In other news, the reason I was walking through a shopping centre at all just now is because as of this lunchtime I've finished work for the year. :-)

I was just walking through a shopping centre, and some random girl walking in the opposite direction handed me a flyer as she passed. I looked at the flyer, but it wasn't entirely obvious what it was advertising. The large print just says ‘TwentyTwo’, and ‘Free admission to any of these events with this flyer’, and ‘join us over the festive season’. After reading the smaller print, which says things like ‘over 18s’ and ‘10pm till 3am’ and describes a dress code, I've concluded that it's a nightclub of some sort, but (a) I'm still none the wiser about what kind of nightclub (what music? what sort of people? is there any particular reason I might want to go to it?), and (b) it seems barking mad that I should have had to read as far as the small print to even get that far!

Now I think about it, this seems symptomatic of a more widespread tendency I've been noticing here and there for a while, which is that people increasingly seem unwilling to spend the effort to tell other people what things are.

Another good case of this: two months ago, somebody sent me a link to some website's terms-and-conditions page with a comment along the lines of ‘Wow, that's the biggest T&C page I've ever seen’ (which it is!). Naturally I was curious to know what website was so important and unusual and difficult that it needed such elaborate terms and conditions; so I followed a link to the front page of the site, and it didn't tell me. It has links on the front page to web forums, user registration, chat, and a FAQ, and it has site news about downtime and server upgrades, but apart from one or two hints that it might do something related to BitTorrent, nowhere is there a clear description of what the site actually is, or why somebody might want to register for an account on it. Even the FAQ is unhelpful on this score, diving straight into tiny little details without any kind of introductory ‘yes, but what is it?’ section at the front.

Computer industry marketing is another area in which this sort of thing is widespread. Occasionally somebody will mention a computer-related term to me which has its own website, and I'll go and read the website and still have just as little idea what the wretched thing is. Increasingly I'm finding Wikipedia fills this niche for me: it told me, for example, what U3 was rather better than www.u3.com did. (Though it doesn't always win on this count: I still haven't got a clear idea of what UML is, because even Wikipedia just seems to define it in terms of other buzzwords. I know it involves diagrams in some way, but I've never quite worked out what you do with the diagrams once you've got them and whether there's anything else to it except diagrams.)

Finally, you also get a lot of this sort of thing in blogs and discussion forums, where people will post a URL without any explanation of what it is or why you might want to visit it. If it's a web forum, one might argue that it only takes a couple of seconds to find out for yourself, but even so, the Usenet effort economy still applies: thirty seconds of one writer's time works out to less overall than two seconds each of twenty readers', and if lots of people post bare URLs then I don't have two seconds to spare for all of them so I'd like some means of deciding which ones are worth looking at in advance. Particularly bad is if the link goes via one of those URL-squashing services which removes any chance of you being able to look at the URL itself in advance and know whether it's a news site or a comedy site or what. Also particularly bad is if the thing being linked to is a ten-minute YouTube (or equivalent) video which you have to watch all the way through before you have any idea whether the person had linked to it because it was bad, or good, or funny, or sad, or just tedious, or what.

I'm not asking for huge elaborate descriptions of things which remove any need for me to go and read the actual thing. I just think that writing, say, ten words or so to give people the first idea of what something is shouldn't be that difficult for anybody, and yet it seems to be taking the first steps toward becoming a lost art.

I've never had the urge to display bumper stickers on my car. But last night it occurred to me that a bumper sticker simply reading ‘THE BUTLER DID IT’ would have the amusement value of being able to claim my car had a spoiler on it :-)

I don't often get cross when people are rude to me. (At least I don't think I do: statements like that always carry the risk that I might do it and not notice, or not remember.)

My impression is that this is partly because I habitually decouple the things somebody says from the precise words they use to describe them, so that if somebody says something to me in a rude way then I do notice that they said it rudely but often find it easy to dismiss that as irrelevant compared to the actual concept they were trying to communicate; and partly it's also because I don't start from the premise that everybody deserves respect, so if (for example) a random stranger from whom I haven't done anything to earn respect doesn't show me respect then that's not a big deal.

Despite these usually reliable defences, one or two kinds of rudeness definitely get on my nerves. One of them is when people send me software support requests by email, and phrase them in a manner similar to the following:

How do I perform [some task] with your software? I need to do [some more details]. Please provide step by step instructions. Thank you.

The surface trappings of politeness, the ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, are there. But in spite of them, there's an unmistakably peremptory tone to a request phrased like this which makes my blood think seriously about boiling; and what's odd is that I can't quite work out why this gets under my skin in a way that many other kinds of rudeness don't.

It isn't just the fact that the guy wants step-by-step instructions and providing those on demand isn't my job. A quick thought experiment suggests that if he'd merely rephrased the offending sentence as ‘Simple step by step instructions would be best, if you can manage it’, then while I might or might not have had the time or inclination to provide them, I at least wouldn't have been offended by the mere request. So it is definitely something about the way he said it.

One possible cause is that the way he said it implies that he isn't in any doubt that I will do what he asks. The more polite rephrasing of the request which I give above indicates an awareness that I might or might not choose to help him, and hence an awareness that the onus is on him to try to arrange that I want to. To phrase it as he did suggests that he believes there's no need to even try to persuade me.

Another thing that might be a key point is that he only needs step-by-step instructions in the first place because he doesn't really understand what he's trying to do. If he showed any awareness that this lack was a partial cause of the situation (‘I'm afraid I haven't been able to work this out for myself; can you give me some simple instructions, please?’), instead of implying that I'm completely to blame for not having already provided a step-by-step how-to for exactly the thing he wants to do, I think that would have irked me less as well.

But why should either of those, or even both at once, make me so cross? They're only misunderstandings of his position relative to me. And misunderstandings per se shouldn't – and usually don't – offend me: if I can tell that someone's only saying something nasty out of ignorance or confusion then my usual impulse is to try to educate them rather than to become angry. For example, I've occasionally had people send me deliberately offensive email containing lots of four-letter words and insults, and if I know the whole thing is based on a misunderstanding (for example, someone forged a spam in my name and the recipient believed it was really me who sent it) then I find no emotional difficulty in dismissing the whole slew of invective as unimportant and replying politely to explain their mistake.

So I actually can't work out why this particular type of unthinking rudeness makes me so much more annoyed than many kinds of deliberately offensive behaviour, and makes me not merely want to ignore their message but to ignore it as a lesson in manners. It's very odd.

The term ‘WTF-8’ occasionally circulates in geek circles, often as a derogatory nickname for UTF-8, and occasionally for other purposes. I keep thinking, for example, that it ought to be the character encoding used in all standards documents published by the OMG.

A week or two ago I realised what it really ought to mean.

It seems depressingly common for Windows software to encode text in Windows-1252 but to claim (in MIME headers and the like) that it's actually ISO 8859-1. The effect of this is that while most characters are displayed correctly, characters which the author thought were single or double quotes in fact turn into strange control characters which are either ignored completely, have weird effects on the terminal, or are simply displayed as error blobs of one kind or another.

A particularly annoying thing that can happen to text which is mislabelled in this way is that it can be converted into UTF-8 by an application which believes the stated encoding. When this happens, the things which were originally intended to be quote characters are translated into the UTF-8 encodings of the ISO 8859-1 control characters which occupy the same code positions as the original Windows-1252 quote characters. In other words, you end up with UTF-8 sequences such as C2 93 and C2 94 (representing the control characters U+0093 and U+0094) where you should see E2 80 9C and E2 80 9D (representing the Unicode double quote characters U+201C and U+201D).

This, I feel, should surely be described as a Windows Transformation Format, and is additionally exactly the kind of snafu you'd expect to see near the letters WTF, so I think that on two separate counts it has an excellent claim to the name WTF-8. Perhaps someone ought to publish an Internet-Draft specifying it.

Last night I did an experiment on a supermarket. I'll be interested to see the results in a few days' time.

I usually shop at the Coldhams Lane Sainsburys, which is on my direct route home from work. One of the many things I buy there has, for some months now, been cartons and cartons of grape juice, because I tried a great many fruit juices and decided that it's by far the nicest.

Last month Sainsburys went into Christmas mode, which involved turning an entire aisle into Christmassy tat and squashing its previous contents into what was usually the fruit juice aisle. Some products therefore disappeared from each of the two compressed sections, and my beloved grape juice was among them.

I was somewhat put out by this, but kept my temper, and went and politely asked Customer Service if I could persuade them to rethink the precise set of product lines they were discontinuing over the Christmas period. I can't, for example, believe that that many people prefer carrot juice to grape juice. I've tried carrot juice. I suppose it takes all sorts and a few people might acquire a taste for it, but more people than like the obvious sweetness and freshness of grape juice? It just doesn't make sense to me.

The customer service person was sympathetic to my plight but was unable to help, because she couldn't find grape juice in the product database at all. We conjectured that it might have been discontinued across all Sainsburys, which I suppose would be more convenient for them because their manufacturing side (it was own-brand) could actually stop producing it completely for a few months. So I muttered a bit, and went away, and eventually discovered that the Asda down the road still sells grape juice. And there the matter rested.

Or rather, there the matter would have rested, if it hadn't been for the fact that last week I was sitting in a line of traffic queueing for the Coldhams Lane roundabout, and through my passenger-side car window I could see through the window of the Sainsburys petrol station. Specifically, I could see the petrol station's fruit juice shelf. And guess what was on it?

So. Either the customer service person's database was malfunctioning and grape juice is still available from some part of the greater Sainsburys organism, or that was simply left-over grape juice from the month before last when they were still stocking it. I managed to find the same customer service person, who remembered me, and she was as baffled as I was and unable to shed any light on the question. That only left one way to find out; so in a spirit of scientific enquiry, I went into the petrol station last night and bought all the grape juice they had. Next week, if I remember, I'll see if they've managed to get some more, and if so then I'll go back to the customer service desk and say ‘ah-ha!’.

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.

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.

Good: feanelwa's party last night was fun, and almost completely filled with people I didn't already know, which made an interesting change.

Good: the Calling on Tuesday was also particularly good, leaving me with a sense of having had a generally good week filled with nice people.

Good: I stayed in bed last night for a full twelve hours, from just before midnight to just before midday, and was actually asleep for most of that. Since I usually can't manage a lie-in like that without first spending two weeks getting out of the working-life rhythm, that was unexpected and very welcome.

Bad: my bruised thumb is much worse today than it was yesterday. If this were a work day, I would be seriously considering staying at home on the basis that I wouldn't be able to type for a day without causing myself serious pain and possibly making it even worse. It's that bad.

Good: fortunately, this isn't a work day and neither is tomorrow, so I can rest my thumb and hopefully it'll be on the mend by Monday. I'm currently using different fingers for the space bar, which feels very clumsy and unnatural but will do for brief things like this diary entry.

Bad: then again, that means I don't get the opportunity to do what I want with a computer this weekend, which is a pain. I start to feel unproductive when my only serious computer use is in the line of work. Still, it's only temporary; my thumb will recover.

Good: when somebody (_proserpina_, I think) at the Calling asked me how I was, I realised that it had been a couple of weeks since anything made me seriously upset (as opposed to mildly annoyed, which is an unrealistic thing to even hope for two weeks without!), which seems to be well above average for me this year. The run of non-upsetness is still unbroken as of today, which is even better.

Bad: then again, it seems faintly depressing that that's the most I can currently aspire to. Things that make me seriously happy appear to be significantly rarer than those that make me seriously upset.

Good: however, out of all the above things, two of the bad ones are temporary and the third is not an immediate problem. So on balance, I think, things are good.

It's funny; when I'm away from a keyboard, if somebody asked me, I generally wouldn't be able to tell them which thumb I use for pressing the space bar. The obvious approach to finding out would be to do some mock-typing on a table and see which thumb I find myself using, but that never quite seems to work, partly because tables don't feel enough like keyboards and mostly because when I know I'm doing it as a test I feel self-conscious and am never quite confident I'm doing what I would naturally do.

But today I know very clearly which thumb it is, because as of last night I have a nasty bruise under the right side of my left thumbnail, and now it is very obvious to me that that's the bit I normally use for thumping on the space bar. Ow.

(Still, I've only been at work for a quarter of an hour and I've already evolved a typing posture which just about avoids the most painful bit. I suspect this is an advantage of never having formally learned to touch-type; my ad-hoc typing style is naturally adaptable in the face of the unexpected.)

My oven gloves just caught fire. That wasn't how I expected to find out I needed a new pair!

I've mentioned before in this diary that the last day of work before a holiday feels less like work to me and more like holiday, because even though there's still work to be done I at least don't have to get up early any more.

Well, I'm not due for any more holiday until December, but it's just occurred to me that since the clocks change on Sunday, this morning was the last time I'll have to get out of bed at 0700 UTC until next March, and it's already over. Realising that has given today a small echo of the same feeling :-)

Every so often someone sends me, or the PuTTY team, an email whose gist is ‘I would like to discuss a [ business proposition | project | piece of work | half-baked idea | whatever ] with you’. No further information (but enough personalisation to be sure it isn't spam). We generally reply ‘go on then’, with varying degrees of sarcasm depending on mood, and then they send some details of their actual suggestion.

I've never quite understood why they bother with the initial zero-content opening email. It delays the useful part of the conversation by an entire round trip, and doesn't seem to serve any useful purpose. I suppose if the description of the idea was going to be very long, they might feel it was worth giving us a chance to say ‘don't bother’ before they went to the effort of typing it all up, but if they don't give any detail in the first message then there's no way we can make an intelligent judgment about whether we're interested! (Well, except that if the mail talks about a ‘business proposition’ then they tend to be to do with website advertising, so we're usually not. But occasionally they want to pay us to add a useful feature to PuTTY, so we can't even reject them on that basis until we know more.)

I've managed to lose two umbrellas in the past two weeks. The nice one appears to be lost for good, but fortunately I recovered the cheap backup umbrella this morning so at least I have some rain protection until I buy a new nice one this weekend.

(That'll be my third really nice umbrella this year. The first one underwent catastrophic twangy failure in May, and the second disappeared last week in mysterious circumstances. Perhaps this time I should see if the shop assistant can find me one without the curse.)

I slept very badly the night before last, so I was extremely sleepy yesterday evening and was careful to get a very early night. I slept like a log from 10:30 until about 4am, at which point I snapped wide awake and only managed to doze off again at 7, leaving me just enough time to become sleepy enough to resent my alarm. Whenever I have middle-of-the-night insomnia, this always seems to happen: I finally doze off again just at the moment I need to be getting back up. I suspect my body clock of doing it deliberately.

I'm clearly not all that sleepy now, though, because on the way to work this morning I spotted the number of a bus, remembered what its route was, and hence deduced that it was going to turn left (and therefore it was safe for me to pull out in front of it) some time before it bothered to indicate. That struck me as quite cunning and useful, although I probably couldn't have done it if I hadn't had the bus routes fresh in my mind from last week.

I've been working at home today, because somebody was scheduled to turn up and replace my gas meter so I had to be in. So a few days ago I carefully set aside some document-writing which I could usefully do without access to the company network, and I've spent the day sitting in my study doing that.

I had worried about my productivity in this environment: it seemed to me that with nobody else around I might easily succumb to the temptation to (for example) play computer games all day, or browse the web, or just sit on a sofa going uuurgh, or be otherwise unproductive.

But instead I've been stonkingly productive, in fact significantly more so than I would have expected to be in a typical day in the office. I suspect I was mostly overcompensating for the above worry, and not permitting myself a moment's rest ‘just in case’. I've finished all of the work I set aside, which is more than I expected to manage; and I'm exhausted. (Though that might also just be because writing documents is much harder work than it looks. Coding is pifflingly easy by comparison.)

It's probably a good thing most of my job can't be done under these conditions; on present showing, if I made a habit of working from home then I'd probably work myself to death in short order!

‘See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places.’

– Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

For several days now I've been getting around town on buses, because my car has (once again) demonstrated all the reliability and build quality of the Millennium Falcon.

Public transport is, of course, terribly slow and inconvenient compared to personal transport. You have to walk to the nearest access point; you have to stand around waiting until a bus or train deigns to turn up; you have to tolerate slow zigzag roundabout routes from A to B and repeated stops to exchange other passengers; you have to walk from the access point where you end up to the place you actually wanted to be. Not to mention that if you're unlucky you have to change vehicles in the middle of your trip and do half of this lot all over again. And that you're restricted in the times of day you can travel, so taking public transport to a distant club or party means you have to either find somewhere to crash or leave annoyingly early to get the last train back. None of this is a surprise, and all of it is annoying compared to the ability of your own bike or car to deliver you from one front door directly to another, in your time, by as direct a route as you can invent, whenever you want.

But in spite of all that, there's something that feels somehow magical about public transport, which personal transport just doesn't seem to have for me. I think it's got something to do with the fact that I leave my starting point on foot, and arrive at my destination the same way, as if I'd walked the whole distance, and yet the two points are so far apart that it would have been infeasible to actually walk all the way. And I don't have to exert physical effort to move myself the extra distance, as I would on a bicycle, or mental concentration as I would driving a car. I just find something that's going the way I want to go, grab on, and let it carry me to where I want to be.

I shall certainly be glad to have the Falcon back with its hyperdrive fixed: that feeling of magic would probably evaporate quite quickly if I used public transport all the time, leaving me with nothing but the various annoyances. But as long as I only have to use it once in a while, I find it actually makes for rather a pleasant change of pace.

Today I wrote a random comment on somebody's LJ, and five minutes after I posted it I suddenly realised I'd inadvertently used the phrase ‘sounds good on paper’. Not sure how something does that. Does it rustle pleasantly, perhaps?

I suspect that mental crossover was simply due to my brain being momentarily indecisive between ‘sounds good’ and ‘looks good on paper’, and the fact that what I was thinking was an entirely abstract thought about the superficial plausibility of the comment I was responding to, to which either of the phrases I was considering would have been at best an approximation.

A more interesting case of linguistic synaesthesia showed up in a mathematical proof I jotted down in 2001 and recently found lying around on my computer, which described a nasty algebraic mess as ‘the following smelly-looking polynomial’. I suppose that in the age of the television, ‘smelly-looking’ would be a perfectly reasonable concept to apply to something seen on a screen, but I'm inclined to feel that when I used the phrase it was probably an unconscious reflection of my sensory deficiency: for practical purposes, when I hear the word ‘smelly’ I can generally take it to mean that the object thus described is something unpleasant which you don't want to go too near if you can help it. Thus, it didn't seem the least bit incongruous to describe a polynomial as looking as if it had that property; after all, how else could I judge something to be smelly?

If you're designing an XML representation of some type of data, and you want a key-value sort of organisation, this is inherently reasonably well supported by XML. If you want to set the key ‘foo’ to the value ‘bar’, you can simply set up your DTD so that it lets you write

<sometagorother foo=bar />

Now occasionally I can understand that you might want to layer your own key-value structure on top of this:

<set key="foo" value="bar" />

because this approach gives you the ability to add extra attributes alongside each key/value pair, which might be useful for all sorts of vaguely sensible reasons: expiry dates, permissions, conditionalisation, you name it. Also it doesn't require you to specify the full set of possible keys in the DTD, which is obviously useful.

However, when I see a third layer of key-value structure on top of even that …

<method name="SetVariable">
    <arg key="name" value="foo" />
    <arg key="value" value="bar" />
</method>

… I really do start to wonder whether someone's brain has been EATEN BY PARASITIC XML MEMES OF DEATH.

I got a new car stereo at the weekend, to replace my Dension DH102 which packed up in April. I was unable to get another DH102 or anything like it: players with their own hard disks seem to have gone totally out of fashion, and even Dension don't sell them any more. Instead, the new fashion is stereos which have an iPod connection; so I now have an Alpine CDE-9850Ri, and an iPod to plug into it. I haven't yet worked out whether I prefer this to the Dension.

( car stereo comparison )

Particularly bad about the last two points (in fact, quite possibly the last three) is that as far as I can tell they're fundamental limitations imposed by the iPod-based design, which means that no other stereo on the market will be able to fix them for me.

On the plus side, I suppose, that means I don't have to worry about whether I should have bought some other model instead. But it is rather annoying me that I can visualise exactly what my ideal car stereo would do, and none of its features seem obviously specialist to me, and yet nobody is prepared to sell me anything remotely like it. If I were more of a hardware person I might have given serious thought to building my own.

I just arrived home from work. I opened the door, picked up a letter lying on the mat, then slung my bag over my shoulder and went upstairs. I got into the study, put the letter down on the desk, put my bag on the chair, and opened the bag. Then I stopped, confused, and wondered why I'd opened the bag.

After some thought I realised that what I had in fact meant to do was to open the letter, but a mental glitch had somehow caused me to mistake which of the things I was carrying I had intended to open – and to mistake it so cleanly and at such a high conceptual level that I carefully put the bag on the chair instead of (as I do when I'm not planning to open it) the floor. At no point did I attempt to treat the bag as if it were a letter; my confusion was not at that level. I opened it exactly the way I would have done if I'd been genuinely intending to open my bag. It's just that that entire intention was the product of a glitch, and the thing I'd been intending to intend (as it were) should instead have driven me to put the bag on the floor and pick up the letter-opener. Very strange.

When I opened the letter, I found I wasn't the only person being strange. The letter was from my bank, regarding a funds transfer I had recently performed via their online banking service, and it said ‘We hereby notify you that we transferred one penny less than you asked for, because otherwise you would have completely emptied the source account and thereby automatically closed it’. This is almost fair enough (though I don't immediately see why it's conceptually unthinkable for a savings account to temporarily contain no money), except that in fact they had transferred £6000.01 less than I asked for! It turns out that the online banking interface handles transfers from this type of account by generating an email to a human, so the human must have manually copied the amount of the transfer from one place to another and got it wrong. Barking mad! I should count myself lucky they managed to get the money into the right destination account, and didn't send it all to Peru.