I was sitting alone, fairly close to the witching hour, in our 300 year old house and had been staring at the blank page just mulling over how I would start today's blog when a sudden loud whooo-hoooo came from just behind me startling me into a spasm like jolt. Although I knew what it was (an Owl) I was unprepared for it to be perched at the end of the room, which of course it wasn't. No it had clearly perched on top of my chimney and the haunting sound of it's call reverberated down the flue and straight into my living room sending a cold shiver down my spine. Then after another call I heard a second owl across the road call back. After that, the mischievous deed done, my owl must have left to go and spook some other poor soul.
We do get a lot of visits from Tawny owls both in our garden and often on our chimneys and ordinarily I love it. I certainly prefer them to the screeching Barn owls.
The owl incident is the second time that I jumped as a result of an alarm going off today which is quite ironic as this morning my actual alarm did not go off at all, instead it reset itself to the factory default of 12:00. The second incident was an annoying beep, beep, beep coming from the conservatory. When I finally found the source it was a small portable radio. Now this radio is the worst designed radio, ever. It has lots of buttons for FM, AM, volume, tuning, memory, memory set, blah, blah, blah and including an alarm button. Unfortunately, not being a big radio, the alarm button is positioned in such a place that every time you move the 'portable' radio you cannot help but touch this particular button unwittingly setting into motion a course of events which eventually some hours later ends in the bloody thing going off. Sometimes it will startle you by just switching the radio on when you least expect it and you find that you have the dulcet tones of Bob Harris whispering to you from behind the herb plants on the windowsill at half past 10 at night. Whilst I'm sure Bob Harris is a jolly good fellow it is quite unnerving to think he is sitting on your windowsill.
I am frequently staggered (and voice this frustration just as frequently to my poor daughter) on how anything in this 'day and age' can be designed so poorly. I mean we have been making radios since the early 1900's, so why can't we get it right now? How can anyone let a design go backwards? Oh I can think of loads of examples of such nonsense like our new kettle which has a lid that is designed to be opened in such a way that you cannot help but accidentally turn the thing on in the process. All of a sudden you find that the empty kettle is hissing as it tries to boil nothing but air. Who designed this? who tested this? who gave a damn? Why didn't they just stick to an old design that is proven to work?
Now you see I'm on a Grumpy old man roll....... The problem is everyone seems to want to re-invent the wheel. We are paying too many people to try to improve the already perfect design. Take the humble Coffee shop Tea pot, been in use since the year dot and at some time the spout was perfected on that little silver teapot that they all use. Hoorahhhh! no more drips because someone finally worked out that you need a certain length of spout with a 'just so' pointy pouring bit at the end. No more drips! Well done everyone, now could we just let it lie please. Could we heck? And so today I still find that I sit in a Cafe, pour a cup of tea only to watch an irritating dribble of failure trickle back on the underside of the spout down the body of the teapot until it can go no further but to drip onto the saucer or table, or both. Then every time you lift your cup to sip on it you receive a warm brown splodge on your white T shirt. WHY, WHY, WHY are these things still sold and more importantly bought by cafes?
I simply do not understand why we still have to put up with such a basic stupidity.
How did I get onto this? Oh that was it, poorly designed radio/alarm. Then designers try to hide the function of something by making it look like something quite different. Many years ago I was on a canal holiday with some friends and during the evening I noticed one of them had a compact camera. Now being very much into photography I naturally picked it up and had a look at it.It seemed to be closed and I tried to open it by pressing a couple of buttons on the side but to no avail so I gave up and put it down promising myself that I would ask her to show me it in the morning. The next morning my friend was a tad grumpy, tired and clearly in no mood to show me her camera, so I did not mention it. However it turn out that she was annoyed and tired because "Some joker" had set her alarm to go off at 2 o'clock in the morning! Holding the alarm up as evidence I feel she saw the guilt on my face for clearly the camera was not a camera but an alarm. Poor design I say! (Shirley take this as a confession).
My last example of poor designed alarms (as I seem to have strayed on to this subject from the prompt of one brief visit from a Tawny owl) was at a cafe near Dover port. Alison, Myself and the two kids, when they were younger, were all having breakfast in this small Cafe before catching a ferry to France.
Some minutes after being served we started to hear a high pitched alarm which seemed to be close to us and probably coming from the front door. I called the waitress who couldn't find where the sound came from and as the noise was quite penetrating she went away returning shortly with the Manager. Now the Manager was perplexed and she too fully inspected the front door,opening it, looking around it and standing upon a chair to look on top of it. NOTHING.
I asked if it could be the burglar alarm, but it appeared that the alarm was a lot louder than that. She went outside to see if it was coming from there but there was no sign of the alarm, it was definitely coming from within . She spent a good ten minutes trying to establish the source until it seemed to slowly dim into silence and it was no more. Everyone was perplexed but The waitress went back to waiteressing, the Manager went back to phone her boss (to get an engineer out) and having finished our breakfast we put on our coats and headed to the car.
It was as I put my hand into my pockets to grab my keys that I felt an icy cold sensation on my finger tips and all of a sudden the penny dropped as to where the alarm was emanating from... you guessed it, Me!
For I was working in our Brighton Store and at the time it was a particularly violent branch to work in so as an aid I had been issued with a personal attack alarm. Well I had this in my pocket and it was the aerosol type. I can only assume that when I took my coat off in the Cafe it knocked the nozzle a little loose, not enough to give the full blown screech of a personal attack alarm but more like pinching the nozzle of a balloon letting a slow, continuous whining alarm seep out for some 15 minutes. The aerosol can was covered in ice as the propellant had totally leaked out. I was too embarrassed to to go back and confess, and anyway we'd be late for our ferry.
All I can say in my defence is....... POOR DESIGN!
Anyway back to the blog.....
I have not had the opportunity to show the neighbours the delights of our joint sewerage as they both work during daylight hours and so this is to be done next weekend. The situation went into panic mode a few days back when I went out into the back-garden to smell the familiar vile stench of pooh again.I immediately run around the garden checking all the 'flash point' manhole covers only to find that they had not become totally blocked. This was a conundrum as the smell was overpowering. I gathered the family and invited them all out to come and sniff for a sewerage smell. Frankly I thought that they showed a great lack of enthusiasm with Stephen coming out for 20 seconds confirming that my garden stank and returning back to the safety of the hall. This was better than Alison who barely stuck her head out of the door, but who clarified that it was a bit smelly. Now I knew it was strong because Alison has practically no sense of smell so for her nasal receptors to pick up anything is to know it is several times worse. Troubled I went to the front of the house and I could still smell it, then I went to the middle of the road and it was still stinking. Well now I was feeling a little embarrassed and I walked down the road some distance only to find that the smell was not diminishing and I must have gone about a hundred yards before it dawned on me that this was probably as a result of muck spreading on the nearby fields.
Now that, I thought, is a sewerage problem!
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