A LONDON newspaper鈥檚 gadget columnist recently discovered BT鈥檚 Call Minder, many months after BT launched the service. 鈥淪ell your shares in answering machines,鈥� he enthused, after finding out that Call Minder is a computer at the telephone exchange which records messages while your line is engaged. It then phones you back to tell you to pick up the messages.
Initially, we were equally enthusiastic about Call Minder and so were all the friends we turned on to the system. But one by one we have all discovered the downside. When the line is busy, with several calls being made, Call Minder works overtime storing messages. It then has to keep calling back to say it has new messages, and the user has to keep calling in to pick them up.
While all this toing and froing goes on, the line is engaged and Call Minder is busily taking more messages, and then calling back to invite the user to make more calls to pick them up. This engages the line so Call Minder takes more messages. Very quickly the whole labour-saving system becomes a farcical, vicious circle.
Advertisement
The simple solution would be an on/off code control, giving the customer the option to turn off the service. But BT does not provide one. In desperation, we begged BT to switch off Call Minder for a few hours to break the circle. While the operator was regretting that this was not possible, Call Minder was stacking up more messages.
We finally escaped from the loop by cancelling our subscription. All credit to BT for doing it quickly. Peace at last.
WEEDS are the bane of farmers around the world because they seem able to survive almost any form of punishment from hoes to herbicides鈥攗ntil you try to cultivate some.
A few years ago, the Natural Fibers Corporation set up a plant in Nebraska to process milkweed floss. These silky fibres were used during the Second World War to stuff lifejackets when kapok was not available, and are now of interest as a filling for pillows. The firm blends the floss fibres with goosedown to improve insulation in pillows for people who are allergic to feathers.
So Natural Fibers paid some farmers to grow milkweed in their fields鈥攁nd most of them failed. In monoculture, the weeds fell prey to diseases and predators which had never seemed to bother them when they were choking corn fields. The farmers also had trouble with other weeds in the milkweed fields, but the usual herbicides were out of the question because they all killed milkweed as well.
Now the company is paying people to look for weedy pastures around the state and pick the pods au naturel.
RACHEL OLIVER wondered in this column last month (11 May) what people will call the next decade, and hoped that they wouldn鈥檛 call it the 鈥渘oughties鈥�. Leslie Gertsch has written in to express her agreement. In the hope that the decade will be one of sober reflection and solemn vows to do better next time, she says that it should be called the 鈥渙ughts鈥�. But Fraser Steele has another idea. Why not call the decade the 鈥渙oze鈥�, he suggests, taking the optimistic view that life will emerge from it.
Other suggestions are the 鈥渙aties鈥� (followed by the 鈥渢eenies鈥�) from Russell Eberst, and the 鈥渘ulls鈥� or the 鈥渄eux-milles鈥� (pronounced 鈥渄ermills鈥�, after the French ski resorts) from Tess Harris. R. Hamilton, on the other hand, points out that the first decade of this century is called the 鈥渘ineteen hundreds鈥�, so the first decade of the next ought to be the 鈥渢wenty hundreds鈥�.
Stephen Saxon, meanwhile, was worried about a different problem. What will we call the individual years? Will we say, for example, 鈥渢wo thousand and seven鈥� or will we confuse everyone by saying 鈥渢wenty seven鈥�? And what about later on: will it be 鈥渢wo thousand and twenty two鈥� or 鈥渢wenty twenty two鈥�?
We will just have to wait and see.
OUR STORY about the student who was looking for the copious water (27 April) reminded Richard Grant of a misconception which surfaced in his mathematics department a couple of years ago. A student was discussing with his tutor his inability to arrive at the correct answer to a problem involving imaginary numbers. It turned out the student was convinced that the square root of minus one was equal to the transcendental number 鈥渆鈥�.
Try as he might, the tutor could not understand where this notion had come from, so he asked the student. It was only when the student reached for his calculator that the reason dawned. The calculator had baulked at the problem, and come up with 鈥渆鈥濃�攆or 鈥渆rror鈥�.
THIS is not an urban myth. Feedback has first-hand evidence that it is, after all, possible to get a British address from a telephone number.
The discovery came when someone mentioned casually that their boss had used a BT directory service to get a telephone number and from there found out where the subscriber lived.
Nonsense, said Feedback knowledgeably, that鈥檚 impossible. Directory Enquiries will not give out names and addresses from telephone numbers. Although computer CD-ROMs available in the US allow 鈥渞everse searching鈥� of names and addresses from numbers, the two CD-ROMs available in Britain, Phone Disc and Telepower Pro, only allow users to start searching from a name. BT鈥檚 online search services are restricted in the same way.
You鈥檙e wrong, Feedback was told. You are thinking too technically. The number had a London code so the boss had given everyone in the office one of the London telephone directories and told them to start at the beginning and check the entries one by one. After three rather mind-numbing days, one of them found the right number and read off the address. The boss had correctly gambled that the target was not ex-directory.
Feedback stands corrected and salutes the initiative of the boss who had not known that what he wanted to do was impossible.
SAN GIMIGNIANO is a Tuscan hill town famed for its medieval towers. Joe Kovalik, however, was impressed by another sight in the town when he was there recently. A sign in a butcher鈥檚 shop window announced: 鈥淚n this store we sell healthy and good meat. The only crazy here is the butcher.鈥�