Archive for 2018

Skills shortage

Successive governments have told us that Britain needs to admit hordes of skilled migrant workers to do the jobs for which we have insufficient home-grown talent.

Clearly we don't train enough native parcel-posting parking-pricks, so we have to import people whose grasp of the English language, manners and road-courtesy leaves much to be desired. That grasp seems to be restricted to the words "I moving, yes?", mumbled in what sounds like a Carpathian accent, and delivered with a free scowl and no contrition. Apparently the skill of noticing huge vacant parking spaces to the left and to the right isn't mandatory:

Does Dan Quayle work at Tesco?

Posted by on February 9th 2018 in Lost in translation, Name and Shame

Who else would put an "e" in potato?

Aside from that, the notion of there being P/Toe in my soup is a little unsettling.

Here's the blast from the past: https://youtu.be/6tmoSGmvR1o

How do you like your… stake?

Posted by on January 26th 2018 in In the News, Lost in translation, Name and Shame, On the box

It's going from bad to worse at the Beeb:

Well done!

I’m Siri I Haven’t a Clue

Posted by on January 21st 2018 in LMAO!, Video (YouTube, Vimeo etc.)

At Tuesday's pub quiz at the Red Lion I was asked if I "do social media". My response was "No, unless you count blogging as "doing social media"". Maybe the following explains why I'm not a part of the herd:

 

People in glass houses…

Posted by on January 17th 2018 in Rambling on...

The school has a hi-tech ID-card-entry security system which feeds info into a little box called a computer. In theory, at all times said computer should know exactly who is on the premises and where they should be, logging all arrivals and departures.

Sadly, said computer isn't very clever and often has to be corrected by manual input.

And when the absentee isn't the pupil but is actually the member of staff responsible for making those manual corrections, the system goes to shit, sending out all sorts of inaccurate automated texts to unsuspecting parents, and waking the synthetic voice which rings our land-line to further the spread of fake news...

Press "1" for Bollocks, press "2" for Bullshit, press "3" to talk to a hapless keyboard-jockey.

In loco parentis, eh?

Auntie has a dicky ticker

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
 
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
 
The slings and arrows of outrageous grammar
 
Or to take arms against a sea of illiterates...

 

Here's evidence that The Beeb uses your licence fee to pay infant-school kids to input data - this sample of their output is from today's BBC News:

That was at 14:42. They must have been kept back after school to do it again - by 16:36 they'd posted a different yet still flawed version: