Temporarily defunct

Please note as from 22 April until "some time" next year I shall not be updating this blog. No, I'm not visiting hell on a sabbatical.

I shall be away backpacking with my wife and our joint blog will appear on

frexandspex.wordpress.com

By the way, our house is guarded by a psychotic (and by now, HUNGRY) pitbull so don't even think about burgling us while we toddle around the globe.

See you back here next year.

With love and xxxx to my fans (all two of them)

Daggersdukc.

Hayes pool again

My sister pointed out after reading the last entry about Hayes Pool that this episode of Mr Bean was filmed there. Nice one.

So, for all you Hayes expats, a taste of home.

If anyone living there now should stumble across this, can you tell me if much ahs changed? (The Hayes is between Heathrow and Northolt, not the other London one near Bromley).

Anyway, inside the pool...

Happy memories by the pool

Before I leave the country for a while, I took a wander round my old haunts and came across this building. Nothing very beautiful about it, but many happy memories were spent swimming here. In fact, the adult pool was so deep I used to have bad dreams about it as a kiddie.

I learnt to swim at this place and the entrance area is extremely nostalgic. There used to be coin operated rocking rocket ride for kids in the lobby area which was a fairly violent rock (at least it was when I was aged four). It was probably the rocket I looked forward to as much as the pool itself.

I would hazard a guess that it was the positive associations I had with sixties monstrosities like this which aided and abetted my later love affair with many other edifices of this type.

A snack idea too far?

I'm biased and love the stuff, but a Marmite cereal bar really stretches branding to fit two target audiences - Marmite lovers and health bar eaters. I doubt these will be around for long, so enjoy while you can. I did.

Reason to be proud?

I've blanked out names. This is actually a source of perverse pride to me. I've only ever had one work complaint levelled against me that I'm aware of. This is it. As complaints go, its pretty full-on. Might as well go the whole hog I guess.

It was sent on Friday.


*****


From: Pissed off customer
Sent: 26 March 2010 14:01
To: My whole work team (including me)
Subject: Phone call

Called your "call centre" 10 minutes ago to order a pocketalker hearing device for my severely deaf father. I have never had such obnoxious, rude and downright poor customer service.
I hung up on the phone call after he tried his hardest to treat me like an idiot.

The man was cocky and surly and has without doubt lost you a sale. If it wasn't for such a poor website I would not have had to use your call centre in the first place.

Please pass this email on to your manager/training department. He should not be allowed to speak to the public in that tone.

Pissed off customer

****


I would contest that I was hardly cocky or obnoxious - no more than usual anyway. I was trying to be my usual helpful self, and the woman was a stroppy shit, hassling for me to speed up my answers, which is impossible without superfast broadband, which is something we don't have.

Generally speaking, in a situation where a customer wants answers I don't have, I'd ask them politely what they need to know, do the research and ring them back, and in 99 percent of cases, this works fine. Seems old "firework up her arse" bitch here wanted the answers now, and NOW only.

So uptight. Such a fuckwit. It tells you a lot that she "hung up on me". I've never had cause to do this to a customer - ever.

I hope she enjoys the remaining years on earth she has. I guarantee that unless I get thwacked by a car or some other act of God, I'll be on this planet for a greater number of years than her, since her stress level appears, at least today, to be stratospheric. I'd love to say with some
honesty that I feel sorry for her but if she insists of pissing off everyone around her, then I don't. I feel sorry for her husband (if he managed to last more than a year in her company he must be a masochist), her family and her few remaining friends.

I believe that the issue she really had with me was that I didin't show her the deference she expected. There are few people I will ever defer to. I generally take the simple rule that if you aren't paying me, aren't someone I care a lot for, or my parents, then deference is earnt, not given as a right.

This is a test

This is just a test to see how easy it is to write a blog entry without having to use the blog thingy itself.  This is just a wee test. 

Great sounds in music #1 - The DX harp preset

An occasional wee series where I pontificate to some extent on what I regard as the most interesting, justifiably famous and simply plain easy to like sounds that have infiltrated pop music over the past 20 years or so. Mostly, just because I prefer that kind of thing most, these will be electronic or otherwise synthetic sounds. Rather than trying to describe them too much, I'll let you find out more about these for yourself with Youtube links to each sound.

So lets kick off with...the lovely sound of the DX7 harp.

A preset on the original DX7 FM synthsizer, launched by Yamaha in 1983, this incredibly fragile, lightly percussive sound graces many a quieter 80s and 90s track and appears in some unlikely places, such as the opening bars of Smalltown Boy by Bronski Beat. Almost Japanese in quality, it doesn't really sound like a typical plucked Welsh harp, but has a more "oriental" quality. Given a bit of chorus or a tiny bit of vibrato (as was done by Level 42 in Sleepwalkers) the sound is like a light breath of fresh air.

I first heard Irish folkmeister Christy Moore's "Reel in the Flickering Light" in the late 90s and am as taken with it now as I was then. Not the usual kind of folk Mr Moore is renowned for, this work of childish whimsy is simply beautiful. I keep wanting to to repeat the adjective "delicate".

Like a lot of FM sounds, they were both over-used in the 80s especially and went out of fashion. And yet, the sounds on this instrument are almost laughably ubiquitous due to the fact that due to clever licencing, just about every computer sound card contains an identikit set of sounds from the synthesizer module.



Another new age-y place you can find this sound is Lanz & Speer's "Behind the Waterfall". Worth seeking on Spotify.

There is a plethora of wonderful sounds on the DX7, and I'll be returnig to it very shortly.

Why the Tories won't win - a little bet with myself

With talk in the news of the Tories failing to engage with the public in terms of zooming ahead in the polls, which in theory they should be doing, here's my very simple theory behind he failure.

Nothing more than a bit of fun, here's why, according to me, the Tories won't win. Or if they do, it will be the tiniest of minorities.

Their philosophy seems to be "we need cuts - lots of them". However, unlike last time they proposed this, in the late 80s, it worked because the medicine seemed to fit the illness.

In this case however, I don't think many people feel the cure is right. For
analogy's sake, the doctor says: "you're overweight, so you need to exercise
more and eat less". Looking at your belly and dreading the hill outside his
surgery, you see he's right and you try your best to do his bidding.

This time round though, the doc says " you need to eat less, exercise more,
and because there are a couple of gods I happen to believe in sitting over
behind that curtain, I'm going to chop your arm off as well as a kind of
good ju ju sacrifice to them". Well how unfair is that???

The gods , in this case, are of course the bankers. Yes, we're fat, yes,
we're unfit, but no, we don't want to feel our arms to be bunch of fuckwits
in the city either. We don't believe or ever ask to share the existence of
our doctor's choice of god.

I predict labour may win by a very, very small margin once people start
realising that they are going to have to give up a whole load of body parts
to beliefs they don't want and don't wish to continue co-existing with.

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