Nice way to start the day

I woke up this morning, got out of bed and walked out of the bedroom into the hall. I was immediately struck by a strange shimmering stippled pattern of light on the hall wall, whose cause wasn't immediately obvious.

I walked over to it and had a closer look. It was a pattern of spots of white light in a roughly hexagonal lattice, each one varying slightly in brightness over time but not moving in space.

I looked around for strange-shaped light sources … and all became clear. The light source was the sun shining through the blobby glass[1] in my flat's kitchen window; the kitchen door was closed, and the shape of the blobby window was being projected through the keyhole in the door to make a perfect upside-down pinhole-camera image of the kitchen window on the hall wall. Cool!

(I'd have taken a photo, but by the time it occurred to me the sun had moved on and the image had faded. Shame.)

[1] Is there a proper name for that, incidentally? The kind of glass you put in bathroom windows so that it lets in light but doesn't let out an undistorted image of what you're doing in there. Sometimes it's simply frosted glass; other times it has a pattern of distortion of some sort. The stuff in my flat has hexagonally tiled round blobs. There must be a name for the general concept of glass-for-bathroom-windows-and-the-like, but I couldn't find it in a quick trawl of Google and Wikipedia.

Less nice way to continue the day

Someone just phoned me up and mispronounced my surname at me. It turned out he was a phone droid for a market research company, calling on behalf of the garage who repaired my car last month, and wanted me to answer a few questions about the quality of the service.

In fact, I was very impressed with the quality of the service; it was significantly more fast, efficient and professional than I'd had from any other garage before, including other branches of the same organisation. So I thought I could probably spare a few minutes to tell them so.

We got off on the wrong foot to begin with, because after a couple of reasonably sensible-sounding questions he then asked whether the purpose of my visit had been regular service, mechanical or electrical repair, bodywork or MOT. Hang on, I said, why don't you already know that? If the garage gave you my name and phone number, surely they ought to have been able to tell you that as well? Well, he said, we just wanted to make sure, we're really ringing to ask about the service. At this point I lost my temper and explained that I'd been a lot more impressed with the service before somebody rang me up this afternoon asking me stupid questions he already knew the answers to.

I let him carry on, though, and it gradually became clear that the droid had a questionnaire in front of him which had two or three labelled tick boxes for each question, and didn't have the intelligence to do anything except read it out over the phone including all the box labels. I persistently refused to meekly pick one label: I had specific things I wanted to say, and when his list of options didn't encompass them I gave him a full answer in entire sentences. He responded each time by saying ‘so that's ‘completely satisfied’, then’ or similar, and I could almost hear him making a totally uninformative tick on his completely pointless questionnaire.

Eventually he came to a question for which my answer was sufficiently equivocal that he couldn't decide which of ‘completely satisfied’ and ‘not completely satisfied’ it should fall into, so he asked me to clarify whether I meant one or the other. At this point I lost my temper the second time, and explained to him that he was the one with a questionnaire with only two boxes, so he should decide which of them to put a tick in. I'd given him the real facts of the case, and it was his problem to decide what to do with them.

‘I don't think I can talk to you any more,’ he said. ‘Goodbye.’ <click>

Well, I suppose that's better than me having to slam the phone down; at least this way I'm reasonably sure he won't call back and annoy me again. But at the same time I'm slightly peeved, because I had expected this conversation to be an entirely positive experience for both of us in which I gushed about the ways in which the garage staff were useful and efficient and helpful and well organised. But somehow, the phone droid managed to turn even that into such a joyless and infuriating bureaucratic hassle that neither of us had the will to finish the call. Bah.