While eerily similar to a phone call I made to my mother whilst on my honeymoon < joke! >, the title of this Blog was actually the scream I heard from my sister, Andrea, when we were little ankle biters.
So let's rewind a bit. Once upon a time....
We had two fish, namely Gilbert & Sullivan, but specifically: Gilbert & Sullivan the Blue Betta Fish. Gilbert was Andrea’s and Sullivan was mine.
Both my sister and I had spent a good few months relentlessly on my mother’s case for a pet. Mum talked it over with friends and finally decided we were responsible enough. Thinking back I rather suspect she was up for anything that might make us stop talking for ten minutes.
Anyway, we all headed off into town one day to the local pet store and this is where we found Gilbert & Sullivan, both struggling to survive in a small container four sizes too small for them.
Now let's flash-forward back to the screaming.
Andrea had been taking good care of Gilbert (& Sullivan) for a couple of weeks, until -- "OH MY GOD! I TOUCHED HIM!! HE'S SO SLIMY!!! IT WAS HORRIFYYYYING!!!! OHHHH MYYY GOD!!!!!" She came running into the kitchen (where I was busy helping mum lay the table for dinner), having a complete little kid style nuclear meltdown, tears flowing in bucket loads.
"What happened?!" mum asked rather concerningly.
"I put my finger in the hole on the top of the tank where we feed them, and I touched Gilbert -- OOOH MYYYY GOD!!!!! HE BIT ME!!! AND I TOUCHED HIM!!! OHHHH GOD!!!!"
"He didn't bite you." Mum said calmly, with a quiet chuckle.
"YES, HE DID!!!!!!" Andrea insisted.
Then I piped up with "Are you bleeding?" < :-) >
"WELL -- NO... OH GOD!!!! WASH MY FINGER!!!!! WASH IT!!!!"
"Calm down!” mum said. “You're fine. Maybe he was just trying to give you a kiss?"
"NOOOO!!! HE HATES ME!!! I NEVER WANT TO SEE HIM AGAIN!!!!" she screamed.
At this point I came up with a plan to stop her whining and screaming. So I walked my reluctant sister back to Gilbert & Sullivan’s little tank, having agreed to make her feel better by putting my own finger in there.
So I poked my finger down the hole into the water. "See, he's not doing anyth--" CHOMP. Holy crap! The little blue bastard had bitten me!
I immediately pulled my finger out and that's when Gilbert came up and out of the hole still attached to the end of my finger! I shook my hand violently and he flew off and landed on top of the tank with a small wet thud.
After a brief moment of stunned silence...
"OOHHHH MY GOD!!!!! GILBERT’s DEAD!!!!!! JENN KILLED GILBERT!!!!!" my dear sister screamed.
"HE'S NOT DEAD!" I yelled, as mum quickly whisked Andrea out of the room and I carefully scooped her little finger-biter back in the water.
A few minutes later I went in to our bedroom to see my sister and found her lying sadly on her bed. "You okay?" I asked. “…how's your finger?"
"It tingles."
"He probably just thought you were a big pellet of food."
"No, he hates me! I never want to see him again!!"
"So shall I ask mum to get rid of him?"
"Nooo, I love him."
"Okay. Then why don't we both go back into the lounge and give them a little food so you and Gilbert can be friends again?" - which is exactly what she did.
And I'm pleased to report Andrea and Gilbert worked out their differences and became good buddies once again.
The end.
May you always have someone in your life to listen when you need them to, and to make you laugh when they know you need to.
Thursday 29 April 2010
Wednesday 21 April 2010
My sexy Sat Nav and I - a love affair!
A Devonshire man charged with the murder of his teenage fiancée claimed he was only following the instructions of his satellite navigation system!
Daniel Ford, 25, from Crediton told a jury at Exeter Crown Court on Tuesday he was not responsible for killing 19-year-old Jessica Jimny and thought he was being given directions to his mother's new home in Plymouth.
According to Ford, the couple got into their car in their garage and he entered the address into the satellite navigation system as usual. However, instead of being given directions, Ford claims the machine instructed him to murder Jessica in cold blood.
Ford told the court: "I thought something was a bit wrong when instead of being told to turn left onto the A374 the sat nav told me “after 200 yards kill your fiancée”.
"But I just thought the machine must know better than me so I just did what it said. It was only after I had hosed the garage down, chopped up her body, wrapped it in a carpet, put it in the boot, had a shower, went to the pub for a few hours and came home and watched Deal or No Deal that I realised what I had done.”
Prosecutor Don Capri said: "This is a clear example of someone trying to avoid responsibility for their actions by blaming it on malfunctioning technology.”
Satellite navigation, or sat nav as many of us call it, is wonderful. I love it!
There I am, chugging along in my Jennmobile, watching the primroses and snowdrops of early spring, and occasionally the road ahead, when a sultry, sexy voice emerges from my dashboard and invites me to turn left in 100 yards at the roundabout. Ooh, it makes me shudder with pleasure to think of his gorgeous voice.
“Dave-Dave”, as my partner Paul calls my sat nav, sounds very sexy. I've stopped going out driving with Paul because my sat nav is far sexier and absolutely never gets the route wrong and then blames me. And I can shout at Dave-Dave as much as I like and he never answers me back.
Having picked up more than one newspaper over the weekend I noticed they all contain a similar story about how satellite navigation systems have made thickos of us. No longer, so the reports go, can we read a map, and as a result we lose crucial information about the places we are in. An example; a sat nav would not tell you that you were passing Stonehenge like a map would….although you would hope as someone drove along the A303 they'd recognise it!
The reason I'm mentioning this is that it just so happens that I heard a very funny sat nav tale the other day. I won’t name names but someone I know was travelling from the Buckinghamshire area to the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. He (yes, he!) punched the details into the sat nav and off he went. Unfortunately he didn’t put the route in properly and had instead reprogrammed a previous destination that was in the depths of Surrey.
So what did he do? He listened to the sat nav, took every turning it told him to take and was completely oblivious to the fact that he was heading into Surrey, in completely the wrong direction. It was only when he telephoned the person he was meeting and said "I'm here, where are you" and they said "I'm here too, where are you?" that he discovered he was hundreds of miles away.
When I was told this story I cannot deny that I laughed so hard I nearly pee'd my pants. How someone could be directed, as I presume he was, along the M25 and then onto the M3 where there are signs for Bournemouth, Brighton, etc. and not realise they were a long way from Kent was beyond my comprehension.
It’s ironic though that as we include more technologies into our vehicles we probably see accident rates go up, instead of going down.
One can argue that with airbags, GPS navigation, and other technologies such as cell-phones, entertainment devices, etc. that drivers have emboldened themselves with a sense of invulnerability, over actually using these technologies to enhance their safety. The problem with sat navs is that the road conditions change quicker than their information database.
Sat navs are often used by long distance lorry drivers as many of them come from abroad and don’t even speak the local language. They are not to know that the road which the sat nav advises them to take has now become a one-way or blocked off at one end. The biggest problem is that sat navs don't show low lying bridges. Knowing that they can't turn around, many lorry drivers will attempt to get under the bridge anyway but then get stuck. Paul and I have been driving across Dartmoor’s beautiful country lanes and come across a lorry completely stuck and unable to turn around, with cars in front of us tooting their horns as if the poor lorry driver could suddenly do anything about it.
Some drivers could definitely benefit from brushing up on their geography skills, with a Polish lorry driver reported to have found his way to the Gibraltar Point nature reserve in the UK, 2,500km from Gibraltar on the southern tip of Spain where he was supposed to deliver a load of cars. I’m guessing the new owners of the cars had to wait a little longer.
So certain drivers probably shouldn’t be allowed to have satellite navigation systems in their cars. For instance (thank you Google), a couple of months ago a middle aged driver, obeying his sat nav’s command “Turn right now!”, jerked the wheel over and crashed into a roadside toilet hut 30 yards before the crossing he was supposed to take. A couple of weeks prior to that a pensioner also followed their sat nav and ignored a “closed for construction” sign on a highway. They ploughed into a pile of sand at relatively high speed.
I know, I know. All I can think about is what great practical jokes you could play on people with such total willingness to do whatever a machine tells them…..but I suppose that would be wrong.
So it seems that in spite of all the incredible new technology we have access to, the good old map will always have a place in the world. The newspaper reports today appear to be spot on. However sexy and compliant he may be, Dave-Dave makes us stupid…...although it's possible that some of us may already be stupid any way.
Daniel Ford, 25, from Crediton told a jury at Exeter Crown Court on Tuesday he was not responsible for killing 19-year-old Jessica Jimny and thought he was being given directions to his mother's new home in Plymouth.
According to Ford, the couple got into their car in their garage and he entered the address into the satellite navigation system as usual. However, instead of being given directions, Ford claims the machine instructed him to murder Jessica in cold blood.
Ford told the court: "I thought something was a bit wrong when instead of being told to turn left onto the A374 the sat nav told me “after 200 yards kill your fiancée”.
"But I just thought the machine must know better than me so I just did what it said. It was only after I had hosed the garage down, chopped up her body, wrapped it in a carpet, put it in the boot, had a shower, went to the pub for a few hours and came home and watched Deal or No Deal that I realised what I had done.”
Prosecutor Don Capri said: "This is a clear example of someone trying to avoid responsibility for their actions by blaming it on malfunctioning technology.”
Satellite navigation, or sat nav as many of us call it, is wonderful. I love it!
There I am, chugging along in my Jennmobile, watching the primroses and snowdrops of early spring, and occasionally the road ahead, when a sultry, sexy voice emerges from my dashboard and invites me to turn left in 100 yards at the roundabout. Ooh, it makes me shudder with pleasure to think of his gorgeous voice.
“Dave-Dave”, as my partner Paul calls my sat nav, sounds very sexy. I've stopped going out driving with Paul because my sat nav is far sexier and absolutely never gets the route wrong and then blames me. And I can shout at Dave-Dave as much as I like and he never answers me back.
Having picked up more than one newspaper over the weekend I noticed they all contain a similar story about how satellite navigation systems have made thickos of us. No longer, so the reports go, can we read a map, and as a result we lose crucial information about the places we are in. An example; a sat nav would not tell you that you were passing Stonehenge like a map would….although you would hope as someone drove along the A303 they'd recognise it!
The reason I'm mentioning this is that it just so happens that I heard a very funny sat nav tale the other day. I won’t name names but someone I know was travelling from the Buckinghamshire area to the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. He (yes, he!) punched the details into the sat nav and off he went. Unfortunately he didn’t put the route in properly and had instead reprogrammed a previous destination that was in the depths of Surrey.
So what did he do? He listened to the sat nav, took every turning it told him to take and was completely oblivious to the fact that he was heading into Surrey, in completely the wrong direction. It was only when he telephoned the person he was meeting and said "I'm here, where are you" and they said "I'm here too, where are you?" that he discovered he was hundreds of miles away.
When I was told this story I cannot deny that I laughed so hard I nearly pee'd my pants. How someone could be directed, as I presume he was, along the M25 and then onto the M3 where there are signs for Bournemouth, Brighton, etc. and not realise they were a long way from Kent was beyond my comprehension.
It’s ironic though that as we include more technologies into our vehicles we probably see accident rates go up, instead of going down.
One can argue that with airbags, GPS navigation, and other technologies such as cell-phones, entertainment devices, etc. that drivers have emboldened themselves with a sense of invulnerability, over actually using these technologies to enhance their safety. The problem with sat navs is that the road conditions change quicker than their information database.
Sat navs are often used by long distance lorry drivers as many of them come from abroad and don’t even speak the local language. They are not to know that the road which the sat nav advises them to take has now become a one-way or blocked off at one end. The biggest problem is that sat navs don't show low lying bridges. Knowing that they can't turn around, many lorry drivers will attempt to get under the bridge anyway but then get stuck. Paul and I have been driving across Dartmoor’s beautiful country lanes and come across a lorry completely stuck and unable to turn around, with cars in front of us tooting their horns as if the poor lorry driver could suddenly do anything about it.
Some drivers could definitely benefit from brushing up on their geography skills, with a Polish lorry driver reported to have found his way to the Gibraltar Point nature reserve in the UK, 2,500km from Gibraltar on the southern tip of Spain where he was supposed to deliver a load of cars. I’m guessing the new owners of the cars had to wait a little longer.
So certain drivers probably shouldn’t be allowed to have satellite navigation systems in their cars. For instance (thank you Google), a couple of months ago a middle aged driver, obeying his sat nav’s command “Turn right now!”, jerked the wheel over and crashed into a roadside toilet hut 30 yards before the crossing he was supposed to take. A couple of weeks prior to that a pensioner also followed their sat nav and ignored a “closed for construction” sign on a highway. They ploughed into a pile of sand at relatively high speed.
I know, I know. All I can think about is what great practical jokes you could play on people with such total willingness to do whatever a machine tells them…..but I suppose that would be wrong.
So it seems that in spite of all the incredible new technology we have access to, the good old map will always have a place in the world. The newspaper reports today appear to be spot on. However sexy and compliant he may be, Dave-Dave makes us stupid…...although it's possible that some of us may already be stupid any way.
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