Week 336: roadworks lamp

Some work. I made a thing go made faster so that a line on a graph went down. The Brighton & Hove bus company publishes an unusual amount of timetable data – I’m not sure, but I think it’s to keep their passengers abreast of even small diversions etc – which was causing me some technical problems – it’s like when Justin Bieber was the biggest person on Twitter and they had racks of servers dedicated to him, but on much smaller scale. But the problems are no more, and I don’t have time to go into great detail so let’s leave it at “I reduced the cardinality”.

Bicycling along, I passed a big bright piece of moulded plastic, like an abandoned children’s toy, perhaps something from the Early Learning Centre or Little Tikes ranges. A bit later I was going the other way, it was getting dark and my rear bicycle light had run out of power, and I passed the plastic thing again, and it turned out to be a ConeLITE, Britain’s best selling roadworks lamp – you know, a battery-powered light that goes on the top of a traffic cone. (Not a toy at all, but you could still have hours of fun with it.) What a remarkable bit of luck this almost was – I could attach the light to the back of the bike to get home safely, if only I had a way of attaching it securely, and of keeping it switched on, and was sure it was the right colour. (In the end I switched the bike light back on, and it worked after all.)

Like last year I went to wave and grin at the convoy of honking trucks taking disadvantaged children for a day out in East Suffolk. Felt stupidly self-conscious about waving for so long in a queenly/papal way, but of course no one looked sillier than all the trailerless tractor units.

Last week I returned to a stack of letters from two banks thanking me for opening an account and stuff. But I haven’t opened any accounts. I am a former customer of bank a, and bank b has recently agreed to buy bank a, so it could have been an innocent computer system cock-up. But fraud seemed more likely.

A while ago, a neighbour pinned a message on a noticeboard about identity and mail theft, and I dismissed it as kooky hysteria, but I should have taken it seriously. The letterbox is downstairs, outside, some way from my front door, and I think some letters have been nicked from it – the postie doesn’t always push them in fully, which let’s say is the result of privatisation and ultimately Vince Cable’s fault. But the letters that hadn’t been stolen yet allowed me to notice the problem, and perhaps the slow and sporadic nature of deliveries these days actually worked in my favour there.

• Is it my fault at all? I’d inexplicably left some junk mail in there, which may have made it look like I was away (and I was away for a bit, like many people during this summer holiday time). And I have a goodish credit rating, which I even thought might be cute to brag about on a dating profile once.

  I’m not as careful as my da about destroying letters and envelopes with names and addresses on – he still burns them, despite having moved to a built-up area, dads are mad. But there are easier ways of obtaining names and addresses than fishing through bins.

• Recall that I used to have a sensor that would detect and send me a text when post was delivered or emptied. Alas, it died after succumbing to the effects of rain getting into the not-perfectly-watertight box, and they don’t sell them any more.

• Is there a way of laying a booby trap that won’t end in me or an innocent postal delivery worker getting covered in glitter?

Oh well, I phoned the banks – one was interestingly quicker and easier to deal with than the other – and it will probably all be fine, and now I know what a Cifas marker is.