How to cause anarchy, #582:
Shopping centre public announcement system: Attention please. The alarms you are hearing are fire alarms. We are currently determining if there is a fire. Please stay alert and on standby for further instructions.
Entire shopping centre full of highly-strung Christmas present shoppers: AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Yes, when I was in Bay City Plaza this afternoon, Geelong’s biggest shopping centre, there was a near-evacuation. My lunch break was almost up, so I didn’t get to find out if there really was a fire or not. It’d be pretty funny if there was. (Well, actually not, but I’m sadistic, so there).
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I saw two women standing outside a cafe on my lunch break today looking at their menu, and happened to overhear part of their conversation:
Scary looking power-dressing woman #1: Hmm, what’s kwitchie like? I’ve never tried it.
Scary looking power-dressing woman #2: No idea. Never had it before.
I didn’t see it for myself, but I’m betting that the item they were reading on the menu was ‘Quiche’.
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Those Shop-A-Docket offers you get on the back of supermarket dockets are so useless. It’s like “Buy fifteen whole chickens from Cheeky Chicken – GET A FREE CAN OF COKE!” The uselessness of these ads was raised to new levels when this morning, I saw my docket had an offer on the back for a local bakery: “BUY 8 LOAVES OF BREAD – GET ONE FREE!” Then again, Torquay really has gone dough mad with the opening of a Baker’s Delight down here. (I still refuse to get so excited over baked goods).
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I had my first real angry customer on the phone at work today. I was so staggered that I actually got a call I almost fell off my chair sideways when the phone rang (I’ve only been getting a couple of calls a day over the past few days). He was really, really angry, and because I didn’t 100% know what I was doing as I’ve just started, I was just sitting there shaking and sweating. It’s quite difficult to handle a call like this when you’re displaying all the symptoms of advanced malaria.
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I’ve been discussing things that are addictive via email to Mercury at the moment. She mentioned how much she loves anime (Japanese animation), and I said I used to like it, but I gave up on that addiction when I discovered men. Her reply to that:
“Oh… you went from anime TO looking at men? I would have thought one would have complimented the other thinking about all the anime I know. I haven’t seen one anime so far without some kind of same sex interest, or at least a bit of paedophile thrown in. It’s really rather amusing, but it makes me think twice about going to Japan.”
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A while back I bought the latest Rammstein CD, which is a live CD. The band’s originally from Germany, and I managed to get my hands on an actual German copy of the album. There’s a mail-in card to add yourself to their mailing list inside the cover of the CD, but it’s all in German. So I thought I’d run it through the AltaVista language translator to find out what it says.
The thing with AltaVista, is that things don’t necessarily come out in perfect English. This is what the mail-in card (which was to be sent to Engine Music, their record label) translated to:
Your opinion is must be in demand!
Engine Music makes good – also you, as soon as we know how. Thus question, answer and are waiting!
Please with 1dm frank!
I’m rather worried that a German record label, home to some very sadomasochistic industrial-music weirdos, is telling me that I’ll make good as soon as they know how.
Also, on the Rammstein CD, there’s a CD-ROM component with some live footage of them performing in Germany. You need the computer program QuickTime to actually view the footage, and it’s included on the CD, so I installed it. The only problem was, as it was a German album, the QuickTime program was in German as well. I’m telling you now, there’s not many more difficult things than trying to uninstall a German version of QuickTime from your computer.
Speaking of odd translations, I got a new modem recently, and the English in the manual is a bit odd. The introduction to Chapter 3 (“Commands”), reads thus:
MOST PEOPLE USE THE MODEM SOFTWARE PROGRAMS TO TELL MODEM WHAT THEY WANT TO DO! OR WHAT THEY WANT TO NOT DO! THEREFORE YOU MUST NOT USE THE COMMANDS IN THIS CHAPTER! HOWEVER, IF YOU PREFER TO HAVE CONVERSATION WITH YOUR MODEM DIRECTLY, YOU CAN TYPE IN THE FOLLOWING COMMANDS. THIS CHAPTER WILL BE HELPFUL!