Back to Warwickshire bus drivers. Got to the bus stop today, and the driver - small, round, about fifty, balding, Cornish-pastie with a pickled onion and pint of Guinness type - was just tapping into his mobile phone. "Be with you in a minute, love," he said, "when I get myself off Facebook".
Facebook?
Now I'm even wondering whether I'm right about the Cornish-pastie. Perhaps I've got him all wrong and he's a rocket-and-anchovy-salad-with-a-coriander-dressing-and-glass-of-Sauvignon type.
The world's gone mad.
It reminded me of the lad who helped us move in to this house a couple of months back. He comes in - tall, thin, nylon tracksuit, Nike cap, the words 'I-like-looking-tough' tattooed down his left arm and the words 'I-like-frightening-people' carved into his army-short hair - and he happens to see Husband's 'Learn Japanese' book in one of the boxes. 'Oh,' he says, 'who's learning Kanji, then?' He and Husband then have a nice intellectual chat about the different Japanese alphabets while I stand there, inadequate and Japanese-challenged.
I do wish, once I've stereotyped people, they would stay where I put them. Most disconcerting.
Wednesday, 28 January 2009
Friday, 16 January 2009
How to recover from accidents with fish with your dignity intact
Look, I know everyone's trying to deal with the credit crunch and all that, but some people are just not getting it right in their efforts to start up new and thriving businesses.
My uncle is trying to start up a new business as a frozen fish manufacturer. The problem is, he didn't read the manual. The manual would have told him to:
purchase a factory
purchase freezers
order fish off a fisherman
wait for the delivery
freeze the fish in the freezers
sell the frozen fish
Having not read the manual, he followed his own DIY method:
go into a pet shop
buy a fish tank
buy £57 worth of tropical fish
bring them home
put them in the fish tank
keep the water at a temperature too cold for the fish
freeze the fish to death
find that there are, sadly, no buyers for stiff and inedible tropical fish
My uncle has three fish left. He didn't want to tell me how many he'd started with.
I think, you know, he's going to have to find some other way to raise money. However, there is hope. I have thought of some uses for his stiff and inedible tropical fish.
1. Use them as substitutes for those blue blocks you put in packed lunches to keep your yogurt cool.
2. Keep a couple in the freezer for when you stub your little toe on the doorframe.
3. Mount them in a frame and keep them on the wall - this kind of art is very popular in rural pubs. Should you have a spare deer's head, put it near this for authenticity.
4. Defrost them, then put them back in the water, to which you have added enough salt to recreate the conditions of the Dead Sea. The fish will float around, looking as fish usually do anyway, and no one will know the difference.
5. Put them in a fish pie with mussels, clams and other chewy bits of unidentifiable fish. A good dash of curry powder should help to take away that residual flavour of stiff and inedible tropical fish.
6. Sell them on eBay. Some people just can't resist a bargain and will think your sale original and trendy, especially if you price them at £75.95 each. It's a bit like the Tate Modern: convince people that they're seeing something amazing, and they'll believe you.
7. Use them as heel pads in high stilettos when you go clubbing.
8. If you have a boyfriend/girlfriend you no longer want, put the fish under your sofa and leave them there a couple of weeks. Kiss and cuddle your bf/gf and when they say, 'Can you smell something weird?' deny all knowledge.
9. If this doesn't work, wear the stiff and inedible fish on a chain as a piece of neck jewellery. This should make the break-up a cert.
10. If this doesn't work, wrap up the stiff and inedible fish in pretty paper and present it for Valentine's Day. If this doesn't work either (ie your bf/gf says, 'Oh darling, you are so considerate - how did you know this was what I really wanted?) you are dating a very disturbed person and should perhaps think about making wiser choices.
It's a good thing, when there are people around with no business sense like my uncle, that I am around to give advice.
My uncle is trying to start up a new business as a frozen fish manufacturer. The problem is, he didn't read the manual. The manual would have told him to:
purchase a factory
purchase freezers
order fish off a fisherman
wait for the delivery
freeze the fish in the freezers
sell the frozen fish
Having not read the manual, he followed his own DIY method:
go into a pet shop
buy a fish tank
buy £57 worth of tropical fish
bring them home
put them in the fish tank
keep the water at a temperature too cold for the fish
freeze the fish to death
find that there are, sadly, no buyers for stiff and inedible tropical fish
My uncle has three fish left. He didn't want to tell me how many he'd started with.
I think, you know, he's going to have to find some other way to raise money. However, there is hope. I have thought of some uses for his stiff and inedible tropical fish.
1. Use them as substitutes for those blue blocks you put in packed lunches to keep your yogurt cool.
2. Keep a couple in the freezer for when you stub your little toe on the doorframe.
3. Mount them in a frame and keep them on the wall - this kind of art is very popular in rural pubs. Should you have a spare deer's head, put it near this for authenticity.
4. Defrost them, then put them back in the water, to which you have added enough salt to recreate the conditions of the Dead Sea. The fish will float around, looking as fish usually do anyway, and no one will know the difference.
5. Put them in a fish pie with mussels, clams and other chewy bits of unidentifiable fish. A good dash of curry powder should help to take away that residual flavour of stiff and inedible tropical fish.
6. Sell them on eBay. Some people just can't resist a bargain and will think your sale original and trendy, especially if you price them at £75.95 each. It's a bit like the Tate Modern: convince people that they're seeing something amazing, and they'll believe you.
7. Use them as heel pads in high stilettos when you go clubbing.
8. If you have a boyfriend/girlfriend you no longer want, put the fish under your sofa and leave them there a couple of weeks. Kiss and cuddle your bf/gf and when they say, 'Can you smell something weird?' deny all knowledge.
9. If this doesn't work, wear the stiff and inedible fish on a chain as a piece of neck jewellery. This should make the break-up a cert.
10. If this doesn't work, wrap up the stiff and inedible fish in pretty paper and present it for Valentine's Day. If this doesn't work either (ie your bf/gf says, 'Oh darling, you are so considerate - how did you know this was what I really wanted?) you are dating a very disturbed person and should perhaps think about making wiser choices.
It's a good thing, when there are people around with no business sense like my uncle, that I am around to give advice.
Friday, 9 January 2009
A seasonal set-in-a-school ghost story
A seasonal set-in-a-school ghost story for you which I wrote for a competition, put it an envelope which I addressed and stamped, and then realised that the magazine I'd seen the competition in was a year old. That's called a painful moment.
The Ghost of Classroom Past
“Write the objective in your BOOKS,” I yell at Year 9, who are fidgeting and delving furtively into their lunchtime crisps. It’s 8.45.
Raymond, in the front row, blinks twice behind his glasses and points at the whiteboard. “You haven’t written anything, Miss.”
I look behind me and he’s right. The words I wrote up there just before the kids all piled in have disappeared.
“Who did that? Confess NOW.”
Rochelle, a sharp, slim girl with hair scooped up into a glittery hairclip, says, “Miss. No one never rubbed the words off. Honest!” Rochelle is more in charge of this class than I am. One day she’ll be a managing director or a madam; she’ll do either like a real pro.
“But - I don’t understand –“.
In the end, I dictate the objective to them, feeling guilty. Dictation is not fashionable. Inevitably, I’m going too fast for some and too slow for others. It’s called mixed ability teaching: some days I’m able and some days I’m not.
After school, I’m at my desk with a Leaning Tower of Marking. The room seems icy cold despite central heating, and the day’s events niggle at me. My lesson objectives vanished from the whiteboard in four of my lessons, causing mayhem. During a clip from Hamlet with the Year 12s, the data projector moaned like a banshee throughout, though no one mentioned it. Then, in my Year 7 lesson, when I said, “Now for the plenary,” I heard mocking laughter from my filing cabinet. I glared at it, and then at the class. “Did anyone else hear laughter?” I said, but was met with blank stares. They went very quiet, which you would if you thought you were being taught by someone who hears cackling from pieces of furniture.
The classroom has a stillness about it now, like the moment before a storm, as I mark Year 10 essays. It’s dark outside. There’s the odd de-icing sound and flash of headlights, but otherwise silence. Everyone else has headed home for sausage and mash and Eastenders.
I try to yank my mind back to the marking. “Shows understanding of authorial intentions,” I write, taking a phrase straight from the GCSE criteria, but then I hear someone behind me hissing, “Criteria, criteria – what a lot of tosh,” and on the ‘sh’ of ‘tosh’ the hissing lingers, like wind whistling under a door. I turn, expecting to see a joker of a colleague.
But, standing with his back to my whiteboard, is a man with sparse, grey hair wearing a black suit and tightly-buttoned starched collar. He is carrying a long stick and a black book. His lips are thin, his eyes a very, very bright blue. I get the feeling he can see right through me. We’d be evens if he can, because I can see straight through him. Where his stomach should be, there’s the board rubber, resting on the whiteboard shelf. And I can see the date - ‘3 January 1937’ - through his forehead. His skin is pale and translucent, like papyrus.
Bloody hell! 1937?
“What’s all this rubbish about ‘understanding of authorial intentions’?” he spits, and I shrink back as he taps his cane on the exercise book. He laughs a filing cabinet kind of laugh. “What a lot of modern clap-trap!” he says.
I’m offended. Ghost he may be, but I take pride in my marking.
“It’s not modern clap-trap,” I venture, only ‘clap-trap’ comes out hoarsely. It’s not every day I discuss educational methods with ghouls. “It – hem! - helps every child to achieve if they understand where they can improve their learning.”
All he can say is, “Piffle!” which is a term I haven’t come across, despite subscribing to Word of the Day from the online OED.
Suddenly, he starts striding around the classroom, clouds of chalk dust, or skin cells, or ash, following him everywhere. “Who arranged the desks in these ridiculous groups?” he accuses. “They’re not even real desks. No inkwells. No pencil grooves. Modern man-made madness.” He slaps a bony hand on a table to emphasise the syllables. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack, crack, crack. I flinch. I can see the outline of his bones and either he’s more substantial than he looks or he’s just sustained six minor fractures.
He pauses by a display of media work. Along with a mist of icy breath, a moan escapes his lips, and I recognise it as the data projector moan. “What is this?” he says, in disbelief, and sinks down onto the edge of a table. He lifts his cane wearily, pointing. “Spelling - dreadful. Punctuation - abysmal. Handwriting - appalling.” He stops, and seems lost in his thoughts.
“This was my room,” he says, eventually. “Before I was – was – asked to leave the school.” His voice is bitter. “I wouldn’t have tolerated this sloppiness. Oh no. Three strokes on the hand soon dealt with sloppiness.” He sighs so heavily that his head is swathed in a swirl of dust and freezing air. I can feel my bronchi constricting, but it seems insensitive to get my Ventolin out, so I breathe deeply. The two of us, sighing and huffing, are like a couple of consumptives.
“They asked you to leave?” I say.
He stands abruptly. I can see the media display through his chest wall; the words ‘tellyvision’ and ‘comunicasion’ are where his nipples would be.
“Ha!” He wanders back towards me and taps his cane on my laptop. I nearly shout ‘Open Sesame!’ and lift the lid, but resist. “What is this idiocy? I suppose you’re going to tell me you have no markbook,” he challenges, slapping his black book on my desk. A long, skeletal finger flips it open. Names - Arthur, Edward, Susan, Jean – are meticulously listed alongside strings of marks, all out of 20.
“No,” I admit. “I keep all my grades on the computer, alongside all the attainment targets and the National Curriculum guidelines, so that –“
He cuts me off, stretching his thin hand out in a blocking gesture. “Stop there!” he commands. “I can’t bear to hear any more.”
“Things move on,” I persist. “We have to change with the times.” But on the word ‘change’ he steps back as though I’ve hit a raw nerve, which could actually be the case, the way things stand.
“Change?” He glares. “Change?” He reaches into the breast pocket of his jacket, pulling out a yellowed document which he thrusts in my face. “Read that!”
I take it gingerly and lay it on the desk. It’s from ‘the Headmaster’, is dated June 1937, and charges ‘Mr Colnbrook’ with refusing to ‘desist from excessive use of old-fashioned educational strategies’. The letter gives him a month’s notice.
Something makes me re-read the name. I look up at his face. Yes! Those piercing eyes. The thin lips. The tweed suit.
“What?” he says, severely. “What are you staring at?” It seems a strange thing to ask, considering he’s a supernatural entity who didn’t even need a window to get in, but I can understand his point of view.
“You taught my gran!” I exclaim. “I’m sure of it. Mr Colnbrook! She used to tell me about you.”
He peers at me. It’s disconcerting. This close, I can see into the back of his eye sockets. But it’s a sensitive moment, so I don’t comment on it.
“What’s your name, girl?” he says, and I feel twelve again. I can see why Gran called him ‘The Grim Reaper’. I don’t let on, though. You should tread carefully early on in a relationship, especially with the dead.
“Sarah. Sarah Brandon. But my Gran was Maisie Doubleday.”
At the name, his sparse lips move upwards into a deathly smile. “Ah!” He says my grandmother’s name slowly. “Mai-sie Double-day. I remember! Yes, you do resemble her.” He looks almost nostalgic, for a spectre. He certainly has his own misty aura, like in posh wedding photos.
“She adored your lessons,” I tell him. And it’s true. Even though she called him The Reaper, like everyone did, he’d inspired her to read Dickens and Thackeray. “She became an English teacher because of you. And so, I suppose, so did I.” He grins widely at this, although I preferred the smile. The grin worsens the skull factor.
He sighs again. “Mai-sie,” he repeats. “Yes. She cried the day I left.” There’s a companionable silence, and my lung passages are even adapting now to his personal dustiness.
He takes up his previous place in front of the whiteboard, nodding towards it. “You saw my clever little trick with your ‘objectives’, then?” he says. His voice is fading; I have to strain to hear him.
“Very amusing,” I say, risking sarcasm. “Not.”
He winces. “Don’t put the negative in a minor sentence like that, my dear,” he whispers.
“Sorry. I promise I won’t,” I whisper back, reverently. “And I’ll work on their spellings. But please don’t moan from inside the data projector again, Sir.”
I glance at my laptop, and then back at him, but he’s gone. I reach out, but all that’s left is cold, empty air. The date on the whiteboard has changed back to 2008. And resting against the wall is a long, thin, flexible stick.
I leave it there. It won’t do Year 9 any harm, just to have a little reminder of how things used to be.
The Ghost of Classroom Past
“Write the objective in your BOOKS,” I yell at Year 9, who are fidgeting and delving furtively into their lunchtime crisps. It’s 8.45.
Raymond, in the front row, blinks twice behind his glasses and points at the whiteboard. “You haven’t written anything, Miss.”
I look behind me and he’s right. The words I wrote up there just before the kids all piled in have disappeared.
“Who did that? Confess NOW.”
Rochelle, a sharp, slim girl with hair scooped up into a glittery hairclip, says, “Miss. No one never rubbed the words off. Honest!” Rochelle is more in charge of this class than I am. One day she’ll be a managing director or a madam; she’ll do either like a real pro.
“But - I don’t understand –“.
In the end, I dictate the objective to them, feeling guilty. Dictation is not fashionable. Inevitably, I’m going too fast for some and too slow for others. It’s called mixed ability teaching: some days I’m able and some days I’m not.
After school, I’m at my desk with a Leaning Tower of Marking. The room seems icy cold despite central heating, and the day’s events niggle at me. My lesson objectives vanished from the whiteboard in four of my lessons, causing mayhem. During a clip from Hamlet with the Year 12s, the data projector moaned like a banshee throughout, though no one mentioned it. Then, in my Year 7 lesson, when I said, “Now for the plenary,” I heard mocking laughter from my filing cabinet. I glared at it, and then at the class. “Did anyone else hear laughter?” I said, but was met with blank stares. They went very quiet, which you would if you thought you were being taught by someone who hears cackling from pieces of furniture.
The classroom has a stillness about it now, like the moment before a storm, as I mark Year 10 essays. It’s dark outside. There’s the odd de-icing sound and flash of headlights, but otherwise silence. Everyone else has headed home for sausage and mash and Eastenders.
I try to yank my mind back to the marking. “Shows understanding of authorial intentions,” I write, taking a phrase straight from the GCSE criteria, but then I hear someone behind me hissing, “Criteria, criteria – what a lot of tosh,” and on the ‘sh’ of ‘tosh’ the hissing lingers, like wind whistling under a door. I turn, expecting to see a joker of a colleague.
But, standing with his back to my whiteboard, is a man with sparse, grey hair wearing a black suit and tightly-buttoned starched collar. He is carrying a long stick and a black book. His lips are thin, his eyes a very, very bright blue. I get the feeling he can see right through me. We’d be evens if he can, because I can see straight through him. Where his stomach should be, there’s the board rubber, resting on the whiteboard shelf. And I can see the date - ‘3 January 1937’ - through his forehead. His skin is pale and translucent, like papyrus.
Bloody hell! 1937?
“What’s all this rubbish about ‘understanding of authorial intentions’?” he spits, and I shrink back as he taps his cane on the exercise book. He laughs a filing cabinet kind of laugh. “What a lot of modern clap-trap!” he says.
I’m offended. Ghost he may be, but I take pride in my marking.
“It’s not modern clap-trap,” I venture, only ‘clap-trap’ comes out hoarsely. It’s not every day I discuss educational methods with ghouls. “It – hem! - helps every child to achieve if they understand where they can improve their learning.”
All he can say is, “Piffle!” which is a term I haven’t come across, despite subscribing to Word of the Day from the online OED.
Suddenly, he starts striding around the classroom, clouds of chalk dust, or skin cells, or ash, following him everywhere. “Who arranged the desks in these ridiculous groups?” he accuses. “They’re not even real desks. No inkwells. No pencil grooves. Modern man-made madness.” He slaps a bony hand on a table to emphasise the syllables. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack, crack, crack. I flinch. I can see the outline of his bones and either he’s more substantial than he looks or he’s just sustained six minor fractures.
He pauses by a display of media work. Along with a mist of icy breath, a moan escapes his lips, and I recognise it as the data projector moan. “What is this?” he says, in disbelief, and sinks down onto the edge of a table. He lifts his cane wearily, pointing. “Spelling - dreadful. Punctuation - abysmal. Handwriting - appalling.” He stops, and seems lost in his thoughts.
“This was my room,” he says, eventually. “Before I was – was – asked to leave the school.” His voice is bitter. “I wouldn’t have tolerated this sloppiness. Oh no. Three strokes on the hand soon dealt with sloppiness.” He sighs so heavily that his head is swathed in a swirl of dust and freezing air. I can feel my bronchi constricting, but it seems insensitive to get my Ventolin out, so I breathe deeply. The two of us, sighing and huffing, are like a couple of consumptives.
“They asked you to leave?” I say.
He stands abruptly. I can see the media display through his chest wall; the words ‘tellyvision’ and ‘comunicasion’ are where his nipples would be.
“Ha!” He wanders back towards me and taps his cane on my laptop. I nearly shout ‘Open Sesame!’ and lift the lid, but resist. “What is this idiocy? I suppose you’re going to tell me you have no markbook,” he challenges, slapping his black book on my desk. A long, skeletal finger flips it open. Names - Arthur, Edward, Susan, Jean – are meticulously listed alongside strings of marks, all out of 20.
“No,” I admit. “I keep all my grades on the computer, alongside all the attainment targets and the National Curriculum guidelines, so that –“
He cuts me off, stretching his thin hand out in a blocking gesture. “Stop there!” he commands. “I can’t bear to hear any more.”
“Things move on,” I persist. “We have to change with the times.” But on the word ‘change’ he steps back as though I’ve hit a raw nerve, which could actually be the case, the way things stand.
“Change?” He glares. “Change?” He reaches into the breast pocket of his jacket, pulling out a yellowed document which he thrusts in my face. “Read that!”
I take it gingerly and lay it on the desk. It’s from ‘the Headmaster’, is dated June 1937, and charges ‘Mr Colnbrook’ with refusing to ‘desist from excessive use of old-fashioned educational strategies’. The letter gives him a month’s notice.
Something makes me re-read the name. I look up at his face. Yes! Those piercing eyes. The thin lips. The tweed suit.
“What?” he says, severely. “What are you staring at?” It seems a strange thing to ask, considering he’s a supernatural entity who didn’t even need a window to get in, but I can understand his point of view.
“You taught my gran!” I exclaim. “I’m sure of it. Mr Colnbrook! She used to tell me about you.”
He peers at me. It’s disconcerting. This close, I can see into the back of his eye sockets. But it’s a sensitive moment, so I don’t comment on it.
“What’s your name, girl?” he says, and I feel twelve again. I can see why Gran called him ‘The Grim Reaper’. I don’t let on, though. You should tread carefully early on in a relationship, especially with the dead.
“Sarah. Sarah Brandon. But my Gran was Maisie Doubleday.”
At the name, his sparse lips move upwards into a deathly smile. “Ah!” He says my grandmother’s name slowly. “Mai-sie Double-day. I remember! Yes, you do resemble her.” He looks almost nostalgic, for a spectre. He certainly has his own misty aura, like in posh wedding photos.
“She adored your lessons,” I tell him. And it’s true. Even though she called him The Reaper, like everyone did, he’d inspired her to read Dickens and Thackeray. “She became an English teacher because of you. And so, I suppose, so did I.” He grins widely at this, although I preferred the smile. The grin worsens the skull factor.
He sighs again. “Mai-sie,” he repeats. “Yes. She cried the day I left.” There’s a companionable silence, and my lung passages are even adapting now to his personal dustiness.
He takes up his previous place in front of the whiteboard, nodding towards it. “You saw my clever little trick with your ‘objectives’, then?” he says. His voice is fading; I have to strain to hear him.
“Very amusing,” I say, risking sarcasm. “Not.”
He winces. “Don’t put the negative in a minor sentence like that, my dear,” he whispers.
“Sorry. I promise I won’t,” I whisper back, reverently. “And I’ll work on their spellings. But please don’t moan from inside the data projector again, Sir.”
I glance at my laptop, and then back at him, but he’s gone. I reach out, but all that’s left is cold, empty air. The date on the whiteboard has changed back to 2008. And resting against the wall is a long, thin, flexible stick.
I leave it there. It won’t do Year 9 any harm, just to have a little reminder of how things used to be.
Friday, 2 January 2009
Why you should keep an eye on your toolbar
I don't normally pay a lot of attention to the toolbar at the bottom of my screen while my laptop is powering up, but it still being my Christmas holidays from school, and me being tranquillised by a diet of mince pies, Belgian chocolates, left-over Stilton and half-good novels, I'm in a zombie-like state. I turned my laptop on today and my eyes flickered - no, flickered is too active a word ... perhaps 'meandered lazily' is more accurate - to the toolbar where it tells you, while it's trying to locate the Internet, what your computer is doing.
And mine was, at one point, 'bursting cached scripts'.
Eh?
This raises a number of questions which I would like answered, as, yes, there are a few scripts on my computer, mainly Nativity plays I've written for youth work at church, sketches I sent to Radio 4 hoping they'd think they were funny, and thirteen husband and wife fight on the motorway sketches in no way inspired by real life events.
So:
1. Was I meant to be aware that I had cached these scripts? All I did was press Save. Is this 'caching', but they just call it 'Save' for dummies?
2. If I have cached some scripts, despite being totally unaware of having done so, does anyone else have the right to burst them without my permission?
3. What kind of scripts are being burst? Is this an indeterminate, random process, or is someone deciding which ones are rubbish and bursting those ones with particular relish?
4. How does this bursting happen? I heard nothing, although I guess I didn't check whether I was on Mute.
5. The message 'bursting cached scripts' remained on the toolbar for 5 seconds. If my whole life's work of Nativities, terrible jokes and marital disharmony has been nuked, isn't this cruelly fast, even if they are bad?
6. Couldn't a more gentle verb than 'bursting' have been selected? 'Your scripts have been EXPLODED GLEEFULLY', it appears to imply. To a sensitive writer who has problems with self-esteem, this seems harsh.
7. Couldn't some warning box come up saying, 'We want to burst your scripts. Are you happy? Yes/No?' You get warnings for most other things, such as 'Your computer is about to self-destruct losing the last three hours' work' and even if it does so anyway without you being able to stop it, it seems polite to ask. The use of the present continuous tense in 'bursting' means that the process is already under way. So why bother telling me, unless it's just to rub it in?
8. Is this likely to happen again? As in, next time I power up, will I be told 'imploding treasured poems' or 'smashing novel to smithereens'? And will these messages, too, be given second-class, lower-case letters, despite the tragic content?
I daren't open up my Word documents, just in case I am script-less. I will have another mince pie and a bit of Stilton on a cracker, and perhaps a glass of port, and put off the awful moment.
And mine was, at one point, 'bursting cached scripts'.
Eh?
This raises a number of questions which I would like answered, as, yes, there are a few scripts on my computer, mainly Nativity plays I've written for youth work at church, sketches I sent to Radio 4 hoping they'd think they were funny, and thirteen husband and wife fight on the motorway sketches in no way inspired by real life events.
So:
1. Was I meant to be aware that I had cached these scripts? All I did was press Save. Is this 'caching', but they just call it 'Save' for dummies?
2. If I have cached some scripts, despite being totally unaware of having done so, does anyone else have the right to burst them without my permission?
3. What kind of scripts are being burst? Is this an indeterminate, random process, or is someone deciding which ones are rubbish and bursting those ones with particular relish?
4. How does this bursting happen? I heard nothing, although I guess I didn't check whether I was on Mute.
5. The message 'bursting cached scripts' remained on the toolbar for 5 seconds. If my whole life's work of Nativities, terrible jokes and marital disharmony has been nuked, isn't this cruelly fast, even if they are bad?
6. Couldn't a more gentle verb than 'bursting' have been selected? 'Your scripts have been EXPLODED GLEEFULLY', it appears to imply. To a sensitive writer who has problems with self-esteem, this seems harsh.
7. Couldn't some warning box come up saying, 'We want to burst your scripts. Are you happy? Yes/No?' You get warnings for most other things, such as 'Your computer is about to self-destruct losing the last three hours' work' and even if it does so anyway without you being able to stop it, it seems polite to ask. The use of the present continuous tense in 'bursting' means that the process is already under way. So why bother telling me, unless it's just to rub it in?
8. Is this likely to happen again? As in, next time I power up, will I be told 'imploding treasured poems' or 'smashing novel to smithereens'? And will these messages, too, be given second-class, lower-case letters, despite the tragic content?
I daren't open up my Word documents, just in case I am script-less. I will have another mince pie and a bit of Stilton on a cracker, and perhaps a glass of port, and put off the awful moment.
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