Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was quoted today as saying he did not want to make use of water cannons [as a way of dispersing student tuition fee protesters], as he ‘did not want to engage in an arms race’.
Boris, what do you think they’re going to do? Turn up to protests armed with retaliatory super-soakers?
Won’t somebody please think of the children?
Don’t worry, I’m not about to start espousing the merits of the ConLib government. Today I’d like to talk about change in the monetary sense.
I’ve become mildly obsessed with paying for small items with very specific amounts of change. I’d normally hand over a few pound coins for whatever I was buying and get a fistful of coppers in return. Many people, as in the photo above, collect this useless amount of cash in a jar to eventually be taken to a bank or a lazy money counting machine that charges you a fee to convert it back into usable cash. I too did this and have a heavy tin of coins at home that serves as an excellent paperweight and/or projectile weapon as the situation dictates.
Recently though I’ve been getting rid of my change in a slightly more creative way – I’ve been overpaying. Occasionally you may have been asked by the cashier, when trying to use a £20 note to buy something worth £1.10, if you’ve ‘got the 10p’. The reason being fairly obvious that if you overpay by the 10p you can receive larger denomination of change in return (in this example, a tenner, a fiver, and four pound coins).
I’ve been taking that to the next level by overpaying pretty much every time if I have the coins to do it whether I’m asked to or not. My regular coffee costs £1.73 – a very inconvenient amount – and so on several occasions I’ve handed over £2.23 in payment in order to get a nice shiny 50p back, and suddenly instead of having a load of pennies I didn’t want I’m back to a nice usable silver coin.
Not only does doing this making me feel stupidly clever somehow, I also find myself getting downright annoyed if I don’t have the change to make this possible. I console myself with the knowledge that if I can’t do it this time I’ll definitely have enough coin flexibility so that I can do it next time. The other fringe benefit to this eccentric practice is seeing how many cashiers comprehend what it is you’re trying to do when you give them too much money. Thankfully many deftly ring it into the till and hand back correct change, some almost hand it back before doing a double-take and realising my intent, and others stare at me blankly and say ‘You’ve given me too much money’, prompting me to explain my overpaying logic.
Not for the first time, I think I’m a bit odd.
As I type this my view of Facebook is slowly mutating into pictures of 80s cartoon characters. There’s nothing wrong with that in principle, because I as much as anyone regard 80s kids TV as the pinnacle of creative genius never to be seen again.
But when the 5th or 6th person changed their profile picture, I had to ask, what the hell is going on?
It turns out that a ‘campaign from the NSPCC’ is encouraging people to change their profile pictures between the 4th and 6th of December 2010 to ‘raise awareness’ for the charity.
I have 2 immediate problems with this:
1) This is not an official NSPCC campaign, it wasn’t hard to check.
2) Just how does changing your profile picture to a cartoon character accomplish anything at all?
Now I won’t do down the work of the charity, which, like most charities, is very laudable, necessary, and worthy of support. The NSPCC is however a very large, national charity and it’s not a reach to assume that vast majority are aware of its existence. A campaign which makes you vaguely aware of their continued presence in the world doesn’t seem very worthy. So what is going on?
It’s not hard to work out. Facebook is chock-full of needless ‘groups’ that are the social networking equivalent of the old emails which said ‘FORWARD THIS EMAIL TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW OR A KITTEN WILL DIE’, and similar. Those emails were also annoying, full of inaccurate information (if purporting to be about a real thing) and invariably a waste of time. Such emails, some from 10 years ago, occasionally re-circulate when some impressionable person sends it off to hundreds of people, who then send it on in the same manner, and so on.
Facebook groups are equally pointless. Their sole intent is to get a critical mass of people who ‘Like’ the group, and there are millions of such groups where people state their support of things such as ‘NO TUITION FEES’ or ‘CHARLIE BROOKER FOR PM’ and even ’10 MILLION PEOPLE AGAINST THE NEW FACEBOOK LAYOUT’.
All such groups are meaningless. Very often once they’ve acquired a huge number of people pointlessly ‘Liking’ the group, and thus becoming susceptible to updates from that group in their news feeds, it’ll start sending out massive spamming adverts to those hundreds of thousands of people, and no doubt making a tidy profit in the process. The original intent of the group is long gone, even if it genuinely existed in the first place.
What frustrates me more is the general susceptibility of the average person, who both assumes the initiative is genuine (for no reason other than a charity’s name is attached), and then believes that following the instructions in some way does that charity some good. If you really want to help a charity the best thing you can actually do when you come across some kind of garbled nonsense like this is to donate some money to them. They will find it much more effective than the questionable ‘awareness raising’ your cartoon picture is doing. If you were looking for a way to satisfy your need to feel like you’re doing some selfless good, reaching into your pocket is a great deal more meaningful.
Don’t be a sheep and mindlessly pass these things on. Do a little research, ascertain the credibility of something you’re being asked to repeat, and consider whether it’s actually a worthwhile thing to do. Don’t get caught up in yet another viral hoax that is nothing but self-serving to its creator. Come on people, none of this is even hard.