Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Tech-no-blog-y

Dammit - after spending ages today getting all the photos ready, the blog website for some reason just isn't letting me put pictures up so I'm afraid there'll be a little wait for my Orthopaedics post.


Meanwhile here's some music.... da da daaa... da daaaa...


I hate being put on hold - either you're forced to listen to some unnecessarily rousing classical cliché like Mozart's Eine Kleine Knackeredmusik, or something that's meant to be calming but actually miserable like James Blunt ("Goodbye Mike Glover" - no wonder he left). I'd rather pay to listen to silence.

Sometimes it's amusing when you can still hear them in the background ('ere Tracy, do we have "Doctor A. Andy Department" here?) but sooner or later you find yourself shouting down the phone at them.

But the worst thing is the jarring, half-arsed monophonic rendition of Greensleeves that they used to have on Kingston Hospital switchboard, the one that sounds like a demo on a very very old Casio keyboard; it's like listening to a Spectrum/C64/Amstrad 464 load.

What's that, you might ask?
- well little one, in the olden days, before the Internet, games would take at least 15 minutes to load (although you can now blue-tooth-wi-fi-zapbeam the same amount of data to your iToaster in a fraction of a second), the "computer" used to make a horrid whining noise in the process, and you'd often have to turn the cassette over halfway through.
What's a cassette? (sigh)...

Either way, hold music does my head in.

Or maybe that's just a ploy to get the caller to hang up...
ah cunning... I wonder if the 999 people have worked that out...?

10 Comments:

At March 14, 2007 12:07 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

i hate james blunt, he enrages me. i've been on many 10 minute rants about how i want to rip out his eyes at just the mention of his name

that bastard

 
At March 14, 2007 12:33 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

useless but interesting fact for the day...
A form of pleasantry (please, thank you etc) is used in over 80% of 999 calls!
because its really important that you leave the operator with a positive impression of you?
...may be your last chance to make one i guess!

more randoms tomoz?

(mix equal parts lime juice with vodka over ice to make a tasty drink that leaves little hangover!)

 
At March 14, 2007 12:35 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

oh, and last sunday a rather crappy comedian spent 5 minutes doing an impression of a old game on the komodor 64. not funny.
the komedia generally is highly comical though! suman, you ever thought of performing there?

 
At March 14, 2007 8:29 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Legend has it that the hold muzak for the Homeless Persons Unit at Liverpool City Council used to be 'No Place Like Home'. They received so many complaints they had to take it down.

 
At March 14, 2007 2:13 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I forget what type of steam powered 'computer' it was but did anyone play a yogi bear game and some aircraft carrier game on cassette. Them were the days

 
At March 14, 2007 3:50 PM, Blogger Dr Joey said...

i don't remember the days of cassettes, but i remember playing captain keen on an amstrad ALL CHRISTMAS DAY one year - such a good present!

and did any one have gorillas? on ms-dos, two gorillas standing on skyscrapers chucking exploding bananas at each other and you had to work out the angle and velocity to make it hit the other player? i remember not knowing what angle and velocity meant but being damn good at it anyway!!

 
At March 14, 2007 11:24 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I remember when my brother got his spectrum years and years ago... i remember the Amiga (if thats how it's spelt) he still has one but he has never got round to hooking it up :(

 
At March 15, 2007 8:05 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Don't forget the one and only Atari you guys...
These 3D games make my head spin :-P

 
At March 15, 2007 10:51 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Amiga games at my best friend's house... and hoping that you wouldn't get a tape loading error waiting for some game to load on the commodore 64 (was that the tape one?)

We had an Amstrad. It had a Bruce Lee game with a cheat that made the colours go luminous.

I hate James Blunt too. He is a weak imitation of lots of minor public schoolboys I went to Uni with, twats all.

C

 
At March 16, 2007 7:15 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Daley Thomson's decathlon on Spectrum 128. 14 minutes to load and Chariots of Fire theme tune on the menu screens. Yay!

 

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