PhobosAnomaly

On the topic of sharpeners, those battery powered pressure sharpeners are satisfying as fuck. They’re shit and invariably snap the nib, but they’re the sharpening equivalent of shoving a Q-tip in your ear and having a good rake about.

Or if you’re all about the procrastination, spending a few minutes every lesson at the classroom sharpener like this one brings back the nostalgia:

Every day’s a school day.

In fairness, it’s nothing short of sheer voodoo what they managed to do with the simple copper loop. As usual though, it was the rural communities that felt the pinch (and the gains) more than most though.

The chances of it being the filter were stupidly low, and I don’t think I ever had a case of the filter being at fault - but it was one of those potential issues that would make a customer look stupid (and £120 lighter) if BT tipped up and declared it a customer equipment fault.

In newer homes (at the time), there were NTE faceplates that had a filter built it, with individual ports for telephone and for data telephony cables. They didn’t last long though. Maybe they were stupidly expensive in comparison, maybe BT could see the fibre future and stopped producing them.

When I did tech support for a UK telecoms firm, that was the easy way to fuck off an awkward customer with any kind of connectivity problem - stability, speed, whatever. Generally, people’s routers were connected to the same NTE as the landline.

“So what we’re going to do, is replace the ADSL filter, see if it’s a gubbed filter, it’s a nice cheap and easy fix. Can you remove the filter from the wall socket please?”

click

Beautiful.

I was talking to my primary-school age kids about their teachers, and one of them says their next teacher will be Mr Smith.

“He’s old,” they said, “he must be at least fifty”.

I said “nah man. Mr Smith is probably only a few years older than me, early forties I reckon”.

They had me with “no he’s like really old. He reads a newspaper”

I miss those toolbars. Static, everything in it’s place, easy to remember.

These dynamic “ribbons” do my head in. Thankfully, I only really have to use Office in… well, the office.