Anything from Grim Fandango

Walk and ride my bike alone to school from about the age of six.

My parents emigrated in the late 1950s. After the Berlin Wall came down, they returned to Germany as tourists and noticed that former East Germans spoke a noticeably different dialect to West Germans, my father said it was similar to the difference between British English and North American English, but the change had come in only about 30 years.

• Doc Martin
• Father Brown
• Not Going Out
• My Family

Why do the British seem to make so many of this type of show?

Did it come with instructions? We left ours for 24 hours and it was fine. YMMV

People are lazy, they get so many emails each day, they couldn’t be bothered reading messages properly. I have turned into a cynical annoying person and write emails with large clear action points like this:

Hi, I have some comments and questions.

Please answer 2 (two) questions so that I can proceed with my part of this work. Without an answer to both, no more work will be done and the project will be on hold.

Consequatur doloribus eaque ut quia veniam est ut. Vitae assumenda sed quisquam omnis dolores nesciunt fuga. Autem non sint minus sed quia. Aspernatur tenetur quis nostrum repellendus nostrum est qui. Sint aliquid est distinctio laudantium.

1. Yes or no- Does this mean that the flibbertygibbet must be completed first?

Reiciendis quia qui quia quo hic commodi molestiae vel. Ipsam ut quia et voluptates quaerat voluptatibus neque recusandae. Et fuga necessitatibus rerum debitis. Repellat facilis possimus ab sed eos doloremque. Ut rerum aut corporis. Cum voluptatem praesentium error.

2. You need to provide further information on the doohickey because there is not enough detail for me to be able to goober the whatchamacallit

And then keep forwarding the original email every day until I get the required information. When the boss asks why no progress has been made, I can show him the email trail asking for information.

Cover your ass, keep asking the same questions until you get an answer.

I turn off sounds. I hate computers that whoosh when I do something with windows, beep for no apparent reason, click when something else happens.

• I don’t want to look at pictures of spiders
• I can’t remember. Surely it must have made sense at the time?

I can’t see how to export the list, sorry.

Government departments, hospital, many companies regularly call me with “No Caller ID” and then seem surprised when I don’t answer.

If it’s urgent, they will should leave a message (instead they keep calling and complain that “it’s hard to get hold of me”).

I actually just got a new phone number because I was receiving literally hundreds of spam calls, text messages, and voicemail messages in a foreign language, every week. I have “Silence unknown callers” switched on. Only my contacts can get through. If anyone else doesn’t leave a voicemail, send a text message, or email me, then it’s not urgent and I won’t even try to follow up.

This is not a captcha, it’s a trick. Don’t do it.

They copy malware into your clipboard and try to trick you into pasting that malware into an environment that will run it.

Delete/ignore and move along.

Finally being immunocompromised and getting all the vaccinations available has a positive effect!

New Zealand

As a passenger, Singapore Changi with the garden and waterfall.

Not a pilot, can’t answer from that point of view.

I haven’t seen monkeys, the woodpecker version is familiar to me. Don’t know if it had a generic name.

Fill up on vegetables instead of carbs. Eat dinner mid afternoon instead of evening, and exercise, even if just a long walk, afterwards.

• Airplane (Flying High)
• Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
• The Empire Strikes Back

I don’t know your specific machine and haven’t used cassettes for years, but from experience back in the day the first thing that occurs to me is uneven tension - what happens if you manually fast forward the tape to the end then rewind it? Does retensioning the tape help at all?

Put it in the oven on lowest setting

If you ever feel like what you are doing is meaningless, remember that there is someone in a BMW factory installing indicators.