1. May experience a delay...

There are two sorts of people listening to "We are experiencing a high volume of calls at the moment. You may experience a delay.". People trying to achieve something in their life, and people who just want to listen to the message.

You might think the latter was just sarcasm. But even if there aren't any people, I think it's a sort of people.

And in actual fact, when writing the first sentence, I actually considered ringing back just to transcribe the message accurately, so it IS possible someone would just want to listen to the message.

If I go on, every sentence needing a sentence to explain it, this'll go on forever. Literally. It's called a Markov chain. Look it up, people. Unless one of the sentences is explained by a previous sentence. Or itself. But being explained by itself isn't really "needing a sentence to explain it". But then, a pre-existing sentence isn't either.

Anyway, there are two sorts of people. Almost all of them actually ARE experiencing a delay. Per se. Qua delay. Ipso facto. Et cetera. A very few of them may NOT be experiencing a delay. But no-one MAY be experiencing a delay. Why pay someone to record a message that is ALWAYS false simply by listening to it?

Why not go the whole hog and say something like "We are experiencing a high volume of calls at the moment. This statement is false."? At least that would be an INTERESTING wasteful inanity.

2. Eat fiery badger death!

"Many of our offers are available on our website, srvc.blah.tld. If you have access to the internet, you may choose to browse, blah, blah."

Believe it or not, I'd actually prefer to sort everything out online. ( Read more... )

NB: I checked in the dictionary when writing insult 2a (I'd already written the title) and "fiants" honest to god is a special word for badger excrement (or ox, wolf or boar). I really really really really really cannot make this shit up.

PS: People who say English has lots of words have a point. I don't know if it's more than other languages, but there's something fundamentally endearing that "badger shit" wasn't enough, hunters used it so often they had a special word.

PS: There are lots more. Start with http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_287b.html and read "The Once and Future King" and google for the terms mentioned. Guano is the very least of it.

3. Relationships.

I have experienced relationships. I've had personal relationships and business relationships. Longstanding and fleeting relationships. Family, friend, romantic and sexual relationships. I am an Adams! OK, not that.

Like most humans, and unlike the company designing this phone menu, I have some idea of what constitutes "a relationship getting better over time".( Read more... )

4. Actual human

Ironically[1], when I actually spoke to someone, he was very helpful. I have a reasonably good contract, and a new phone.

( Read more... )

[1] I decided my acid test for "irony" would be "if this were a play, would it be dramatic irony". This seems to identify situations we would all agree are ironic, and leave all of Alanis Morrisette's examples out in the cold, and generalise fairly well to intermediate examples.

Does that make sense?

Beer festival

I will be at the beer festival tonight from about 7.00. Was anyone else wanting to go today?

6. How long did I rant about this for? Compared to what I save over several years, was it worth it?

I had another several days worth of rant about mobile phones, market segmentation, confusopolies, complicated metaphors involving concatenations of pseudo-linear functions, jumentous companies, and other things that make my spell checker throw up its hands in dismay.

But I decided to talk about dragons instead. I know people whose animal is a panda, or an elephant. That has some individuality. Somehow dragons are too *obvious*. But hey, I have to accept I can do something well but not have to be the first, the only, or the best. I like dragons.

Why do dragons eat princesses? It's like in the matrix. Princesses are not a good source of nutrition, people. For starters, there's not very many of them. In LOTR there are no female characters at all (though there are a relatively high proportion of scions), Smaug would be toast. And humans aren't particularly interesting metabolically.

If you just want food, stick to cows. If they're eating for nutrition, Dragons are in an evolutionary dead end. Sea-serpents, crocodiles, fireflies, etc probably do better as a species, however badass a dragon is one-on-one. Princesses didn't even EXIST for millions of years, any dragon who could eat anything else would be at a great advantage.

No, it's a power thing. They get off on making the kingdom dance to their tune.

What do Dragons get from their food that isn't meat? They need to eat souls. (This is also why carnivores always have so much more oomph than herbivores, they recharge their mana an awful lot more. And why the more militant the religion the more specific the kinds of meat you eat. You may notice at about this point in the post that I'm making up things that aren't true.)

What is a soul? I'd normally say something else, but here I think we're talking about accumulated life experiences. There may be something else, but we're talking about that which is eaten.

Which is why dragons want princesses. There's two basic things you want out of life, adventure and luxury. Knights have adventure, but dragons don't have to form convoluted plans to find knights, they just have to sit down somewhere and demand princesses. Dragons want a taste of the high life, and they want to feel special, hence princesses.

Also notice dragons in stories are male. Female dragons are larger, more majestic, more intelligent, and generally so successful they don't hang around terrorising kingdoms. And all the stories are written by knights' bard squires, and jousting with a female isn't chivalrous to them.

That means the bards, like vampires, have a sexual metaphor thing going on, which means princesses. And preferably unmarried princesses, being so much more tragic. (And besides, life experiences of being married off to powerful ugly foreign potentates probably isn't a dragon's cup of tea.)

Do you think there's a story in this? I'm thinking reversing a few things, where the knight is the evil soul-eater, (who starts off just big and brash, but is shortly wearing all black armour, and then pushing back his visor to reveal only swirling darkness underneath) and the princess is the hero, and she and her family band together with the dragon to defeat him. Basically, I want to ask the_alchemist if I can rip off the royal family in her book.