Tips from Idea15 Web Design

I went networking last night.  Overall I enjoy networking.  What I don’t enjoy is something I have to deal with pretty much every day of my life:

“So where is the accent from?”

I realise people are just trying to be polite and make good conversation, but does it not occur to them how much it drives me up the wall to be be placed into the same conversation every time I open my mouth?  At an event like last night, I end up answering the same cursed round of questions (so where is the accent from, so what brought you here, so how long have you been here, so do you like it here?) about 15 times.  On a good day, it’s annoying.  On a bad day, it makes me feel like what I came to call the “foreigner freakshow”, where people are only interested in hearing cutesy human interest stories out of someone from that place they see on TV.

Everyone – from networkers, to doctors, to the lassies behind the till, to waiters, to bankers, to strangers on buses – wants to run through the same questions with me.  Every day.  Multiply that by 365 days a year times seven years, and it’s small wonder I’m ready to scream.  It’s also why I generally avoid taking taxis.  If I don’t run through the same tired round of questions – which make it clear that I’m now a local – the driver assumes I’m a tourist and tries to charge me £35 for a three mile trip.  Ye cannae win!

I wish people would understand that I don’t hear my accent, nor do I hear other people’s accents.  I only hear words.  I was quite self-conscious about my accent when I first moved to the UK, and realised very quickly that it was a quick route to complete emotional paralysis.  So I stopped caring about my accent, and remarkably, so did many in return.  But I forget that other people only hear the intonations and nationality, and not the words and context.  People can’t of course see with their eyes that I’m now a naturalised British citizen.  Legally and emotionally, I have more in common with them now than I do with friends in the US, and I can’t help but wish that people I meet here would approach me from the starting point of what we have in common rather than what makes us different.

The irony, of course,  is I don’t have either an American or a Scottish accent now.  My accent is hovering somewhere over the Titanic.  After years of complete immersion in Glasgow, I don’t sound remotely American, and Americans don’t sound at all like me.  But I’m miles away from sounding Glaswegian or Scottish.  It’s not something I do on purpose, it’s simply the natural progression that all languages take (as my former boss in Washington will tell you with a 56-slide power point presentation).  I sound like me, basically.  I can’t be categorised.  And if you want to really annoy someone in the UK, be someone who can’t be categorised and ranked into a tiny little box on the spot.  It’s waving a red flag to a bull.  So the questions will continue every day.

In my business, I won’t work with people who are seeking to make an issue out of my nationality and accent, positive or negative.  Another experience learned the hard way.  After my disastrous role in the public sector came to a quick close, I learned from a company mole that – as I’d suspected – the only reason I’d been hired was because the managing director thought I would be the “token American” in the company, chirping feelgood enthusiasm and that sort of pish that aligned with his touchy-feely-huggy way of thinking.  My skills, expertise, and talents meant less in his mind than the qualities he assumed I toted around in my genetic makeup.  It was devastating and yet so obvious.  When you get a job, you assume you have been hired because you are the best person for the task, not because someone else expects you to fulfil their ill-informed national stereotype.   I learned I had to take steps to protect myself from wasting any more of my best efforts on someone else’s twee “tokenism”.  So after that experience, I decided to make my nationality a non-issue.  I just wish, when I’m trying to talk about what I have to offer and only receive tedious trivia questions in return, others would do the same.

</kvetch> or </whinge>, depending.

This is what happens when you don’t include commas in your written copy.

Between us, my husband and I have seen Simple Minds perform over 50 times in six countries, and own a library of concert recordings dating back to their punk rock club days in 1978.  So it’s fair to say we’re authorities on the subject.  And before last night’s concert on the esplanade at Edinburgh Castle was even over, hubby and I were in firm agreement that it was the most dreadful show we’d seen in years, and the worst Simple Minds gig we’d ever attended.

Note rain ponchos and cascading ennui

Most of us know that Jim has slowly changed from singing the songs live to crooning them, making up new lyrics, forgetting them altogether, or speaking them in something closer to beat poetry than music.  I can buy that as an embellishment for a few songs.  But that was how the entire gig went.  There was literally only one song that he sang the whole way through.  The rest were so badly mumbled, mashed up, or left for the audience to sing that Mel lost the beat twice.  How you can forget the lyrics and lose the beat to the standard greatest hits you’ve peformed almost weekly for 25 years is beyond me.  (Even hubby, who broke his Bruce Springsteen cherry this week, observed that The Boss never forgot a single word to songs he hadn’t played in years.)  See The Lights wasn’t even See The Lights, it was like watching someone’s dad doing karaoke at a wedding.  Call me picky, but if I shell out £90 just for tickets, I want to hear the band actually perform the songs, not mumble and fluff through them as if it was a soundcheck.  The Wee Man, Andy Gillespie, and Molto Sexy Boy were on fire as usual, so credit to them for salvaging the gig from being a walkout.

Which brings me to my other problem, the set list.  It was standard issue greatest hits, despite the fact that they have a new album out.  They only played two songs from that album and never mentioned it once.  (Great marketing, guys.)  They just did a greatest hits tour last year, so it’s not as if the Castle gig was a one-off celebration.  As any fan of any band knows, you can love a band while wanting to fling yourself from the castle walls on hearing that horrid pop radio hit that was big in America for the 438th time.  But that was the whole gig.  In the pre-gig fan meetup, there were people from more countries than I can count who had flown in from all over the world just for this show.  What a shame not to give them something to remember.

Now, I sound a little crabbit about the whole thing, as every person in the audience had the right to be. Between the opener and SM, a good old
Edinburgh gale blew through. I do not mean a drizzle, a rain shower, or even a torrential downpour.  There was a waterspout in the sky.  I wasn’t sure if I was watching a gig or the freakin’ Discovery Channel.  It was that severe. Two hours after the concert ended, my fingers were still pruned as if I’d just gotten out of the bath.  Being Edinburgh Castle out in the open, there was nowhere to run for shelter other than under the wooden seating risers, which were even worse because the water was pouring down through them. But the show must go on, so they started the gig while the gale was tapering off. Try enjoying a show standing on wooden risers in a gale in a plastic poncho when you’re so wet that your clothes are starting to bleed their colours. Once the gig was over, you’re discharged from the scenic vista of the Castle Esplanade to the Grassmarket, a street whose only inhabitants at 11 PM are hen nights, stag parties, and drugged-up lads looking for a fight. And you’re left to dry yourself off in a pub loo between vomiting hens, hours after the bog roll has run out.

When Jim first came out he said “I can tell tonight’s going to be something special” – and you would think, in the vista of Edinburgh Castle, it would be – but it was the most uninspired gig I’ve seen since, well, nevermind that one.  They were running through the motions to the point where it was taking the piss. In the last song Jim even sat on the amp and said “Taxi for Kerr. I’m starving.” Easy for you to say, Jim. You’ll be in a dry warm dressing room in 60 seconds eating sushi.  We’ll be wringing our clothes out in a pub loo with miles to go before we sleep.

We see them next in December at the SECC and hopefully they’ll have gotten their act together by then, literally and figuratively.  It was lovely to see the old crowd and old friends (especially the lot from Liverpool), but all in all, I’ve never wanted to be at home with a warm drink and WordPress more than I did last night.

It’s been just over a year since I joined Goodreads, the social networking site for book lovers, and I can’t imagine a day without it.  Goodreads lets you list and review books you’ve read, see other people’s reviews, see what books they have read, and join book clubs.  You can organise your books into “shelves” and browse other users’ shelves as well.  It definitely appeals to the inner obsessive-compulsive in all of us which likes to list, organise, and categorise things. Your “friends” grow to include both your real-life friends as well as total strangers who happen to share the exact same book interests as you, which gives you a great mix of people beyond the brainless status updates so common to most “friending” sites.

Thanks to Goodreads, I’ve been able to discover some fantastic books I never would have known about otherwise, and I even got to read a preview of a book that my favourite author is still writing.  It’s also nice for me to see what my web design colleagues are reading both for work and for leisure; it would be pretty boring if we only stuck to computer manuals, so it’s great to be able to share our personal interests as well.

Why not give it a try today.  Here’s me.

Google unveiled its UK Streetviews today.  I rushed to check it out in a fit of narcissism because their camera caught me last year.  It was a beautiful summer’s day and I was in the back courtyard hanging my bedsheets out on the line when a car with the alien from War of the Worlds strapped to the top and a “Google Streetviews UK” sign on the door rounded the corner and preserved my image for posterity.  I stared at the six-sided lens thinking “Holy crap, that’s Google Streetviews”, and the driver stared back as if to say “Holy crap, that’s Heather Burns.”

And after all that excitement, neither I nor my bedsheets nor any other street in my town even made the cut.  Humph!

Google Streetviews car photographs neighbourhood