Barring the code

I bought some printer ink yesterday. I know - rock and roll, eh? I had an urgent letter to print. Naturally the printer, which had been showing "zero ink" (a friendly black cross in an empty cylinder) for weeks, chose that particular day to start printing things as if intended for the spirit world (i.e. ghostly).

Nowhere nearby sells Lexmark cartridges, so I planned to drop by the PC World in Stockport on my way to pick Nikki up from work. During the journey I remembered that the evil Excel parking shysters had taken over at the Peel Centre (which used to be free for parking of less than an hour), and I'd come out without any coinage. Maybe I should risk dropping in at Staples, even though for the last couple of years they've never stocked the particular black ink cartridge I need?

Staples didn't have the particular black ink cartridge I need.

Off to Peel then. Risk another few months of illegal threats from Excel that they'll take me to court for the heinous crime of depriving them of their £1 for five minutes' parking, or pop along the road and pretend to be a customer of Dunelm Mill? The latter was the better option on this particular occasion, requiring a couple of minutes' extra walking in each direction. With the previous detour to Staples I was already running late and on arrival I discovered that this particular branch of PC World has had a complete refurb since my last visit and is now more of a Curry's - majoring in domestic appliances rather than computer frippery and having moved the ink to a completely different part of the shop. By the time I found it I was definitely late. I grabbed a couple of cartridge packets and headed for the till, but was beaten to it by a gentleman who would easily qualify for an ESOL course, with his undecipherable query about why he couldn't pay with the credit card he repeatedly waved under the nose of the till guy.

Was it my hopping from foot to foot, or my thunderous countenance that gave the till guy the clue I was in a hurry? Who can tell, but full marks to him for calling over an interpreter another operative to deal with ESOL so that he could attend to me. Only for some reason he found it impossible to scan my items.

Yes, well done Lexmark! A masterpiece of packaging design. Your plastic blister is smooth on five of its six surfaces, but inexplicably ridged on the side beneath which the ink cartridge packet has its bar code. The ridges diffuse, refract and reflect the scanner's laser light, rendering it completely incapable of actually reading the code. Till guy had to type it in. More delay.

He didn't spot that I had two of the same item either. So rather than entering "2x" of "this", we had to go through the rigmarole again: scan; fail; retry; fail; examine packet; retry with scanner at a different angle; fail; type the code in again.

I wasn't late, but it was close.

The letter didn't need printing in the end.

In a life I more nice

I'm a lucky man. There can't be many men as sought after by hordes of Russian beauties as I. They write to me all the time.

Some of them, of course, take themselves out of the game with their first line. I could never be attracted to anyone stupid enough to ask, in their opening sentence, "What is your name?" when they've sent their email to my primary address, embodying as it does both my first and last names.

In her latest email, Olga assured me: "In a life I more nice." I could only wonder which life she was talking about. Still, I was reassured that she will be more nice when she eventually reaches it.

Recently, Svetlana was also moved to write to me, declaring: "I am 25 years, growth 178." Is this some arcane tumour denomination they use in your country, Svetlana? If so you can hardly expect me to hop the next plane with your life span already so badly compromised.

She went on earnestly: "I hope, our dreams will come true also we probably we shall embody them in the validity."

I'm sure I could aspire to hope for the same thing dear, if only I understood what it meant.

Sign of the times

I had an appointment in the city (Manchester, not that London) this morning at 9.30 to attend a "probate interview."

That was annoying enough in itself. To manage an estate you need a Grant of Probate. A certificate, effectively, that officially states to anyone who needs to know "this person is allowed to handle all the affairs of this other, dead, person."

There are two ways to get one of these. You can engage the services of a solicitor, who fills in the form for you and pays the fee, and everything goes through on the nod. Because solicitors are trustworthy people aren't they? And if they sign something, then it's right and proper and true. This alternative, you won't be surprised to hear, is expensive.

Alternatively you can fill the form in yourself. It's not complicated. Because you're not a solicitor you'll have to pay an inflated fee - roughly double what the solicitor would have paid (or, more accurately, what you would have paid through your solicitor) - but the really galling part is that you then have to attend a meeting with a representative of the Courts & Tribunals Service to make a formal declaration that what you put in the form is the truth. Because let's face it, since you're not a solicitor you can't be trusted and have probably made it all up. Despite having proven who you are, and being the person named IN THE WILL as the one the deceased chose to handle their affairs.

Still, all that is not what this post is about. I just got carried away a bit. Sorry.

Since the Probate Registry offices in Manchester are in the Civil Justice Centre (an imposing steel building in the Spinningfields area) I parked in one of the central car parks. One of those with a "pay before you leave" machine. Returning to the car after the brief meeting (I was in there a total of five minutes) I was urged by the machine to "Please insert your ticket."

And the second language the machine gave this prompt in?

Polish.

Commercial-Time

I've been trying to work out why I found the adverts on Canadian TV so intrusive and irritating. Canadian Broadcasting limits advertising to 15 mins per hour on commercial channels, but "only" 12 minutes per hour on "Specialty" channels. However those numbers apply to real commercials - i.e. those advertising product. From my admittedly brief exposure, it doesn't cover trailers. And it doesn't excuse the extremely annoying habit - something we don't have in the UK - of running the same ad twice in the same break - sometimes only 30 seconds apart - or running very similar ads, such as hair care products for two different types of hair, which have almost identical wording, serially. The worst we ever get is a repeat of the last few seconds of an ad - these agency types have learned their lessons about the way memory works - to "fix" the product in viewers' minds, but these almost always run at the end of the ad break, separated from the original by up to three or four minutes.

One evening I finally managed to watch a movie from beginning to end. Aliens. It was scheduled to air over three hours, which given its posted running time on IMDb of 137 mins leaves 43 mins for ads - 14.33 per hour. But they're not evenly split. The first hour felt almost like UK television. The first break didn't come until 20 past the hour, and the next was twenty minutes later, each one showing only 3-4 minutes of ads. I should have been wise. As the film continued, the frequency of breaks increased, to the point where the last half-hour of the film suffered three breaks of five minutes each.

I have no idea how the law constrains the incidence of ads. My Aliens experience would suggest that rather than being a rigid per-hour limit, that "15 minutes per hour" is an average. Being allowed to relax the grip of ads in some hours only to tighten it fiercely later, destroys any enjoyment.

I used to think I'd be able to live in Canada. That I'd actually quite enjoy it. But if I ever had to, I don't think I'd be watching any live TV. I'd be PVR-ing everything and spending a lot of time with my finger on the FF button!!