What happened this week?
It was a bit rainy. Riding on a slightly leaky bus, I witnessed a war of attrition: a passenger closed the windows, then shortly later the driver leapt from his cab and reopened them, then another passenger upon boarding re-closed at least one window. I feel like the saga was more interesting at the time – maybe the cycle repeated more times? – hmm.
The rain also contributed to my doing some work – well, I had a burst of productivity on Monday. How can I put this? I changed some things. Only one or two people have complained about the differentness, which has to count as a resounding success.
An email arrived from a scumbag recruitment consultant – probably in breach of data protection regulations, but am no a grass. Recently, some of these emails have been actually interesting, or at least entertaining insights into the crazy world of blockchain snake oil, but this one wasn’t. An extract:
Skills/Experience Required
- Web Services (SI, SOAP, REST)
- Knowledge of MI / BI Applications
- SQL, .NET or JAVA Programming Languages
- Capable of providing 3rd line support for Applications
- CLITORIS
(Love the random uppercase letters. Sometimes it’s endearing, like when Winnie-the-Pooh does it, but sometimes it isn’t.)
“CLITORIS”? The spotted hyena has a particularly large one, but there’s no relevant buzzword by that name. Perhaps the job advert was a bit like the “get me off your fucking mailing list” academic paper – but designed to expose lazy recruiters, not academic journals.
Returning to the email later, I found the last item in the list had changed to “ITIL” (a real soul-destroying–looking thing I’d had the good fortune never to have heard of before). But that’s impossible – emails are immutable.
It turns out that just before the first reading I’d read an email written in Polish, with the help of the machine translation feature of my favourite web browser. The translation switch had remained switched on, and had translated that word from Indonesian. Apparently, information technology service management boffins are well aware of the phenomenon, and it impedes searching Twitter for tweets about it.
I passed a – by which I mean my – driving test. Which is nice. But cars are Tory.
A photograph I took appeared in Coach & Bus Week, which has to be the highlight of both my week and career. I crouched in a provincial branch of WHSmith, but couldn’t find a copy. On the way home, I saw another steam train – I may have looked at a PDF timetable beforehand, although I didn’t quite understand it. Two men who like trains were perched precariously some way away either side of me, and no doubt they saw many more trains that day – I was just interested in obtaining content for my vacuous 1 Second Everyday video diary – I am not like those men.