Birthday shopping

It was my birthday on Friday - you forgot, it's OK! The entire Guru clan decide it would be fun to go to the Trafford centre to buy my present. I should state that the clan consists of the current Mrs Guru and three daughters. Knowing that, it will now take you just one moment to see that I am hopelessly outnumbered, that any two of them could take a vacation and I would still be outvoted! Come to think of it, even Millie, the 'Peter Pan' of the Retriever world, is a bitch (in multiple senses of the word) so actually three of them could take a vacation and I would still be the minority. So, it was against this Banana Republic, democratic backdrop that 'we' decided a trip to the Trafford Centre on a Friday would be just the ticket!

I tried to claim that I had an important client meeting to go to and so would, regrettably, and with a very heavy heart, be unable to join the retail fun. I so nearly pulled it off too until my secretary rang to wish me a happy birthday whilst I was indulging in my favourite birthday pastime ( a trolley dash around Staples since you ask - that's sad and pathetic you say? so you're so perfect are you?) and confirmed that "No, I'm looking at his schedule right now, Tom ALWAYS takes his birthday as holiday" (that blows next year too then I guess!).

So we arrived at the place, after only a very reasonable 2 hours of crawling along the M62 (I think speeds above 25 miles an hour are probably bad for us in some dark and sinister way so I am grateful to the Department of Transport for ensuring that my feeble and rapidly ageing frame was not to be subjected to the sorts of 'G' forces that speeds of, say 40 miles an hour, would have exerted upon it).

Have you been to the Trafford Centre? First thing, it's enormous, it's probably one of those structures that can be seen from the moon (or at least Widnes) it has doric columns and Greek cherubs on the outside and no end of very miserable people on the inside. I swear, in 4 hours the only time I saw anyone smile was when I caught my own reflection as a toddler dropped his ice-cream over a banister and on to the head of a very bemused chav beta male below. There seems to be some retailing compulsion gripping the British. We shuffle round these places (the new cathedrals) looking for stuff to make us feel better, only trouble is, any joy is fleeting and then the bills come in! Anyway, enough with the social commentary, as I say, the reason I was given for the trip was to buy my birthday present, which appears to be some sort of code for "Let's all buy shoes because we need a new bag". Those of you who are gentlemen may not have understood that last sentence but rest assured, you did read it correctly.

Buying shoes with Mrs Guru has been a task that I have not endured for some time now. For some reason, she felt the entire experience was somewhat less enjoyable when I was around. I find this odd as I very quickly grasped the concept of it. Accompanying Mrs Guru on a shoe shopping trip is actually like a kind of elaborate treasure hunt (Dan Brown, if you are reading this, please feel free to use this as subject matter for your next novel, it has more twists and turns than the 'Da Vinci Code' but is similarly complex and won't land you in court. Essentially, shoe shopping with Mrs Guru is a treasure-hunt where you go in the first shoe shop you come across after leaving the car and find a pair of shoes. You now follow the following process;

1) Try the shoes on
2) Say "they are really comfy, were just what you were looking for and are the perfect size"
3) Put them back on the shelf
4) Walk out of the shop
5) Visit every single other shoe shop in Christendom
6) Return to first shop and buy the shoes (if they haven't been sold in the meantime)

When I was newly wed, I thought this was an annoying and immensely frustrating practice, but Mrs Guru's careful and patient coaching down the years has helped me to to see that this is actually perfectly natural, and indeed the only way to get a pair of shoes. Nowadays however, I long for the joyful, simple charm of that method! Now there are offspring involved and the complexity has been ratcheted up significantly. Now the process requires more planning that Airbus uses to build the Superjumbo jet (then again, most people's bathroom habits involve more planning than the Superjumbo launch!).

I watched in abject horror as they, in turn, pushed, pinched coerced and just plain shoved their feet into stupefyingly tiny shoes. Shoes that had points like winklepickers but which started almost from ankle level. I cast my mind back a few short years, to the scouring around Lancashire looking for a shop with a 'Clarks' foot measuring service. Of paying wayyy over the odds for shoes that were guaranteed to not pinch those teeny tiny delicate little toesies "Do you have this sandal in a 3H?" Now, those same feet were being subject to forces more powerful than anything seen on earth (apart from the Tokyo underground train service obviously). Essentially, this process continues for a few hours and is punctuated by trips to designer knit wear stores to play the interactive fun game they have there. You know, the one where the assistant sneers at you for coming in and then follows you around the place. For your part, you must get out and unfold as many jumpers, sweater, cardigans, 'knitted tees' (whatever they are) as possible and they have to sigh or tut and fold them back up the very second you put them down. An assistant that was 'marking' me timed her move badly and ended up re-folding a garment I had not actually let go of yet, what followed could best be described as 'unseemly'

And yet, I shouldn't complain,the entire process was over in less than 91/2 hours (god they stay open late!), only cost £1,200 and did achieve it's primary aim, of getting my birthday present, and so, if I sound in any way bitter or ungrateful, please forgive me, I am not, a £20 WH Smith voucher is always going to be something I can make good use of! Until Next Time, Tom.

Preparing a Proposal

Have spent the last four hours preparing a proposal for a new piece of work with the firms most important account. Correction. Have actually spent three of the last four hours trying to get PowerPoint to do the things it is supposed to do without malfunctioning, crashing or presenting me with that irritating Paper Clip thing. What the hell is that thing anyway? Why does Microsoft imagine that I would follow the advice of a paperclip anyway? I mean, is that even likely, is it remotely rational?

The thing that really gets my goat about software designers (other than the fact that they are all younger than me and earn six times as much) is that they are all so melodramatic! Half way through slide 46 my laptop decided it had had enough of this world and froze. After frantically bashing the 'Enter' key (why do we do that? We know it won't work) I got a message telling me that a 'Fatal' Error of type 23087 had occurred and that my PC would now shut down, hitch to the airport and retire to Bermuda until it felt better. Why are PC problems always 'Fatal' or ' Catastrophic', why can't they say 'a mildly irritating thing has happened and I'm shutting down now, sorry you haven't saved your work for two hours, but, hey-ho, no one ever said life was fair". Moreover, are there really a minimum of 23087 catastrophic things that I can do to my computer? Why do they tell me the number? Is it in any small way possible that I could ever be so much of a trainspotter to actually memorise them ("Oh thank god, it's type 23087, that's not such a bad one, I'm so grateful it wasn't type 23,086 as that one is a total home wrecker").

I don't actually think the error numbers mean anything at all. I'm pretty sure they are just produced by a random number generator anyway. I think I can prove this. When you phone an IT help desk, having gone to great lengths to document every single keystroke leading up to the problem and then writing out long hand the bizzaro error message and number, you aways get the same response from the pimply foetus on the help desk "Have you tried turning it off and then turning it back on again"? I don't know which makes me more angry, the fact that I am paying £1.25 a minute for such lame 'technical support' or the fact that it invariably works!

Finally defied all the odds and got to the end of the proposal and tried to send it to the client but the gods of IT are not done with me yet, oh no. First of all it was rejected by my firms mail server as being too large (lots of sexy graphics in it, e.g half moons, crescents etc - no one ever knows what they mean but they look good) Am now trawling through the thing trying to make images smaller so it will be small enough for the server to deign to send it, latest casualty was a fabulous image of a pyramid with 5 layers to it that looked superb (it didn't actually make any kind of a point but that isn't really important, it looked complicated and impressive and that in my game is what counts).

Whilst doing the research for the proposal, I found myself hopelessly distracted. I read recently about a phenomenon called WILFing. I think the WILF part means "What am I looking For"? I had thought it nonsense when I read the article but have in fact just spent two hours doing it myself. I remember, when preparing the proposal, I definitely opened a Firefox window to Google something specific, trouble is, an hour later I was reading an article by a relative of Ainsley Harriot's on the importance of aerating lawns, which itself lead to a very interesting article on why Bats hang upside down and another on the different fonts used on the old sixpence coins - all very fascinating but totally not what I went online to look for. I still can't recall now what it was I was after.

Time to go now, early start tomorrow, I'll just read this email that has come in.

Oh no, "Your email entitled 'Proposal' was rejected due to error number 23086 and just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, here comes a paperclip to patronise you until you are sorry".