Ant go bye-bye!

In all my blabbering on about stuff, I forgot to mention that I'm off to Nam for the long weekend (alright, alright - Nam', not 'nam, but it just sounds more exciting). The Gilb and I are doing Windhoek and Swakopmund, with one of our flights paid by Voyager credits - thanks to my excessive credit card use. I picked up my new credit card this morning, so there'll be plenty further abuse from tonight onwards.

Oh, and on another point - I laughed when I saw Peas's post about road rage, I came into the office yesterday unbelievably tense after 4 jerk's maneouvres in the morning traffic jam. It occurred to me that a lot of the bastards pulling these rude road moves are probably the sickeningly 'chivalrous' types who insist they always open a door for women (or stand up when a woman enters the room etc), but have absolutely no problem cutting a woman off in the traffic. "So long as she's in a car, she's weaker than me in my car, and I'm going to cut her off" type of thing. Because it's always men who do it, I've very seldom come across women who do. But let me stop there, because I can feel my rage from yesterday returning.

Happy long weekend y'all, I'm only back in the 'burg (and not the burg') on Wednesday!

Pillow Talk

Smooch smooch smooch smooch smooch…
Ant: How come we don’t French kiss anymore unless we’re having sex?
Gilb: What?
Ant: Kiss me. Properly.
Gilb: “ ”
Ant: What’s wrong?
Gilb: It’s just that… you’re a bit forcef...
Ant: WHAT?!? We’re 4 years and 8 months into our relationship, and you’re telling me NOW that I’m too forceful???
Gilb: I’ve told you before… not in so many words…
Ant: I can’t BELIEVE you’re telling me I’m a bad lay only now!
Gilb: That’s not what I said, liefie. You’re a great lay –
Ant: Bollocks! That’s what you implied!
Gilb: Don’t be stupid. You’re over-reacting. You just need to me more gentle.
Ant: *sulk sulk sulk* [deftly shoves tongue halfway down Gilb’s windpipe.] I’ll show you forceful!

Anyhow, after that astounding revelation last weekend, can you blame me for not kissing him unselfconsciously during two sex sessions? I just meekly held my mouth there and let him do all the probing work. It’s going to take a while to get over this. Or, a lot of alcohol, or drugs. I never had myself figured for anything less than a fantastic smoocher, and this has really thrown me. I’d ask for some good Samaritan’s assistance in practising, but then I couldn’t be held liable if they suffocated during the exercise.

And on another bed-related note, I’m alarmed that Gilb’s and my sleeping positions could suggest we’re distant and uncaring. Our view on the matter is, cuddle for a few minutes (largely my pinning him down and smothering him with kisses (not of the French kind, in case you’re concerned)), then move as far away from each other as possible, so that it almost feels as though there’s no-one sleeping in the bed with you. When we first started sharing a bed, we had to use separate duvets so we couldn’t sense each other moving about during our sleep, but we’ve now progressed to the stage where we can sleep reasonably comfortably in each other’s presence, so long as we’re not touching.

But the other day my colleague told me about how she and her fiancée are always wrapped around each other like entwined vines (they even have ‘positions’ for optimum entwinement depending on each’s movements during sleep). And then, my other colleague agreed with her: that they just sleep better knowing their other halves are there, protected by their embraces. And then, I saw something in Gilb’s Men’s Health, alluding to the same thing, and also describing and illustrating sleep positions for a couple, depending on whether each is a stomach/back/foetal sleeper. Are we crazy, or is everyone out there crazy? How do you sleep, couples (or one-night stands) of the world? Tell me!

The good, the bad, the concerning and the downright freaky

Good news first: got a call from the credit card division of my bank, my card’s arrived (now if only I could find the time during their inconveniently short hours to go collect it!)

And the overwhelmingly bad news: I got a call from SARS. Has the mere word induced a cold sweat in you? Now, I’ve never had any trouble with the folk (in fact, no dealings either – all forms are deftly handled by my Dad’s tax dude) so when the lady announced herself as one of Satan’s henchmen, I suspected nothing amiss. Until she stated that I am a creditor of the State, to the tune of a hefty R17,700. I start telling her how bloody ridiculous that claim is, the tax comes straight off my salary, I never get any rebates back, I have no allowances for petrol or telephones, so there must be something seriously wrong with their forms and/calculators and/or brains. She advises me to “go to the Germiston branch to sort it out.” I instead call my Dad’s tax dude who only just received my assessment form (or whatever the damn thing’s called) last week, and he does a quick calculation and unfortunately takes the devil’s side. Although it’s not finitely concluded yet, it appears my employer has been deducting too little tax from my salary each month, and a whopping 5-digit figure has been raked up as a result. Which also means I’m going to be paying a potentially far heftier fine for tax year 2007, too. Strangely, it’s just me from my company that’s been affected. Sigh…

Downright freaky: unwillingly, the Gilb and I attended a charity ball in the Poenda on Friday night – when a friend’s organising a ‘do’ for a cause, it’s kind of hard to say ‘fuck off’ – but this, of course, is nothing like the balls Joburgers are accustomed to. For starters, tickets were R200 each (I’m thinking, how are they going to make any money for the cause after expenses are deducted?). Then, they have a magician as entertainment. A 70-year old endearing man, who at the beginning of the evening, while trying to climb onto the stage, falls back and concusses himself while inflicting a deep blood-spurting gash into his noggin on a table top. Minor pandemonium ensues, the guy is aroused and a serviette pressed to his wound to stem the blood flow, and the MC announces: “Ladies and gentlemen, there has been a minor setback to the entertainment. While we’re trying to stop Alfred’s head from bleeding, please go and help yourselves to food in the entrance hall.” Unsurprisingly, there is no sudden stampede for the pap queue. But the weirdness does not end there. Further entertainment followed in the form of fire dancers (bloody hell it’s a ball, not the hippie hall at Woodstock) and a freaky teenage dj who looked like a cross between Alex Jay (and every bit as old as Alex Jay) and that Swiss genetic aberration, DJ Bobo (if you don’t know, don’t ask). He also used a tambourine to some of the music, and commanded about half of the dancefloor’s space doing his Ricky Martin / Michael Jackson / primary schoolgirl’s modern dance class routine. One of Gilb’s friends leaned across to me and said with dazed admiration: “Wow, look how well Manny dances, don’t you think he’s amazing?” What on earth do you reply to that??? Despite the otherworldliness of it all, I enjoyed the sokkie-ing – for a change Gilb and I didn’t have an outright fight about who leads and who follows, I sort of managed to read his half-baked lead, and neither of us suffered a stray elbow in the eye socket (quite a feat, given the way a good sokkie lends itself to having them flailing about at high speed).

The concerning: I guess we all subconsciously know, but deny it (unless you have worked as a waiter before – a torture I’ve happily never had to endure) because it makes our lives easier and our meals more palatable… last night, while having jam jars with Jen-Jen at Primi in Rivonia, the waiters were packing up for the night and had shamelessly brought out large plastic containers, into which they were scraping each of the contents of all the little chopped garlic and chilli saucers they hand out at each table. I can only pray that no-one is as childish as I used to be in high-school, mixing sugar or tomato sauce or saliva into the little sauce bowls. Aaaaaaaargh!

Our shit don’t stink

Oh the satisfaction of it all! It may be a mere R75 saving, but the mere ego factor of my victory is worth far more…

You see, I have a credit card with one of SA’s major banks, the bloody thing is less than a year old (you know how they send you a new card every 2 years?) and has some mysterious large credit limit which I will discover shortly when my statement is sent to me for last month (yip, I maxed it, thankfully mostly on company-related expenses that will be reimbursed).

Anyhow, the thing should not cease to read when swiped through retailers’ machines unless some major damage (and I don’t mean the financial kind) is inflicted on it, but mine has given up the ghost. After weeks of frustration (including a non-reading incident that delayed me for 45 minutes at the airport on the Friday evening of the Blog Awards, causing me to miss the announcement of Peas’ award, courtesy of an exorbitant parking bill I had no cash on me to settle) I called the customer ‘care’ line, to enquire about the procedure to replace my damaged card. All goes fine until right at the last step, when it dawns on me to ask whether there is any charge for the new card (because they train their sly consultants not to inform you of the fees they will automatically deduct from your account sans your permission), and it turns out there is indeed a charge – R75. I tell the consultant that is preposterous and that I will shop around for a new credit card, and that I will lay a complaint against the company, which I pursued immediately as promised.

I send an email informing them:

It is utterly incomprehensible that in the increasingly competitive environment of credit provision, you dare to suggest I should pay a R75 fee for a new card that has been damaged through no fault of my own, except perhaps overuse (which is to your advantage, anyway). My FNB debit card which is far older, and from a seemingly more reliable manufacturer, has never failed me, and I am increasingly using it to charge large expenses that my [insert name of offending bank here] credit card won’t read.

As I type this, I am already visiting the websites of competing products – do you know that one of your major competitors only charges R25 for the replacement of a damaged card? I’m certain the new-age affinity group credit cards charge nothing, along with their drastically reduced annual management fees, which appears to me to be a far more attractive proposition than that offered to me by your institution.

In the next few days I will have selected a new credit card product, and you will have lost another customer. I expect to write you yet another complaint when I realize that you will have charged me my full annual management fee of R150 for my card, even though at that point I will have used it for only 4 months of the year, but that is a battle I will fight when I come to it.

Yours sincerely

Angry Ant

To my amazement, I got a response within 3 hours, and the obsequious consultant managed to calm me down to the point that I agreed to stay with the bank if they gave me a free replacement card (lucky for them – my colleague tells me she has information that they’re bleeding credit card customers like hell at present) – which she promised will be available by next Monday at the latest. I wait in anticipation.

And in a little unrelated (as always) anecdote, Gilb’s friend told me a truly cringe-worthy story: he went to the Easter Oppikoppi festival, where the open-air male and female ablution blocks are separated by a mere wall. From the male shower stalls, the men could hear two girls going about their business (number 2’s, apparently plainly audible) in the toilets on the other side of the wall – this will be a hazard of going to the festival, but it’s to be expected, I guess. Anyhow, the one girl finished her business earlier than her friend, and she gets impatient with her and says (again, very clearly audible to the showering men): “knyp hom af, man, ons moet gaan!” (for the Engelse out there, this translates to “pinch it off, we must go!”). Sorry to dispel the myths about girls not pooing, guys, but at least ours do smell like roses :)

The best way to terrorise your boyfriend…

… is to start singing the chorus from Natasha Bedingfield’s lastest offering “I wanna have your babies” absent-mindedly in front of him.

Like so:

All you hear is Uh uh uh uh uh uh
Gonna button my lips so the truth don't slip
Uh uh uh uh uh uh
Gotta beep out what I really wanna shout
Whoops! Did I say it out loud?
Did you find out?
I wanna have your babies
Get serious like crazy
I wanna have your babies
I see 'em springing up like daisies

For the male readers – if you’re like most men involved in a fairly long-term relationship right now and have not yet had children, I’ve probably just induced the following reactions in you: your heart is beating a little faster; your palms are sweaty; you’re mentally calculating the last time you had sex vs the last time she had her period; you’ve just opened up another Explorer tab and are frantically scrolling through the Google results for “fastest route to Lima”.

Note: I am neither currently broody nor pregnant, but may well be either in the next few years – the above behaviour is purely for comic relief – the power of the spoken (or in this case, written) word, eh?

I happen to think Natasha Bedingfield is one of the kookier singers out there, I’d never write a song on this topic for mass consumption if I were in her shoes – but then, maybe that’s another reason I’m not a millionaire recording artist. Does she – or did she until one sudden moment a few weeks ago when her song was released – even have a boyfriend?

And on an entirely different topic, it dawned on me yesterday while mulling over the lastest Mail & Guardian that pretty much the most embarrassing confirmations of one’s incompetence in the workplace one could ever receive is this: you’re the CEO of a prominent company listed on the JSE, the moment your resignation is publicly announced your company’s share price increases! Shudder… spare a thought for poor mortified Papi Molotsane, recently-resigned CEO of Telkom, whose plans for departure resulted in a 4% increase in the Telkom share price.

Back to basics

Forgive my arbitrary topic of algebra in today’s post, but I simply couldn’t resist. Back in my student days when I’d do anything for money, tutoring Maths / Science was my staple in the income-earning department, and many times students asked “but why do you solve it like that?” and the answer often had to be “I’ll think about the explanation and come back to you next week.” Because sometimes it’s bloody hard to explain why someone else’s logic is wrong.

And then, last week, in the course of an ordinary work day, a bit of a mathematical row broke out (as it so often does).

Our office manager V has started hosting big dj parties as an additional income earner, together with 4 friends. The 5 of them organize the venue, arrange the dj lineup, the free cocktails and snacks, and market the event to the general public. The venue owner calculates the profit of the party, takes 20% of it, while the remaining 80% gets shared among the 5 organisers.

One of V’s friends (N) called her last week to say that he’d been through the accounts, and had discovered the venue owner had been cheating them. “No he hasn’t! I checked the accounts myself!” V exclaimed. “Oh yes he has! He’s taking more than 20% of the profit!” Now, N is a lawyer – for a big, renowned firm – working in the corporate realm, and it seems he often has to work out VAT amounts for things. His take on the split of profits was as follows:

R18,800 was the total profit of the party (correct)
This should be split into two sums: 20% for the venue and 80% for the 5 organisers (correct)
80% of R18,800 = R15,667 (what the f%#&%*?????)

To which V responded that 20% of R18,800 (calculated by typing ’18,800 – 20%’ on her calculator, or equivalently ‘0.8*18,800) was equal to R15,040.

I overheard their argument on the phone and could not resist the urge to join the battle.

N’s reasoning was that when you calculate a VAT amount for a number, you use the following calculation – for argument’s sake, the number is 100: (100*114)/100 (us normal folk would’ve just said 100*1.14, but hey). The answer to this sum is 114. Now, if you have a number 114, and want to remove the VAT from it, you use the equation (114*100)/114 (again, I’d simply have said 114/1.14, but us simple folk don’t know the fancy equations lawyers do, it seems). So N proposed to do the same thing with the amount of R18,800:

80% of R18,800 is the same as removing 20% of R18,800, i.e. (18,800*100)/120 = R15,667.

The argument went back and forth about how you calculate percentages (at this point we’d moved to Google Talk), and he kept pulling out the argument that if you remove x% from a number y, then try to add x% back to the new number, the answer never gives you y again. [Yes, N, but what the hell does that have to do with this? We’re not working with VAT!]

Our Google chat went something like this:

N: I can’t believe your firm of supposedly smart people does not know how to work out a basic percentage!!!
Ant: I can’t believe you work with financial aspects of companies and can’t do basic arithmetic!
N: Any moment now, you’re going to realize you’re wrong and humiliate yourself!
Ant: Do me a favour – please please PLEASE go and ask your manager to help you with this calculation!
Ant [again, typing furiously]: But be sure you have another job lined up first, he’s gonna kick your ass out of there for your stupidity!
N: Fine, I will! You should ask yours too!
…

Of course, he came back a few minutes later, humbly apologising because he’d “got confused and was working from an interest-based perspective” (what’s that? Do you even know, N?) to which one of our colleagues told us we should ask whether he’d considered nominal vs real terms in his calculation!

That night, I spent some time thinking how to explain why he was wrong, and this is the reasoning: the formula he used to remove 20% is wrong, because that is a formula used to remove a percentage when that same percentage has before been added to a number. In this instance, the base number, R18,800, has not had any percentage added to it initially, so you can’t ‘remove’ anything from it using his VAT equation. In algebraic terms, let’s assume that R18,800 = x.

From his formula to remove 20%: (x x 100)/120 = x/1.2 = 0.83x (which is why he’d thought they’d been cheated by the owner, who had given them only 0.8x instead of what N had calculated).

Anyway, it allowed me to sleep better that night – I hope this has the same effect on you.

Puppy love

The outcome of the session my folks had with the dog psychologist last week, is an adorable chocolate-brown labrador.

The animal expert came over to their house, marched around the lawn with the troublesome alsatian Frodo, and declared the following:

1. He (Frodo, that is) is frustrated by the fact that he can hear traffic from the street, but cannot see the source of the noise. Solution: Frodo needs daily 20-minute walks on the street.

2. Frodo was in fact abused by his former owners, although not to a sufficient extent that ‘turned’ his personality – he is still a loving, trusting puppy desperately seeking affection and care from a new family.

3. Frodo hates the gardener a lot. But this does not take a dog whisperer to figure out – all our dogs have hated the gardener, he’s not the most affable personality around.

4. Frodo needs a playmate (again, no genius required to figure that one out). Not just any playmate, mind you. Female, young, and to match his temperament, it had to be a labrador. A suitably adorable one was sourced in Bloemfontein and transported up to Joburg, and is now living at my folks’ house. Mom is insisting she be named ‘Amber’ (gag), while Dad is arguing for the better name, ‘Roma’. Knowing that Mom is likely to win this battle, I’m very much in favour of the dog dude being brought back to ask the puppy what she’d prefer her name to be.

And in other ‘news’ (really scraping through the barrel of events here), the Easter weekend was wonderful. But really, really uneventful. Friday was spent on a delightful acquisitive spree (happily not by me, all the Gilb’s expenditure) – it’s amazing how much influence you can have on a shopping partner when you’re renowned in your circle as a fashion guru. The Gilb succumbed to buying long pants (shock, horror) – and not just any long pants, three pairs of pants that actually define his shapely legs – and collared shirts. Friday evening was spent at a braai (followed by vehement denial of any meat-eating to my parents and the Malawian priest who’s staying over at their house); Saturday was spent doing a good deal of fuck-all bar two hours spent washing my beloved Ant; Sunday was devoted to a gorge-fest breakfast with my folks, followed by dope and bubbly with Peas at the Emmarentia Dam rose garden, followed by a crap-in-your-pants-terrifying movie (The Exorcism of Emily Rose – not the best choice for paranoid stoned lasses), followed by dindins with the Gilb’s folks; Monday was spent traipsing around at the Pretoria Zoo and kicking ass at tenpin bowling.


Happy 4-day week y'all! Yet again, I'm off to Cape Town today.

Facebook: Passing fad or here to stay?

What with the manic craze sweeping the world right now (and stealing further work hours from our weekdays, as though blogging wasn’t enough of a distraction), Peas and I had a mini discussion on the issue of Facebook’s longevity, and are unresolved on the issue.

But before I get into reasons why / why not this craze might survive longer than the average Hollywood marriage, let me give you a brief history of its origins…

Young computer programming whiz, Mark Zuckerberg (born in 1984), has other acclaimed software projects behind his name – most notably a media player that learns your taste in music based on your previous song choice behaviour, and then designs playlists to suit you.

Facebook was born out of a combination of a number of his previous programs, including the following: Facemash, which uploaded two Harvard students’ photos onto the Internet, for viewers to vote who was hottest (he got into a lot of trouble for that); and Coursematch, which allowed Harvard students to see which other Harvard students had enrolled for their courses.

Facebook was released at Harvard in February 2004 and by mid-year had reached membership across the country of 150,000, through participation of Ivy League university students.

Zuckerberg (due to graduate in 2006) left Harvard in that year to run the website full-time, as revenues from advertising grew along with membership (then released outside of the elite university network). According to Wikipedia, membership today stands at over 17 million.

My computer-expert friend tells me this project is most certainly not the first of its kind – since 1995 the concept has been attempted to be plied in the mainstream, but never before has there been a critical mass of socially-bent Internet users to support these, hence Facebook’s success.

Right, that’s the history out the way. Onto the burning question: but will it last? I guess the answer to that lies in its perceived value, or lack thereof (and I must defend myself from any in-depth criticism of my comments here, I am a self-confessed Luddite, streets behind many of you in IT savvy).

A few months back, the whole LinkedIn networking craze hit us, and I’m told that serious networkers, particularly in the IT industry, use the utility quite religiously. I for one, have not looked back at my profile since the last time anyone new linked into it all those months ago.

A few other explosively popular social internet… activities (for want of a better term – maybe programmes? Help!) have emerged in the past few years – myspace (which incidentally I still don’t get), YouTube, and our own dear blogging addictions. All seem to have some form of staying power – at least judging by the fact that they don’t appear to be heading south anytime soon.

So why my skepticism of Facebook? In its defence, it’s a great way to hook up with lost souls from lives past, and a fun way to play the Kevin Bacon game. But beyond that, I’m not sure how much more value it holds. Sure, you’ll spend 1 obsessive week trying to amass a group of friends big enough to ascertain your alpha status in the social empire, but then what? You won’t use it to communicate regularly with close friends, will you? That’s what phonecalls, emails, SMSes are for. You might use it to communicate with long-lost friends strewn across the globe, but if you start communicating with them regularly, won’t it just be easier to get their email addresses and write to them that way, instead of having to log into Facebook (a painfully slow procedure, I find) every time you get email notification that someone has written on your wall/poked you/sent you a message? Also, you have your blogs, and one of the major reasons I started mine was so that friends overseas could follow my day-to-day life if they felt the burning need to do so.

Clearly I’m wrong – everyone I’ve spoken to disagrees with my view wholeheartedly. Will someone please explain what I’m missing?

I will acknowledge that it’s probably a fantastic tool for marketing – I’d imagine you can get very targeted advertising, perhaps you can advertise only to members of specific groups. G sent me an interesting article discussing MySpace’s US presidential primary election to be held in January next year (with membership supposedly high enough to have MySpace counted as the 11th largest country – although double-counting is likely as members can have more than one MySpace page). The article goes on to list the popularity of the candidates’ own MySpace pages – take the time to read through the readers’ comments on the article, especially those of representative this sample population is of the voting population. Anyhow, the author’s comment mentions the value Facebook would have over MySpace in holding this primary: Facebook’s user base is considered to be of higher quality, as accounts are tied to email addresses or cell phone numbers, and this identity check means duplicate profiles are far less likely, and US-based citizens can be far more easily identified (as the only participants in the election, the vote of global users is a largely irrelevant indicator of the election outcome)… A useful side use of the program, perhaps, but I assume not its creator’s primary intention.

Parents. Go figure.

They’ve been acting a bit weird this year, that’s for sure. For starters, my family has always been a good Italian example of the ‘communication through screaming’ school. But, to my utter horror, every time I’ve been over for dinner this year (admittedly on very few and far between occasions) we’ve not been fighting in our usual way. It’s a displeasingly enjoyable get-along-gang type of event that quite frankly leaves my gagging. I’m really not a fan of affectionate family behaviour – it simply has to be yelling and wild gesticulating and name-calling, which is how nature intended blood relatives to interact. So what the hell has gone wrong?

[A brief aside: my Father had me laughing and my sister sulking last night. My sister often goes over for dinner, and generally is much closer to them than I am. She tends to blag a lot of free food/household equipment off them, given that her salary’s not much is comparison with mine. Anyway, in honour of my infrequent dinner visits to the fandamily, my father always goes out of his way to prepare a lavish feast. My sister moaned at him and asked why he goes to so much effort for me and none for her, when she clearly cares a lot more for them than I do, judging by the frequency of our respective visits. To which his response was: “But sweetie, have you not heard the parable about the prodigal son?!”]

Anyhow, sickly sweet family visits aside, there is further evidence of parental weirdness. My father, the stereotypical fat Italian man (for whom his company’s logo was redesigned from a skinny guy to look more like a fat Italian guy. No, seriously) has mysteriously given in to our years of nagging (read: screaming, gesticulating) about losing weight. He might not be doing it entirely au naturelle, relying on appetite suppressants to curb his relentless appetite, but he’s at least making it to the gym thrice a week, which is a lot more than can be said of me right now. He now tends to eat less than I do (granted, I have a disturbingly healthy appetite myself) or either my sister or mom do (and those two eat like scrawny pigeons). Which is a mind-warp of obese proportions.

But the real cherry on top came in a revelation last night that my folks, the walk-the-straight-and-narrow skeptical kind, are taking their new puppy to a dog psychologist. They recently got him from the SPCA, and have had trouble training him. He chews up the garden more efficiently than a mole colony could do, and has no problem chewing through the (ridiculously expensive) electric cables of the (ridiculously naff) garden light extravaganza my parents had installed a few years ago. (I would honestly do the same if my new owners had rechristened me ‘Frodo’. But I guess this is better than some of their other pet names of the past: Pashmina, Zorro, Candy). My mom explained in a totally serious voice, that this dude is an expert who talks regularly on 702 weekend shows about dogs and their feelings, and communicating with them. Now, I’m not about to dispute the fact that animals do have their own personalities, but somehow my parents falling for the “let’s talk to our dog and try get to the bottom of his social disorder” scene doesn’t gel. And I bet there won’t be any of the traditional screaming and gesticulating either. Barf/woof.