Clueless in the UK

So about a day after Sue and I moved into the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle in 1995, we witnessed somebody breaking into a car across the street from our house. Rather than running after them with a pair of aluminum softball bats, like I could have if I wanted (I had the bats, just not the balls, if you get my meaning), I called the police.

So today I am walking down the street in quaint Hampstead and three guys, in their 20s I’d say, are running down the street towards me. One is running away, the other is punching him in the face, and the third is trying to pull his buddy off the first.

He succeeds. Everybody standing around witnessing this whole thing is stunned (including about 10 mothers breast-feeding - I am not kidding, they are everywhere arond here!). The guy getting punched keeps walking, the other two walk back up the hill but not without the punching dude yelling something in a foreign language I didn’t understand. I am standing right next to the first guy who by this point is looking a little upset about the whole thing, with his The Gap bag in his hand, looking at the growing bruise on his face in the glass window of a store front. The only thing I can think of is, The first guy said something nasty about the bad guy’s mother or maybe he shop-lifted from The Gap.

Anyway .. I mean, COME ON! What’s up with that? Coincidence? I think not. We move something happens to remind us we’re in a big bad city where big bad things happen. Or maybe it’s the drugs: I am on large quantities of Nyquil and jet-lagged after a night of trying to sleep in the smallest room I have ever even seen, let alone tred to sleep in. Picture lying on your back, spread-eagled and able to touch all 4 walls in your room, and you’re on the right page. Tonight I am in a bigger room, using the internet in the hotel, after figuring out a way to hack myself into the hotel’s network.

Yes, hack is too strong a word. Once they admitted they were using a different kind of authentication, and once I figured out the password by dumping it from a PC in their office that worked, I was able to get on their network as long as I manually specify an address.

But really, I am not sure this is of interest. What is of interest is the ache in my neck from using a laptop and looking down at a screen for too long. Ergonomics really do matter, especially when you’re as old as I am …

Anyway, tonight I had some pizza at a nice place. When the nice lady came up with my food to put it on my table, she said in a very pleasant voice, using the english language, “Blah blah blah blah blah?” I said, “Huh?” She said very clearly again, using the Queen’s English this time, “Blah blah blah salad, blah blah pizza?” Since she had a huge pepper grinder in her hands, I said, “No thank you.” She got really confused and then I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t think I understood you …” Then she said slowly, so as not to confuse me, “Did you order a salad and pizza?”

Wow, huh?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 29th, 2006 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Clueless in the UK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.