Henrik Lantz

I had a visit from the Helpdesk this afternoon; coming to help me install a new version of the client for our ticketing system (he’s the third one that has tried and failed after I repeatedly tried and failed myself [and I consider myself to be pretty good around computers]) and to sort out my Outlook reminder problems.

He tried the Remedy client four or five times before he gave up and said he’d have to come back on that one after researching the odd error message I got displayed. The Outlook reminders he actually made more progress on than the previous people; by creating a new profile for me and synching in all the old information he managed to pop up about 150 old reminders before he got back to the same error message again, and then we were back to square one. He resigned to asking Microsoft on that one and restored everything to the original state, before he left. The comments he scribbled down on his ticket printouts were pretty fitting - after 45 minutes with the Helpdesk engineer I was left with a “?” and an “X".

(As he had left the room, I had a stroke of genius and simply googled for installshield error 6001 and guess what? It turns out I only have to delete or rename the folder C:Program FilesCommon FilesInstallShieldProfessionalRuntime701 and suddenly it will all magically work.)

One of the more entertaining TV series I’ve seen is Brainiac: Science Abuse, a show that us non-UK-viewers can pick up via the Discovery Channel. The show should come in a big box that says “Don’t try this at home", as it tests various theories (such as “which kind of household tape is the strongest", “which office appliance is best to use as a floating aid” and “using CO₂ as the propellant, does a wheelchair go faster/further than a shopping cart") and conducts various experiments (eg. “does a person’s ears go red when people talk bad about him” and “can someone tell from the smell of your armpit what kind of junk food you had on the way home from the pub last night"). There are a lot of explosions (predominantly caravans blow up) and scantily clad big breasted women; so I assume that the target audience is predominantly male…

One of the recurring characters throughout the show is a guy called Jon Tickle (known from fantastic segments such as “Things Jon Tickle’s Body Can’t Do” and “Things Jon Tickle’s Body Can Do” - and not forgetting the memorable episode when he walked across a swimming pool filled with custard(!)), a former Big Brother contestant who has been given a new lease of life. When the program breaks for commercials, viewers are sometimes left with one of “Tickle’s Teasers” - according to Wikipedia “rhetorical, nonsensical or punning questions” - and some of them are actually pretty good. For the whole list, check out this link. Some of the better ones:

• If a word is spelled wrong in a dictionary, how would you know?
• Why does your nose run and your feet smell?
• Where does the white go when the snow melts?
• If quizzes are quizzical then what are tests? (Go on, sound it out.)
• And, I think my favourite:
• Where would we be without rhetorical questions?

An anecdote about a yellow plastic toy gun by Dilbert creator Scott Adams made me think of a story my colleague Andrew told me the other day about when he was crossing a border somewhere in Europe in his car a few years ago. The security officer pointed at his guitar case and commented something about “I hope there’s not a machine gun in that case, sir". Andrew, letting his mouth get the better of him replied “I hope so too, I can’t play the machine gun very well.".

They not only went through every inch of his car in the security check, he also got stopped in customs on the other side and had the car taken apart.