It's like talking to the wall.

Welcome team.  I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, but with writing a couple of books (Yes, actually writing them, rather than cobbling together stuff from this blog and palming it off on all and sundry as original work.) and the day job, things have gotten away from me a bit.

As far as the books go, I’m still finishing stories for ‘Forever Girl & Other Stories’ that I’m trying to get out in time for Christmas 2014.

And Book 1 of the Windspider Chronicles is in need of a major re-write and some cover art (If any of you fancy painting a full-colour Steampunk female airship pirate captain with her power-armoured younger brother in the background? Volume 2 will have the opposite, volume three will have them standing together). It’s looking like an Autumn 2015 release at the earliest.

And my children’s book ‘Mummy where’s my Soul?’ about a ginger kid and his pet dinosaur wandering through the pantheon looking for the titular spiritual construct is still in the early planning stages, still trying to decide who’s going to be most offended if I’m honest.

-oOo-

So, to today’s subject.  It’s something I’ve covered before, a subject I like to talk about because it’s impossible to get it wrong.  That’s right.  My favourite subject, THE FUTURE!

I’d like to talk about a specific part though, something that a lot of us have already experienced in a small way.

Talking to your appliances and them talking back to you. If you’ve got a reasonably modern smartphone, this is part of your everyday life.  But as time goes on, more things will do this, more of your household items will think they know better than you, is this something we should have to stand for?

Imagine for a second you’re a chap called… Erm… I don’t know… Maybe Dave? – Well, a lot of people are aren’t they? I mean, they’ve even got their own TV Channel and everything.  So, you get home after a long shift at Spacely Sprockets and really fancy some cheese on toast (Grilled Cheese)

Dave: Crap! I’m hungry, Mr Spacely really gets on my ass sometimes, could just go for some cheese on toast.

iFridge: I’ve got some of that Cheddar you like Dave, probably just enough for a sandwich.

Dave: Great, thanks, [Opens the fridge and sees that the little bit of cheese that he has left has been pushed suspiciously to the front] we got any bread?

iCupboard: You have half a loaf of Farmhouse that your Mum bought you last week when you felt ill and… Two slices of thick white [Two cupboard doors open automatically to display the choices]

iGrill: [Apologetically] Ah, I’m sorry Dave, I’ve started my self-clean cycle… You were late and you normally bring a take-away home on a Friday, I just assumed…

Dave: Don’t worry, I’ll make a normal sandwich… Hang on [Eyes the toaster]

iToaster: Awww Hell No!

Dave: Look, all you have to do is lie on your side!

iToaster: And how many times have you used that line?

Dave: Here, just… Owww!

iToaster: You did NOT just try and invalidate my Warranty!

Dave: You burned my finger!

iToaster: Self Dee-fence Honey, any court in the land would agree with me, you’d be banned from owning kitchen appliances for life.

Dave: [Points at a non-existent something out of the window] Look! A flying Halibut! [Tries and fails to grab the toaster and turn it sideways]

iToaster: [Yells] Help! I kid you not I will set fire to your raggedy ass in your sleep!

Dave: I’ve dropped the cheese on the floor now [Looks sullenly at the smug toaster] I hate you…

(In my mind, Chris Rock played the iToaster, or possibly Wanda Sykes, which is only slightly racist.)

-oOo-

But it’s not just appliances that will have personalities, I think that eventually everything will, even things that you wouldn’t even consider normally.  I heard on the radio some months back that it costs the local council thousands, if not millions, of pounds every year for them to sort out people putting the wrong rubbish in the wrong bins. This would be the perfect opportunity for some cut-price sentience, each bin would know what you were supposed to put in it and have some method of figuring out what you were attempting to throw away.  For ease of use, each would have a different accent perhaps? 

Your garden waste/compostable bin could have a deep West Country accent, ‘Hedge Trimmings? Yarr just the thing innit? Gorrany more?’ – Although that might be your pirate bin, where you throw away your unused pieces of eight and dubloons.

Your recycling bin could talk like a hippy, possibly Nigel Planer’s character Neil from ‘The Young Ones’, ‘Ooooh, Heeyy, yeah! Baked bean can mannnn! You’re helping to really save the planet Daaave! ’

And your normal bin? The one that doesn’t want your garden trimmings or your recycling? The one that sits there in the corner imperiously telling you what you can and can’t throw away without being fined?

Well, it’d be French wouldn’t it?

Dave: Why won’t you open? I’m trying to throw stuff away.

iBin: Non, Ah shall not open for you. What ees eet that you are even throwing away you peasant?

Dave: It’s a… Yoghurt pot.

iBin: Ees eet  plastique?

Dave: Er, I suppose so.

iBin: Zen eet ees le recycling, non?

iRecycle: Oh yeaaah Maaan, that’s totally my baaaag.’

Dave: OK, [Moves to recycling bin] What? Why won’t you open?

iRecycle: awww bummer! There’s still, like, yoghurt in it maaaan, that’s food waste!

Dave: Seriously?

iRecycle: Sorry… It’s The Man’s rules! [Whisper] Fight the system! Boomshanka!

Dave: [Moves to compost bin] Food waste!

iCompost: Olroight moy lover? Oh that’s mahhhvelous [Lid opens for yoghurt leftovers and closes with a comedy burp]

Dave: [Moves back to recycling bin] What’s wrong now?

iRecycle: You need to wash it maaan.  It’s not me! It’s him  [Recycling bin shrugs towards normal bin]

iBin: Oui you feelthy animal! Wash your recyclables before you recycle them, what are you, a tramp?

Then you set fire to your bin and pay the hefty fine. Then you keep setting fire to them until they send you one that sounds like Ray Winston.

How cool would that be?

See you soon Brothers and Sisters!

*Yes, I realise that I missed a huge opportunity by not having something say ‘What’re you doing Dave?’ I thought it was too obvious though.

Welcome to the world of...

.....THE FUTURE!

That's right kiddies, today I'd like to spout a page full of nonsense about one of the broadest subjects on which you're still allowed to have an opinion and sound as if you might know what you're talking about - The vast panoply of things that haven't happened yet.

I know that not everybody likes science fiction, but everyone likes 'cool' stuff surely?

Cool stuff like, oh... I don't know... Flying through space, faster than the speed of light, giving it the old pew-pew-pew whilst shouting 'Eat Plutonium death, you repulsive alien weirdos!'

Or being transported from your bed to the breakfast table by conveyor belt, having a tablet that tastes like bacon and another that tastes like eggs.  Jumping into a hollow glass tube and be lowered to the garage level where you sit on a floating disk and tell it where you want to go.

If things like this ever happen, they're not going to happen whilst anyone who's currently alive is still alive, at least I don't think so... But then I'm not a Futurist.

There are people out there who are paid to tell big companies what the future is going to be like so that they can develop products that will better fit into that world.

Apple employed a futurist who told them that the future will all be featureless black monolithic slabs, that would spring into life when you touch them. (Leading a lot of people to believe that he'd watched Stanley Kubrick's film 2001 the previous night and had eaten a bad chimichanga.)

You'd expect Apple to be able to employ warehouses full of bearded, flip-flop wearing 'visionaries' to tell them how the future should look, but what about the chaps in the little vans who mess about in that mysterious green box at the end of the road?

British Telecom have a whole raft of futurists, a couple of whom came up with a frankly brilliant idea ruined by being called, incredibly ominously I think, 'The Soul Catcher'.  One of its functions is to cheat death, you wear the device throughout your life and it records everything you experience. At the moment of death, or frankly, whenever you feel like it, you can download yourself into a new-born baby and have another three-score and ten ad infinitum.  I'm sure they've worked out all the moral implications of this, and we shouldn't worry at all.  In fact, I've just noticed that they've renamed the project 'Soul Catcher 2025' and I'm going to go ahead and assume that this means you'll be able to buy yourself one for Christmas in about twelve years time.

While we're on the subject of the Technological Behemoth that is BT.  One of their other research teams are (allegedly) looking at human microchipping.  Much like they currently do with dogs - They cite their reasoning as developing a cashless, passportless societly.  Where your identity could be confirmed by swiping you with something that perhaps looks like one of those wands that they wave at you if you make the metal detector go off at the airport whilst you're just wearing your pants.   What it's not for, they say, is to be able to tell where every, single person on the planet is at any specific time... Oh no, nothing like that.  And it's not to provide plot devices for action films where the bad guy figures out where your chip is, hacks off that part of your body and lives as you for the next few weeks.  We do quite enough of that already with those eye-scanning lock things that all the secret bases seem to have nowadays.  All you need to do in that case is find someone who has access and introduce them to the business end of a teaspoon.

Mind control devices are also seeping into our toyshops at the moment... I don't mean they control your mind, yet... I mean that there are toys that claim to be able to be manipulated by your mind.  Did any of you see the Gadget Show Japanese special where the very lovely Pollyanna Woodward wore a pair of brainwave controlled cat ears?  She could make the ears move by thinking, or at least, by simulating different moods.  There are helicopters you can fly with your mind, assault courses that you can move floating ping-pong balls through.  And I'm reliably informed that there is a Star Wars game where you learn how to use the Force (i.e. make something happen just by thinking about it)

There are your standard advances, that every can think about, things like 'Oh computers will definitely get smaller.' You're right, they will.  But how small will they get? A chap called Gordon Moore (Nearly typed Gordon Freeman then... There's a Freudian slip for you) who helped to found a little company called Intel, posited something which has come to be called 'Moore's Law'. This states that the amount of 'switches' on a given size of computer chip will double about every two years - So it gets twice as powerful.  This can't go on forever though, as there's a limit to how small things can get - Or is there?  Scientists have managed to create a switch (more properly called a transistor) out of a single atom of phosphorous that can be used in the next level of computer design, something called Quantum Computing.  You know how all the information is stored inside computers as millions of '1's and '0's? Well, Quantum Computing's just the same as that, but all the switches are set to '1' and '0' at the same time... (This theory originally brought to you by an Austrian bloke who considered sealing a cat in a box with some poison to prove that it was both alive and dead at the same time.)

(No, not THAT mad Austrian bloke, not the one that enjoyed some hardcore antisemitism, a different one - It must be something in the water.)

The thing to remember is that these are just the things we know about.  The military (Specifically a bunch of complete nutters called DARPA - Who gave us the Internet amongst other things) are working on stuff that would turn your ears green and make your socks set on fire.  For instance, those of you that remember the first Gulf war in 1991, remember seeing all those videos of the new F117 'Stealth Fighter'? Well, they started developing it in 1975, and it first flew in 1981, so they're VERY VERY good at keeping things secret.

Listen to the tin-hat brigade and they'll tell you about reverse engineered alien technology, mind control (the bad kind), genetic engineering of humans and boxes that can generate and control the weather.  Who knows?

What do I see in the immediate future?

Well, lunch initially, then the publishing of a wildly successful book by a new writer about airships and robots, that has a strange close-up picture of the author from his eyebrows down to his chest on the back, because he is fat and balding.

What do you think the next century holds? I'd be genuinely interested in finding out, leave me a comment, it's the way of the future...

If you create too much friction, the skin comes off

A long time ago, all the way back in 1996, I worked for a childrens' clothing supplier based in Nuneaton. As normal, I won't mention the name, but their logo was an apple and their stores were decorated like nurseries with pretend laminate flooring with hopscotch... erm... boards? courts? What do you call the thing you draw on the floor when you play hopscotch?

Anywho, their Head Office was decorated in the same way and it was a wonderful, jolly place, where it was a joy to work... Honestly, I really enjoyed my time there, it wasn't like having a real job at all.

There are many stories about this particular period that might be of interest to you guys, and some of them are directly below.

-oOo-

The HQ was quite a large building, with offices at the front, and a huge warehouse at the back, where thousands of different types of childrens clothes were stored in racks going about thirty feet up into the air. The guys who drove the forklifts would have a pick-list of daily stock that the stores needed and would wander around picking bits and bobs from here and there. The trucks that they used were very strange, in that they didn't have forks, the cab where the driver sat went up and down to reach the shelves. I'm sure there's a proper name for them.

One day, a couple of us were in the computer room, which was on a mezzanine floor, overlooking the warehouse, when we heard that noise that an AT-AT makes when it trips over a snowspeeder tow cable followed by a really loud bang.

What had happened was that one of the drivers, whose truck was fully extended as he was getting something off the top shelf, had noticed that his next pick was on the top shelf of the next set of racks. He didn't bother to drop the cab back down, as the safety instructions suggested, and had driven his truck down to the end of the row, done a u-turn to go up the next one, clipped another truck and toppled over, taking a set of racks with it. We stood there and watched as the racking fell in slow motion into the next row of racks, all of the boxes sliding off it and falling to the floor. It was like a snowdrift of baby-grows and inappropriately adult looking childrens clothes.

I commented to the warehouse manager a couple of weeks after the event.

'I know you have posters all over the place saying that you shouldn't move the trucks with the cabs extended, don't you tell them that when they start?'

'Yes, we do,' He replied, 'Unfortunately it seems that during the interview process, we don't check to see that they're clever enough to be able to eat with a fork, or able to read'

-oOo-

The IT department was quite large, but it was also pretty relaxed. It was one of those places where the Boss genuinely meant it when he said 'As long as the work gets done, and I don't get any complaints, then you do what you like.'

So we took him at his word, and often decamped to the beer garden of the local pub of a summers afternoon and stayed there until we got a call, or until it was time to go home. Winters days were handled in roughly the same way, except that we'd be in the bar rather than the garden. Until that is, someone bought in a hooky copy of a PC 3D shooter game called 'Descent'. The entire department was instantly hooked. It was loaded onto pretty much all of the computers in the office and eight of us at a time would take turns blowing each other up with little blocky spaceships. It started as a lunchtime timewaster, and mutated into an afternoon timewaster, then an evening timewaster... Games would often start at five in the evening and end at nine o'clock at night. Except at Christmas, when they would last all day.

We didn't let it influence our professionalism of course, not once did we ignore the phone when one of us was on a kill-streak, neither did we get the Big boss' PA to call whoever was winning at that time and ask them IT questions until we managed to pass his score. We were professionals, and we always put our customers first. As I explain below.

-oOo-

I had a call once, from one of the buyers, she was quite pretty and as I was 'between relationships' at the time, I'd been cultivating a relationship with her that was on the cusp of becoming... Not completely professional.

'Hi Dandy, I have an IT emergency, I need your help right now!'

'OK, what seems to be the problem.'

'I think it's my clitoris, it's not working.'

I took a deep breath, waved at my work partner, whom we all called The Shadow, who had been following my heavy-handed attempts to progress my relationship with this particular customer and put her on speakerphone, 'You say you're having problems with your clitoris?'

'Yes, I'm pushing it from side to side but nothing seems to be happening!'

'OK... Erm... Have you tried... Erm... moving it up and down?'

'No, that makes my finger feel funny, I only ever go side to side.'

'I think I need to take a look,' The Shadow gave me a thumbs up, pointed to himself - implying that he would like to attend this call too, 'where are you?'

'I'm in the front office, downstairs.'

'We'll be down in a second.'

'Both of you?'

'Yeah, if that's OK?'

'Of course, the more the merrier!'

We looked at each other, stories from Mayfair's Readers Confessions running through both our heads, slicked our hair back (This is when I still had hair) and nonchalently ran down the stairs. We paused to catch our breath before we entered the office, expecting to find her alone, in a state of undress. posed languidly on the desk.

What we actually found was a full office, with the young lady in question waving at us from the middle of it.

'Helloooo! Over here!'

We dejectedly made our way over to her, took up positions behind her shoulders and I said, 'You're having a problem with your..'

'Clitoris, yes, look...' She proceded to open her laptop and start to violently tug at the little red pointing device in the middle of the keyboard. 'See, it doesn't work.'

'You call that a clitoris?'

'Yes, why, isn't that the proper name?'

'Well, it gets called a lot of things, I've known people call it a joystick, or a nubbin, even a nipple, but never a... a...'

'A Clitoris?'

'No, I've never heard anyone call it that before, but I vow, that from now on, that's the only thing I will ever call it'

And true to my word, that is what I have called it from that very day. It makes for some interesting conversations with IBM engineers, but I have become something of an expert. So, if any of you ever need any help with yours, even if it's just to get the dust and gunk from around the edges, give me a call, I have a special tool reserved for just that purpose.