The rubbery boy with the gun giggles incredulously as I tell him I’ve never had an eye examination before. It’s a curious reaction, one would have thought a bit of reassurance would be more appropriate, but this shop, like so many others, appears to be run by kids under the jurisdiction of one or two backroom adults who only appear when there’s a problem. He appears to be having some trouble lining me up and as my left eye begins to water uncontrollably he switches his aim to my right.
“Nobody likes this test,” he says, smiling wanly.
“Why’s that?” I ask, as he casually shoots me in the eye with a jet of compressed air.
Although my first reaction is to give him a right hook and remonstrate wildly with him for being so careless, “that went right in my eye, you idiot, I want to speak to your mother, I mean manager...etc” Instead, I meekly offer my watery left for more of the same.
I’m here because in the past few months I’ve caught myself holding things at arm’s length and zooming them back and forth to find a point of focus, muttering to myself like some daft old man. It’s not a huge step to deduce that this will be the first of many incremental defeats for my previously resilient youth.
The next test is of peripheral vision. I tell myself it’s not a competition but it’s hard not to treat the outcome of an exam as anything other than success or failure. My attendant assasin slopes off as I stick my head in a box to follow a red dot around, clicking a button on sight of any green ones. But the machine breaks down and the lights come up, and for a moment it’s a minimalist puppet theatre with a giant audience of one. Someone swishes past and I jerk my head out of the box, finger in the air, but they’re gone. No one else around so I wander through to the shop where the team are gassing over by the till.
“Machine’s stopped.” I say, in answer to their raised ‘who let you out of the box?’ eyebrows. For a second time I’m ushered into the waiting area, to flick through their sales bumf while they sort it out. One leaflet extols the virtues of getting the most from your contact lenses, another urges me to consider a new look. It reminds me of the dentist where, thankfully, everyone has the right to smile with confidence.
We are lucky to have easy access to professional health services, so it doesn’t do to be too critical. I take a deep breath which nonetheless sounds like a sigh, as I’m taken to another room for the actual sight test. My foppish new Jewish-looking inquisitor runs through some banal patter - just like the dentist, and the hairdresser too - as he pfaffs about setting a pair of ridiculous looking Star Wars anti-blast glasses on my nose.
“How are you?“
“Yeah, good thanks...and you?”
“Fine, thank you. When was your last eye test..?”
“I’ve never had one.”
“...and has your eyesight changed significantly since then?”
“Well, I’ve started holding things at arm’s length...”
“How often do you have to wear your glasses?”
“I haven’t got any.”
“Oh...no glasses,” now he’s actually looking at me. “So what brings you in here today?”
Well, you know, I was walking past and I looked in and thought 'they look like erudite, well-travelled people with an insightful world view'. Only kidding, my eyesight isn’t what it was.
I decide for the dubious pleasure of being subjected to such impersonal questioning to pursue my own, without this pointless politeness. It turns out his family are from Pakistan and so I ask him about the Pakistani government. He blinks myopically as he registers the shift in the balance of power in our brief relationship. Then he looks a bit irritated and says he’s actually from Slough, so we talk a bit about Slough but pretty soon it turns out he does have something to say about Pakistan, which is more interesting.
“The president is a superstar-thief,” he says flatly. “He has castles in France and the UK, a mansion in the centre of London and billions of dollars he doesn’t know what to do with.”
It's a recurring and topical theme. People have no right to prosperity but I do worry about power and the inordinate localised wealth that seems to come with it. And, crucially, whether this has a deliterious effect on the wider spread of opportunity? Does the man who has more necessarily deprive his fellows, or is he the very source of opportunity? It's hard to see things in a positive light in the case of the Pakistani president, or Gaddaffi, Mugabe, Mubarak and so on. But I have to ask myself what do I really know about these people, other than what I'm told by the likes of my optician?
I should have asked him if he was really helping me to see straight.
Sunday, 27 November 2011
Thursday, 17 November 2011
Some Shady Shit
We’ve spent a frustrating week, ludicrous as it sounds, trying to spend some money. It’s not really a great amount of money but it represents all the fat in a month’s pay, so it’s a lot to us. The problem we’ve been trying to solve, for once by chucking money at it, is the storage and enjoyment of all the music we’ve bought over the years and into the future. Jane wants the CD’s and the vinyl packed away, the wires hidden, or removed, and the general amount of equipment minimised.
Fair enough, I thought, and set about researching some of the streaming set-ups, which became strangely irritating remarkably quickly. Call me old fashioned but I like a bit of foreplay when I go shopping, a bit of effort on the part of the seller goes a long way to lubricating that sale. Instead I was confronted by overpriced, poorly thought out, less than credible technoporn which left me feeling a bit dirty, and not in a nice way.
One manufacturer refused to state system output saying that watts can be a misleading measure, volume depending on design. I really don’t care, if the system has an amp in it, the power output should be noted, so that one was duly crossed off the list. Another system required a remote (if you don’t own an iPhone) which was £280 extra! Others required network adaptors, also sold as extras. This narks me because if they are required, they aren’t technically extras.
Confused and a bit annoyed I consulted Hi Fi John who took the conversation in another direction, telling me about a so-called industry leading product, with a picture of a fruit on it, which kept dropping his wireless connection - something to do with the network next door. So, even if you put your hand deep into your pocket there are no guarantees of a reliable and robust wireless streaming solution, yet.
“Best thing is to stick with cables,” said John.
“That’s what we’re trying to get away from,” I replied, wearily.
And what ever happened to having a blast? I mean, what can the standard 30-odd watts really do for you? Will it shake the windows? Anything more than a room-fill seems to move you into serious money, like it’s become the last bastion of the true music devotee. Come on guys, isn’t this traditionally the first question? Like, ‘how fast does it go, dude?’
As ever, there are always options and Jane's most excellent friends put us onto a hard drive with USB, a CD slot and an integral amp. You can even plug a tape, or record deck into it to transfer legacy media. It won't stream music from our PC but I’m happy enough with this, after what John said, and we have laptops for that anyway. The really interesting thing was the difference in the experience of buying a sound product versus the flaky, plastic 'beta' boxes I’d come across.
The preferred solution was developed by a small company in Cambridge which has sold so many of these boxes that at one time it purchased the entire global supply of a particular component. At one point it also had to cease advertising to damp down demand. Payment is not deducted from your card until shipping can be confirmed - actually thinking about their customers there - and second hand examples (there are none currently on eBay) reputedly sell at 90 percent of the new price. There are no technology lock-ins, as far as I'm aware, and all you need is to do is plug it in, load your music and connect up a pair of speakers.
This is another thing that irks me with developing technologies, feeling I'm being hustled down some kind of technology alleyway. Extra brand compatability doesn’t come high on the list of large developers’ priorities, they'd rather play the tune and have everyone else dance along. It's a dirty business, and they have the nerve to talk about customers like they really have our best interests at heart. I haven't bought a Sony product since they produced a Minidisc player called the Net MD, which I bought thinking I could transfer my MP3s onto it. Silly me, as an internet friendly device it was a pile of mouldy old bollocks.
Mike the product designer tells me he bought a dock for his iPhone and changed the handset for a newer iteration which turned out to be incompatible with the dock. This is some shady bullshit and Mike was righteously unimpressed.
You guys have got to stop this selfish bullshit, you’ve got to get together and share, you really have, or we ain’t gonna buy your shit. That’s it, that's really it.
Fair enough, I thought, and set about researching some of the streaming set-ups, which became strangely irritating remarkably quickly. Call me old fashioned but I like a bit of foreplay when I go shopping, a bit of effort on the part of the seller goes a long way to lubricating that sale. Instead I was confronted by overpriced, poorly thought out, less than credible technoporn which left me feeling a bit dirty, and not in a nice way.
One manufacturer refused to state system output saying that watts can be a misleading measure, volume depending on design. I really don’t care, if the system has an amp in it, the power output should be noted, so that one was duly crossed off the list. Another system required a remote (if you don’t own an iPhone) which was £280 extra! Others required network adaptors, also sold as extras. This narks me because if they are required, they aren’t technically extras.
Confused and a bit annoyed I consulted Hi Fi John who took the conversation in another direction, telling me about a so-called industry leading product, with a picture of a fruit on it, which kept dropping his wireless connection - something to do with the network next door. So, even if you put your hand deep into your pocket there are no guarantees of a reliable and robust wireless streaming solution, yet.
“Best thing is to stick with cables,” said John.
“That’s what we’re trying to get away from,” I replied, wearily.
And what ever happened to having a blast? I mean, what can the standard 30-odd watts really do for you? Will it shake the windows? Anything more than a room-fill seems to move you into serious money, like it’s become the last bastion of the true music devotee. Come on guys, isn’t this traditionally the first question? Like, ‘how fast does it go, dude?’
As ever, there are always options and Jane's most excellent friends put us onto a hard drive with USB, a CD slot and an integral amp. You can even plug a tape, or record deck into it to transfer legacy media. It won't stream music from our PC but I’m happy enough with this, after what John said, and we have laptops for that anyway. The really interesting thing was the difference in the experience of buying a sound product versus the flaky, plastic 'beta' boxes I’d come across.
The preferred solution was developed by a small company in Cambridge which has sold so many of these boxes that at one time it purchased the entire global supply of a particular component. At one point it also had to cease advertising to damp down demand. Payment is not deducted from your card until shipping can be confirmed - actually thinking about their customers there - and second hand examples (there are none currently on eBay) reputedly sell at 90 percent of the new price. There are no technology lock-ins, as far as I'm aware, and all you need is to do is plug it in, load your music and connect up a pair of speakers.
This is another thing that irks me with developing technologies, feeling I'm being hustled down some kind of technology alleyway. Extra brand compatability doesn’t come high on the list of large developers’ priorities, they'd rather play the tune and have everyone else dance along. It's a dirty business, and they have the nerve to talk about customers like they really have our best interests at heart. I haven't bought a Sony product since they produced a Minidisc player called the Net MD, which I bought thinking I could transfer my MP3s onto it. Silly me, as an internet friendly device it was a pile of mouldy old bollocks.
Mike the product designer tells me he bought a dock for his iPhone and changed the handset for a newer iteration which turned out to be incompatible with the dock. This is some shady bullshit and Mike was righteously unimpressed.
You guys have got to stop this selfish bullshit, you’ve got to get together and share, you really have, or we ain’t gonna buy your shit. That’s it, that's really it.
Tuesday, 15 November 2011
Waking Up and Going to Sleep
It’s hard to believe I’m fifteen minutes from the motorway, standing in front of this new house in the woods somewhere in Surrey. The map shows the road petering out in a big patch of pale green, the hallmark of a top-end, not tap-end, development. The owner and designer of this house is also the founder of the construction company that built it. So he’s going to get what he wants, like a cosmetic surgeon giving his wife a boob job.
Plots like this one don’t come up for sale very often and the house that stood here was demolished to make way for his new vision. It’s clearly the plot that he was after and who can blame him. An acre or so surrounded by tall pines at the end of a muddy track, here and there the spent leaves of interspersed deciduous trees drift like snowflakes onto the lawn, or what will be the lawn. The deep blue iridescent tiles of the swimming pool beckon me in, I lean toward it, feel my head slipping under, cool, clean, sub-marine...
“What you here for mate?” a skinny bloke in an ill-fitting leather jacket breaks my reverie.
“Uh, can you tell me where the site office is?”
“I’m it.” he says, “Are you here to see about the pool?”
“Er, no, it’s the air test...I’m the air test guy.”
He turns out to be the aforementioned owner, a nice enough guy, a bit of a geezer. I’m here for free on the basis that his company will continue to give us lots of work. It’s a perfect example of how good fortune self-replicates, once you reach some kind of critical mass.
The test goes well and pretty soon I’m bouncing back down the track to the main road. It’s nice out here, really nice, and I’m in no hurry to leave. I would have liked to have stayed a while and asked a few more questions but any over-eager vicarious appreciation might have made him feel like I was eyeing up his girlfriend or something. He just wanted the job done and everybody out so I cut it short and kept it businesslike, although my role justified a visit and therefore a nose in every room.
An hour later I’m wandering down Farnham High Street in search of Guitar Village and I’m looking at the faces of the people passing, wondering if they know how lucky they are, how goddamn lucky we all are? We wake up and go to sleep knowing that we can carry on waking up and going to sleep for a very long time before any unsolicited change might be forced upon us.
We’re warm, fed, secure, and well entertained, free to set and follow our course in the knowledge that no one is likely to step in and take it all away at a moment’s notice. Women will remain unmolested (unless they go in for a bit of a ‘struggle cuddle’ of course) and our kids will attend school uninterrupted. Perhaps having a new baby has made me soft in the head but the sheer good fortune of this place, it’s infectious and it's really got under my skin.
There are a lot of nice houses tucked away in the countryside, I see them all the time when my work takes me off the beaten track. A whole bunch of people have clearly done really well for themselves and they're generally very discreet about it. Are they embarassed about their great good fortune, I wonder, or simply worried about crime? Or is it more symptomatic of an apetite to disconnect from the wider world and it's tawdry in-your-face issues? Whatever it is, I think I’m pretty much the only one who is smiling on Farnham High Street, which is crazy.
Plots like this one don’t come up for sale very often and the house that stood here was demolished to make way for his new vision. It’s clearly the plot that he was after and who can blame him. An acre or so surrounded by tall pines at the end of a muddy track, here and there the spent leaves of interspersed deciduous trees drift like snowflakes onto the lawn, or what will be the lawn. The deep blue iridescent tiles of the swimming pool beckon me in, I lean toward it, feel my head slipping under, cool, clean, sub-marine...
“What you here for mate?” a skinny bloke in an ill-fitting leather jacket breaks my reverie.
“Uh, can you tell me where the site office is?”
“I’m it.” he says, “Are you here to see about the pool?”
“Er, no, it’s the air test...I’m the air test guy.”
He turns out to be the aforementioned owner, a nice enough guy, a bit of a geezer. I’m here for free on the basis that his company will continue to give us lots of work. It’s a perfect example of how good fortune self-replicates, once you reach some kind of critical mass.
The test goes well and pretty soon I’m bouncing back down the track to the main road. It’s nice out here, really nice, and I’m in no hurry to leave. I would have liked to have stayed a while and asked a few more questions but any over-eager vicarious appreciation might have made him feel like I was eyeing up his girlfriend or something. He just wanted the job done and everybody out so I cut it short and kept it businesslike, although my role justified a visit and therefore a nose in every room.
An hour later I’m wandering down Farnham High Street in search of Guitar Village and I’m looking at the faces of the people passing, wondering if they know how lucky they are, how goddamn lucky we all are? We wake up and go to sleep knowing that we can carry on waking up and going to sleep for a very long time before any unsolicited change might be forced upon us.
We’re warm, fed, secure, and well entertained, free to set and follow our course in the knowledge that no one is likely to step in and take it all away at a moment’s notice. Women will remain unmolested (unless they go in for a bit of a ‘struggle cuddle’ of course) and our kids will attend school uninterrupted. Perhaps having a new baby has made me soft in the head but the sheer good fortune of this place, it’s infectious and it's really got under my skin.
There are a lot of nice houses tucked away in the countryside, I see them all the time when my work takes me off the beaten track. A whole bunch of people have clearly done really well for themselves and they're generally very discreet about it. Are they embarassed about their great good fortune, I wonder, or simply worried about crime? Or is it more symptomatic of an apetite to disconnect from the wider world and it's tawdry in-your-face issues? Whatever it is, I think I’m pretty much the only one who is smiling on Farnham High Street, which is crazy.
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