In Which I Is Pissed Off ...

See what happens when bar-owners find out about flowcharting, and decide to incorporate this new-found knowledge into their signage? Nothing good will come of this ... mind you, it just goes to show that not so much has changed since the days, many years back, when I was working for the PNCC: this pretty much encapsulates the decision tree we used to have to work through at 11:30 on a Friday morning.

Of course things were more difficult back in our day - you younglings just don't know how easy it is now - for we had an extra question, this being "can we be arsed driving somewhere, and does anyone have a car in working order?" and if the answer was "yes" then we might head off to The Homestead at Fielding: if not, then it would be off to The Stable. Which had the advantages of being a) just around the corner and b) the best French restaurant in Palmerston North. (Proper foie gras was of course unheard-of, but I still remember fondly their chicken-liver pâté.)

And it was, incidentally, immediately below what was once my very first office: if you can dignify a walk-in closet with a single grimy window and an attached toilet full of bound lineflow program listings (66 lines of 132 columns per pale-green and white fanfold page) with that name. I was but a lowly intern: I took what I could get, and anyway it was still rather more spacious than a lot of student accommodation.

Ineluctably the hours would pass, and then we'd note that we'd finished the post-dessert cognac and it was about 16:00 and thus past time to head back to the office so that we could officially leave at 17:00 and head across the road to the upstairs bar at The Commercial Hotel, where Maggie presided behind the bar covered with plates of buttered extruded white "bread" slices, and steaming bowls of saveloys and tomato sauce.

Tell that to the young folk today, and they just won't believe you ... and fair enough too, for truth to tell we were in fact great liars back in those days. It all ended in tears of course, one day when the then Town Clerk remarked gently that, given the amount he was shelling out on the EDP budget, he would rather appreciate having at least a skeleton staff available in the EDP Department of a Friday afternoon ... sic transit gloria mundi, and all that.

Back in the beginning of 1987, when we split our time between Vitré and Paris, we'd stay in Alain Porcher's fuck-hutch, conveniently situated just off the Allflex offices, under the mansard roof of one of those Haussmannian buildings a stone's-throw from Opéra. From there it was about a 3km walk to Ile de la Cité ... done that a number of times, and walked around outside Notre Dame, but never once set foot inside the place. I suppose that now I never shall.

Like I've said before, the only problem is that sooner or later you will find yourself in bad company - I must admit that for some reason this seems to happen to me rather more often than the laws of probability would normally indicate, but that is so not my fault ... as usual it was Philippe, and as we inhaled some vitamin supplements out under the sun we fell, for some reason, to exchanging stories (possibly somewhat embroidered, or enhanced, or Photoshopped) of Hotels from Hell.

So after Vitry, and Yaoundé, St-Dénis and that place in the backblocks of Cameroon whose name I cannot for the life of me remember it was his turn, and he told me the woeful tale of his experience in Libourne a while back when, having occasion to pass that way, he took a hotel room for the night. Seemed a reasonable place, took a single room, single bed, and then the woman at the desk asked "avec ou sans couverture?". "What", he asked himself, "is this? Of course I want a blanket on my bed ..."

And was then - he says - somewhat surprised to open the door to a knock at 9pm and find a young lady of negotiable affection waiting there: she was the couverture, turning up as ordered.

For some reason, mostly having to do with someone giving me a hat-tip about a chateau which had some rather good wine, I headed off the other day to do a bit of exploring: Azille, to take a look around the market, then to La Lavinière to see if I could find the wine, and then - because I could - off to Caunes-Minervois to have a poke around the old town and the abbey. All very well, and the first leg took me to Olonzac, just a bit north of here ... and that, of course, was when it started to go all titsup. As things will.

Now things are getting better than was once the case - I can still remember arriving at Tours way back when and encountering exactly two road signs coming into the place: one pointed left, and said "All directions" and the other pointed right, and upon it was written "Other directions". (If memory serves I barreled straight ahead and we found ourselves in the centre of town, which was - luckily - where we actually wanted to be.)

But I digress. There are a number of road signs in Olonzac, some of which are in fact not entirely works of fiction and one of which will direct you to Azillanet, which you might reasonably think was not too far from Azille: you would, of course, be wrong. At which point I thought "OK, let's get the phone out and ask the great Goofle ..."

Of course, the previous night I'd let the phone do its update thingy, and it had updated Google Maps but failed to update Google, and as it turned out Google Maps wouldn't even start: cue a furious search in Sarah's pocketses and finally find an honest-to-god paper map (remember those?) and fortunately I'd thought to take my reading glasses. This has happened before: I am getting used to it.

Whatever, I made my trip, no thanks to modern technology, and got home with three cases of wine (six bottles of a rather tasty Grenache gris, six of a respectable Cabernet Sauvignon, and a last lot of an excellent 2015 Syrah which should last for another few years yet), but the GPS business still rankled ... so I did what any other fearless IT guy would do under these circumstances, and fired up Google Play to see if I couldn't force an update for Maps.

Somewhat to my surprise, Google Play wouldn't start either: nor, come to that, would Gmail, or anything other googly - which started to get me seriously pissed. So I uninstalled the updates and lo! the apps were there and would start, but were completely non-functional, which is of very little use to me.

I fairly quickly guessed that either some failed update had totally borked the phone, or that - it being a Huawei - updates and functionality had been blocked thanks to the orange turd, so "what the hell, head off to the Bouygues shop at Carcassonne and pick up a Samsung, or something" which kind of annoyed me because I actually rather like the Huawei gear, and I hate having to shift my life from one phone to another, and I had better things to do than make a trip to Carcassonne.

 But then again, it must be admitted that the poor thing was three years old and the screen had developed an unsightly yellow stain in one corner that looked for all the world as though the cat had pissed on it, so gritted teeth and off I headed.

And after half an hour or so following camper vans and old farts who seem to think that the speed limit is in fact 70 kph I made it to the big commercial centre on the western side of Carcassonne (because of course it would be on the wrong side from us) and found the boutique and went in and looked at the phones on offer, and an obsequious flunky came over and asked if he could service me.

Not being a complete fool I said yes, and asked what he had that was about the same size as my little P8 but which was not a Huawei: and he showed me a couple of Sonys, and a few Samsungs - and that is when things really went bad, or at least morphed into the old Python cheese shop sketch.

For every time I said "OK, I'll take that one, my good man", he would pop out the back and check and then come back and say, with a perfectly straight face, "Sorry squire, could've sworn I had one but the bloody cat's got it ..."

I swear to god, this is a perfectly notional phone shop with no actual phones in stock ... by the time I made it back home, with no new phone, after a good fifty minute round trip under a baking sun and fifteen minutes wasted in this apology for a "shop" that doesn't seem capable of actually selling anything (which I'd always thought was their raison d'être), I was marginally furax. So I had a gin. Things always seem better after that.