178 The Scunthorpe Problem

I have told you before about the battles I’ve had with the moderators of the comments section of a famous online broadsheet newspaper (click to see).  It has happened again.

Yesterday (April 8th), a story in that newspaper was published, titled: 

Don’t sex up sex scenes using body doubles, say actors

It was a story about actors who were angry that their bodies were sometimes altered digitally to make it appear that they were naked on screen.

In the Comments below the story, I could see that several had been removed or deleted because they had violated the paper’s comments policy.  I suppose that was bound to happen when more than 200 people commented on aspects of nudity on the large screen.

Inevitably, some readers mentioned the newspaper’s moderators and their weird decision making when it came to allowing or deleting comments.

Somewhat off topic, a reader named Alan Jackson wrote, “I triggered the swearing violation when I mentioned a particular football team. Lower league, Yorkshire (south of Hull)."

He was obviously referring to Scunthorpe United - the team from a town that is very well known in the computer world for the refusal of some service providers to accept it because of the issue of the embedded word ‘c_ _ t’.  This is known as The Scunthorpe Problem.

Scunthorpe is also probably unique as a town in being an integral part of a punchline to an old rude joke: If Typhoo put the T in Britain, who put the c _ _ t in Scunthorpe?

Mr Jackson had something wrong, however, because Scunthorpe is in Lincolnshire and not in Yorkshire.   I felt compelled to correct his error but I had a problem.  If I wrote, “Scunthorpe is in Lincolnshire,” it would not, if Mr Jackson is to be believed, be posted.  Instead, I used asterisks thus: S********e is in Lincolnshire.

It never appeared and this morning, I had an email from the newspaper informing me that my comment had been rejected because it violated guidelines.

I rang Customer Services and spoke to a young lady who had huge difficulty understanding my concerns. She didn’t understand why ‘Scunthorpe’ had caused a problem.  Eventually, I spelt out the word to her.  There was a long pause.

“That’s not how you spell whore,” she said.  “There’s a ‘w’ before the ‘h’.”

I tried again: “S……. CUNT……. H   O   R   P   E.  Got it?”

She assured me she had, but eventually, I came to realise that the only part she played in the process of customer complaints was to answer the phone and so I gave up with her and asked to speak to a manager of some kind. 

After some time, I spoke to a man who assured me that he had influence and clout.  I told him of my dissatisfaction and suggested that no actual person had ever really read my comment and that the entire moderation procedure had been done by a computer algorithm.  He vehemently denied that and insisted that a real person had rejected it.

“In that case,” I suggested to him, “That person is as stupid, unsophisticated and unworldly as a computer.”  He disagreed passionately and vociferously.

If he was being truthful, that newspaper and the press, in general, has a serious problem and it needs sorting.

177 How Disappointing

Before reading the first piece that follows, you must know that I have virtually no musical ability.  

I have never thought, even for a moment, about writing a song or any kind of musical composition.

In the early hours of the morning of Tuesday March 23rd, I had a dream.  In that dream, I was with a group of people gathered around a radio.  We were listening to a singer who was singing a song that I had written.  

Everyone was congratulating me and telling me how wonderful it was.  Someone asked how much I had earnt from it.  I had to admit that it was the first song I’d ever written and until that moment, I was completely unaware that anyone had recorded it and so I’d earnt nothing. 

When the song ended, the singer was interviewed, and he told the interviewer that he had come across it by accident and all he knew about the writer was that his initials are TW.

I was woken from the dream by the noise of a police helicopter hovering somewhere close by.  It was 3.35 a.m.  (I haven’t found out why it was there or what it was doing)

I was disappointed to be woken because I had just been told that I was certain to win a Grammy.  I was just as disappointed as the time in 1966 when my roommate in my first year at Durham, splashed cold water on my face just as I was about to set off on a walk along a beach with Brigitte Bardot.

Four hours later, Caroline was in the shower and I was lying in bed drowsily listening to the Today programme on Radio 4. 

I was suddenly wide awake as I heard an item encouraging people to write a song inspired by the Lockdown.

Spooky!

sadness or displeasure caused by the non-fulfilment of one’s expectations or hopes.

That is the dictionary definition of “Disappointment”. 

I think it is a very poor definition.  There is a big difference between the feelings arising from the non-fulfilment of expectations and the non-fulfilment of hopes.

Until December 2020, when the odds against winning with premium bonds went from 1:24500 to 1:34500 (making it 40% less likely to win), I expected to win a minor prize occasionally in the monthly draw.  Every month, I hoped I would win the top prize of a million pounds.

When I didn’t win a minor prize, my expectations came to nothing and I was disappointed but when I didn’t win a million pounds, I never gave it a thought.  I was certainly not disappointed.  There is, I think, a big difference between dashed hopes and unfulfilled expectations.

Caroline was disappointed recently when the item that she had bought, online as a birthday present for me, arrived through the post.

“Oh!  It looked a lot bigger than that in the picture,” she said.  She had expected it would be larger and so she was disappointed.

Caroline had bought the chocolate caramel pralines thinking that when it was empty, the very attractively decorated tin could be used for biscuits or cakes.  

Even though it had cost around £20 (really?), the tin has a diameter of just 12 centimetres with a depth of 3 centimetres and so it could possibly be used to store odd buttons or assorted screws but certainly not cakes.

The landline phone rang the other afternoon.  I was immediately on guard because as far as I can remember, the only calls we’ve had on the landline for the past 6 months have been from scammers. 

Nonetheless, I answered the phone but all I heard was coughing.  After a few seconds, it stopped, and a croaky female voice introduced herself as a representative from Barclays Bank.

“Here we go again,” I thought.  “Another thief who will shortly be asking me to log into ‘TeamViewer’ so that she can share my computer screen to “help me” stop some transaction or other that I haven’t authorised but in fact, what she wants to do is to gain access to my bank accounts.”

Then, I had another thought.  It was the afternoon, not the morning, and she spoke with what seemed to be a genuine English accent.  She sounded English.  

Every scammer who has called me every morning between 8:45 and 11:45 for the past two years or so, almost without fail, has an Indian accent that is so thick as to be almost unintelligible. 

“How do I know you’re from Barclays and not a scammer?” I asked.

“Would you like to call me back on this Barclays’ number?” she replied.

“No, I wouldn’t.  I’ve read about how scammers clone phone numbers to make people think they’re genuine.”

“Why don’t you let me tell you why I’m calling and then you can decide whether you want to talk to me or not?” she said.  

“Go on, then.”

I waited patiently while she had another short coughing fit.  “You paid off your mortgage in April last year and because of a mistake on our part, you are owed money.”

“How much?”

“I can’t tell you that until we’ve been through security but….,” she coughed again, “it’s not a negligible amount.”

I quickly supplied her with my address, postcode, date of birth, memorable word, hat size, mother’s maiden name, the name of my first school, inside leg measurement, my first car and the name of my first pet.

“Okay,” she said, “You’ve been overpaying every month between April 2003 and March 2020 and as a….,” she started coughing again.  “Sorry about that,” she croaked, eventually.  “I’ve got a tickle in my throat.” 

“As a result of overpaying every month for two hundred and twelve months, you are owed a total of thirty….”  This time her coughing fit lasted longer.

My mind was racing.  “It’s been building up over seventeen years and so it must be a lot.  Thirty what?  Thirty thousand?  Thirty-nine thousand?  It’s got to be more than a thousand as she would never say, ‘thirty hundred.’  What are we going to do with a windfall that size?” 

At last, she regained control and her composure.  

“Where was I?  Oh yes.  As a result of overpayments, you are owed thirty-one pounds and thirty-four pence.”

Now, that was really disappointing.  I was expecting, not just hoping, for a lot more and despite what the lady from Barclays told me, it is a relatively negligible amount.  

An overpayment of what amounts to less than fifteen pence a month is, by any measure, insignificant.

On the bright side, we did win £25 in the March Premium Bonds Draw but in case you’re wondering, we didn’t win the million.