items that were years out of date.  And he was insistent on his sharing his astonishment with me at each new archaeological discover that he made.  For the sake of a quiet life I allowed him to bin stuff that I would never have thrown out and would quite happily have used today.  I mean dried pasta is dried pasta – what can go off.  And anyway, some pasta is naturally green!

I have been hoping that typing will prompt my fingers in an unconscious sort of way to suddenly become possessed by the Spirit of Domesticity and reveal the item.  But, nothing!

Himself will soon be home and I am sure that as soon as he steps over the threshold it will come to me with a bump.

I can always aver that my mind is now consumed by the looming examination and I have no time for trivial things.

REVISION STARTS TONIGHT.  Unless there is a decent film on.  NO!  I will dedicate myself to the acquisition of the rudiments of the language.  I will.  I will!  A bit.

The trackpad that lost its click

Once upon a time, and a very long time ago, when Windows 3 was ravaging the land (reducing grown men to bitter tears of impotent rage) with its malevolent vagaries, one hapless seeker after gadgets stumbled upon a machine with an operating system that seemed specifically designed to invite humans to interact, allowing (nay, encouraging) adherents to be instinctive and logical in their responses to particular problems and lo! they were resolved!  The Holy Grail of computer systems had been found, and that system was enshrined in a Mac.

The Gadget Seeker was hooked.  And he stayed faithful, even though he was so lonely in his affirmation of the Wonders of the Mac because all his friends, colleagues and virtually everyone else in his little world owed allegiance to the false gods of Microsoft.  He stayed faithful, even when he discovered that the Grand Mufti of Microsoft had a secret decree that forbade those programs that worked on Windows from working with Mac – even though it said it would on the box!  Such deception!  So unlike the friendly, civilized world of Mac.

And the Seeker was true unto the Mac, and lavished praise and pounds, and more pounds, to affirm his faith, buying anything and everything that Mac made.  Soon his electronic life was enriched by iPod, iPad, iPhone, MacBook Air and a mighty all-in-one.

But our little Seeker didn’t realize that the providers of this profusion of goodies were no longer the welcoming, helpful, altruistic innovators of old – they had become hard and calculating.  They had progressed from their lowly garage cradle and had been shown the riches of the world - and they had Fallen, because the Voice had said that all of those riches could be theirs!

The Seeker was beguiled and listened not to the voices of reason that told him that his devotion was being manipulated and that he was being taken for a very expensive ride.  He clove unto the beauty of the design and the thinness and the lightness thereof and said that his eyes were wide open and he was prepared to suffer for his faith.  A little.

And the cost of his devotion was ever rising and he appeared to be getting ever less important ‘stuff’ for his money and doubt began to sow its seeds.

And then the dark minds that held sway in the realms of Mac began to flaunt their power and produced such vapid things as the Apple Watch - that was not really a patch on the Pebble and cost oh-so-much-more!  And the murmurings grew.

At last, as was inevitable, there was the Golden Calf Moment in the Messianic Empire of Mac and they flung a gewgaw of great price but little worth in front of their fanatics and screamed, “Buy!”  Behold!  It was the iPhone 6, and it was ridiculously expensive for what it was, but the Demons of Mac said, “Believe - and Buy!”  And many did.

But the veil was torn from the faithful eyes of the Seeker and he repudiated his faith (though not to the extent of getting rid of all the Mac stuff that he had, or not using it, or anything silly like that!) and vowed to turn towards Windows in a Dell.

Which he did, so now his MacBook Air (once his Pride and Joy) is now relegated to his jobbing ‘second’ laptop!  Ho!, and yet again, Ho!

But fate had yet a sneaky trick to play.

The trackpad of his main computer (a Mac) became skittish and refused to bend to his will.  And he was wroth.  It looked perfectly normal from the top.  Underneath, however, one of the two ‘pimple’ foot-bumps had become dislodged.  Its design was simple, it looked like the top half of a very small spaceship: a curved ‘dome’ with a circular flat flange around it.  That flange was supposed to fit underneath the bottom casing, but, try as he might, the Seeker could not get that flange in the hole, or at least not enough of it to make the connection secure. 

He knew that there must be a ‘knack’ to its re-insertion, or that there would be some useful (but specifically and exclusively Mac-type tool) that would facilitate the operation.  He also knew that there was a small Mac Temple in the town where the Followers of Mac-dom would work their magic.

Hoping that the practitioners would not be able to guess that he was an apostate, he tentatively entered the Temple and proffered the offending touch-pad with a simperingly dismissive smile at the simplicity of the challenge it offered to the Geniuses. 

The Chief Priest of the Mac Temple looked at the touchpad, looked at the foot, looked at the hole and made a few ineffectual attempts to reinsert the thing.  In much the same inept way, it has to be admitted that the Seeker had done.  Eventually, the Chief Priest turned to the Seeker and said, “The Engineer will have to look at this.  He will decide if anything can be done.  It may not be possible.”

The Seeker was puzzled, astonished, nay dumbfounded  Where was the specially designed tool for this particular job which could, obviously, only be used for this particular foot replacement?  Where was the easy display of ‘knack’ showing how melodiously simple and ‘right’ everything Mac was?

“Come back in one hour!” said the Chief Priest in a voice heavy with lugubriousness.  With a sinking heart, illusions shattered, despondency settling on him like dust from disintegrating floppy disks, the Seeker left

.

The hour passed.  He returned.

And lo! The job had been done!  The offending trackpad was brought to the Seeker by a lowly Server, who turned to the Chief Priest with a questioning look.

The Chief Priest looked at the trackpad long and hard, then he looked at the Seeker, then back to the trackpad and then, in a voice drained of emotion, he said, “That’s OK!” and dismissed the Seeker with a half-hearted wave.

Stammering his thanks, the Seeker backed out of the Temple, the only man to get something for nothing from Mac!

MORAL: Sometimes money isn't everything.

ANTI-MORAL: If you get lucky once - run!