Frustrations of the Modern Lifestyle - cushtie.com - Page 3

Category: Frustrations of the Modern Lifestyle

  • Unwanted financial advice

    About 5:20 today, the phone on my desk rang: an international number of some sort. I answered, because I’ve been raised to answer the telephone, and because international numbers speak of some smoky and exotic excitement. Was it a secret agent, calling to tell me he’s broken the launch codes of the Russian ICBMs? No, […]

  • Hang the telephone

    We signed a two year contract with Starhub in Singapore, for our internet connection, our phone (which inexplicably stopped working after two weeks; Starhub told us the problem was our handset, which was odd, as it had worked perfectly well for the first two weeks), and our cable television (which we watched once, in March […]

  • Living Well Is The Best Revenge (Apart From Plausible Deniability?)

    I discovered Dumbest Tweets today, which was highly amusing, although it can be distracting to have the unmitigated sewer pipe of Twitter curated and fed to you. A few thoughts, a propos of that, Squid Ink, and discussions with colleagues: There’s room for a natural language based service that gives you plausible deniability the next […]

  • Do you miss me that much, Mr Zuckerberg?

    I’ve logged into Facebook twice so far this year: once to tell everyone I wasn’t going to be checking Facebook this month, and once when my phone alerted me that I had a message and it was something I felt guilty about not responding to. Like a clingy ex, Facebook keeps emailing me to tell […]

  • Going down the toilet once again

    After the first twelve hours or so in the air, a certain sense of unreality descends on you. It begins to feel as though you’re forever traveling around Narita, leaving the plane for security checks, reboarding, eating the same meals you had a week ago, ad infinitum. Things begin to smear together into a mess. […]

  • Going back on my word

    I’d hoped I was the sort of person who was impeccable with his word, who carried through with the things he committed to do. Not the sort of person who said he’d do one thing, and then ended up doing the exact opposite. Thus this morning filled me with shame and regret.

  • The disappointment of doing doughnuts

    I lost 42 and a half minutes of my life today, on hold waiting for Air Canada’s reservations department to answer the phone. All I wanted to do was ensure that I got a vegetarian meal on the flight back to London at the weekend, a task that took thirty seconds to achieve when I […]

  • If you don’t like your television, why don’t you smash it up?

    Felicity had her first dose of TV this week: a one-two punch of the second half of Casino Royale, and some guff where Vanilla Ice renovates houses. She sat on her aunt’s knee, mouth open, transfixed by the gogglebox.

  • The Devil’s Coffee

    This morning I planned to buy myself an iced coffee on my way to the office, but with a tight budget that did,T make much sense when I’ve got a French press in the cupboard and a big jar of coffee doing nothing in the fridge, so I executed an about-turn half way from my […]

  • Adventures at the call centre

    For the last few days, I’ve been bombarded with sales calls from a Mumbai call centre. In the UK, some people get quite exercised about this, as though an unwanted phone call is much worse if it originates in the sub-continent, rather than from an office which doesn’t have to pay international calling rates. Perhaps […]