I went to a gig last night. No, wait, don’t scroll down! Its not one of those blog entries – there’s actually a story attached to this! I went to see veteran punk band The Damned with my dad (with whom I’d been to see the Sex Pistols a few weeks ago). I reasoned that I like punk, and I like my dad… what could possibly go wrong?
So the first of two support bands finish their (terrible) set and I ask my dad who the next band are. Casually as anything, he tells me that they’re a bunch of strippers.
“What the fuck, dad?”
Needless to say, it was going to be literally the most awful and awkward thing in the world. So I spent the duration of the “act” browsing the internet on my snazzy new phone, trying to forget that I was with my dad, technically watching what is apparently described as a “burlesque” act.
It wasn’t entirely seedy – well, sort of, anyway. It was compared by a piano-playing woman with an irritating voice, which she used to emit sub-Norton innuendo interspersed with dreadful songs. She also had a glove puppet of a sheep.
It was terrible on so many levels.
It reminded me a lot of when you get TV personalities who are inexplicably famous for being fun characters, despite not actually being comedians. Like Ant & Dec or Vernon Kaye – have all of the enthusiasm and bravado required for their job, but negligible actual talent.
Terrible.
Luckily, the actual band, The Damned, were pretty good, and inadvertently hilarious. Despite being arguably the originators of punk, they did the most un-punk thing and got a member of the audience ejected for throwing his drink at the stage. Excellently, thanks to the magic of technology, I got most of this incident on film – check out the video below. Things kick off about 30 seconds in when you see some liquid enter the screen from the left. The keyboardist, Monty Oxymoron, goes mental. The security had to restrain him, as you’ll see on the video. He then spends the remainder of the song drying his keyboards:
I’ve been doing a lot of futurology lately. Its dead easy – anyone can do it, and it must be one of the most lucrative career paths in terms of workload. All you have to do is imagine what it’ll be like in the future and say it in an authoritative way, and you officially qualify as a futurologist.
So that’s what I’ve been doing – speculating what the future will be like – and I can’t lose. If I’m right, we’ll all have jetpacks, live in space and wear clothes made almost entirely from tinfoil, which will be cool – and if I’m wrong, I’ll still be remembered by generations yet to come, when I’m featured on some sort of BBC nostalgia documentary in footage of what people in the olden days thought what the future will be like.
Sure, future people will be sneering me and arrogantly saying “Hoho, weren’t people years ago utter idiots, thinking that the future is like that?â€, but my futurology will get me remembered for longer than say, all of those generic boybands from the 1990s, whose contribution to society is already (thankfully) long forgotten.
So what do I think the future will be like? Good question.
Unlike futurologists of the past, who thought we’d all be living on different planets, I’m hesitant to speculate the same way – scientists these days tend to be a lazy bunch, and we haven’t done any big new space things in years, annoyingly. And in my uninformed, reactionary newspaper columnist opinion, I think they should get a move on. I think they need to put more money into space. I mean, into like research and development and so on – not literally blasting cash into orbit, as that’d be stupid.
Maybe in the future, a robot Tony Robinson will dig up the remains of what used to be what they assume are our societies place of worship – these buildings are all nearly all identical, and contain the same symbol: golden arches. They may also discover the remains of a false idol, the so-called “Burger Kingâ€.
What if future people discover our holy books? The “Marvel Comicsâ€, full of tales of men who have incredible powers and are capable of performing extraordinary things – and like even older holy books, the ones from our society are riddled with internal contradictions sparking endless debate about the canonicity.
Maybe future television programmes will include a series where a slightly eccentric presenter in a loud shirt travels around the country trying to uncover “What Adam Hart-Davies did for us�
Maybe they’ll be semi-historical mythical figures, like the fabled “Robin Hoodieâ€, a weapon-wielding law-evading bloke who will become, appropriately enough, the mascot for the city of Nottingham?
Hopefully though, in the future they’ll finally figure out some official protocol for what to do in those awkward situations where you step aside to avoid walking into someone, only for them to step aside too, and then the both of you step back, continuing to block each other’s path – the future government could just tell everyone to stick to the right.
I bought a new phone today, because my old phone is barely functional. It turns out that buying a phone is approximately infinite hassle. I knew what I wanted: a Nokia N95, and I knew that I didn’t want to get a contract of more than £20 a month, because frankly, that’s too much as it is. I’d seen an offer on the T-Mobile website for exactly this – but I thought I’d go around the mobile phone shops to see if I can get the same deal on O2, the network I’m on at the moment, on the basis that it would probably be less faff. How wrong I was.
Scene 1 – the O2 shop
I made the mistake of approaching the trainee sales person, who’s breath stunk (I wasn’t kissing him, you could smell it from a metre away), and enquiring if they were willing to negotiate on contract prices, on the basis that nearly everyone I know has an anecdote about how they bought a phone and got some sort of excellent deal on it after doing some bartering.
“We can’t do stuff like that… blah blah blah… head office… blah blah blah”, says the trainee. I kind of lost interest once I knew he wasn’t going to be very helpful.
Scene 2 – Phones4u
I think mobile phone retail is that sort of intermediary step between being a lowly tillmonkey and swaggering open-necked sales twat. I was hanging around looking at the phones, waiting for one of the sales vultures to try and chat me up, when the manager started talking to me. I explained what I was looking for, the rival deal that I had seen on the internet, and he referred me to the sales guy. “Take a seat”, he said, and I sat down.
It was here I encountered perhaps my first ever first-hand experience of a “hard sell”. It was a very high pressure thing. The salesman got out a contract and started asking me for personal details before he’d so much as asked what I was looking for. He’d even surreptitiously put me down for a bluetooth headset that I didn’t need.
With the details practically filled out, he got out at blank sheet of A4 paper, and began explaining the £45 a month deals to me – and how that if I wanted a cheaper contract I’d have to pay £400 for the phone as well. Despite his writing being near illegible, and the information he was transcribing being nonsensical – just figures that make no sense without context – he persisted in writing stuff down whilst trying to talk me into an expensive contract.
He clearly wasn’t having much success, as I was having none of it – I wasn’t going to budge. His manager could see that he was floundering, so slithered over in his slimey way, and I thought he was going to do that thing they do on Rogue Traders all the time, where the crooked salesman asks his boss for a discount, and the boss grants it as a “one time only special offer”, and the customer is pressured into taking it because its such a “spectacular” deal. This didn’t happen though, because £35/month is out of my budget too. Like I said at the beginning.
It got to the point where, in order to illustrate the fact that I’d apparently either have to compromise on price or handset, the salesman turned the page over, and drew two boxes, putting ticks in them, and then drew a dividing line between them, and held up the piece of paper to really illustrate his point.
It was at this point I decided to leave – but not before he insisted I take his card… and insisted on writing a day and time on which I’d come back to see him to finish the deal.
Scene 3 – The T-Mobile Shop
I walked thirty seconds up the road, into the T-Mobile shop, and got a Nokia N95 for £70, on a £20 a month contract. Job done.
The staff in the shop were generally pleasant and helpful (although it did turn out they delayed running a coverage check on my postcode until after the sale because my town has no 3G coverage). What I didn’t anticipate though was the faff involved in making the sale. There was a credit check, many forms needing to be signed – I even had to go to the bank to find out my account number. I love gadgets, but its enough to drive anyone insane.
What I’ve neglected to mention is that throughout this adventure, my friend Katy was with me – and despite being a woman and practically genetically programmed to enjoy shopping, I thought she was going to kill herself (or me) after the first hour and a half of trying to buy a phone.
I was happy though – I’ve got a rather excellent phone out of it, even if the shopping aspect was intensely irritating.
Scene 4 – Back home
Unfortunately it didn’t end there though. Despite being thoroughly bored of hearing about free minutes and free insurance, I had to ring O2 this evening about transferring my number, where before they would tell me my PAC code (the code used to transfer your number to a different network), they insisted on putting me through to sales, who tried to convince me to stay. A woman spent a good five minutes explaining what deals O2 had, before I explained that I signed an 18 month contract only a few hours previously.
