Tee-hee

Today, members of my old department would have been startled to receive the following email:

From: Michael Grant's Mischievous Cron Daemon <michael.grant@bbc.co.uk>
Date: 06 July 2009 11:00
To: FM TVP Team
Subject: So, now that I've been gone for a month...
Importance: Low

...have you managed to find all the easter eggs I left buried in your codebase and your servers yet? ;^b

Michael

--
Dr Michael Grant
Senior Software Engineer, Interactive TV
BBC Future Media & Technology
BC5 A1, Broadcast Centre

http://connect.gateway.bbc.co.uk/record.asp?IDN=32757

The idea was that they would spend quarter of an hour getting worried and frantically checking their codebases before receiving another automated email saying "No, don't worry; this is the only one". In actuality, though, they got let off the hook seven minutes early by an enterprising member of the department, who tracked the message to its source and discovered the second one waiting to be sent; who subsequently sent me an email reading, "Nice one ;-)".

:o)

Bloody National Express

Yesterday I went to Leeds to attend my uncle and aunt's silver wedding anniversary celebrations. Despite leaving home at a reasonable time, I got flustered by the fact King's Cross Tube station was shut that weekend to Northern Line trains, and twice managed to end up on the wrong platform in Euston for a replacement, the second time only realising my mistake after I'd waited four minutes for a train.^* I finally got to King's Cross station concourse a good minute before my train was due to depart, only to find the train had already been removed from the departure board, so I couldn't find out what platform it was on, and hence missed it.

* I did the same thing on the way home as well. What I think was happening was that my brain was insisting I should take the southbound Victoria Line to complete my southbound journey, whereas in fact I wanted the northbound. The fact the extra leg was due east meant the line directions did not register properly either on the map or in my head.

I've got on wrong trains beforehand, but not for a long time—I'm usually good at getting to the station on time—and haven't had a problem with it.  Not so with National Express nowadays:  They wouldn't accept my ticket, and they wouldn't let me pay the supplemental fare they announced before departure for people with tickets not for that train; I had to pay a full fare of £115 on top of the £48 (for a return ticket) I'd already paid; I am abso-infix-lutely fuming about this.

Not least because it wasn't entirely my fault that I couldn't get on my original train: apparently trains are removed from departure boards three minutes before they leave.  When I protested about this, I was informed national regulations say you have to be at the station twenty minutes before departure.

Yeah, right; as if more than a tiny fraction of rail passengers ever do that.  I shall protest and kick up a fuss, but I doubt I'll get anywhere with it, with the company that the government has just taken the East Coast line franchise away from because "they walked away from their responsibilities".  Greedy exploitative bastards!