Gah. Innumeracy and stupidity

I took a phone call from somebody the other day. She was having to fill out an order form to pay for some of our services.

She needed an answer to a question, and I was the one whose number she had dialled.

“I’m filling out a [sic] order form. What’s your hourly rate?”

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I want to blog about this because I’m *seriously* wound up, but I don’t dare write it on my own blog in case my sister, who I stupidly gave the url to, accidentally reads it and gets upset. Babel has therefore volunteered to let me use his blog, which is very kind of him and may stop me exploding and making a nasty mess everywhere.

The background to this story, is that a couple of months ago the husband of my aunt, who is in his early 40s, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. It was a severe shock to the entire family. Parkinsons is a disease which people typically do not suffer from until they are much more advanced in years, and even the doctors are surprised to have discovered it in someone so young. It’s a degenerative disease, and one for which there is no cure. He has now been provided with appropriate medication which is supposed to slow down the effects of the illness, but it’s all a case of buying time; the prognosis for the future is not good. (more…)

What is it with people throwing around words unnecessarily, superfluously, redundantly?

There’s a grammatical concept called tautology, which is when one uses a word redundantly, since another word in the phrase carries the same meaning.

Examples would be such things as current incumbent (the latter word means “the current occupant”), bad headache (are there any other kinds?), and adequate enough.

I also have a disdain for corporate-speak.

So when tautology and corporate-speak meet, I find myself wanting to murder people to death.

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I had a bit of a mission yesterday. I had to go out to someone who had a brain injury.

He’d been living with his parents, who helped him. His father recently turned 70 and was astute enough to acknowledge that, statistically, there aren’t a million years left for him, and he was now another year closer to leaving his son on his own.

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I don’t particularly like social misfits who pontificate behind a keyboard because they have a bit more knowledge than you do about geek culture. You know the ones I mean: They’re better than you because they use Linux.

I had an issue with one of these types a few months back when we needed to talk about something, and I gave him a list of four instant-messenger programs that I use. He mailed back to say that we would have to talk via another programme that I didn’t have (Jabber), since he would only use ones that were open source. If you’re a business, however benevolent, you’re the enemy.

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Sometimes you hear a story and think you must have misheard.

You understand all of the words, and they make a proper sentence when assembled, but you can’t accept that you’ve got it right.

I was speaking to one of our carers today, a really good one. The subject was family members who have cancer.

Well, she brought to my attention someone who has to be the world’s most selfish person.

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I tend to tut-tut when do-gooders determine that conventional language use must be changed to avoid upsetting people. I should no longer allowed to select from black or white coffee, for example, in some people’s eyes.

Well, I now need to apply these people’s approach to my own work.

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About, oh, six years ago, I set up a Yahoo! email account. I already had one, now inactive, but it had something of a jokey name. I was living in France in that summer of 2002 and was scheduled to be heading home soon. I made the decision to have an email address that featured my name rather than a gimmick, and so came into being my principal email addy.

I don’t recall ever having had a problem with it until earlier this week. For a period of a couple of days I couldn’t log in. Every attempt to do so would take me from the log-in screen to the, erm, log-in screen again.

Seemingly as soon as the problem reached the point when I was using GooglePower~! to try resolving it, it sorted itself out.

With one slight problem.

Now, every time I go to check my email, this is what greets me:

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It’s now not far off six months since the company Wolff Olins unveiled the logo for which it had received £400,000. It’s supposed to be used to brand the London Olympics in 2012.

This is it:
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