Sogger’s Blog

I’ve not had a good weekend; in fact, I’ve not had a good week - I’m thoroughly ticked-off (in the American sense). We have to deliver a big project next week and there are still some serious bugs remaining. In fact, if you look at the simplest measure in the bug database, there are 35 open “must-fix” bugs. The big-boss uses only this number as the measure of quality, and therefore asked me “formally” to inform my team that they were to come to the office to work this weekend in order to make sure that the number falls to zero for the shipping date (”otherwise, you and I will have some serious issues to discuss”, he said with what he obviously thought was a disarming smile). The problem with his request was that this involved asking two new guys to work this weekend, one of whom has been with us for only 3 weeks and has his child for the weekend only, and therefore would have to ask him to spend a sunny Saturday kicking his heels in an air-conditioned soulless office - a good preparation for later life maybe? The other unfortunate aspect of this is that I had to “formally” decline to come to the office, which made me feel even worse, and my boss even angrier, giving me a good ticking-off (in the British sense)

We planned to go to Beaune this weekend to leave the kids with Papi for the last week of the school holidays. I always enjoy these trips (see some of my first posts), as they are often accompanied by a purple haze of burgundy-red. To be honest, I could just have easily have sent my wife and sat in the office, presumably looking perplexedly at the list of bugs and writing a variation on this post, but what the hell, sorry guys, I’ve done the grind in the past, family and alcohol come first (not necessarily in that order).

Another reason not to work this weekend is that the hunting season starts next week, so the forests become off-limits to sane people for six months. This means that it is the last chance I will get to go mushrooming, it being a particularly good period, as the Girolles are in abundance (or so I thought). Saturday afternoon, after a long lunch, a siesta and a suitably concerned-sounding call to the office, we set off to the forest, armed with knives and bags for the kilos and kilos that we would undoubtedly be bringing back for dinner that evening.

French forests (the ones around Beaune anyway), are dense, dark, sprawling, and, at this time of year, damp underfoot. As you step on the fallen branches, they crumple like paper into a deep, shag-pile carpet of dead leaves. Girolles are orange mushrooms. Unfortunately, French slugs are orange too, as are dead leaves. In the past, when I have been looking for Girolles, you can put up with bending to pick up a slug, as you will always find clumps of mushrooms to make up for the disappointment. This time was different though. I saw nothing; clambering over the fallen branches, picking the spider’s webs from my hair and mouth,  slipping down embankments for an hour or so with not a single sniff of fungus soon ticked me off. The only bright moments were seeing an adder glide off the path into the undergrowth - the first time I have seen a wild snake in Europe - and son 2 picking a toad out of a puddle and putting it inside son 1’s Wellington boot, much to everyone except son 1s’ amusement. As time wore on however, I began to feel more and more guilty about not staying in the office to give moral support, and thinking that I would never get back in time to call the big-boss with a status update (as if that would change anything).

Believe it or not, as we got back through the door, my phone was ringing and it was the big boss. This left me on the horns of a dilemma - answer and tell him that I didn’t know what the status was, or don’t answer, call a team member, and then call him back pretending that I didn’t know he had already called. I’ll let you guess which option I chose…

In fact, things had moved on surprisingly well in terms of the product quality. In terms of the bug count, however, things weren’t so good, falling only by about 5 or 6. My attempts to explain that a pure bug-count is not necessarily the best way to measure things fell on stony ground. Big-boss, once again, ticked off. Software team; tired and ticked-off. Me; ticked-off by the big-boss. Bugger it, let’s get a bottle, off with its cork and back into a purple haze.

So now it’s Sunday afternoon; the guilt of not being in work has worn off with the wine from Sunday lunch, and the apprehension of going back to work tomorrow has not yet settled in. Good news though - they are showing Wigan Athle-tick versus Chelski on TV. Small comfort, but you take it where you can. I settle back on the sofa, arms behind my head, and my wife says, “what’s that black spot in your armpit?”. I twist to look, thinking that maybe it’s a previously undiscovered mole, but this black spot is surrounded by a red ring.

A closer look, and it turns out that the only thing I brought back from the forest yesterday was a tick, a small burrowing insect that gets under your skin, gorges itself on your blood over several days, leaving you with Lyme disease, a particularly nasty infection that needs treating with antibiotics, otherwise you end up with arthritis and heart failure. Tweezers out, tick - OFF!

So, as the weekend ticks to a close, I’ll take a break, and wait until later to post about a hospital visit during the week that was possibly the worst since I was diagnosed as an epilep-tick…

As the only native English-speaker in a French company dealing with customers outside of France, I often get asked to review flyers, white-papers, release notes etc. before they are sent to customers. I am happy to do so, but loathed to be too critical because I know that my written French is appalling and I am no Shakespeare in English. I have somehow become the defender of the English language in my corner of France (albeit, a very small corner and purely because there is no-one more qualified). On several occasions however, I have had to rewrite large tracts of a document before I can allow it to be released to the outside world.

One of the errors I constantly feel the need to correct comes from the incorrect or missing use of the hyphen; I will systematically change the wording to add or remove them as I see fit. It is only since I have been in France that I have understood its importance and how it can change the meaning of a written statement dramatically.  The French don’t seem to place so much emphasis on the hyphen, and invariably don’t use it at all in English documents.

Often, after having received my reviewed document, the author is none-the-wiser and comes back for a more detailed explanation. My guiding principle is that it is used to clarify that a group of words are tightly-bound in the current context (although I use it interchangeably with the colon and semi-colon to link together two ideas in the same sentence - but that’s not important in this post). This is a bit dry as an explanation so I always explain how to use it via examples.

Most recently an engineer asked why I moved a hyphen (purely in the spirit of learning to speak proper English like wot I does). To explain (in a non-patronising way, obviously), I asked him if he saw the difference between the phrases, “I work with twenty odd engineers” and “I work with twenty-odd engineers”. Sadly, he didn’t. Someone from marketing came to see me for an explanation of a similar modification. A religious kind of guy, I showed him that “pre marital-sex” could be considered as foreplay between husband and wife, whereas “pre-marital sex” was forbidden by his religious principles. He didn’t get it either.

It looks like I’m going to have to find a different way of getting the message across. If you don’t get it either (or think that I don’t get it), and are as pedantic as me, you can refer to “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” for a more correct, complete and humourous definition of how to use the hyphen.

You may have followed the ongoing saga that is the reparation of my shot pre-molars (shamelessly self-referenced here). About a month ago I started to get pain again in a tooth that had supposedly been deadened - how could this be? Was my trust in dentist 2 misplaced? No messing around, this time I called the dentist straight away only to be told that he was on holiday for the next 3 weeks (don’t you just love long French holidays?). So again, a long wait, whinging to anybody willing to listen (nobody in fact). But a date was at least fixed. Eating in the meantime was a painful experience; food seemed to get trapped everywhere and my favourite, steak and chips, was off the menu.

“Steak and Chips”, the combo long championed in player profiles in Shoot magazine (a football magazine for pre-adolescents rather than a lowbrow gay porn magazine. Although having said that, A picture of Kevin Keegan on the front page in his 80’s footballer shorts might lead to some confusion). The player profiles were always the same: same questions, same answers. “So, Mister Beattie, what is your favourite food?”, “Steak and chips”. “Who was the biggest influence on your career?”, “My Dad”, and other such insights. I am reminded of the Kevin Keegan cover, not because it roused some long-repressed adolescent angst, but because I still have this issue (of the magazine, not one related to Kevin-Keegan-in tight-shorts-causing-issues-with-my-sexuality). It is the seminal (don’t confuse the meaning of this word either) issue where my question was published in the “Ask The Expert” section.

Soggers from Cumbria asks,

“Dear Sir, please can you tell me how Sheffield Wednesday came to get their rather unusual name?”.

Incidentally, my question was, “Please can you tell me how Sheffield Wednesday got their name?”. They probably added the “Dear Sir” and “rather unusual” to make me sound like less of an illiterate working-class northerner, son of a coal miner etc. Anyway, you can go find out the answer for yourself - if you can’t be bothered to “Ask the Expert” yourself, why should I help you?

Back to the dentist…

Funnily enough, I hadn’t seen the dentist from scoop 1 since that day, even though his surgery/butcher’s slab was only a few hundred metres from my house - I tended to keep my head down as we passed in the car, or look the other way in case he came out and harangued me about unpaid bills. The morning of scoop 5, I had to walk to the bus-stop which took me past his surgery, and as I did so, he appeared on the doorstep (sad to say, not with a blood-covered cloak and a dripping scalpel). He saw me. He didn’t say anything, just turned on his heels and disappeared inside. This could either mean that he was embarrassed or was off to find his blunderbuss (if you remember the description of his antique surgery you may know what this is. Alright, so it’s a big gun). Anyway, I was glad to see that he didn’t accost me directly and wasn’t going to wait around to see if he was going to run me through with a rusty drill-bit.

A bus and a tram ride, and 1-hour later (I really went to great physical lengths to get away from the original dentist), I was back in the chair from scoops 2, 3 and 4. A quick description of the symptoms and a quick look in my mouth and the dentist was able to tell me the problem: part of the tooth he recently deadened had broken off, leaving a hole into which food would be trapped, causing irritation of the gums which was in fact the cause of the pain. So in he went. Again.

Wriggling about inside with some shiny white equipment he was able to fix the damage quickly. All very neat and professional. However, just as I made to stand up, he said, “Hhhmmm, a lot of tartar in there, I think we’ll get rid of that”. I’ve never had this done before, which probably accounts for the ensuing pain as he fought to chip the stuff off the back of my teeth. It was probably the worse moment of all the work I had done. At any moment, I felt that he was going to touch a nerve ending and cause my feet to touch my nose as they shot involuntarily into the air and my head did likewise.

But hey, what a difference! I could actually feel that I have individual teeth, not just a silver and yellow strip that makes it look like I have a small, over-ripe banana skin behind my lips. That was 1 week ago, and touch wood everything is OK. No reaction so far, so hopefully Scoop 6 will be the Unstarted Symphony.

I know that I promised that scoop 5 would be the end of any description on my oral tribulations (don’t get me back onto Kevin Keegan), but this time, I promise it is the case.

My kids are learning English at school. Although they already speak perfect English, when they are in class they speak English (”Ingleesh”) with a French accent. The only explanation I have for this is that they don’t want to stand out.

One of the ways they learn English is through song. It’s usually of the type, “The wheels on the bus go round and round” or “Happy Birthday”, that sort of thing. However, this week, in the run-up to the summer holidays, they have been learning the aptly named, “School’s Out”. I guess this comes from High School Musical or some such sugary show, but I know that it’s origins are darker as I’m sure you can guess if you read the lyrics. In fact, it was first sung in the 70’s by Alice Cooper, the scary-looking bloke who adopted a girl’s name.

Few people know this, and of those who do, none believe me, but I met Alice Cooper in a video-shop in Manchester in 1989. I believe he was playing the Manchester Apollo at the time. I lived in Rusholme - the curry capital of the north-west. In the heart of Rusholme was a video shop and I went along one Saturday afternoon. While I was choosing, in walked a middle-aged Goth. Dressed in black, drainpipe trousers, wrinkled face, deep black eye-liner, it was obviously Alice Cooper. I was the only other customer in the shop and was completely gobsmacked.

Alice didn’t spend time browsing - he was obviously a man in a hurry. Instead, he walked straight to the counter, asking in his American accent, “Hey, you got any’a those Splatter Movies”. The answer was obviously yes, because the owner disappeared into the backroom, coming back with a small selection. I wondered why they weren’t on general display, but I guess it’s best not to ask. As Alice chose, I left, in such a state of disbelief that I didn’t even stop to ask him why he had a girl’s name. I hope he found something with enough splatter to fire him up for a top performance that night.