Blind Panic!

I had one of those moments yesterday. I'm sure you know the kind of moment... it's when you do something and immediately panic you've done something wrong. Now I don't want to dwell on anything distasteful or crass for long so I'll try to keep it polite.

I was at work and I had a pain in my stomach, so I went to the bathroom. Let's just say I had a slightly upset stomach... you fill in the blanks. Mission complete I reach for the flush button and push.... and nothing happens! I stared in horror, and just in case the toilet had miraculously fixed itself in the last 2 seconds I pushed the button again. Unsurprisingly, but no less horrorfyingly, nothing happened again. Several scenarios instantaneously flashed through my mind, and every single one of them involved humiliation as I try to explain why I used a toilet that everyone else knew was broken. Remember the start of this paragraph when I mentioned the upset stomach... you can imagine how one might feel the onset of panic at a time like this.

Being a reasonably logical chap I started through the checklist of obvious faults, found that the cistern was empty and the fill valve turned off. A quick turn to the left and the water began to flow, my heart rate returned to normal and the pallor left my face.

Ok... maybe not a truly momentous occasion worthy of space on this page... but it felt pretty meaningful at the time.

A movie i want to see

I have a pitch for a movie. Basically I’m tired of all the feel good, warm fuzzy, overcoming movies out there… particularly those about sport… especially those about American Football (incidentally the lamest “sport” ever!... oh the controversy). You know the movie… you’ve seen it several dozen times:

1. It has either a small town team or a team from the ghetto.
2. They suck
3. The team consists of misfits and miscreants.
4. One team member is grossly overweight but lovable.
5. One is a tough guy who doesn’t need anything from anyone.
6. There is an undercurrent of racism that will explode about 20 minutes into the film.
7. Enter the tough new head coach who won’t take crap from anyone. He’ll throw a few team members off the team for not getting good grades. He’ll also threaten the team with a good dose of violence at the end of a baseball bat.
8. The team will rebel… then they will listen. They’ll probably also stand up against the conservative management who now want to throw out the head coach.
9. The movie will end with a game against the nemesis team. It will be close. Our team will win the championship with 2 seconds to spare.
10. The credits will begin with photos of the characters and text that tells us how each of them has gone on make something of themselves.
11. Of course it’s all based on true events.

I don’t want to see that movie anymore. This is what I want to see:

The Sweetville Titan Panthers are the greatest team in the league. In fact, people are saying that there has never been a team like them in the history of College football. Records have been broken every time the team has taken to the field. The trophy cabinet is bursting at the seams.

But all the fame and success has not gone to the heads of the players. In fact they are all ‘A’ students, take part in community service projects and care for the environment. The team is a model of multicultural understanding and respect for women.

The head coach is fantastic… a pillar of the community… loved by all. But he’s just accepted an offer from NASA to train autistic children to pilot the space shuttle.

After a quick search on Ebay the college find a new head coach… a drifter named Derek who, when he’s not hopped up on crack cocaine is running an illegal underground fight club. Derek can’t stand the kids on the team but the money’s not bad so he figures he might as well stick around until something better comes along.

At training camp Derek feeds the team on a steady stream of doughnuts and soda. The weather’s a bit cold so rather than going for a run in the morning the team play football on their Xbox. Average weight gain is 30 pounds per player. Nerves start to wear thin and there is a knife fight between the offensive and defensive teams, leaving the quarterback with one eye and three fingers missing. The star linebacker calls his girlfriend of ten years and dumps her for no reason.

The first game of the season is about to be played. Due to a mix-up at the Chinese clothing factory all the uniforms have been sent to Las Vegas and used as part of Celine Dion’s new stage show. Half the team are laid up with a debilitating case of acne… and the other half are drunk.

Head coach Derek gathers the team together in the locker room and completely demoralises them with his pep talk. There are no ‘high-fives’, no boisterous yelling, and strangely for an American team there is no ass slapping.

During the game Derek drinks all the Poweraid himself and falls into a sugar coma leaving Doris the cafeteria lady to run the plays. Unfortunately the ‘Spagetti spiral’ play is not as successful as Doris had hoped, leaving two team members permanently crippled. The other team completely decimate the Sweetville Titan Panthers 200 points to nil. Due to the high attrition rate the season is over after one game.

The township of Sweetville goes bankrupt, mostly because the local clothing industry can’t compete with cheap Chinese knockoffs of football uniforms. The college however stays full… but mostly because the students are too dumb to pass and keep being held back another year. We end the film with a slow zoom out of the town, the dilapidated buildings crumbling picturesquely in the dull glow of the sun through clouds of dust from the dried up fields nearby.

THE END

Five Photos...

Do you ever wish that you hadn’t been listening to what the preacher said at church? I have to say that I have been feeling that way a bit recently. Why couldn’t he have just shut up? You see, now I’ve heard what he said, I have no excuses.

I have no idea what most of the sermon was about now… all I remember was the part about how we treat people. Are we friendly to the checkout operator at the supermarket? Do we reflect a God of love or are we just as bad as the rest of the world?

This thought annoyingly intrudes upon my conscience on Sunday afternoon as I stand, in a quiet rage, at Camera House. All I want to do is get five photos printed in a hurry. Sounds simple, but apparently on Sunday it’s not.

There is now a proliferation of these self service photo machines, purportedly to make things simple for us. There are about seven of these machines at the shop I was in and they were all being used. So I stand between the racks of photo frames, trying to avoid being run over by pushchair wielding mothers searching for a frame to make their ugly baby’s photos look good. And I wait…… finally a machine becomes free but before I could start loading my pictures a shop assistant asks me if I am a “special member”. I stare blankly at him for a moment, incomprehension furrowing my brow before remembering that I have a gold membership card entitling me to cheaper prints. Apparently though, the shop has just updated their systems and now I need to get a new card… before I can load my pictures.

So I follow him up to the counter, losing my place at the machine. There then followed a conversation with the assistant that, if you saw it in a movie you would fire the scriptwriter, it was that confusing. He looked confused, I felt confused, I may have even lost consciousness for moment. To abridge the conversation… even though they had my details on their computer already, I had to give it all to them again to get my new card. But the way the assistant approached this was with a logic that felt like a Salvador Dali painting, complete with flying goats and melted clocks. My blood pressure was slowly rising.

Finally I am free to go back to the machines…. Except that they are all busy again. More waiting in the aisles, reading the fine print of price stickers.

Have you used one of these photo machines? I ‘m pretty good with computers but I still found the process difficult. A touch screen with more options than the menu at the foodcourt next door. And it doesn’t seem to follow a good logic. But I get it done, I’m now on the home straight. Ha.

The machine spits out my receipt and I go stand back in the queue to pay… as per the old system. I wait in the queue for maybe 5 minutes before being told that the system has now changed and I don’t need to pay until I come back in an hour to pick up my photos. Grrrrrrr!

I dutifully come back in an hour, money in hand, expectation building, excitement at seeing my photos… to find that they have been cropped oddly, cutting off an important part of the picture. So I vent a bit to the assistant, not too politely, and shove my photos back across the counter to him before striding back to the machine again to have another go. The problem is that the stupid machine software that is supposed to make things easy for us all, fails to show when a photo is bigger than the print area. This is something that every home printer tells you automatically… but somehow the brilliant programmers of this machine can’t get it right. Going through it for the second time I find a microscopic “edit” button well hidden that when pushed shows me all the cropping and sizing controls I need. Of course when the brilliant programmers developed the system they put it next to the whopping big button that shows you the full picture with no cropping in evidence.

So I go away again for another hour to wait for these new pictures to be ready. That’s when I start to think about what that preacher said and I start to feel a little convicted. It’s not the poor assistants fault that he’s lumbered with a crappy system. It’s not his fault the new owners of the company have changed all the procedures that are now confusing the customers. It’s just that he is the guy standing in front of me feeling my frustration as I vent it at him.

So when I came back for my pictures I apologised to him. Then we a had a good talk about how his job is difficult and I apologise again. His manager came over too and we all had a good laugh and left on a really positive note. It’s not easy to show God’s love to people when you are as easily annoyed as I can be… and I wish I never heard that preacher! But in the end I guess I’ll be better off for it.