Author: Rob

One day one a bus

Tuesday March 26th 2002

“Does this go to Glasgow?” I asked. “Near a station?”

I had stressed the second part like a typical briton on a foreign holiday, trying to make a local understand them by talking louder. It wasn’t really necessary in the event, as the driver had replied in such a thick Glasweigan accent that Rab C Nesbit himself would have struggled to pick it up.

“Aye – goestae Central – Glasgae Central!” He spat, stressing the last part in case I was a foreigner.

“Thanks – I’ll just have a single then.”

“Tae whair?”

I blinked once to see if he was taking the smeg, but he wasn’t so I told him “Glasgae Centrul” in the best scottish accent I could muster. It came out like a bad impression of the driver.

Why is that? I wish I could understand why my scottish accent is crap whenever I’m trying to put on a scottish accent. I know I spent three years in Cornwall, but that was fourteen years ago now and I’m well aware that I have a scottish accent of sorts.

Anyway, I sit on this bus after quite a surreal adventure involving crossing a field in what appeared to be the middle on nowhere, but turned out to be right beside a dual carriageway. I had turned up at the bus stop, via the field, clutching a recently burned copy of Windows 98 with absolutely no idea where I was or in which part of Glasgow.

An hour and a half before I had struck up a conversation with a stranger in a computer shop in the city. I had told him that my developers copy of Windows 98 had expired and he offered to drive me to his place and give me a copy, which was nice.

I didn’t realise at the time that the 30 minute drive was a one way trip and that Mr Helpful would bid me goodbye with a brief wave in the direction of civilisation and one of those head-tilt-wink things that scottish people do when they say “Seeyie”

Criminal Waste

Tuesday March 19th 2002

Last night I checked out my bank statement online. On Friday of last week a ?399 transaction was made in payment to BT Cellnet/Internet.

My mobile is a vodafone one, and although my internet service is provided by BT it costs ?385 a month less than the amount withdrawn. So I called BT this morning, then BT internet – both of whom denied taking the money from my account. So I called my bank and asked them to investigate the transaction.

At just after four pm they called me back and explained that my details had been used to purchase a couple of mobile phones from a BT Cellnet shop in Leeds.

I have never been to Leeds and I was freaked at this point.

Turns out that something in my rubbish was used – like a bill or a statement that has accidentally been thrown out. The fraudster called the shop and arranged payment over the phone, then turned up with the bill on them to prove their identity when they collected the purchase.

Pick holes in this plot if you like, but that’s the way my bank pieced it together.

Aside from being quite a cool crime, it’s something that could have gone undetected for almost a month if I did not have internet banking set up.

So, just to let you know, this is obviously a new-ish type of crime… get shredding your paper rubbish.

R269-653

Monday March 18th 2002

I hate that.

I hate that I can remember that one letter, six digit combination almost eight years after it ceased to be relevant to me.

Let me explain. I used to be in the Ministry of Defense. Or rather, I used to be a civilian working for the ministry of defense, as an electrician. The number above was my reference number to the MoD, my code, my tag, my unique ID in the sea of bodies that work for the great lumbering organization that makes up the MoD. We needed it for everything you can think of; call in sick and you need your number, ask for leave and you need to quote it – miss a college class and your number gets taken down. Then it all goes in your file. File R269-653.

At the time it was pretty useful, I suppose – I don’t remember feeling any opinion either way on the fact I was just a number to the personnel people. There’s another funny thing – most companies have an HR department. The MoD has a personnel department – they deal in persons, or numbers, not humans which are not.

But in later years it irks me somewhat. Knowing that in some filing cabinet somewhere, under a tab marked R269-653, there’s a whole load of information documenting my every move for five years. Which days I was late, which days I was sick and the reasons for them. Every time I wanted to take holiday, except that it was called “leave” in the MoD, I filled in a form which is now in that filing cabinet, where ever it is.

I didn’t leave the MoD in the best of ways. I was stabbed in the back by men I respected – my boss and his boss, two people I really thought I could count on. When it came to the crunch they closed ranks and hung me out to dry – even lieing in front of a panel of people who were judging my future. And for what? To keep the “integrity” of the MoD? To save their own faces?

Hey, it didn’t matter anyway – I’ve moved on and made a success of my life, to a point far beyond I could ever have gone with the MoD. So I don’t really want to dwell on what went wrong, how I carried the blame, how my entire family used to talk about me at family gatherings, saying I’d screwed up my life because a job with the MoD was a job for life. I mean, why dwell on that? It would only make me bitter in a way that frightens me.

To forget completely, though, I would need to forget that number. And that’s the difficult part.