Ben Nuttall

Blog: A Day In The Life

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Tuesday, 30 March 2010

A Year Of Twitter!

Labels: Twitter

Posted by Ben Nuttall at 20:32

Have You Got Any ID?

I lost my bus pass last week, but fortunately it was handed in to the Stagecoach office so I was able to go and collect it (I must have dropped it while on the bus and it must have got handed in to the driver). I started getting ready to leave the house earlier this afternoon to go to the office to pick it up, when I thought "I wonder if they'll ask me to provide ID to collect it" and amused myself at the thought of being asked for identification to collect my own ID card (the plastic wallet contains a bus pass and a student ID card, both of which must be shown to the driver). I thought they might do, but didn't bother taking any because I thought it would be funny if the situation I had imagined presented itself when I got there.

So I set off and caught the bus (I had to pay, of course) to the bus garage. When I got up to the office, this is how the conversation went:

Me: Hi, I've come to collect my bus pass which has been handed in here.
Receptionist: Ok, do you have any identification?
Me: That's what I've come to collect.
Receptionist: Oh ... well, do you have any other?
Me: I don't think so; that is my identification. (I then looked through my wallet but I had nothing with a photograph)
Reception: Don't you have a driver's license?
Me: No, I don't drive. I get the bus.
Receptionist: Oh...
Me: That is my identification I've come to collect. It has my photo and name on it. You can see it's me.
Receptionist: Erm...
Me: I can show you the email I was sent telling me to come here to collect it, if that helps...
Receptionist: Erm...
Me: The ID card with my bus pass has my name and photo - you can see it's me.
Receptionist: Erm ... can you write down your name?
Me: Yes...
Receptionist: Ok, let me go and ask someone...
(10 minutes later...)
Receptionist: Here it is.
Me: Thank you.

I love it when stuff like this happens, it's so amusing. I love getting in to battles of initiative! Trying desperately to explain how I'm right and there's no way anything could go wrong if they did what I asked. It's the same with getting ID'd for alcohol or using a student card for discount travel fairs.

I had an instance a few years ago while in my first year at sixth form, with a bus driver who wouldn't let me use a student discount weekly travel pass I'd purchased earlier in the week, because he claimed the student ID card I presented wasn't the right sort of student ID card. Basically, he was saying it was supposed to be an NUS student card, but mine was a Connexions student card. I explained that I'd been using the Connexions card for months and it had always been accepted, and that I had already paid for the weekly pass, so it was unfair for him to refuse me if the company had already taken my money. He kept repeating himself that it had to be an NUS card, and I kept coming up with another reason why it made no difference. I said "I am a student. This student ID card proves it. I'm on my way to school now. The student weekly pass is available to students, I've shown you proof that I'm a student, so what's the problem?" and he wouldn't back down. We debated for another ten minutes (seriously) and he even phoned a colleague to check, he still wouldn't back down. I came out with more reasons why he should let me on, and repeated the more important ones I'd already outlined, until he finally said I could get on. He battled for fifteen minutes and just let me on anyway. The whole thing was pointless. I went to see the manager of the bus garage that evening, who told me that the small print said that it had to be an NUS card (although he gave me no reason why other proof of student status was insufficient), to which I said was fair enough, but that it wasn't fair of them to take my money on Monday and refuse me the next day. I ended up having to get an NUS card just in case I got someone like that driver. No-one would ever check but occasionally I'd get one like him (literally about 1 in 50 would check) and whenever I did get him he'd recognise me and, with a smug look, would always say "Can I see your genuine NUS card" and I'd show it to him, to his disappointment. The bastard.

The NUS card is valid only for 1 year, so in the first week of my second year I had to order a new one. The old one was due to expire at the end of the first week, so I had used it to get to school the first day back. We were given the forms to send off for new ones on the first day back; I filled mine out and sent it off straight away, expecting it to take a few days (as it said it would), but it hadn't arrived by the Friday, the day after my old card expired. I got to school fine that day, and went training after school and ended up going for the bus later on in the evening, around 8:00. I thought to myself how it would be typical that this one time I don't have a valid NUS card I would get the driver I had had problems with in my first year - of course, that's who I got. Brilliant. He's the only driver in the company who would thoroughly check the card, looking for any imperfection invalidating it. I flashed it and, of course, he asked to take a closer look. After 30 seconds of examination his heart leapt as he saw it. He must have taken a few seconds to confirm to himself that what he saw was true - it was genuinely invalid. "This card's expired", he said. Fuck. I began to explain that it was valid when I purchased the weekly pass, and that I had already sent off for a new card which should have arrived by then, that I had phoned them up to ask why it hadn't arrived yet and they apologised for the delay, but he was having none of it. I exhausted my arguments and he wasn't backing down. It was game over. I got off and saw that the next bus wasn't for another 40 minutes or so. Of course, the next bus driver didn't check and I got home fine on the next bus.

It's a similar situation when buying alcohol. As I told the receptionist, I don't have a driver's license (not even provisional - I've had the form for over 4 years now but never got round to filling it in) so if I need to show ID anywhere, I have to take my passport, which I only take with me if I know I'm going to need it. When I moved in to the house I live in now, I went to Sainsbury's to buy a few things for the house. Amongst the items in my trolley were a toilet brush, a bread knife, washing up liquid, a washing up bowl, oven gloves, a toilet duck and things like that. There was no alcohol or anything like that in my trolley, so you can imagine my surprise when I was asked for ID. "What for?", I asked the checkout lady. "The knife", she replied. I thought to myself "What knife? ... Oh, the bread knife.", so I said "Well, how old do I need to be to buy a bread knife?" and she said she had to ask anyone who looked under 25, and I had to prove I was over 18. I showed her my student card (that's all the ID I keep in my wallet), but although it has a photograph, it doesn't show my date of birth (why the university produces ID cards with no date of birth is beyond me), so she said it had to be a passport or driver's license. I told her I had neither. Eventually she let me off because she thought I looked old enough, but it made me think - why doesn't initiative come in to it? What the hell sort of under 18 buys a toilet duck!? And well, why is that the rule? Is it to stop young people purchasing items they could use as weapons? If I was a 17 year old trying to buy a knife to kill my friends with, would I really buy a Sainsbury's Basics bread knife!? Come on!

Labels: Miscellaneous

Posted by Ben Nuttall at 18:13

Tuesday, 23 February 2010

ITV Fixers & Absolute Radio

On Sunday morning I was at my computer, surfing the web and doing some programming. I kept an eye on Twitter, noticing that Dave Gorman was tweeting about the radio show he was broadcasting at the time (Absolute Radio). The theme of his show was people's odd routines & rituals; things they do all the time, without questioning. People were texting, emailing and tweeting in saying things like they always put their left sock on before their right, or that they always eat food in a particular order (crisps: large to small; skittles: yellow first; etc.), when they changed the volume on the TV it would have to be even or a multiple of 5, and other things like that. I sent Dave a tweet saying I don't have lucky numbers, but criticise people whose lucky numbers are non-prime..., thinking little of it at the time. A couple of hours later I happened to check my ReTweets (my tweets, retweeted by others) and noticed that several people had retweeted this tweet, none of whom I recognised until I noticed that among the retweeters was none other than Dave Gorman himself, meaning that he must have seen it in his mentions, liked it and retweeted it, then several of his followers must have seen it and retweeted it themselves.

By the time I had seen this it was towards the end of the show so I waited for the show to be made available as a downloadable podcast (similar to iPlayer, et al; watching shows after they were broadcast). I downloaded and listened to it when I got home last night, listening out for my tweet to be read out. Unless I missed it, I don't think Dave actually read it out on air, but at one point one of the co-presenters performed a song about the things people had sent in - and he mentioned it! That part went like this:

I'm normal you know. I'm normal you know.
I sort out my sweets in an orderly row
In case I end up with too many yellows.
I'm perfectly normal, aren't I?
I'm perfectly normal. I'm perfectly normal.
I have to read an old book at bath time.
I don't have a lucky number but if I did it would be prime.
I'm perfectly normal, aren't I?

The podcast can be downloaded from Absolute Radio (21st February).

Now allow me to explain my prime number thing. I don't have any numbers I would consider my 'lucky numbers', partly because I rarely find myself in a situation where I need to pick numbers in such a way, but mostly because I know there's no such thing as luck and cannot stand people's attitude to sticking to their 'lucky numbers', especially when it comes to things like the Lottery (I hate the Lottery and despise people who play it thinking they have a reasonable chance of winning, but I think I'll save that for another blog post). Being a mathematician, the only method I would use to pick numbers where there was no indication of any difference to be seen between them at the point of selection would be to select mathematically interesting numbers. Usually number selection of the nature to which I am referring is between 1 and 10, sometimes 1 and 20, 30 ... 50 or around that area, so you're looking at relatively small numbers (note that seriously interesting numbers are numbers like 33 550 336, 9 814 072 356...) so the even numbers have little appeal as they're common and have many factors or are factors of other regular numbers, which pushes me to go for the primes. Having said that, 6 is a wonderfully interesting number as it is the smallest perfect number (the sum of its factors 1, 2 and 3 is 6), and 2 is the only even prime.

Recently I was contacted by an organisation called ITV Fixers, which is a project to give 16-25 year olds the chance to do something to help others in their area of interest or something they are passionate about. We arranged for the Manchester parkour group to take part in this to launch a project to promote our view of parkour and show people what we do. They filmed us doing some training last week and we shot some interviews, and the week before, Paul & I attended the exclusive launch event (ITV Fixers has been running down South for some time and is just launching in the Northern areas now) where I was introduced to the regional news reporter Tony Morris who asked me to speak about the project during the official launch.

The main show will be shown next week but the preview (meet the fixers) was shown yesterday (watch from 2:18):

EDIT: Something I forgot to mention; Dave Gorman has to be commended for his commitment to replying to people on Twitter. He makes such an effort to reply to people who mention him in tweets, which is a great thing for him to do. If you remember reading on this very blog almost a year ago, I posted explaining what had led me to start using Twitter (Tweet Tweet); it was due to a blog post of Dave's in which he explained the one-way system of connection (as opposed to becoming someone's friend on Facebook, Twitter lets you follow someone to see their tweets without them having to see yours, only whose they decide to follow). He explained then that he always tried to reply to people who sent him tweets, which made up for him not following people back, and still meant that he could use the service the way he wanted (i.e. following only people he wanted to.

I happened to mention Dave in a tweet a couple of weeks ago ('Googlewhack' was trending at the time), without demanding or expecting a reply, but one came. I replied back and so did he again. The next day something else came up and he replied again. This was actually the day before I saw him do standup at Sheffield City Hall, and that night I mentioned him in a tweet saying the show was great and I'd really enjoyed it - he sent one out thanking everyone who'd tweeted about the show, that he was glad they enjoyed it. Then this week he retweeted my prime numbers thing during the radio show, and after I posted a link to this blog post (mentioning him) he replied saying:

Labels: Featured, Internet, Maths, Parkour, Twitter

Posted by Ben Nuttall at 14:34

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