Please refer to Episode I if this topic is new to the reader.

Well, today I received a second letter from the IRS. It came to me at my imaginary home address of 1234 Elm Street, Hollywood, USA. (For an explanation of the imaginary address again please see Episode I.)

This second, computer generated, letter informs me that; 1.) “Another refund check has been issued for the above tax period,” 2.) “I should receive the replacement check within the next 30 days,” 3.) “You need do nothing further to receive your check,” 4.) “Unless the above is not your mailing address.”

OK, I don’t have to do anything, unless the address they mailed the letter to is not the address at which I receive my mail. But if the address to which they sent the letter is not the address at which I receive my mail, then I will not receive the letter, which contains the instructions on what to do, if I do not receive the letter.

Umm, maybe programmers don’t think about these sorts of things the same what other folks do, but if the mailing address doesn’t work, then how will I receive the letter telling me to do something about the, apparently broken, mailing address.

Stay tuned for the next gripping installment of “Your IRS At Work.”

Or perhaps ‘Post Office of the Brain Dead,’ or ‘IRS of the Brain Dead.’ But read on and compose your own appropriate title.

My mailing address is not; 1234 Elm St. Hollywood USA 56789. It’s not, but let’s just pretend that it is.

Yesterday I received a letter from the Internal Revenue Service. The letter was mailed to me, successfully, at 1234 Elm St. Hollywood USA 56789.

The letter informed me that the IRS had attempted to mail me my Federal Income Tax Refund check at the address 1234 Elm St. Hollywood USA 56789. However, the United States Postal Service informed them that the check was undeliverable at 1234 Elm St. Hollywood USA 56789 and consequently the check has been returned to the IRS.

Now at this point the story is merely about the USPS, who have proven themselves unable to deliver a piece of mail to me at the address wherein I have resided for several decades. An address to which they appear to have no difficulty delivering all sorts of other mail, which while they do not contain checks for me still have my same name and address on the envelope containing the check from the IRS. What is the Post Office thinking?

However, the IRS, now figuratively if not literally, holding my returned check in their collective hands, decided to contact me in order to notify me of the problem. Remember, the silly Post Office says that the address 1234 Elm St. Hollywood USA 56789 is undeliverable. So rather than phoning me, the IRS has my phone number, or emailing me, they also have my email address, they mailed me a letter informing me of the problem. They sent a letter to 1234 Elm St. Hollywood USA 56789 informing me that my check mailed to 1234 Elm St. Hollywood USA 56789 was returned as undeliverable, and what would I like them to do about it. What is the IRS thinking? I mean, if the mailing address doesn’t work for the first item of mail, the check, then why would it work for the second item of mail, the letter informing me that the check was undeliverable. This makes the IRS look pretty silly, and by that I mean sillier than the Post Office. So that’s pretty darned silly.

On the other hand, the reason I’m ranting on this subject is because the second letter was successfully delivered to me yesterday. So I guess that’s back to making the Post Office look silly. I mean it’s the same address, what could be the difference that made the first envelope undeliverable? The weight of the envelope? The color of the envelope? The size of the chip on my letter carrier’s shoulder?

So I phoned the IRS to see what could be done about the problem. The computerized phone messaging menu wasn’t too complex, and the music on hold wasn’t too obnoxious. Too loud, but not too obnoxious. And it only took a half hour for a human to come on the line to help me. The automated computer voice told me that the wait time would be only 10 minutes, and I timed it at 30 minutes, but still that might be pretty fast for the IRS. And, unlike any other customer service phone bank to which I’ve spoken, the IRS representative insisted that I call him ‘Mr. Smith’ rather than his first name. But aside from that, he seemed pretty helpful. Well, he did keep demanding to know which tax form I’d used. I didn’t know the answer to that, so he said that he couldn’t help me unless I told him which form I’d used. We went round and round for a bit. I kept telling him about the letter, and he kept demanding to know which tax form had been used to pay the taxes for which I now had a question. Eventually I asked him if the number of the tax form would be on the letter I was holding, and he said, “Sure. What’s the number of the letter that you’re holding.” I told him that it was CP31, and he told me where to look for the number of the tax form, and once I’d told him that, then he asked me what letter I’d received. I told him CP31, again, and he was ready to help me.

Then we spent around 20 minutes discussing the letter/check problem. It took me a while to get through that I didn’t understand why a check couldn’t reach me at 1234 Elm St. Hollywood USA 5678, but a letter could reach me at 1234 Elm St. Hollywood USA 5678. Eventually he admitted that this did seem a bit weird. Then he asked if I could just receive my refund check at my business address. I informed him that I had a home office, with the same address as my home address. Then he asked if I could have my refund check sent to my wife instead of me. I informed him that I wasn’t married, and then asked if I had been married wouldn’t my wife’s mailing address be the same as mine, I mean if we were married and living together. He said “Hmm” and explained that he was just trying to “Think outside the box.”

So eventually he decided to just ‘Release the check’ again and mail it to the same address, which hadn’t worked the first time, but maybe it would work this time. I asked him what we would do if the check was returned a second time, and he said, “We’ll have to wait and see what happens.”

Then he asked me if there was anything else he could do to help me, and when I said “No” he said a polite goodbye and hung up.

It really is the Post Office’s fault, but somehow the IRS managed to make the USPS look better.

Programmers always have stories about end users and passwords. Mostly these center on the hilarious misunderstanding of the nature of passwords. Hilarious is a relative term, programmers tend to be pretty dull people. Every business has at least one employee who listens politely while the representative from I.T. explains about why everyone has their own password. Explains how the password must be kept in a safe place. And then the employee writes the super secret password on a post it note, and sticks it to the edge of their computer screen, where they won’t lose it, but where everyone else in the office can read it. After this the computer guy politely explains that putting the password up in public, where all the people in the department can see it, sort of defeats the purpose of personal secret passwords, and then the employee goes to a supervisor and complains about being persecuted by the jerks who understand computers.

This story isn’t exactly about that, but it is about passwords.

Imagine if you will a programmer/consultant who was only just coming to grips with the fact that he was being paid to do what the client, in this case the president of the company, asked and not necessarily to do anything useful. At one point, the day before the company Christmas party, the programmer was ushered into the president’s office and asked if he was any good at rhyming words. After a brief, but confusing, exchange it developed that the president was trying to write a funny poem to read at the Christmas party, but she had realized that she wasn’t very good at this. So, naturally from her point of view, she thought that she’d stop the programmer, who was billing her hourly, from writing programs and switch him to billing her hourly for writing a poem. No matter how many times he said, “You’d still be paying me at the same rate to write a poem. Are you really sure you want to do that?” She still thought it was a really good idea.

Let’s pretend that the name of the company was CPM-I. CPM is a more businesslike version of a nickname created by a non-programmer who when listening to the above poem story said, “What’s the name of this company? Crazy People Manufacturing?” So the programmer started calling the client CPM, but when it began to seem that all his manufacturing clients seemed to share the same sort of zany characteristics he was forced to start numbering them, as in; CPM-I, CPM-II, CPM-III, etc.

So, shortly after the Holiday Season, and a wildly successful poem presented by the president at the company Christmas party, the company’s I.T. manager approached the programmer for help. The I.T. manager was also the president’s sister, and had a sweet heart deal in which she showed up around 10:00am, left around 2:00pm, and was paid wheel barrow loads of money for spending most of her four hour day playing computer solitaire. The sister was also very touchy about the programmer/consultant, suspecting that his presence somehow would undercut her responsibilities as the president’s sister, or for playing solitaire 20 hours a week. So it was rather unusual that the sister would come to the programmer for help. Her request was password related.

CPM-I used some 20, very large, CNC (computer numerically controlled) machines to lathe, mill and cut high-grade steel for airplane parts. The company had a stand-alone (not connected to the PC network) computer that ran a CAD-CAM (computer aided design, computer aided manufacturing) program that created a ‘part program.’ This ‘part program’ was then saved on a 3-½ inch floppy disk, which was inserted into one of the big, expensive, CNC machines that then used the information on the floppy to tell it how to cut the, very expensive, steel part.

The problem was that this CAD-CAM program required a password. Now the password had originally been kept on a post it note stuck to the side of the computer screen for the CAD-CAM system, but after the programmer had mentioned to the president that this was a bad idea from the standpoint of system security the post it note had been taken down, and thrown away. Unfortunately, no one had thought to memorize the password, or write it down anywhere else. So now no one knew the password, and no one could log on to the CAD-CAM system, and without the CAD-CAM system no one could program the 3-½ inch floppies, and without the 3-½ inch floppies no one could run the big CNC machines, and without running the big CNC machines the company couldn’t make any parts.

So round about 11:00am the I.T. manager came to the programmer and asked for some help in determining the password. The president had picked the password 2 years before, and she’d said that it was all digits – so numbers not letters – and it was only 4 digits long. The I.T. manager had been typing in numbers at random for around an hour, and she was wondering if the programmer could come up with something that would list all the possible 4 digit combinations, and then she could type them in, and check them off as she did so. Whilst the I.T. manager and the programmer were sitting there talking over the problem the president, who had picked the original for digit password came over and offered to help out.

President:
Four digits, huh?

Programmer:
Yes, that’s right. Your sister says that you picked a four-digit password.

President:
How about SUCK?

Programmer:
What? Um, no. You said it’s a for digit password.

President:
OK, how about BLOW?

Programmer:
Um, no. Those are four letters. You said that you picked four digits

President:
OK, I’ll just leave it to you and my sister.

I.T. Manager:
I think you’re lucky that she stopped at those two, and didn’t just keep saying every four-letter word that came into her head.

Two hours later the programmer came back with a list of all the possible four digit combinations for testing as the password. The I.T. manager was back in her office, getting ready to go home for the day.

I.T. Manager:
Oh? Thanks, but I don’t need that any more. I figured out the password myself around noon.

Programmer:
What? Well, that’s good. Now we can use the CAD-CAM system. But why didn’t you tell me when you found the password? I mean, the company just paid me for 2 hours work that I didn’t need to do for you.

I.T. Manager:
Huh?

Programmer:
OK, so what was the password.

I.T. Manager:
After my sister made those guesses at the password I decided to think like her. So even though she said it was a 4-digit password I decided that she didn’t really know what digit meant, so I just started using every four-letter sex word I could think of. Here it is.

(She writes the password down on a post it note and hands it to the programmer)

Programmer:
DOME ? How is dome a sex word?

I.T. Manager:
Not dome. Do Me! You gotta think like my sister.

Having thus finished a very productive day the I.T. Manger went home at 1:30pm.

Maybe this only bothers me because I’m a programmer. For programmers, “It’s either a 0 or a 1.” The lights are either on or off. Things are either right or wrong. Or perhaps it’s because I’m an only child. There are lots of editorials on the Internet that seem to blame people’s behavior on that sort of thing. Perhaps I’m just some sort of a twerp who doesn’t understand how the world works.

A few months ago a friend, whilst listening to my complaints about minor domestic issues, suggested that I just “Lie About It.” She is of Greek extraction, and therefore far more sophisticated than I in interpersonal matters. I was at the end of my tether, so I gave it a go little realizing that it would be so successful that I am now awash in a sea of falsehoods.

My aged mother likes to wash clothes. As the years have passed she has not grown less competent in this task so much as more erratic. In some operations she has become flamboyantly unsuccessful. Now we’re not talking about simple laundry adventures here. It’s not just red socks in with the whites, or bleach in with the cashmere sweaters. It’s the completely inexplicable, and yet completely predictable flooding of the garage where the washing machine is located every single time she washes any size volume of clothing. As may be easily imagined, this is very bad for all the non-waterproof items stored immediately downhill from the washing machine. Taking my friends advice, I unplugged the washing machine. Mum has yet to discover what is wrong with the appliance, and why it is that now only I seem to have the necessary technological skill to run a load of laundry. This bit of covert sabotage, “Lying” if you will, has resulted in;
1.) I am repeatedly berated for my laziness and worthlessness, in this case because of my inability to ‘fix’ the washing machine. So in essence no change there from my daily routine.
2.) The laundry is no longer ruined, and mum’s steamer trunk, and my tax records, are no longer flooded on a regular basis.

So, from a programmer’s standpoint, this is a “1” The operation is a success, despite the otherwise unsavory issue of deliberately misleading a trusting parent.

Having succeeded with laundry I moved on to the subject of bathrobes. Previously there had been a great deal of confusion over bathrobes. There used to be a new and lovely, soft and warm pink bathrobe received as a Christmas gift last year. There was also a not so nice, thin and not nearly so warm, much older, pink bathrobe from the 1990’s. And there was the very old, very thin, threadbare, blue and yellow item left over from the 1980’s. The mere existence of a choice over bathrobes seemed to engender not only angst, but also a great deal of confusion. Repeated advice along the lines of, “That’s not the new bathrobe. The new bathrobe is more fluffy and comfortable than that.” or, “No, that’s not the new bathrobe. The new bathrobe is pink. That one is yellow with blue stripes.” didn’t really seem to be much help. So one day I stole all the bathrobes except the new one and gave them to the Salvation Army. There was a brief period of Stalinist revisionism on the subject, in which I had to deny the very existence of any bathrobes other than the new, fluffy, pink one, but after a few weeks everything seemed to settle down. So aside from an uncomfortable feeling that I was now working for The Ministry of Truth (“The chocolate ration has been increased. There never were any other bathrobes.) lying seemed to be working here as well.

Finally I applied the technique to luncheon, or more accurately to the preparation of TV dinners. Mum likes Healthy Choice TV dinners. More accurately, mum will eat Healthy Choice TV dinners, and complains less about them than other foods. However, even these frozen delicacies have a problem with the included desert. She loves the ‘Cranberry, Mystery, Fruit Compot,’ but can’t stand the other deserts. This is odd, because it means she rejects the ‘Peach Cobbler Thing,’ and yet loves peach cobbler. She loathes the ‘Apple Crumble Thing,’ and yet wolfs down apple pie. A prolonged period of investigation, in which I made inquiries as to just what was wrong with the deserts and was berated for “Asking a lot of damn fool questions,” unearthed the surprising revelation that the offending deserts were bad because they weren’t red like the good ones.

So now when I’m micro waving a lunch I check the box art. If the desert isn’t red I remove a small bottle of food coloring from the cupboard and furtively add it to the offending item. Mum has yet to notice that the various deserts taste different. She has noticed that the frozen food companies seem to be packing the good colored deserts more frequently.

Yes, the new strategy appears to be a rousing success. And yet I suffer from the same sort of unease as when you tell the trusting family dog that he’s going for a car ride, and take him to the vet instead.

At least victory of a sort.

The little white dust mop dog is, apparently, no longer afraid of the kitchen floor. As is evidenced by the following.

1.) He now stands in the middle of the kitchen floor and barks at me, presumably in hopes of receiving bits of toast, whilst I prepare breakfast.

2.) And then there’s the evidence from last weekend. When I arrived in the kitchen Monday morning there he was, asleep, in the middle of the kitchen floor, with his head inside the dismembered bag of dog kibble. It was a very big bag of dog kibble, and he is a pretty small dog. It seems that after watching me open the bag to refill his daily food containers for some months he finally made the connection that, “The dog food comes from out of the big bag standing next to the refrigerator.” At some point late Sunday night, after I’d used the big bag to fill up the little plastic food tubs for the upcoming week, he dragged the bag over to the center of the kitchen - why the center and not where it stood next to the fridge will one supposes forever remain a mystery - tore it open, and began his nocturnal feast.

So, Hooray! No longer afraid of the kitchen floor. And, fortunately, the bag was almost empty. So no need to be concerned about the treasured family pet bursting like some sort of canine pinata. However, I must now find a new place to store the bag; the kitchen is now unacceptable - the dog being aware of the bag’s vulnerability to canine teeth, and the garage being susceptible to intrusion from… Raccoons I suppose, who for generations appear to realize the susceptibility of big bags of dog food to ‘Racoonian’ (???) teeth.

The phone rings, and a programmer answers.

Programmer:
Hello?

Voice on the phone:
Hala Misa Hailon Da?

Programmer::
I beg your pardon?

Voice on the phone:
Hailon. Hailon Da?

Programmer:
I’m sorry, but you’re slurring, or we have a bad connection, or I can’t understand your accent. What did you say?

Voice on the phone:
I said, is Mr. Allen there?

Programmer:
No. I’m sorry, but there’s no Mr. Allen here.

Voice on the phone:
I think there is.

Programmer:
What?

Voice on the phone:
This is Kaiser Permanente and our records show this as Mr. Allen’s home number.

Programmer:
Really? How is Mr. Allen’s name spelled in your records?

The voice on the phone now spells Mr. Allen’s name with a series of letters that do start with an “A” and end with an “n” but which combined do not assemble into the name “Allen.” Still it’s not as bad as the Department of Motor Vehicles where a clerk once looked at the programmer’s name and asked if he was “Dale Hambone.” The programmer concedes to the inevitable.

Programmer:
Yes, I lied, I really am Mr. Allen.

Voice on the phone:
Good. How much to you weigh?

Programmer:
What? Um, around 180 pounds.

Voice on the phone:
So, you’ve gone up 40 pounds.

Programmer:
No, I’ve gone down 2 pounds. Who is this? And why are you calling me?

Voice on the phone:
This is the Hypertension Clinic and we’ve been referred to you by your doctor at the Geriatric Clinic.

Programmer:
No you haven’t.

Voice on the phone:
Yes we have.

Programmer:
I don’t have a doctor at the Geriatric Clinic. I am not a patient at the Geriatric Clinic. My mother is a patient at the Geriatric Clinic. Should we really be talking about her?

Voice on the phone:
No Mr. Allen, we are talking about you.

Programmer:
Really. What’s my first name?

Voice on the phone:
What?

Programmer:
What’s my first name, as it’s written in your records?

Voice on the phone:
Umm, Peterly? Your first name is Peter, Mr. Allen.

Programmer:
I see. Would you please spell my name to me, one letter at a time.

Voice on the phone:
P-E-R-L-E-Y

Programmer:
That’s not Peter. It’s not even Peterly. It’s Perley. That’s my mother’s name. I’m pretty sure that you don’t want to be talking to me.

Voice on the phone:
No… Mr. Allen… I want to talk to you… Mr. Allen.

Programmer:
Don’t your records have a box in them with “M” for male and “F” for female. What does that say?

LONG PAUSE

Voice on the phone:
Yes, so how much does your mother weigh?

Programmer:
She weighs 144 pounds.

Voice on the phone:
So, then she’s lost weight. That’s very serious. We instructed you that we wanted to increase or at least maintain her weight.

Programmer:
No, she’s gained weight.

Voice on the phone:
No, she’s lost 2.75 pounds.

Programmer:
I see. What did you write down when I told you her weight?

Voice on the phone:
137.25 pounds.

Programmer:
Yes. I see. That’s very interesting. But I didn’t tell you 137.25 pounds. I said 144 pounds. Which is 4 pounds higher than her weight the last time she was in the Geriatric Clinic.

LONG PAUSE

Voice on the phone:
Is she drinking the protein drink?

Programmer:
Yes, she has a can every morning when she first gets up, before breakfast.

Voice on the phone:
Oh, no, no, no. She mustn’t drink it before her meals. It will suppress her appetite unless she drinks it between meals. Only drink it between meals.

Programmer:
But by drinking it first thing in the morning it helps with her blood sugar, and prevents her from falling down, and if she drinks it first thing in the morning doesn’t that mean she’s drinking it between the meal that was dinner last night and the meal that is breakfast this morning?

LONG PAUSE

Voice on the phone:
Well, I think that this has been very productive, and I will use our computer system to mail her some dietary instructions that are specially tailored to her program of treatment.

When the dietary instructions arrive they consist of a yellow page whose first point is to “Always drink whole milk to help maintain body weight” and a blue page whose first point is to “Always drink skim mile to help lower blood pressure.”

I should have noticed this earlier, but yesterday I discovered that my dog is also afraid of the patio.

Now by this I do not mean that he’s afraid of the patio, as in the back garden. No, he’s not afraid to go out into the back yard, because of some unseen, and thus unnoticed by me, trauma experienced recently. Instead he’s afraid of the physical patio. By which I mean the concrete slab that you walk on when you go out ‘onto the patio.’

For some time his trips to the bathroom, which originally were exuberant sprints all the way to the column at the end of the house, have become progressively shorter. Last week he peed on the barbecue that I’d moved under the patio (as in the awning attached to the house, I did not move anything underneath the concrete slab itself) to keep it out of the rain. I’d assumed that he didn’t want to go out in the damp, it really was little more than a mist, but apparently he was avoiding that long, and now frightening, walk across the concrete.

So yesterday I was puttering about, on the patio, as the nervous canine sat in the open doorway and watched me. At this point the dog next door, whose name is Chew-Chee, (the spelling of which is obviously wrong, check previous posts on the English tradition of mangling foreign names) barked at me through the side fence. This initiated the Sunday afternoon tradition of Feeding the Neighbor’s Dog. I went back to my kitchen, removed a bread crust from the refrigerator, and returned to the back garden where I sat on a low stone wall and produced tasty treats for the appreciative dog next door. After pressing the third piece of crust through the chain link fence, again following longstanding tradition, I broke off a piece for the Little White Dog, turned to receive his supplicating paw shake, and… nothing. He wasn’t there.

Now it wasn’t as if his bark actually revealed his hiding place. He was four feet north of his traditional location on the patio, in the garden, sitting in a bushy green shrub, with his head sticking out of the top.

So for a bit we reenacted a scene from one of those silent comedies. I looked at him. He looked at me. I looked at the spot on the patio where he normally would have sat to receive his bread crust treat. I looked at him some more. Then he barked at me again. Clearly there was something very important going on that I just didn’t understand.

I tried luring him out of the garden and back to his traditional begging spot, but no dice. The best I could produce was one forepaw barely touching the concrete with his neck extending in the fashion of a white, fluffy, 12 inch tall, giraffe.

So I alternated between presenting pieces of crust to the very cooperative, and confident neighbor dog – who would have squeezed her snout through the chain links if possible to get closer to the bread in my hand – and waving crusts, near the shrubs, while my dog whimpered for me to bring them closer to the garden and farther away from the concrete.

When we were done Chew-Chee returned to the back door of her house, and I walked across the patio to my back door. The rustling noised to my right revealed that my dog had begun a sort of jungle trek through the garden, rather than follow me across the concrete. When I reached the door I turned around and saw the nervous little creature trapped at the end of the garden, it stops some 6 feet from the back door, eyeing the concrete with great trepidation. He then hurled himself through the air in an attempt to vault from the garden into the house. He didn’t quite make it, and ended up hopping twice rather like a fluffy white kangaroo. Once inside the house he sat at my feet, looked up at me, and smiled (It may not be anatomically possible, but I swear he looked up at me and smiled.) as if he had just succeeded in tight rope walking across Niagara Falls.

So, he’s now afraid of the back patio and the kitchen. What do these two areas have in common? Well, they’re both flat, and you walk on them. Then why is he not afraid of the sidewalk out in front of the house when we go for a walk? I’m afraid that this remains to be seen. Stay tuned for more, frightening, developments.

Eventually this is about a TV show in America. Bear with me.

Philosophically, I suppose, I don’t understand the name M’Bai. And this is only partially because in geography class as a schoolboy we were all taught to pronounce it Bombay. When we were youngsters we all thought that Bombay was the name of a town in India. Now it appears that it was an English mispronunciation of the name of a town in India.

My take on the chain of events, which admittedly may be a bit dodgy as India is quite a distance away, runs something like this. In the 17th century British merchants – or entrepreneurs, or pirates depending upon how one might break down the exact nature of their business transactions – arrived on the west coast of the Indian subcontinent and pulled their ships up to the pier at a large port. Early on, perhaps even before haggling over prices began, someone asked for the name of the port/city. The locals, who were part of the Mahratta Confederacy, answered, in the Mahratta language, that the name of the town was M’bai.

Now on a good day the English aren’t very handy with foreign place names. In the 16th century a boatload of English merchants/entrepreneurs/pirates pulled into a port on the west coast of Italy, asked the name of the town, and when the locals said “Livorno” the sailors managed to turn that into “Leghorn.” So I suppose the chaps did a bit better with M’bai. I’ll wager that what they thought they heard was something like “Umm-bye.” And I’ll wager that there were enough Londoners on board to suggest that the “Bye” part of “Umm-bye” was simply the Cockney pronunciation of “Bay.” And the town was, after all, a port located on a bay. So the pronunciation was corrected to “Umm-bay.” I also think that you could bet money that the sailors thought that some of the sounds from the word preceding the town’s name weren’t the end of the word immediately before “M’bai” but were actually the beginning of the name “M’Bai”. OK, so if that sound was a “B” then they ended up with “Bmm-bay.” This probably sounded a lot like “Bum-bay.” Having shared drinks with 20th century American sailors, I’m pretty certain that their 17th century ancestors would have been quite happy naming a new town something like “Buttocks Bay.” However, the more genteel bookkeepers back in London would have wanted to change it to something a bit less anatomical. And Voila! “Bombay.” At least that’s the way I like to imagine it.

Time passes and some 300 years later India is independent. Now days India is a very large country, well… technically I suppose it’s now three countries (Pakistan, India and Bangladesh), but it used to be lots of much smaller countries, each of which was individually absorbed into the British colony of India. Since each of the provinces that used to be separate countries spoke their own language, the PBS documentary ‘The Story of English’ indicated that India has a myriad of local languages (was it 17, or was it 37, or was it 117 ?), the brand new Indian government decided to make English the official language. That way no one group or sect would be insulted at having to communicate in the language of a local rival, and besides under the British colonial administration all the street signs and railway information had been in English, and this way the government wouldn’t have to spend money on changing the signs.

More time passes, and in local elections a sort of Mahratta Independence party won the 2008 elections for the state in which Bombay was located. They had promised to secede from India, but the federal government took a rather dim view of that political platform. So they floundered about, and settled on making a gesture of independence, and changed the name of Bombay to the original name, M’bai. This despite the fact that the majority of citizens in M’bai are no longer Mahrattas, don’t speak the Mahratta language, and just might prefer the name Bombay.

Even more time passes, and a week after the terrorist attack on the hotels at M’bai there were huge demonstrations against terrorism. One supposes that in a county with a population the size of India’s any demonstration would probably be huge. At the front of the crowd was a gentleman who was dressed and made up to look like Gandhi. Immediately behind the Gandhi reenactor were some signs decrying terrorism, others complimenting democracy, and one insulting the Indian government. (“Lions been Leading by Donkey!”) But the vast majority of the signs, admittedly from the second row on back, said things like, “Give Us Back Our Old Bombay.” At first I interpreted these as appeals for a return to the old fashioned, civilized way of life, but then I thought that they might actually be demands that were less behavior related and had more to do with the name of their home town.

Finally, returning to the promised story about TV, whilst watching late night television Jay Leno announced that his next guest would be the very attractive, young, female lead from the film ‘Slum Dog Millionaire.’ The band played some music, she walked in, Jay welcomed her, and she sat down. Mr. Leno then noted that she; was originally from M’bai, that there had recently been a dreadful terrorist attack in M’bai, and inquired if any of her relatives, in M’bai, had been injured. She thanked him for inquiring after her relatives, said that yes she was originally from M’bai, and as a matter of fact had been on a flight back home to Bombay when she heard news of the attack. She didn’t seem to notice that she’d switched to the older name for the town. By the time the segment had ended the American talk show host had used the word M’bai three times, and the Indian actress had used M’bai once, but had used Bombay eight times.

One wonders how well the change over is actually going, and how much money the city fathers are spending on changing the signs.

Time has passed, and it appears that the staff at my local Subway Sandwich shop is once again composed of completely new, enthusiastic, but inexperienced employees. Upon noticing this I surmised that I would thus be destined to repeat all of my previous sandwich adventures, with a new supporting cast. However, I was wrong. There was still plenty of confusion, but it was new, and unexpected confusion.

Me:
May I have a foot long tuna on wheat to go please.

Sandwich Specialist:
You want tuna?

Me:
Yes. May I have a foot long tuna on wheat to go please.

Sandwich Specialist:
Uh-huh, you want normal?

Me:
What? Um, I beg your pardon?

Sandwich Specialist:
Normal? You want normal?

Me:
Normal?

Sandwich Specialist:
Normal, normal! Normal tuna.

Me:
As opposed to what? Abnormal tuna?

Sandwich Specialist:
Huh?

Me:
Mutant tuna? Instead of swimming about the Pacific Ocean with its fins it hops about the dusty prairie on two hind legs, balancing itself with a huge tail, like some sort of post apocalyptic scale covered kangaroo?

Sandwich Specialist:
Nah, normal or toasted. You want toasted?

Me:
No thank you. Normal tuna will be just fine.

Very interesting.

In a boring sort of way, for people with nothing better to think about.

As I’ve already admitted, I find myself strangely drawn to channel 57-5. Which displays a live feed of three pine trees on a California hillside under the call letters “SNOW CA”

Well, the station is gone now. Not exactly gone, 57-5 is still there, but “SNOW CA” is gone.

Now it’s another one of those Vietnamese variety show stations. Even though I don’t’ speak the language, I’m pretty sure that it’s Vietnamese, and not some other Asian nationality, because the call letters have changed from “SNOW CA” to “SAIGON TV”

It remains to be seen how much I will miss three trees, who didn’t really do much of anything on camera, broadcasting live, 24 hours a day, even when it was too dark for the camera to pick up a picture.