An Alien Encounter of the Green Coated Kind

If you are offended by swearing, please do not read any further!

I was going to tell you about my MRI scan, wasn't I?  And I'm only 6N *whimper*...  At first I thought it was aliens, subjecting me to this strange ritual... they had all dressed up in green uniforms...  but they had sent me to a different building, leaving me to find out that I was 15 minutes early needing to get to a building 1200 yards away on bandaged feet in slippers and hobbling along on a walking stick.

Oh how we laughed!  I met an old friend, a chap who has LOVE on one set of knuckles and HATE on the other.  We passed the time of day while my feet complained... eventually I made it into the antechamber to the Alien spacecraft.  There was one person who directed me, a la Star Trek, to follow the green arrows [And yes I was thinking there was simply too much green in all this].. to an antechamber... where I was told I would wait for the .... examination.

I sat my by now spent carcase on the biggest and most imposing chair I could find.... did they not know this was Chumbles of the Internet....  a legend in his own lynchtime?  They told me they would be a short while, because the consultant had f****d off for a quick ciggy break (my words not theirs).  Aeons passed; I need not have crucified myself hurbling and hurpling along that 1200 yards.  But!  I am not without resource, I had brought a small bottle of water: I finished that.  A book with 3 chapters to go: I finished that.  My patience: I'd almost finished that when an orderly (ho ho ho) arrived and took me through a group of supplicants.  A lot of these had appendages of the artificial kind and plastic tubes...  a strange pulsing noise and flashing lights came from a room...  I was swiftly lead past into the second antechamber, and told to take off my garments with metal in them...  Aliens, witches and MRIs are a bit similar, iron f***s 'em up, but they were wise to this.

They made sure my mobile phone was also with my garments and stowed in a lead lined safe ('Screws up our antennae chief, we bump into each other in the dark and get all horny')  But I knew it was to keep me from calling for help on my handy.

They then wheeled out some poor bastard who looked just liked the poor s*d who'd preceded me in the queue for the colonoscopy in December.  You know, the utterly zonked out one, with blue skin who leaked pain in psychic waves....  I was starting to wonder whether I could out-hobble them down the corridor when they grabbed me, chucked me on a trolley cart, stuck a f***ing great plastic widget between my legs, strapped me in and then....

... stuck a needle in my arm.  This is for the cannula.  So they can pump you full of stuff...  One of the greencoats looked at me and clearly thought: dirty old b*gg*r, I'll fix him, but her fellow alien spotted that I was leaking red fluid all over the place....

At this point, they mopped up, simulating concern (but with that certain edge of stress that says: you s*d, why are you bleeding?)  They then fled the room...  They threw over their shoulders "Don't worry, it won't hurt, but in Scotty's name stay still."  There was a low hum and the platform I was on moved into the enclosed chamber, my fat upper arms constricted against the sides with me staring at an old fashioned video screen with measurements and flashing numbers and.... a countdown!

Kind of them to tell me when I was going to be inseminated with one of their green coat wearing kind.... And then, lights flashed and

BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM

...

Strangely I felt nothing; more numbers, more distances, more lights flashed and

BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM

...

And then I was told that it was all done and don't worry about the blood on my clothes: lucky I was wearing black, piss off and I would hear from the Alien gynaecology unit in due course.  By now I was certain they were.  Aliens that is...

Well.  That went well didn't it?

And onwards to BT Infinity!

Don't get me  wrong, BT isn't a bad service and the speed of connection in this area is streets ahead of the competition, but..

I have spent too much of today, reviving a Thinkpad T40... this was because I rang the BT broadband helpdesk in Utter Pradesh (by name and by nature) to be asked to do all the things I had just done, in my underwear, in the cold last night, simply to play my games and read my regulars.  I mean, how much am I meant to suffer before I lose my latest Chess game.

So I'd turned the hub off, and the router, made myself a small libation, got the torch back out, replugged the stuff into their sockets in an artfully hidden corner of the room... several decads of minutes, having found the carefully filed number which doesn't simply route you through to a message telling you to go to wibbly-wobbly-woo and look it up on the interweb thingie. Just how am I supposed to do that when you fools at BT have poked my virtual eyes and ears out?

And I get through to the only human interface that BT still have. Some poor so and so even further into the night with a degree manning a help desk responding mostly to people who forget to plug their laptops in when their batteries run out. No wonder they sound tired, knackered and fed up... at 3 in the morning, watching the cockroaches run around the wiring in the basement of some sweatshop with 96 degrees of both humidity and temperature trying to speak patiently to some well-fed English idiot... and I am not overtelling this, their conditions are horrible...

But that's not my problem! I have a seige coming to completion on two cities and need to pull my troops if my attack isn't going well and this bozo is telling me to check stuff I've already checked, run tests I've already RUN AND I'M GETTING VERY ANGRY! So I tell him to hold the line, take more BP tablets and tell him I used to do his job, but now it's been outsourced to monkeys who get paid peanuts. I think my faux sympathy might earn me some consideration... in spite of the phone harpies recording the conversation and even though English is his second or third language, he hangs the phone up...

Well, I go swinging from one telephone menu to another until I reach the same call centre in Utter Pradesh... must be a quiet night... it's the same bloke! So I faux apologise and say that I've now done all he asked me to. And repeat it when he repeats back to me all the steps. Trouble is, now he remembers the phone harpies and is going to get me to do every. damned. step. and. tell. him. once. I've done that. I bite the inside of my cheek (eating the remains of pork scratchings, I tell him this so I get some of my own back). I get through all this...

Do you have a laptop Mr Chumbles. It's late, it's an unguarded moment. Now I have both and stupidly tell him this. He tells me I need to connect it to the hub with a lan cable. The laptop was last connected to the net in November 2012. It will take forever to boot up, update Widows*, update the AntiVenom software and recharge the battery sufficiently to do what he asks (5 hours to be precise - I've done this whilst writing my memoirs),

I give up. I go to bed. I know perfectly well it's a screw up at their end, I just want someone there to admit it. But every so often I wake up in the night and thank my lucky stars I am not an outsourced help desk guy in Utter Pradesh.

*Widows TM: the code name for Windows 9

A serious thought to start the year...

I was reading an article in the Guardian.... Vicky Coren is unquestionably the woman with the combination of looks and mind I most lust after and fear talking to. A honey with a mind like a steel trap. She was writing in Comment is Free in the Guardian about the expansion of the original hunt for hidden crimes by Jimmy Savile. I guess I'm born near enough to remember the witch hunts for communists in the mighty US of paranoid A to see the parallels... the witch hunts have begun, and because the actual crimes are undeniably abhorrent, this appears to give licence to all kinds of activities that would otherwise be castigated as either disproportionate or inappropriate.

I am going to get some flack here. Since thinking about the VileSa [Jimmy Savile] I have seem trying to put my instinctive revulsion for the man from when he was a DJ behind me (bad taste joke - ignore) and try to see the situation from a balanced perspective. Very, very difficult. I have an astonishingly violent reaction to people who hurt other people. Cannot abide bullies at any price.
 
But the thing is this. Stoke Mandeville Spinal Injuries centre as part of the fallout from this has been forced into giving the monies given by SaVile to other charities. The unit has been absolutely key to providing a new approach, a new capability to many, many thousands of people crippled by horrid injuries, including our War Heroes as the Sun would say. And SaVile's contribution to the funding this was critical.

This is why mob rule does not work. Why the will of the majority has to be tempered by people we trust to make balanced decisions. For all he was a monster on an individual level, some part of me wonders whether there wasn't some part of him trying to find redemption through good works.  If there is a hell, he is probably in it, but I have no personal evidence.  And that is the point.  All of what we hear is via the same broken media that covered it up in the first place.  Like a state's evidence guy they're all assiduously hunting around for anything to conceal their own incapacity.  The moral bankruptcy of most of the media never fails to live down to my expectations.

One of the most telling and emotional comparisons for me is from the wonderful To Kill a Mockingbird - the film which in my mind made Gregory Peck one of the finest actors of his generation. The lynch mobs represent the majority... those who react to the moment and who only after a long period of consideration can come to the long, the better view.