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Today I accidentally knelt on my phone and severely cracked the screen. I was surprised to note how calm and unbothered I was, baring in mind that bits of the screen were starting to flake and fall off. I merely brushed them onto my desk and put them in the bin, before coolly returning to my phone to inspect what was left of my screen. I was surprised by my level of Zen-like collectedness and coolness. Perhaps it’s the therapeutic influence of all those cats on Saturday. If so, then it was well worth the £5 and the salad stealing. Maybe we could drag Trump to the cafe for a day and see if it can sort him out a bit.
Apple have tested the Iphones for durability by doing tests that involve dropping them from a variety of heights, and there are bold statements that brag about their resilience, seemingly supported by videos with titles such as, “An Apple iPhone survives the ultimate drop test, plummeting 9300 feet out of a plane.” There are loads of these videos: people encasing their phones in ice, people dropping their phones from the top of really tall buildings, and even one where the phone is dropped from space. I suppose the idea is that if the phone can survive a drop of over 9000 feet, then it can survive anything. However, this is far from the truth. Granted, if you are the kind of person who is clumsy enough to drop your phone from 9000 feet, then it’s reassuring to know that Apple has you covered; but if you’re the kind of reckless buffoon who does something really stupid like kneeling on their phone for half a second, then I’m afraid you won’t be so lucky. I think I might join the geeky tech reviewers, and set up my own YouTube channel reviewing phones, only I will focus on putting the phones through their paces when it comes to being knelt on for half a second. I accept that it won’t be as exciting and dramatic as dropping a phone from a plane, but I would argue that it is more practical, and that more people are likely to briefly kneel on their phone than drop it from 9000 feet, or accidentally freeze it in ice for a week. I think Apple could do with sorting out their priorities a bit.
In Dollop 95, I mentioned that I’d done an interview with the Big Issue about The Young’uns. That article has been released today, as I discovered due to a tweet which declared that they had an interview with Dave Eagles from The Young’uns. I cannot understand how they’ve managed to get my name wrong. I emailed the answers back to them via david@davideagle.co.uk. I have a signature at the bottom of my email that includes my name, David Eagle, my website, davideagle.co.uk, and my Twitter name, @thedavideagle. Also, at the very top of the document I sent them, in bold letters, it said, “answers by David Eagle, The Young’uns.” Even after all those clues, if you still weren’t entirely sure, a second’s-worth of Googling would soon tell you that I am called David Eagle. So how and why have they abbreviated my first name and pluralised my surname?
On my first day at my office job, about six years ago now, I was given my own email address. Great, I am officially part of the team, I thought. Except, my email address started with, david.eagles. I immediately notified the person who had created my email account, but she didn’t seem bothered about changing it, and so I was just stuck with it. At first, whenever people referred to me as David Eagles, I would correct them. But I communicated with so many different departments and people from different organisations, that it became too time consuming and tedious to keep putting them right. Also, it was getting people confused. I was getting phone calls from people complaining that I hadn’t replied to their email, and then I’d discover that the reason was because they’d emailed david.eagle instead of david.eagles. I mentioned it to my managers several times, but nothing ever got done about it, so in the end I decided that it would be a lot easier if I would just change my name to David Eagles. So while I was at work, I was David Eagles. I mean, this job had already managed to rob me of my dreams and my sense of optimism and hope, so they might as well rob me of my identity too.
Another thing that the editor at the Big Issue has somehow managed to do is get the name of our podcast wrong. It is down as The Young’s Podcast. You’d have thought that the most cursory of reads would have highlighted this mistake; given that the name of our band is The Young’uns, it’s unlikely that we’d call our podcast The Young’s Podcast. I don’t know how they’ve managed to make this mistake, given that I wrote the answers. The answers were typed up by me, and so all they had to do was leave what I’d written in tact and it would all be accurate. I’ve checked the email I sent them, and this is what I wrote: “listen to our podcast, The Young’uns Podcast. I’m sure you can work out how to find it. You seem like a clever bunch.” But for some reason, this is how the published article reads: “listen to our podcast, The Young’s Podcast. I’m sure you can work out how to find it. You seem like a clever bunch.”
Well, they’ll have to be even cleverer now, as they’ll have to deduce that this information is incorrect. If you type the Young’s Podcast in Google then you are unlikely to find it. You get Jimmy Young’s Podcast, the Young Entrepreneur Podcast, Kirsty Young’s Desert Island Discs podcast, Young Lion’s Dancehall Reggae Bashment (DRB) podcast, Tim Young’s Contrast podcast, etc etc. If you do type Young’s Podcast into Google, we’re not even in the first 100 search results, and then I gave up after that.
All I can assume is that they’ve put it through a spellchecker and it’s corrected the name. So all they have done by spellchecking, is make the article less accurate and misspelt. I’d already spellchecked it, and it was all fine. I have employed Jools as my secretary (A lovely in-joke there for the old time dollop fans).
There may be people reading that article who’ll assume that it was me who made that stupid mistake, and they might then jump to the conclusion that, if I’m stupid enough not to be able to spell my own band properly, then it was probably me who also wrote my own name wrong. Well, I’m putting the record straight here: it’s all the Big Issue’s doing, not mine. I think you should all boycott the Big Issue and refuse to support any of the homeless people who sell it, until I am given a written apology, and it better be spellchecked properly. Perhaps when they see the devastation and hardship they have caused among the homeless community, they will come to realise their wrong-doing, and address their failings. If a few homeless people have to die in the process, then so be it. It is a small price to pay for ensuring long-term editorial integrity.
P.S. That was David eagles who wrote that last bit, whereas David eagle would not encourage any such thing, so if you found that last bit offensive, address your comments to David.eagles@theyoung’s.co.uk.
You can read the article here.
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