Schizophrenic Voices?

Last weekend I headed up to Manchester very early, stopping to fill the car up with fuel at my local petrol station. It was just past 7.15am and I was the only person on the forecourt.

As I was stood there filling the car, I swore that I could hear voices in my mind. I even turned round at one point to see who was there, only to find nobody there at all. I went back to filling the car, watching in horror as the total went up alarmingly, whilst the litres dawdled slowly upwards. Again, I could hear voices behind me, chatting away. At this point I has started to get a little concerned. Had I not actually woken up, but was dreaming instead? Had I crossed into some sort of twilight zone? Was I on the verge of some kind of breakdown? I then realised that the garage had inadvertently left their tannoy on and I was hearing a conversation that the two staff members were having inside the garage.

I wandered in to pay and pointed out that their tannoy was on. We had a laugh that they were only talking about mundane garage chatter, rather then their conquests in the pub last night or something equally embarrassing

Professional porn

I had to take part in a conference call this afternoon. Sometimes it is easier to get people together on the phone for a discussion rather than schedule diaries for a meeting. Whilst a phone call doesn’t allow you to read people’s expressions and reactions, it does mean you can decide whether a meeting is worthwhile.

Back in January / February I did some work for a company and put together a technical specification regarding a new service they wanted to bring to market. As is often the case, these things then go a little quiet and then all of a sudden deadlines change and things pick up pace.

So, I find myself on a phone and web conference this afternoon, where the host has the ability to share what they see on their own desktop with the other participants. After about 40 minutes talking about merchant service accounts, HTTP interfaces and all manner of clever things to make quite a good service even better, I was given the ability talk through a Visio diagram (drawn by yours truly) that the host had on his own desktop.

As he was then trying to find something else, he was flicking through the various programs he had open at the time. Bear in mind there was myself representing my business and his web developer / pseudo distributor for this product and all three of us could see what was going on on his computer.

He then flicked through his open programs to Internet Explorer, which had a somewhat graphic porn site on display. Suddenly my web conference had gone from Visio diagram to hard core porn.

The sound of this guy backtracking and making excuses reverberated down the phone, and I swear that for about 10 seconds, time stood still and a tumble weed rolled through my office.

Tomorrow I am putting his price up. Somehow I think he’ll be good for it.