I've decided to become a born-again Luddite.

Mutterings continued.

Again.

All week at work I have tried to satisfy the needs of main shared printer. First it wanted a new waste toner bottle - NOW! - so I got one couriered. Put it in, only to have another error message come up on the panel - it wants an Oil Kit. NOW! So I had one of those couriered. Put the oil kit in. Got an error message saying that it now wants Cyan toner and a clean. AAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Rang the supply people, asked to have ALL FOUR TONER KITS delivered today (as I know damn well that as soon as I put the cyan toner in, the fucking machine will want the red, or the yellow, or the black); response from them was, "We had to send out an oil kit by urgent courier to someone today." "Yes," I replied. "That was me."

Stupid printers. Stupid technology.

A further rant, this time about the abuse of the English language. Bit of a hobby horse of mine, but it's so satisfying to discover others who are willing to have "a bit of a spray" (thank you, Roy and HG). "When Don Watson wrote Death Sentence last year a torrent of letters and emails began from people rebelling against managerial language. We are fed up with building our capacity to develop synergies with key stakeholders.

Here at Weasel Words we intend to cascade this vision, leverage off our leadership initiatives and invite you, as team players, to engage in a strategic partnership and commit to the challenge of resolving the issue of impactful language."

From the We Were Tougher Back Then files:

From the Guardian, "Over the Pennines now to the Manchester Evening News - and another
plague of popups, worse than Whitby's. Having zapped them, in a way which reminds me of that old Space Invaders game as you try to whiz
to the little 'kill' box in the corner before yet another one pops up, there are goodies to be found on the current newslist.


For example, those long-standing friends of the journalist, "university researchers", have established that the frequency of violence is more than 10 times greater in nursery rhymes than in TV before the 9pm watershed. Well spotted, the guys from the Archives of Disease in Childhood. I remember living in a more or less permanent world of kidnapping, murder and ingenious ways of snipping people up when I was aged between two and six. Worse, it was gift-wrapped in beguiling images of gingerbread houses and boys living a life as pirates on a coral island.


The MEN highlights the light-hearted treatment of a serious accident in Jack and Jill, the callous stereotyping of Simple Simon and even -
maybe a bit peripheral, this - the allegedly incurable aggressive syndrome of the Grand Old Duke. The researchers add: "Other episodes
which caused concern included placing a baby intentionally in harm's way by placing his or her cot in a tree top. A social services
referral would undoubtedly follow." That's Rock-a-bye-Baby, if you hadn't guessed."

Today's youth are obviously more impressionable - I was brought up on Grimm's Fairy Tales, a grimmer, more blood thirsty bunch of stories you wouldn't want to read, and I've turned out perfectly normal. Ok, so I occasionally threaten to take to the computers and printer at work with an axe, but who hasn't felt like that from time to time?