Office Phone Prank #19
Posted on | August 31, 2010 | 3 Comments
I was reminded today of an office telephone prank I used to play when I worked for the corporate arm of a noted Australian university. It was a simple enough jape, but always good for a giggle on a slow afternoon.
It relies upon a rather specific setup for the office telephone system. While it’s possible that other workplaces I’ve enjoyed have also had systems capable of the following, I’ve never been able to re-master the all important third item on the list below.
Requirements
- everyone in the office must have their own phone with a unique extension number
- every employee has voicemail set to answer calls when they are away from their desk and, crucially, when their line is busy
- every handset has the ability to switch between multiple phone lines without losing the current call
You see where this is going, don’t you?
I would ring somebody in the office. Let’s say Bob. Bob answers the phone and I serve up something businesslike along the lines of “Hi, Bob. I’ve got a call for you on the other line, can I put it through?”
And Bob, being an obliging sort of bloke, returns serve with “Yeah, bro, fo’ shiz. Patch that bad boy in1.”
So I tell Bob to give me a second to connect him up. I put him on hold, open up the second phone line and dail his extension again.
Because Bob is currently on hold, this second call goes directly through to his voicemail. I wait until the message ends, and then connect live Bob directly through to to this second line.
Bob’s hold music ends, so he knows he’s now on the line with a new caller. He produces his professional best “Hello, this is Bob speaking. How may I help you?” and then pauses waiting for an answer that doesn’t come.
Bob then repeats the greeting, or falls back upon the time-honoured “hello? hello?” until he assumes that either the line has dropped out or I fucked up the transfer.
And then Bob hangs up.
A few minutes later, a little red light blinks into life on Bob’s phone and he sees there is a voicemail waiting for him. Bob dials in, waits for the good news, and is treated to the dulcet tones of his own recorded voice from a few moments earlier2 – “Hello, this is Bob speaking. How may I help you?”
I am reliably informed that the experience of hearing your own voice greeting you unexpectedly when you answer the telephone is a distinctly eerie experience.
This is childish, but entertaining. If your phone system will permit such shenanigans, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
- Bob is a hipster
- It’s even better if Bob doesn’t see the message right away. A skillful prankster will ensure that they are at Bob’s desk in time to intercept his attention and take him away to the tea room for a quick informal meeting and cuppa so that, by the time he returns to his desk, the original phone call is long forgotten. In a perfect execution, Bob leaves the message just before going on a four week holiday to Bermuda and doesn’t hear the result until after he returns.
Twimericks
Posted on | August 17, 2010 | No Comments
It started here:
Well now. That’s a cry for help that cannot go unanswered. And so dear friends I give you: The Twimerick.
As far as I have been able to discern from my extensive research1, while the word twimerick is in popular use, it’s most commonly applied to a combination of tongue twister and limerick. Well fuck that. I’m hereby appropriating it.
My first impulse was to follow conventional form, but heavily abbreviated. Something like thr 1ce wuz a man frm n’t'kt, and so on. But that seems like kind of a cop out. What we really want is a short form version of the familiar limerick, suitable for the ruthlessly minimalist Twitter character count.
So I propose the following:
- A five line verse
- lines one and two comprise a rhyming couplet of five or six syllables per line (as opposed to the traditional limerick, which tends to have 8 to 10 syllables on average in these lines)
- lines three and four are a couplet of shorter, approximately three-syllable, lines
- the twimerick concludes with a final fifth line to rhyme with the first couplet, true to the traditional limerick form but deviating in that the fifth line has the shorter meter of lines three and four rather than the longer meter of lines one and two
Due to the non-uniform handling of line breaks across the various twitter clients, the recommended practice is to indicate a new line with the pipe | symbol.
For example…
The man from Geelong|Knew a very rude song|Which he sang|Through his wang|All night long #twimericks
Please enjoy this new standard in short poetic verse. May it bring you years of maintenance-free joy.
1. One Google search, four of ten hits read at speed.
I was wrong
Posted on | August 12, 2010 | 2 Comments
It can happen with song lyrics and quotes, be they popular or obscure. It may be the mis-heard name of somebody you met last week or an old wives’ tale which years ago took erroneous root in your mental filing cabinet of Things That Are Correct™.
I’m talking about those little nuggets of non-facts, of false data, which you have long believed to be true. They lie dormant in your mind, sometimes for years or even decades. Some of them may never surface into the shiny light of day to be exposed, and you may well live with them until the day you die, blissfully ignorant of your blissful ignorance.
An example:
When I was younger, I picked up an idea from somewhere – God knows where. I’ve always slept with my arms semi-folded beneath my pillow. It’s comfortable and gives the impression that, even in slumber, I have a concealed weapon ready for active service should you attempt to sneak into my room and steal my bedside lamp or spit in my water glass.
Somewhere around the age of eight or nine, I got it into my head that only children slept like that. I was convinced that when I became a grown up I would have to sleep with my arms by my side. How this idea got into my head, I do not know. Nor do I know how I thought these laws of positional slumbering would be policed. But I do know that for a period of several months I would make regular and uncomfortable attempts to sleep with arms at my side — practicing so that when I was required to adopt this pose as an adult I would be able to it properly.
You may not be surprised to learn at this point that, as a child, I was something of a worrier. For those of you who know me as an adult, this will hardly be a revelatory piece of information.
Anyway…
The point of all this is that today I learned of another small thing which, for as long as I can remember, I have been getting wrong.
You probably know of the brown mulchy, barky stuff that lines the ground in children’s outdoor play areas to soften rough landings without leaving dirt or grass stains on clothes. Right now you are probably thinking of its name, and you’re most likely getting the name correct.
All my life, I have called it Tam Bark. Two words, the first ending with an “m”. All my life, I have been wrong.
It’s Tanbark. One word, and with an “n”. So called because it is the bark from the tanbark oak tree. The bark has a high level of tannins and various chemicals which are used for leather tanning (no doubt the tanbark/tanning connection is no coincidence, and maybe the tannin/tanning thing has something to say about the origin of one thing or another to, but I’ll leave that particular tangent (no pun intended) of research up to somebody else)1.
There may be a moral to this story, something about not taking ‘facts’ for granted or not assuming things blindly without demanding evidence and applying a proper process to test assumptions (Andrew “Fuckface” Bolt, are you reading this?2). But today is Friday and Friday is no day for morals. So please carry on as you were.
- Nested
parenthesis’sparentheses are fucking awesome. - I doubt that he is is but, Bolt, if you are reading this I really do mean it: you’re a fuckface. Sue me.
Euphemism Generator
Posted on | July 18, 2010 | No Comments
A quick spot of fun whipped up over the weekend, the euphemism generator was a tiny project mainly intended as an excuse to fiddle around with JQuery – something I should have done a long time ago. The result is pretty basic, but it’s amusing enough (at least to me) to warrant it’s own little place on the web.
I dropped in a fairly primitive tweet this function which uses the ?status= querystring approach. It’s crude, but it does the trick. I also threw in a rather nifty social networking widget from www.addthis.com which seems to work quite nicely.
Check it out at www.notaeuphemism.com.
The idea for the generator itself was shamelessly lifted from these funny dudes.
Waiter, there’s a soup in my iPad
Posted on | June 14, 2010 | 1 Comment
I’ve long harbored a desire to have a meal at Pearl, a house of noms widely regarded as being a bit of alright by those who ought to know. It certainly looks like the kind of place i like – creative, contemporary cooking which draws from a variety of styles in a schwanky, but not wanky, setting.
But my enthusiasm dropped several notches last week when I read that proprietor Chris Lucas intends to supplement printed menus with Apple’s new plaything, the iPad*. In an article in The Australian, Lucas enthuses about a specially written app which will allow diners to read about each dish in his restaurant, plus the wine list, and delve into great detail about specific aspects – presumably cooking styles, ingredients and their origin or some such thing. The app will also recommend wine matches and provide tasting notes on all things drinkable.
What I want to say to Chris, if he is reading this, is: Do not be a dick.
I can think of at least a dozen places where I would happily use an iPad in the place of a book, a tv, a laptop, newpapers, a music player…well, you get the idea. But the thought of sitting around the table at a relatively classy restaurant while my dining companions tap, swipe, pinch and scroll their way through a detailed multimedia glossary of the meal they are about to enjoy does not appeal. Not at all.
Restaurant dining is a social activity. Sure, the food is at the center, but the the real joy comes from the company you share it with, from the atmosphere of the room, and from the interaction with the staff on the floor. Unfortunately, screens have an inherently detrimental effect on interaction between people, especially screens which are fundamentally designed for a single user.
Lucas says it’s all about catering to his diner’s desire to know more about what they are eating. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s ingredients, origins of produce or wine, and particularly Old World wine, this platform can provide as little, or as much, information as each customer wants.”
No thanks. As far as I’m concerned, at a restaurant the caliber of Pearl that’s the job of your waiters and sommeliers. I’ll fiddle around on Wikipedia when I get home if I want to read about a history of beef carpaccio, but when I’m in your restaurant I’d prefer to speak to real people. Especially the ones I’m sharing a table with.
I know, i know. It’s just for the ordering part of the night. People stop and read their menus anyway. It allows interested diners to learn more about the food they are paying so much money to eat. Blah-di-fucking-blah.
Sorry, but it’s not like a menu at all. A fine menu is an art, it should tantalise and excite, it should intrugue. It should create a sense of anticipation and expectation. It should leave room for surprise so that the moment when the dish is presented is ever so slightly magical. And, critically, it should stimulate discussion – not kill it stone dead.
To my mind, some of the magic is lost if, by the time the dish has arrived, you have seen photos of the finished product, watched a video of it being prepared, read about the farm from where then main ingredient was sourced, and learned that carpaccio was invented in Venice in 1950. And who’s talking to anyone while they play with all that on a shiny touch screen gizmo?
Here’s an idea – take the iPad and release it for download. People who are interested can play to their hearts content before they come to dine, or use it afterwards to relieve the great meal and learn more about its origins, history and craft. But please, keep the screens off the dining table.
*you may not have heard of the iPad. The media, blogosphere, twitter, and other popular sources of news and gossip have barely bothered to even acknowledge the existence of this funny little gadget, let alone disucss it any great detail. So far as I can tell from what scant information exists, an iPad basically a sketch book with a waffle iron attached**.
**apologies to Grampa Simpson
Hype
Posted on | May 25, 2010 | No Comments
Joshua Davis and Branden Hall have released a fantastic ActionScript 3 library for visual programming. Not be be confused with a tween engine, Hype is a collection of tools which greatly simplify the task of programming and combining complex visual effects and behaviors.
I’ve only had the briefest of fiddles, barely scratching the surface, but so far i’m really impressed by the ease of use, the range of tools available, and the overall performance of the engine. I’ve posted a couple of samples to whet your appetite here (non-interactive) and here (wiggle your mouse for some action).
Sample 1
Sample 2
For the full enchilada, check out the official site http://www.hypeframework.org.
Tags: branden hall > coding > hype > joshua davis > Programming
Modern Ideas Are Bullshit
Posted on | April 25, 2010 | 3 Comments
Idea #17: Crowdsourcing
There’s this thing all the kids at work are talking about. It’s called crowdsourcing, and apparently it’s the absolute fucking business. In the tradition Lady Midler’s finest, crowdsourcing provides unparalleled opportunity for the unwashed interwebby masses to offer up the substantive wind of content beneath one’s bloggy wings.
Let’s say that again, shall we? The substantive wind of content. Yes, it’s that great.
In a nutshell, the crowdsourcing premise is simple. Publishers ask audience for content. Audience supplies content to publishers. Publishers publish audience-supplied content back to the same audience. Audience consumes content supplied by itself, now repackaged with advertising. Copywriters go back to waiting tables, where they belong.
I don’t know about you – hell I don’t even know about me – but the thought of this, a kind of publisher’s perpetual motion device, is enough to make some of the more mercenary types in my business go a little misty eyed. However, the question remains: does it work? In the spirit of scientific enquiry, a test was required.
So I raised the digital conch to my lips, inhaled a lungful of Melbourne’s best, and gave breath to a distress call for my fellow twitter citizens of the interpipes: “I have a mind to write something. Give me a topic for a blog post. Anything will do.”
In response, the internet literally came alive* with a number of replies so vast that I can only describe it as “four”.
Four.
Ok. So the actual quantity of replies was kinda sub-par. But quality counts for something, right? Well then, let’s review the interweb’s finest thought-starters in the order in which they were received:
- makin a sandwhich
Not a bad idea, this one. Now that Master Chef is back, the mood is doubtless ripe amongst the visor-wearing hipster community for an instructional spray on the intricacies of assembling a deconstructed BLT with a bacon foam, lettuce sorbet and tomato jelly, served on croutons with aioli dust sprinkled around the rim. But this is not a food blog, and sandwich was spelled incorrectly, so no dice. - hand models
This was a good callback to an earlier Zoolander quotefest i was drawn into, but basically just an in-joke and not much use as a topic for mass consumption. Besides which, I’m a face and body model, mama, and those finger jockeys are a different breed. - anal leakage
’nuff said. - do something sensible about anzac day and boat people.
Tempting, but I think far too much copy has been flung about on those topics already. And aiming to write something sensible on the subject would seem to fly in the face of current blog thinking to such an extent that i wonder if it’s actually legal.
In short, crowdsourcing has failed me. There is probably some neat aphorism buried in all this – put not your faith in the people, lest the people prove to be something something** – but frankly, I can’t be bothered digging it out. In the spirit of crowdsourcing, find it yourself and then tell me via the usual channels.
That is all.
*Not in the Terminator/Skynet sense of the word. More in the ‘people got enthusiastic’ sense of the word. Only not so much, because bugger all even responded. So, by literally, i actually mean not literally.
**fucking useless, for example.
Tags: crowdsourcing > networking > social media > social newworks > twitter
Stay out of my phone
Posted on | March 10, 2010 | 1 Comment
Sorry. This one’s a rant. I’ve had the flu, so think of the following as a kind of therapeutic blowing off of steam. You have been warned.
I don’t like getting unsolicited junk mail from people, no matter whether it’s delivered to my real world letterbox, one of my email in-boxes or to any of the various accounts I hold online in this brave new 2.0 world. What’s more, I don’t care if it comes from somebody I’ve purchased things from in the past. Unless I have specifically given you my details for the purpose of trying to sell me more of your shit, I don’t want to hear from you about your big sale, hot new product, or cool new upgrade.
I’m sure this a common sentiment.
But one method of contact more than any other makes my blood boil. Mr, Mrs and Ms Marketer, listen up. Let me tell you now plainly and simply: If you ever ring my phone or send me an SMS with any kind of sales message, you and I will never do business. Ever. I don’t care if I’ve bought from you in the past. I don’t care if I’ve been your loyal customer for 10 years. I NEVER give out my phone number to any business or individual and tick the little contact me by phone with special awsome offers box.
But why is the phone such a sensitive spot for me? To be honest I’m not entirely sure that I can say.
Maybe it’s because it seems somehow more personal, an intrusion into my very local space. The internet, well that’s out in the void somewhere. Sure my email is sucked down the magic pipes right into my computers at work and home and, yes, even onto my phone, but it still feels remote and distant. I will give my email address to a stranger far more readily than my phone number for just this reason, even though it makes no real sense these days. And stuffing things in my letterbox doesn’t really phase me other than it’s a pointless waste of good trees when we clearly have a “no junk mail” sign on the fence.
But the phone gets me every time. It gets me in just the same way as that time when somebody snuck a catalog under my door. They walked past the street-accessible letterbox, opened my gate, walked onto my property, and put a fucking imitation tupperware catalog right under my door to lie on my hallway floor INSIDE MY HOUSE. Irrationally, this felt to me like a total invasion and i feel the same every time somebody SMS’s 140 characters of crap into my pants like a kind of reverse pickpocket.
Short of speaking in person, my phone is the most intimate way i have to communicate. It’s connected to my personal space in a way that email or even the slot of my letterbox simply is not. The vast majority of people I speak to on the phone are friends and family. And while most of the others are from my work, even then it’s colleagues that I see daily. These are people I know, and know well. When my phone rings or blurps an sms blurp, I know that it’s either somebody who matters to me personally or who is connected to my work and wouldn’t be calling me unless it was important. So when it turns out to be some dick tyying to sell me something i don’t want, that dick relinquishes all chance of seeing my cash.
Which brings me to today. Today I received an SMS from Marshall (you know, the car battery guys). They had my mobile number because about 12 months ago I needed my battery replaced. I was stranded and so i did what the ads said, and I hollered*. I gave them my number at the time because no doubt they needed a contact phone in case their mobile driver had trouble finding me.
Now, a year later, I get an SMS advertising their services and telling me the number I can call if I’m ever stuck with a flat battery. I read it, annoyed as always by the intrusion into my phone of an ad, and think “well yes, I know your number and what you do because I AM A FUCKING CUSTOMER,” and wondering why they would bother to piss off a previously satisfied client. And then, half an hour later, they send me the same message again. Which was probably just a database error or glitch or something, but came across as pushy, needy and stupid.
So: Fuck you, Marshall. You just converted a satisfied customer who would no doubt have used you again into a pissed off dude who will look at any and every other option first before turning to you.
This rant is over.
*Totally excellent brand positioning, by the way. I remembered that little ripper from way back into my youth and it still made them top of mind in my hour of need. But that’s another topic.
Talkin’ about Shoes
Posted on | March 6, 2010 | No Comments
For reasons both complex and stupid, I recently composed a few paragraphs for the ever charming legal-eagle @gabfran on the subject of footwear. Check it out at http://lawandshoes.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/guest-shoe-blog-post-by-gilfer-the-wedding-shoes/.
My humble thanks also to the anonymous twitter friend who found some very kind words to say about me by way of an introduction. You know who you are.
Flash CS5 Will Be Able to Create iPhone Apps
Posted on | March 6, 2010 | No Comments
’nuff said, really.
With Flash CS5, ActionScript programmers will be able to create native iPhone applications and sell them on Apple iStore.
I got chills.
keep looking »