The Cir-her-her-cle oooof LiIiIife!

Back in August 2004, I took a trip to that London place, you know the one, the Capital of England (And you thought that was 'E' right? LOL), that sits on the River Thames, where Kubrick filmed the battle scenes for Full Metal Jacket (The old Beckton Gasworks) and Ridley Scott filmed most of Aliens (Acton Lane Power station)

Was I visiting scenes from movie history? No, I wasn't, but in fairness it's quite difficult to wander around London and not see a location from a Richard Curtis film.  I was going to see a show, a musical, a professional terpsichorial display of the highest order. Otherwise known as 'The Lion King'.

Now I know that there are people out there who will be saying things like 'A musical? but that's how gay men spend their free time!'  Well, traditionally, perhaps they do, that and ordering multiple copies of the 'Queer as Folk' box-set from Amazon...  And, erm,a lot of casual bumming, obviously.

But, you know, in a mixed group, some of the 'West End Shows' can be really very good. I've seen a few and on the whole, if you can get a cut-price deal to go and see one, they're well worth it.

But on this occasion, we're talking about The Lion King.  There were six of us on the trip in total,  Mrs Dandy and Myself, my now-American artistic benefactor and her husband, and two more people, one male, one female, who were not at that time, nor have they ever been, before or since, involved in a relationship with each other... Just friends, OK?

As my job at the time involved moving around the country quite a lot and staying in hotels, the group trusted me to book somewhere for us all to stay.  Once I'd confirmed that everyone favoured a budget hotel, so that there would be more money left over for beer and other frivolities, I set to work, trying to find a budget hotel within walking distance of the Lyceum Theatre, in WC2, that had two double rooms and two singles.  Believe it or not, I managed it, Great looking place, All of the rooms were en-suite, Central location, easy walk to the theatre, £25 or so per room.

That should have rung alarm bells right? Yeah? - Not with me it seems.  We had a great trip down on the train, all shiny faced excitement, cans of British Rail Strongbow and talking slightly too loud,  When we arrived outside the hotel, it still looked great, it was quite a large building, that overlooked one of those nice gated private garden type things that you see sometimes on the TV.

We went inside, and frankly it was a bit dingy, the owners and staff were all natives of some unidentified Eastern European country and had raised surliness to an artform.  There was a little light confusion as to whether we'd already paid, which got everyone off on the right foot and we were all given directions to our rooms, which were spread at every possible corner of the building.  The directions involved a lot of pointing, and words like 'Go stairs two floor, turn *handsignal for left* three doors. toilet at both ends corridor'.

Now, being sharp witted, I picked up on this and said 'Aha! Excuse me, my good man, but the booking form clearly states that the rooms are en-suite!' and I waved the printout from the Internet under his bushy moustache.  He inhaled, and the paper disappeared into his nasal cavity, losing me all of my documentary evidence in one fell swoop, then he replied, 'Room have shower in, toilet at end of corridor.'

So we made a plan to unpack, then go for a beer and some lunch, said our goodbyes and went to our rooms.  We went up two flights of stairs, turned left, went down three doors and pushed.  The room was... Small, yes, that's a kind word... Small. There was a (barely) double bed and a long-dead potplant.  Most of the room was taken up by a hardboard box that stretched from floor to ceiling, that was covered in the same 'Early Mental Hospital' style wallpaper as the rest of the room and had a concertina door on it.  My curiosity finally got the better of me and I opened the door.  It was, of course, the much vaunted en-suite shower.  To say that it was a bit of a lash-up would be to despoil the good name of lash-up showers such as the ones that Colonel John Blashford-Snell made out of three bits of bamboo and a sloth, whilst trying to transport a Grand Piano up the Congo some four years previously (look it up).

It was whilst I was examining a particularly unusual piece of fungus, emanating from the shower drain (hole in the carpeting inside the box) that I decided that a quick trip to the conveniences was in order.  I left the room, made for the end of the corridor and gingerly pushed open a door with many panes of frosted glass in it (and one perfectly clear pane at face height, when you were sat down.) The toilet could not have been more Victorian if it had a hairy German bloke, wearing a T-Shirt that said 'I [heart] Saxe-Coburg and Gotha' and an unfeasibly large pierced penis, sat on it.  I attended to my urgent business and pulled the chain (as it had a high-level cistern, like back in the day) and nothing happened other than a faint gurgling.  I pulled a few more times, in the style of Ned Beatty trying to start an outboard motor, but finally gave up and went back to the room.

It was then that I noticed that the doors didn't have numbers on.  You know that scene in every single film set in a hotel? The one that sort of zooms in then back out again down the corridor full of doors?  Well, let me tell you, that actually happens.  I went from door to door, listening carefully to see if I could heard the sound of Mrs Dandy silently complaining about the room.  But I could not, so I chose a door at random and opened it.

It was then that I noticed the urine-soaked corpse of a tramp.

No, seriously.

He was a tramp, he stank of urine, and he was dead... Probably - If he wasn't, then he was sleeping so deeply that his chest wasn't moving at all.  Now, I've seen enough horror films to know that if you go down, alone, to the reception of a hotel run by unidentified Eastern European types to say that you've just discovered a dead body, then you often find yourself being served to your friends for breakfast the next day.  So I backed out of the room, apologised (OK, so he was dead and couldn't technically hear me, but that didn't mean that I shouldn't be polite) and closed the door.

We all met up again in the lounge, had a long pub lunch, told everyone the story of the toilet and the tramp, then went back to the hotel to get ready for the evening.

The next few hours or so passed by quickly and will remain undescribed to spare the blushes of my dear wife.  Suffice it to say that there was no bar, or indeed mini-bar, so we had to resort to the old fashioned way of passing the time with only a bed and a dead plant for company, and it was only due to one of our party knocking on the door and asking if we were ready that reminded us of the time (and it seems that answering 'give me about thirty seconds and I will be' will earn you a slap from your wife)

We went to the theatre, had a great time, then came back to the hotel and had a few drinks in one of the rooms that had a working balcony until the early hours of the morning.

Breakfast was an interesting affair, the advertised Full English Breakfast turned out to be a single sausage and a piece of bacon each, calls for beans and/or tomatoes and toast fell on deaf and slightly frightening ears and in true tabloid style, we made our excuses and left.

The trip to the railway station was fairly uneventful, apart from not being able to find the tickets, going back to the hotel to look for them and then finding them in one of the ladies handbags and having to run to get the train.  And we put the whole sorry business behind us.

Until just over nine months later... The MicroDandy was born...

I saw his face, I'm not a Belieber

Well, if you tuned in yesterday, you'll know that I conducted an ill thought out experiment to see if I could bait a Belieber into threatening me with bodily harm.

I admit I didn't try very hard, I just commented on the whole Anne Frank/Justin Bieber news story (There's a link to the story on the BBC website in yesterday's Blog) and said something to effect that Beliebers are more likely to make death threats than they are to be effected by them.

You'll be pleased to know that I've not been threatened, or had my sexuality or the very reason for my existence questioned, unlike some people I could mention.

There have been no DMs from 14 year old girls from Oregon telling me to leave their future husband alone or face the consequences.  Neither have I had clouds of youngsters with nary a pubic hair between them camped on my front lawn burning effigies of whichever member of One Direction is popular at the moment which they've quickly drawn a moustache and titanic sideburns on to make it look more like me.  My cat has not been nailed to the front door and my goldfish has not been blown up with my own pair of antique, Victorian fire bellows.

So, this lack of affirmative action leads us to a number of possible conclusions.

1. I am not important enough to bother with.

Now ,this is my favoured explanation, I assume that the people who issue the threats are only interested in clashing swords with the great and the good.  A sort of Munchhausen by famous proxy deal.  By abusing a famous person, they belie(b/v)e that they become famous themselves, or at least they interact with people that they see on their 50" plasma screen balanced precariously between the sink and the toilet of their aloominum skinned single-wide trailer.

2. I wasn't obvious enough

I like to think I'm fairly subtle. I mean, I enjoy knob jokes as much as the next man... As much as the next few men all rolled together if truth be told, but you know - I do tend to dress things up in 'purty talk' more befitting my inferred Dandy status.  Instead of comparing the antics of his more psychotic fans to things that may have gone on in the latter days of the Wiemar Republic - I should just have said something like 'Beebur iz gay an Sucks Donkey D*ck' and let them have at me. (Please note: I have no insider knowledge of the 'artist' in question's sexuality, or his propensity for performing fellatio on farm animals, I include this section purely for dramatic effect, as an example of the language that his fan-base would be familiar with, no offense is inferred, implied, intended or suggested - Just in case there are any multi-armed cybernetic lawyer machines watching).

3. It's all a big con, engineered by his management to keep media attention on the pint-sized popinjay.

Contrived? Well, if your manager is a real life Van Wilder from the nation that can turn the honest and honourable sport of all-in wrestling into a mass market soap opera, then why shouldn't you take the angst and hormone fueled attention of love-starved teens with unformed emotional compasses into a huge (but supremely moist) cog in the media machine.  After all, you've turned a nineteen year old from a prosperous suburb of London (Ontario) who started out posting videos of himself singing on YouTube, into what I understand is termed a 'Wigger' and a polished, preened and soul-less cash cow.  what's one more offence against youth helping to weigh your soul down into the fiery pit?

Whilst we're on the subject of his management, I wonder if Mr Braun has had a quiet word with him about the whole Anne Frank debacle, what with his own grandparents having only narrowly escaped the holocaust themselves?

One would hope so... Wouldn't one?

Anyway, the only thing that happened to me was that I had my original tweet immediately picked up and forwarded by what I presume to be a Bot... And the number of hits on the Blog was slightly higher that I would have expected (23 hits in the first few minutes, rather than the normal 10-15)

On the whole, a bit of a damp squib, which by a strange quirk of fate, is, I beliebe, the name of Mr Bieber's next album.

-oOo-

As an aside, during the rigourous research procedure before the publishing of today's Blog (the customary flick through Wikipedia to check names and dates) I noticed  a couple of (semi) interesting facts.

London, Ontario (The City of Mr Bieber's birth) is in the county of Middlesex.  Which goes to show that if you don't nail things down, people will steal them, geography included.

There's a river running through it called the... See if you can guess... That's right, The Thames!

There's a Blackfriars Bridge, a Victoria Park, an Oxford Street, and the township of Westminster (which includes the village of Lambeth)

However, the most unintentionally funny thing that I read is that there was a fire in 1845 which destroyed a fifth of the (then) town... That's not the funny part though, the funny part was that one of the first 'casualties' of the fire was the only fire engine that the town had.

I know that Americans don't understand irony, I wonder if the Canadians do?

You do know how a button works don't you? No, not on clothes.

OK, so this one's probably going to be late too, not as late as yesterday's but certainly well into, what I like to call, Lunchtime.

I wanted to use a quote from 'The IT Crowd' as a title, and I just got caught up reading through the quotes from Series One, and then I had to have a bit of a sit down and a rest because I couldn't breath properly because I was crying with laughter - I couldn't even tell my workmates what I was laughing about, I was, quite literally, unable to speak.

Anyway, as you've probably guessed by now, today's post is IT related. In it I will relate a few more of the things that have happened to me over the years. During the time when I had to resist slamming peoples' foreheads onto their desks on a daily basis.

The following few 'incidents' that happened whilst I was working for the popular Midlands Builders' Merchant 'Where the Trade Go'. And are all, as ever, completely hamster-fondlingly true.

-oOo-

The thing you don't want to have happen when you've just got into the office after a two and a half hour drive, is to be told that one of the London stores cannot trade because their server has crashed. Do you know how most Back-Office server crashes are fixed in Midlands based Builders' Merchants? Yes, that's right, you turn it off and then back on again.

So, after someone had made coffee for the team, I called the store, with the intention of talking whomsoever answered the phone through the aforementioned task. The sales desk phone rang out... The office phone rang out... Then I took a deep breath and called the Manager's phone.

Now, before we go any further, let me just say that most of the Store Managers we had at the time were pretty good, they knew exactly as much about computers as we did about selling screwdrivers, and that was fine - We understood each other's limitations, but this particular guy was a bit... special. Imagine Del-Boy's mind in a Bond villain's body, but with the vocabulary of Father Jack Hackett. He was also known for having a lot of temper, but not a lot of patience.

He picked up the phone.

'Yeah?'

'Oh Hi, it's Dandy from IT...'

'Yeah?'

'You've got a problem with your system, you can't process any sales?'

'What?'

'The computer, that runs the tills, has stopped working.'

'Why?'

'Well, we're going to take a look at that in a minute, but we can't log into it, we need you to restart it.'

'What?'

'The big computer, in the metal box, in the office... We need you to turn it off, is that OK?'

'Yeah,' then he dropped the phone, and it went dead... For about ten minutes, then he picked it up again, 'It's not working.'

'Right, OK, Sorry, what exactly do you mean when you say that it's not working?'

'It won't turn off.'

'So, you're pressing the round button on the front?'

'Yeah.'

'With the little green light?'

'Yeah.'

'And it won't turn off?'

'No.'

'OK, can you hold it in and count to ten for me, see if it turns off then?'

'Yeah,' He dropped the phone again, this time, I had time to go and get a sandwich, when he came back he said, 'No, doesn't work.'

'OK, what I need you to do now is...'

'I'm too busy, send someone to fix it.'

'Well, we just need to...'

'Too busy, Bye,' Then he put the phone down.

So, we were stuffed, 'someone' had to drive to London and get the store working again. OK, it was only about a 200 mile round trip and it was a nice day, but I had been nominated as the 'someone'. (Like you hadn't guessed that already). The trip down the M40 took a couple of hours, but on this occasion no laser printers were harmed 
I wandered into the cavernous store and made myself known to the guys there. I went behind the counter and knocked on the door of the manager's office, which was duly opened by the man in question.

'Yeah?'

'Alright? I've come to see why your computer won't turn off.'

'Right.'

I went into his office, where the little rack was sat in the corner, covered in dust.

'Can you show me what you did?'

'Yeah,' He wandered over to the cabinet and pushed the button, 'Doesn't work, see?'

'Ah, I think I've found your problem, the round thing that you're pressing is actually the Dell badge, the power button is the 'other' round thing on the front, with the green light...' I held in the button, powered off the server, turned it back on and service was restored. I then had a fry-up for my lunch, got back in the car, and drove the 100 odd miles back to Birmingham...

-oOo-

Funnily, the remaining two stories are also about a London store, the same one in fact, well, not the same one as the one above, these two stories are about the same one. (That made a lot more sense in my head) However, this one was managed by a wonderful guy, He was an ex-mountain, I don't mean Mountain Rescue, or Mountaineer, but an actual honest to goodness mountain. He was computer literate, outspoken and he knew how to motivate staff, usually by causing a small avalance to form in their general direction.

Anyway, we'd just installed the new system at his store and we were going through the basic training. The tills that we had installed were touchscreens, but you need to remember that this was in the days where phones didn't have them, but PDAs (remember them?) did.

So our training guy had given the sales assistants their standard half-day's training and was spending the afternoon going from till to till, with the manager, watching them putting sales through and answering questions. I was tagging along, just for the hell of it really, I should have gone back to the office, but I was trying to spin it out a bit and then go straight home.

We came to one young lady, who was fastidiously using the keyboard and mouse rather than the touch screen, we looked at each other, looked at her, looked at each other again, and the manager said to me,

'You did check the touchscreen was working didn't you?'

'Yes, definately.'

'Then, why isn't she using it?'

'You're asking the wrong person Dude, sorry,' I said, and pointed to the assistant.

He sighed, waited until she'd finished serving her customer, walked over and asked,

'Why aren't you using the touchscreen? We pay a lot of money for them you know'

'I'm waiting for the thingy'

'You're doing what to the who-now?'

'The thingy, the pokey thing, you know?' She mimed the stabbing scene from Psycho.

The manager turned to me and shrugged in a very accusatory fashion, which is fairly difficult if you think about it, 'Pokey thing? Do we supply pokey things?'

'I think she means a stylus'

'Yeah! stylus, I'm waiting for the stylus,'

'Oh! the Stylus, why didn't you say,' He beamed, 'They each come with ten, and they're pink, you'll love them!'

'Really?'

'Oh yes!' He excalaimed as he reached down and took hold of her wrist, 'Here they are look, one.. two.. three.. four.. five... and the rest are on your other hand!'

She went that shade of red that's normally reserved for the Royal Mail and worked the rest of her shift in complete silence.

-oOo-

The store had been trading for a while, and everything was both Hunky and Dorey. We were well into the business as usual phase and we'd handed the support of the store over to the Helpdesk. One day I overheard a conversation that one of the girls was having with the store.

'I just need you to press 'Escape'... No, that's 'Return'... Escape is the one in the top, left hand corner... No, not F1, next to F1, it has E.S.C. written on it... It's definately there... You are using a computer aren't you?... Well, what's in the top, left hand corner then?' She pressed the mute button on her phone and asked me,

'Dandy, do we give the stores keyboards without an escape key?'

'Not to my knowledge, no, ask them if their keyboard looks the same as another one there.'

'OK, good idea,' She took the caller off hold and asked, 'Can you see another keyboard? Right, has that got an 'Escape' key? No? Can you check another? What about the one in the office? Yeah, I'll wait... What? That hasn't got one either? I don't really understand...'

'Why don't you just log into her computer remotely, do what you need to do, and we'll look at it later?' I suggested, which is what she did.

We thought it was odd, and had a laugh about how stupid you'd have to be to not be able to find the Escape key on a keyboard, but eventually we forgot about it.

Until, I was visiting the store some weeks later, about something completely unrelated when I suddenly had the need to get my email. I went into their little office, logged on, started my email and chanced to look down at the keyboard. Where the Escape key should be there was a hole, no key, no spring, no button, just a hole. I collared one of the guys behind the counter.

'Are all your keyboards like this?'

'Yeah, the Manager did it.'

'Why did he do that?'

'Well, someone from IT said that if we hit Escape while we were doing a Credit Card transaction, it'd muck it up and the sale would go through but the customer wouldn't be charged.'

'OK...'

'So he decided that the best way to make sure we didn't do that was to take the key away.'

'Did he use a drill?'

'Yeah, I think he did...'

'I'll order you some new ones.'

So, it seems he wasn't quite as IT literate as I'd initially thought, although I guess it was lateral thinking on his part.

Then I posed, and he took my picture

Some of you, mainly the people who've known me a while, or worked with me, or attended a formal event that I've gone to, or helped me celebrate a birthday, will know that I occasionally make and wear kilts. Not for any real ancestral reason, although the Dandy line is almost certainly blessed with a bewildering array of Scottish blackguards and jackanapes.

I just like messing with people's heads, and, as has been mentioned in multiplicity before, I am a massive show-off - And there're few things more likely to get you noticed in public than having your knees out and not wearing any underwear - You ask any woman between the ages of 16 and 40.

However, there are times when even wearing a kilt sees you fading into the background, Highland events for instance, or weddings of whacky and/or self-important people. The thing to wear on these occasions, for the fashion concious Dandy at least, would obviously be something like full Roman Imperial battledress or the rear half of a pantomime horse. This situation vexes me greatly, the Chimping Dandy does not do 'fading into the background' easily.

Which is bizarre really, because on one occasion, I was in a room with over a thousand, like-minded, people - And I was probably one of the most conservatively dressed people there, and I had a marvellous time.

Many, many, years ago, I used to work with a young lady, quite pretty, moderately shy, and very efficient at her job. If you looked up the phrase 'Butter would not melt in her mouth' in a dictionary of phrases (if such a thing exists) there would be a picture of her. After we both left the company, we kept in touch by eMail, as Facebook etc. did not exist at the time.

One day, I received an email from her that said something along the lines of, 'We're going to a show in London and can get you some cheap tickets if you're interested'. Now, not being blessed with children at the time, both Mrs Dandy & myself jumped at the chance and immediately started to prepare.

Prepare? I assume that you're asking, 'Why would you have to prepare for a London Show? Unless it was Rocky Horror? Was it Rocky Horror?'

No...

It wasn't...

The young lady in question, and her significant other of the time, had developed certain... erm... Shall we say 'Peccadillos'? that made them very popular with other, like minded, couples (Don't get excited, that's not where this story is headed - Not exactly anyway) - And the show in question was: Skin-Two Magazine's Rubber Ball.

Google it... But probably not at work...

It's a jolly get-together for people who enjoy dressing up and pushing the envelope, or being naked and being sealed in an envelope. And they really won't let you in if you're wearing 'Smart-Casual'. So I put on my Seamstress' head (The one I keep in the freezer for situations just such as these) And knocked up a couple of costumes. I made a PVC hobble-skirt for Mrs Dandy - Which was more zips than PVC. And for myself, I made a kilt, also out of PVC (Which, for those who wish to replicate the experience, is a right, royal, bitch to iron pleats into).

We booked a VERY nice hotel in London, a couple of First-Class train tickets, and waited.

On the night in question, we'd all agreed to meet in a pub around the corner from the venue in, I think, Hammersmith. Of course, when we got there, they were nowhere to be seen (Turns out that they'd 'bumped into some old friends in the hotel' - repeatedly, in several different positions, I'd imagine), but the place was full, almost to bursting, of clinically odd people. We found a table with a couple of spare stools and proceeded to wait.

We shared the table with three giant transvestites, I don't mean they were really, really, transvestite... I mean that they were all just shy of 7 feet tall. I really wish that I could remember their actual names, but I'm just going to have to make them up, they were great... guys?... And introduced themselves with both their male and female names - 'I'm Patrick-Mary, He's Brian-Fifi and that guy at the bar's Steve-Tracey'.

One was dressed in an outfit completely made of car-mats, which gave... him... a distinctly Female Klingon vibe, one was dressed as a bald Nun, with a PVC habit (the clothing item, not the lifestyle choice), but with the buttock area cut out, and the other was dressed in sort of a neon Flashdance ensemble which left very little to the imagination for either his male or female 'identities'.

We spent a happy couple of hours, swapping stories, such as we could with our limited knowledge of this type of thing - it turned out that we'd all turned up unfashionably early. And 'Patrick-Mary' was just telling us about the time his wife came home early and found him dressed in her wedding underwear and pleasuring himself with the toilet-brush when I felt a hand on my shoulder and a German voice said,

'Excuse me, may I haf a vord?'

I looked up and saw a bald, stocky gentleman, with a magnificent handlebar moustache, wearing a tight white T-shirt and a significant amount of rubber/leather.

'My friends unt I noticed vat ju are vearing vhen you vent to ze bar, ve vere vonderink if you minded us takink a few photos?'

I looked at Mrs Dandy, she shrugged, I looked at our new found friends, they grinned and excitedly gave me the thumbs-up. I stood, and then followed the German chap to the other side of the room, where a table of similar gentlemen, clad in various wipe-clean outfits were sat, along with a collection of suspiciously professional looking cameras.

'Ju stand zere und ve take a few photos, yes?'

I nodded, still not 100 percent comfortable with the situation, but did my best to strike a pose that didn't make me look like I'd stepped from the pages of the Littlewoods catalog.

'Nein, nein, nein... More... er... GRRRRRR!'

I did the 'Hulk-Smash' pose, you know where you grit your teeth, and sort of bring your arms into your chest and bend over (towards the camera, before you ask).

'Jah, Jah, ist gut... Now er... More sidevays!'

We were starting to attract a bit of a crowd, and if I'm honest, I was well out of my comfort zone, but it was all in fun and no-one seemed to be taking themselves too seriously (apart from one of the photographers, who REALLY looked to be enjoying himself) - It probably didn't take more than five minutes, it felt like a lifetime though.

'Gut, jah, I sink zat iz enough... Can ju just sign zis?'

They handed me what I assume was a model release form and offered to buy us all a drink, which we accepted. We were there for about another hour before we decided to head off to the event proper. As we left, the chap with the moustache waved and called,

'The magazine should be out next month!'

I might save the sights, sounds and smells of the actual Ball for another episode - I think it probably deserves one of its own.


So, if you ever find yourself rambling in the German countryside, and happen across a gentleman's art pamphlet, designed for one-handed reading, lying unloved in the bottom of a hedgerow, and think you recognise someone in a two-page photospread...

You might not be wrong.