99th Post Spectacular

Hello. Yes, I'm still alive.

I've had a terrible month for everything fucking up, hence why I've not been here.

The first thing, and the main reason I've not been around, is that I've had no internet. This is due to a breakdown of trust. My sister-in-law decided to make hundreds of calls to mobiles from my landline, despite us telling her that she wasn't allowed to. As a result, we were stung with a bill of £300. Ouch.

To compound matters, Sky, bless 'em, erroneously cancelled our services entirely, despite knowing the situation and promising that "your services absolutely, definitely will not be erroneously cancelled by our crack team of ignorami". So, we cleared the bill, and waited a couple of weeks for Murdoch's goon squad to replace the hamster and the elastic band and get our internet and landline back on. What a pack of cunts.

Not only that... not only that... but, as I said in the last post (over a month ago now), my PS3 died. Yep, the yellow light of death decided to happen my way. For those of you not familiar with the yellow light of death, let me explain. It's the PS3's equivalent of the Xbox 360's red ring of death, only much worse, because IT'S MY FUCKING PLAYSTATION 3. I paid Sony £131 to get a replacement. "Don't you want to upgrade to a 160GB model?" they asked. "No, because I won't be able to play PS2 games on the model you're offering, so it isn't much of an 'upgrade', is it?" I replied. I bought the PS3 on launch day for £425, and it lasted 3 and a  half years. Normally, I'd balk at the thought of paying £131 for something I've already got, but it's such a centrepiece of my life I did it without hesitation. Of course, as with everything else, something went wrong. The peon from Sony took my card payment over the phone. I asked if it would be an immediate payment. "Yes, definitely," I was told. 5 days later, following some direct debits going out, so did my "immediate" card payment, leaving me overdrawn. It happened during a busy working week, so I didn't have time to constantly check my bank; I had to take Sony's work experience kid's word for it. It's my own fault for having such a trusting fucking nature.

So, anyway, it's all back in place now. And here we are, the 99th post on Dystopian Fuchsia. Blimey.

Not much to report, really. I'll be doing a much bigger and interesting post for the anniversary post this weekend. In the meantime, I thought I'd share this with you. In my job, I take calls at a customer service level for a major mobile phone network. Now, I use the phonetic alphabet to get through the most sibilant of letters (where the letter f sounds like the letter s and so on), but as I have to get the customer to quote their mobile phone number, what can I turn to if there's a bad line, or the customer can't quite master the gift of spoken language? One woman has provided me with the answer. Unable to decipher whether the woman was saying "2" or "3", due to a poor line, I asked her to repeat. She said "3, as in '3 dogs'". 

Does that make any fucking sense to you? If so, what do you think the phonetoalphanumeric phrase-o-bet should consist of, based on what that genius has started?

Oh, one other thing, if I'm allowed to brag a little. In June, SFX magazine ran a competition on Twitter to come up with a description of the Eleventh Doctor, in the style of Terrance Dicks in his Target novelisations from the '70s and '80s (eg "crotchety old man in a frock coat" for the First Doctor, "baggy check trousers and a mop of untidy black hair" for the Second Doctor, and "slight, fair-haired figure with a pleasant, open face" for the Fifth Doctor). Because of Twitter's 140 character limit, plus the fact you had to add "@SFXmagazine" and "#SFXWHO" meant that you were limited to 119 characters. Anyway, I won. Yay.

This is it:

“A slim mismatched jigsaw of a man, paintbrush hair atop a young face with ancient eyes, an enigma wrapped in a bow tie."

My description was chosen by Terrance Dicks himself (making "a wheezing, groaning sound" as he chose it - Doctor Who fan joke, there), and will feature in a forthcoming Eleventh Doctor novel. Plus I win some books. Now the next thing to do is to get my own novels published. Fingers crossed, eh?

Click here for the original competition, and click here for the results article.

Right, I'm off. The 100th Post Spectacular is on its way...