Igor’s rants

If you tell people often or long enough that the people in "you and me did it" really ought to be "you and I" (as I'm the subject of that verb), what'll apparently happen is that they'll ignore it for ages, and then all of a sudden, over the last year or two, develop it into some sort of meme, whereupon they all start using the subject "I" in places where the object "me" is required. "A photo of my partner and I" - huh? Is it a photo of I? No, no, and thrice no. It's not. It's a photo of me, isn't it.

The most crushingly irritating thing about it is that people make a point of doing it. Egregious, yo.

… do people insist on putting toilet paper the wrong way round on the holder? It's really not even a question of preference, if you think about it - turned the other way, the strip presents itself for plucking, while this way you have to hunt around underneath the roll, like some sordid, snuffling subterranean troll. It's not computational fluid dynamics, people. It's simple efficiency.

Hang on then, better not just arrive at the airport and get on the ’plane. No, definitely better load yourselves up to the gunwales instead with supposedly-“reduced”, still-grotesquely-overpriced, indulgent shit you know you don’t need and can’t afford, but could probably buy on credit if you were to manage to allow yourself to be kidded into the delusion of “saving money” by the minor concessions made in the name of “growing the economy” by these manipulative, devious, exploitative corporate shitmongers. Much better that way, for everyone. Otherwise the gears just won’t keep turning, and we can’t have that.

This, on the wall in Marks & Spencer in Islington, North London, is one of the most meaningless, vague, weaselly, vacuous environmental "statements" I've ever seen. "By 2012 we'll aim to ensure that none of our clothing or packaging needs end up as landfill" - what does that mean? In 2012, you'll finally grace us with a decision that, at some unspecified, subsequent point, you'll somehow engender a situation where all of your clothing and packaging can be disposed of using methods other than burying them in holes in the ground? And what methods might those be? Sure, recycling could be one possible method, but does this "statement" in any way imply that it would be employed, as against, I don't know, setting fire to them, or breaking them down using some bizarre radiation process? And do you think the fact that they won't "need" to end up in the ground absolves you of any and all responsibility for the means and ultimate effects of their disposal?

No doubt there's some website or information leaflet out there somewhere which gives more detail of how M&S really are saving the world, but in terms of the phrasing and the message, this is meaningless, vacuous greenwash of the worst sort, designed to induce a feeling of hazy, warm goodwill towards M&S without any actual justification. I really hope the people who come up with this stuff find it hard to sleep at night.

I received this email from someone called "The Mentalist", using an anonymous Yahoo mailbox, out of the blue on Monday:

Hi Igor, How's (my place of work) treating you these days? Hope all the family dinners went well. Do you think you'll pursue more creative ambitions in photography or stick to the tech side of things? Best wishes, The Mentalist tinyurl.com/mentalist5

All of this is information that I've made publicly available via Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn - I don't exactly go out of my way to keep it hidden - but it's tied together in a way suggesting someone who either knows me or is following me around on-line, which in the context of an anonymous email from "The Mentalist" is less than comforting.

So I replied, in a friendly manner, that I didn't know how far the photography would go other than as a hobby, and asked directly to whom I was speaking. No reply. I checked the email headers, found out the network location from which the mail originated and the contact details of the network manager in case I needed to use it, and left it at that.

This morning, however, I received another reply:

Well, you should maintain the photography as a side kick one way or another. Did you miss me last night? See if you can work out some mentalist abilities at seemorethanothers.com. Best, The Mentalist

Oh. This is an advert for a TV programme. Right.

The whois record for the domain linked in the mail shows the registrant as Brooklyn Brothers, a Soho digital agency who, according to their website, started because they "wanted to be an antidote to advertising in general", and who believe that:

[…] we are currently placing the future of all commerce and communications in a network that can’t be trusted to deliver a reliable answer to a simple question. You can’t trust online reviewers. You can’t trust the gossip-cum-news outlets. You can’t separate the wise from the cranks.

So, Brooklyn Brothers, I don't have a TV. I know nothing about your campaign or your product. All I see is person(s) unknown making it clear to me that they know details of my personal life, refusing to reveal their own identity, and directing me to some vaguely sinister photos. How, exactly, am I supposed to separate you from the cranks? More importantly, why should I have to?

This is not wise. It's all wrong. It's obviously intended to be 'edgy' or 'alternative', but frankly it's nothing more than intrusive and creepy.

Apart from anything else, once the load has been shot and the website link has been sent, as a campaign it just feels a bit crappy. If they had the balls, they'd go the whole hog and really scare the shit out of me by going over the line - that'd get some publicity, alright - but of course, they know they're subject to ASA guidelines and ICO laws the same way anybody else is, so they're reduced to "well, err, can you look at my website please?". Well, err, no.

As I said in my email to the Brothers, if this is the antidote to advertising, give me billboards and banners any day. This is bollocks.

Waste of space.

So start being a bit more bloody considerate, you towpath-hogging, danger-making, irritation-causing, bell-ding-enrudening, selfish cyclist fucks.

Yes, I know I ride my bike all over the shop; yes, I know I have been less than 100% considerate on various occasions in my life, but: it's pretty clear to anyone with even half a brain that hoofing a bike along a narrow path next to a cold pile of dirty water with lots of people walking on it is NOT a safe or good idea for those people, particularly under bridges, you daft, impatient bastards, so I just don't take my bike on the towpath, even though it would be quicker and safer for me if I didn't have to ride next to trucks and buses.

The thing is, I'm really not an especially non-selfish person; it just seems bleeding obvious - so what's with you lot? Are you different in some way? Do normal common sense, courtesy and decency not apply to you? Do you have a special dispensation from Boris Johnson to piss me off every day? Has he sunk to the level of trying to annoy individual London-dwellers one by one, by proxy? Well, I hope you all fall in. Maybe you'll all get Weil's disease and select yourselves out.

As in every other recent winter, I tried to go clothes-shopping yesterday. Everywhere I went, I encountered a farrago of suspiciously drab hues; mostly sluggish greys, but also mucky browns, dirty greens, shifty-looking blues. What's with all this? We know it's winter, we know it's miserable and raining and shitty and cold. We can hardly avoid knowing it. Surely we don't need to be reminded of this all-permeating fact by the sight of every passing person blending into the next through their co-operation in this conspiracy of crud? I want bright! I want shiny! I want us all to stand out in our rainwear and I want to feel happily dazzled by vivid vermillions and acute aquamarines and day-glo oranges and acerbic lemons and louche lime greens and frightening fuschias!

I must have gone to twenty different shops, in England's London's famous Oxford Street and its nearby Covent Garden, and my eyes were dripping visual rust by the time I could take no more. Are you manufacturers in league with some hidden ministry of moping? Are the Powers that Be using clothing design to manipulate our mood and stifle open revolt? Or, worse, is there some unspoken yet universally-accepted agenda, on which such agency may piggy-back undiscovered, that because it's wearisome winter-time, we're damn-well going to mope about and feel rotten and subdued? Well I won't have it, I tell you. I found one bright yellow shirt, and I damn-well bought it. Have at you, you couturiers of the crappily crepuscular.

This morning, I rose early and, rather than do any of the interesting things that I would actually have liked to do in the time before work, I started on the list of intensely irritatingly necessary action points life had imposed upon me, and tried to carry out chore #1 by going to the Post Office to pick up the unexpected packet they'd been “unable” to deliver the other day. (I’d decided in advance not to get into a dispute about the precise level of their delivery “abilities”.) Was it waiting for me, as promised? “Sorry, Sir, no, it's not here - I know it says that you should wait 48 hours and you’ve waited about 64, but, well, even though a number of hours in this type of ‘literature’ usually refers to actual hours rather than one-seventh or one-eighth fractions of business days, as otherwise of course they’d have specified business days, in this case, it means business hours, yes, including the night time, yes, and you see yesterday was a Bank Holiday, so it hasn’t come back to the sorting office yet”. You fuckers. You fucking fuckers.

So I cycled home, took advantage of one of the few compensations of shitty weather by putting on a warm, comforting, shitty-weather coat, and started the half-hour trudge down to the bank to carry out chore #2, “pay in cheque”. See, banks usually don’t open early, because as we all know, they’re egotistical, usuring, global-economy-devouring, economic-fallacy-propagandizing, regulation-squirming, capital-propping fascist bully-boys who’d rather piss on their own feet than actually provide a realistically useful and useable service to their “customers” unless doing so happens to coincide with “streamlining their processes”, but one of my eagle eyes had happened to take in on a recent visit to said establishment a notice proclaiming the immediate effect of their new early opening hours, so I knew it would be OK. Until I arrived to discover that not only were the bastards staying firmly shut until 9.30 today because it was a Tuesday (of course), but they’d actually taken the trouble to print up notices to that effect and plaster them all over the bloody windows, with the single intention, I felt, of rubbing my recently-arrived nose in it. Fuckers. Fucky fucking fuck fuckers.

Chore #3, “buy boring but annoyingly necessary toiletry crap” was mildly less irritating insofar as the individual items of annoying crap I needed to buy were actually in stock, but as if to mitigate that small mercy, the shop fuckers had yet again moved every single thing that I needed to buy to a different place in the shop. Are you people so staggeringly crass that you think that if I arrive in the deodorant-should-be-here place and find, I don’t know, swimming goggles or thrush cream, I’m suddenly going to go “ooh yes, now I think of it, you never know when your next bout of candida will be, do you?”, and pile excitedly in to a buy-one-get-one-free offer? You fuckers!

So, maintaining a suitable combination of upper-lip stiffness and attempted muscular looseness (a tricksy manœuvre at the best of times), I moved onto chore #4, “take pleasingly nostalgia-inducing selection of old photos filtered from pile discovered in bag in cupboard under stairs during weekend faffing mission to Snappy Snaps for cheapo automated scanning”. Imagine my escalating delight on being casually informed that yes, Snappy Snaps does indeed engage in the paid scanning of photographic materials, at £1.99 per scan, and, further, my strangulated gurgles on being told that in fact no, that’s not crazy, it costs £1.99 per scan, and that’s pretty reasonable. Hang on, are you people mad? Don’t you have some sort of brutal automaton capable of ripping through this stuff at breakneck speed? If I wanted some poor human to waste hours manually scanning and cropping a load of not spectacularly interesting photos, wouldn’t I do it myself at a charge of exactly nought pounds for fifty scans, rather than ONE HUNDRED ENGLISH? You fucking, fucky fucker fuckers.

And all of this before nine o’clock in the morning. Oh well, at least I saw a big splatty pile of splatty yoghurt mess in the road.

One carriage. One carriage. What is it about Sundays that transport operators think makes people either less likely to want to travel home than they were to want to travel wherever they were going the day before, or less deserving of some vague semblance of reasonable treatment in return for the stratospheric fees they have no choice but to stump up? Is this some sort of atavistic legacy from an ancient fear that a wrathful deity might smite the train drivers for daring to compromise his rest? No? Then why on earth are we lowly Sunday-travelling passengers treated like cattle even less deserving of any consideration or concern than the same beasts on any other day of the week? Surely a genuinely loving God would want His people to be happy and relaxed on His day, and to reward those who willingly sacrifice such calm in the service of others' comfort and convenience with peace, long life and everlasting virginity, or something? Anyway, to those whom it may concern: a train, consisting solely of one carriage or otherwise, which is shown plainly by the people standing in the aisles and entranceways to provide insufficient seating for the number of people to whom the train operator is prepared to sell tickets, is simply not good enough. The issue of its being composed of a single solitary carriage is consigned in light of this simple truth to a mere slapped face after the fact. Sort it out, railway-operating oligarchs.