MaW’s Blog

Yup, did it again. Most of my readers have been putting up with me bouncing around the virtual room looking forward to it for a couple of weeks now. I have had periodic cause to wonder if this level of excitement is entirely healthy, and come to the conclusion that it’s just incidental. If I should ever succeed in joining the Specials myself, outright terror should put a damper on the excitement, and by the time the terror has worn off the novelty should also have diminished.

Several years ago I was privileged to observe a shift with Northamptonshire Police. This time it was Surrey and I was out with the Specials rather than a regular. Two Specials and me in a rather spiffy Ford Focus estate with plenty of room in the back seat even for my excessively-long legs. This turned out to be a good thing; differing policies and a distinct lack of a stab vest meant I stayed in the car much more often than last time. As it turned out this was a good thing; it meant I could avoid a two-hour session in a house with a woman who keeps a pigeon in her kitchen (not in a cage in the kitchen, just in the kitchen. Yes, really).

Still, it was interesting. Much can be overheard from inside the car, and the division radio chatter conveys a great deal of information and amusement at times. A very different kind of shift to last time, and thus very valuable for pre-joining experience and information. The amount of paperwork involved even in the jobs that we went to that evening is rather intimidating and appears completely nonsensical. When you have officers writing more or less the same things on various forms in various different media — on UNIX databases, in Word documents and on forms and in notebooks — you do tend to realise that there’s something very wrong with the way that the paperwork system is organised. A decent application of IT could help out a lot here, but as with anything it would have to be done entirely correctly.

And we all know that’s not going to happen, right?

So thanks Dave and Tim for putting up with me in the car (and Dave for providing a bed in his house), thanks to the other Specials for being so friendly despite me never having met them before, and thanks to the people who gave permission for it to happen.

It’s very weird seeing on-duty officers actually using the duty system I helped to create though.

Well, it was last night actually, but I couldn’t resist being able to use as a title for this Entry a line from the folk song ‘Lowlands’, which is sung by June Tabor (excellently of course) on the Oysterband Big Session Volume 1 CD. Which everyone should get. There’s a song about making beer (John Barleycorn), one about the end of the world (When That Helicopter Comes), one about sex (The Cuckoo’s Nest), one about commercialisation (Country Life) and even a song which makes very little sense at all (Ten Thousand Miles) but which is good.

But I digress.

Last night I had a dream. A strange dream it was. It probably doesn’t surprise anybody to be told that it was about police recruitment. I do that moderately often, although rarely in such detail as this (not accurate detail, just detail of some sort, as it wasn’t a very realistic dream).

Firstly, it seemed I must’ve got through the initial stages of trying to join the police, because I had been stashed in a small room much like one in a University hall of residence on a big park-like campus somewhere in… err… Britain, I assume, since it was definitely an English or Welsh police force involved.

There were other applicants there. While we stayed there, we had to complete a sort of combined fitness/obstacle course/memory test. The dream seems to have skipped over some of it as I remember dreaming that it was a lot longer than I remember actually dreaming about (that made sense in my head, honest). But there were three bridges to run over. One was like the bridge over the A10 between Impington and Milton, which I cross on my way to and from work each day. Concrete, footpath-sized. The one in the dream was rather steeper though, and over a deep deep chasm.

The second bridge was a rope bridge with a deck made of wooden slats. Each of these was painted a different colour and had two words on it. We were supposed to remember as many of these pairs as possible, while crossing the bridge as fast as we could.

The third bridge was styled much like the cycle bridge over the A14 at Milton, which I also cross on my way to work (my brain is clearly a dreadful inventor, so it has to steal bridge designs for dreams. It has to steal characters too, more on that later). Except that it was very narrow, had steps up the side we went up, and required one to slide down a pole to get to the ground at the far side. The far side was a street which looked like it came out of Paragon City (which is the virtual city where City of Heroes is set). In fact, if you come in-game and go to Kings Row, you can go and stand on it. As I said, my brain is a terrible plagiarist. Well, either that or I’ve been playing too much City of Heroes, hmm?

Anyway, on that street stood a Sergeant who was asking each person coming off the bridge to recall things from the second bridge, usually by saying a word and expecting us to shout back all the words which had been paired with it on the bridge slats. I did appallingly, because I’d gone over the course far too fast, but I was first off and had done a good time and apparently they’ll substitute speed for memory. Odd indeed.

After that it seemed the residential thing was over, because we were at the local nick (although I very much doubt my local nick looks anything like this one did) and we were waiting for an interview. One of the officers was a familiar character from The Bill (plagiarism again), the others had indistinct faces. While we were waiting for the interview to start, we chatted amongst ourselves. One girl was wearing half blues and wondered why we weren’t. We told her we hadn’t been issued with uniform yet, and she seemed surprised because she’d gone and bought hers already! We thought this was silly. I can think of someone I’ve encountered in real life who could have been that girl.

Then we got called into the interview room. It was a sort of two-way panel, as there was all of us candidates (about eight), facing off the panel of five, all being interviewed simultaneously.

The thing that really makes me think I was playing too much City of Heroes is that we suddenly all gained floating text above our heads with our names on. That and the first question involved the interviewers calling up a hologram of a level 30 hero who’d just got themselves an aura, and asking us what the range of the power was.

Then I woke up, before I could explain that auras aren’t powers and being merely cosmetic, have no effect on other people at all so it’s irrelevant to ask what range they had.

So am I mad, or did I just play too much City of Heroes this week? It’s actually the best dream I’ve had for a long time, so perhaps I’ll get to revisit this bizarre little alternate universe and find out what happens next.

This from Cambridgeshire Constabulary: “Unfortunately the Disability Discrimination Act does not apply to eyesight standards. There will be no changes to HOC 25/03.”

That apparently they got from the Home Office. Where the Home Office got it from I have no idea, but it might be somewhere I shouldn’t mention on a family website. It simply doesn’t make any sense, but I guess it’s not worth worrying about it now. Never wanted to do anything more than this, and it’s the one thing I most absolutely emphatically cannot do.

Ain’t life grand?

Well, the last entry I made was the one about the results of my LASIK consultation. One of the reasons I haven’t blogged since then is that I’m trying to avoid descending into pointless self-pity and ‘why oh why’ kind of writing, which obviously doesn’t do anybody any good — especially when it’s me posting it on the Internet for all to see. I’ve been trying to avoid that kind of thinking entirely actually, especially since it doesn’t look like the DDA is going to be useful (although I could join the Army… odd, isn’t it?)

So I’m thinking about doing a PhD again. People will tell me that I’m mad, but I wish they’d tell me something I don’t already know and might actually get some use from. I’m going to wait for a definitive answer on the DDA, and if that’s not positive I’ll seriously investigate doing a PhD, which will give me three years of something else to do before I have to start worrying about what to do with my life again, at which point hopefully some better opportunities will have arisen.

So in the mean time what have I been doing? Well, there’s work of course. I’ve booked two weeks off at the start of November, so if people want to get together to do something around then that’d be great (Matt I’m talking to you in particular), although I’m away in Germany for the middle weekend. I’ve also been playing The Sims 2 quite a lot. I never had the original game, but I’m finding the sequel quite addictive, although it would be nice if the Sims were clever enough not to leave the baby on the kitchen floor when they go to work… also, it’s apparently impossible for them to take out the rubbish and then do something else. If you try and queue up an action for them to do later, they drop the rubbish on the garden path and go and do the new thing, and then have to be told to go and clear it up.

Still, my current family have a daughter who appears to be quite intelligent, and is rapidly acquiring skill points in both creativity and logic. Unfortunately she comes home from school with such a low fun meter that I can’t make her do her homework without letting her spend at least an hour watching TV, playing darts or stargazing. Thankfully the latter provides logic points.

One thing that concerns me is their general lack of money, because the parents seem incapable of getting promoted. Once I figured out that they need to make friends in order to get promoted (as well as having skill points), things got a little clearer, but they’re also apparently inept at making friends. The husband seems to want to spend most of his time cooking, while the wife just wants to have sex with everyone.

Have purchased a fair bit of new music recently. Well, three CDs, but they’re all good so I shall mention each of them.

The first is ‘The Big Session Volume 1′ which is a live session by Oysterband and numerous special guests including June Tabor, Jim Moray and Show of Hands. Very good stuff — lots of variety, a chance to hear artists I don’t usually listen to, and a fantastic sense of immediacy about the whole thing. I just wish I’d been at one of the performances where they did the recording!

One thing worth noting is that Jim Moray’s rendition of ‘The Cuckoo’s Nest’ is quite the rudest variant on that song I’ve ever heard, but it’s also very good. Makes Steeleye Span’s ‘Drink Down The Moon’ seem mild…

The second CD is The Kathryn Tickell Band with ‘Air Dancing’. Kathryn Tickell plays the Northumbrian pipes and the fiddle, and she’s very, very good at both. Her band are similarly talented and the result is a fantastic instrumental CD which is great for writing, and also for playing in the background of City of Heroes, which I’ve also been playing a lot this week (when I’ve not been playing The Sims 2, working or watching Star Wars DVDs).

The third CD is Show of Hands with ‘Country Life’. That’s just good, no more needs to be said. Very good.

Writing… writing’s not gone so well since Friday. I don’t seem to be able to concentrate on it like I need to to write these very difficult bits of the story. Bad timing there I guess… I’ve missed a week of Unfinished History in the Post, I hope I won’t have to miss another one. I want to get it done before November so I can concentrate on NaNoWriMo.

And that, my friends, is more or less the update. Except to mention that I’m now a developer on Growl, which is a Mac OS X notification server, for popping up little windows when people come online and the iTunes song changes. Very clever, very nice to learn Objective-C and Cocoa and how to develop for a really very nice platform. They even gave me Subversion commit access. Make of that what you will.

Well, that was the consultation. Lots of bright lights and eyedrops and strange flashing things.

And the end result is that he doesn’t recommend I have laser surgery. Although my degree of shortsightedness and astigmatism are within the bounds of what he’s treated successfully before, I’ve got quite flat corneas and also rather large pupils, which mean he doesn’t think I’d get satisfactory results. He recommends I continue with my contact lenses, as they’ll give me the best vision of any alternatives available to me.

That just leaves the DDA, but my reading of that is not optimistic. Time to rethink my life, perhaps.