How sinister is this?

The boiler guy downstairs has local radio on (so I'm going to be humming various power ballads for the next few days - sorry Openspace/friends). But Foreigner aside, the radio station keeps running adverts for something called Quest For Truth, a company which offers polygraph - yes, lie detector - tests. It presents these as being 'fascinating,' but then goes on to suggest that people can use them for finding out if their partner is cheating or if someone they know has nicked stuff off them. Given the very questionable reliability of polygraphs this just sounds massively dodgy all round. As dodgy as that place in Chorlton that does extra scans of your foetus for you? Dunno. But still highly dubious.

Be Very Afraid, and some updates...

Firstly, thanks to OA again for striking fear into my heart when I opened my email to this excerpt from a Financial Times book review:

The most shocking tales are about Sarah Palin, who last week took up a new role as a Fox News commentator, and whose recent book, Going Rogue, is selling in the millions. So uninformed was McCain's running mate that advisors had to give her junior school tutorials on the first and second world wars, Vietnam and the cold war. Palin insisted that Saddam Hussein launched the September 11 attacks. As the depth of her ignorance sunk in, as well as her total lack of interest in rectifying it, McCain's senior staff members were “ridden with guilt over elevating Palin to within striking distance of the White House.

And a couple of updates.

First, wahey! My boiler scrappage scheme voucher has arrived, and as I type the cats are cowering in the bedroom as the rest of the house descends in to a chaotic mess of disconnected pipes, lifted floorboards and men in boiler suits wielding bits of machinery. But that doesn't mean I'm retracting any of my comments on the equally chaotic implementation of the scheme, which I put down to the EST's political masters trying to create a bit of a warm (literally) fuzzy feeling before the electioneering really gets going.

The second one is a corker. Remember Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling declaring that Moss Side was like the Wire? A couple of journalists - a freelancer from Manchester and a crime reporter from the Baltimore Sun - decided to swap cities and see if he was right. So Baltimore blokey, from a city with several hundred murders a year, gets to spend a night with GMP in sunny Moss Side. Simon Binns reported the result in Crains:

Justin Fenton, the Baltimore Sun crime reporter, spent a week on a job swap with Northern Independent hack Mark Hughes in order to see if Moss Side really was like hit TV show The Wire, a recent claim made by Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling. Fenton was positively disappointed at the lack of excitement, however, after 14 hours with Greater Manchester Police. “The lack of action on my ridealongs has been quite ridiculous, especially since the press and the officers I rode around with in Manchester insist that these are tough streets,” he said. “Here's what I witnessed first-hand: a car full of teens who had just finished smoking marijuana; a kid whose furious bike riding raised suspicions but turned out to be nothing.” Furious bike riding is a suspicious activity now? Good news for Manchester's public image, though, and proof that cycling really has taken off since the Velodrome and Sir Chris Hoy's Olympic success.

Gaza book - fundraiser for ISM and FreeGaza

For anyone considering buying Gaza: Beneath the Bombs by credit card, if you use the Pluto Press sales website and enter the code FREEGAZA or ISM GAZA during the payment process the relevant organisation gets a cut...

The Boiler Scrappage Scheme: pt II

So, the Monday After the Saturday Before (see this rant), I get a phone call in response to the message I left for the Energy Savings Trust. I will not, for reasons which will become obvious, be divulging anything at all that might identify the person who rang me. That's the problem with slagging off organisations like this - some of the people working for them are actually genuinely dedicated and lovely. It's their bosses that are the problem.
So, Nice Person from the EST (NPEST from now on) gives me a call and establishes that what I would like is to apply for the effing Boiler Scrappage Scheme. They then helpfully offer to take down all my details for the application form, while admitting that they haven't actually seen the form before and certainly haven't filled it in. There's a first time for everything. But NPEST does warn me that this might result in my application going in several times, as they've already been told that "although the form looks like it doesn't work it actually has."
Maybe.
So, NPEST goes through the form, filling in the details as I read them off. They get a bit stuck trying to fill in the address section, since, as they comment, the fields are a bit confused and all over the place and it's not totally clear which bit of one's address is meant to go where.
NPEST also divulges (which I'm guessing they shouldn't have) that there was supposed to be a dedicated team staffing the phone lines to deal with the boiler scrappage scheme. I don't know if these are secondees from somewhere else in government, or what. But, says NPEST, for some reason they're not actually being trained until this week, ie won't actually be staffing anything for a few more days at least, and the EST's normal staff were significantly dischuffed to find this out when they came into work this morning, expecting to be able to farm this particular weight off onto someone else.
So, according to the computer screen in front of NPEST, my application has actually gone through this time. I haven't had any kind of confirmation email to that effect (and this must be six hours ago now), which is a bit worrying, but given the standard of form building which seems to be standard at the EST they probably just haven't remembered that people might actually want some kind of receipt.
The saga continues... (or, hopefully, it doesn't, but I get a nice voucher in the post).

The Boiler Scrappage Scheme: a tale of bureaucratic hell

In my bimbling innocence, I have been sucked into a bizarre parallel world of quangoese cockups that could drive a woman to... oooh believe that the state is incompetent and corrupt...
Gordon B announced with much fanfare a couple of weeks ago a boiler scrappage scheme, like the car scheme, which would replace G rated boilers with A rated ones, allegedly reducing CO2 emissions by the same amount as taking 45,000 cars off the road, and - the buzzword of the moment, create British jobs! Woohoo! What can go wrong, one asks.
The answer, of course, is that one can give the job of administering this scheme to the Energy Savings Trust, a clunking bureaucracy which isn't apparently up to anything more complex than sending out a few leaflets about changing your lightbulbs. It certainly managed to screw up the solar incentive scheme a few years back. Trying to make contact with this organisation is like dealing with some little organisation with three staff and a doggie on a string - you'd never guess its budget runs into tens of millions and it gets to second dozens of staff from government departments.
The sorry saga so far is that on the 6th January, my very on-the-ball boiler installer rang my at about nine o'clock at night to tell me to apply for the scheme. I went to the EST site next morning and, as per the instructions, emailed boilerscrappage@est.org.uk with a 'registration of interest' which included the make of boiler being replaced, the new one etc. I heard nothing back. So on about the 12th or 13th I rang up to chase this. The very nice, if somewhat woolly and confused-sounding woman on the phone told me they'd been 'snowed under' with interest (although I managed to get through straight away on the phone - obviously a good thing but not necessarily a sign of stretched capacity). She informed me that 'Steve' (not the name she said) would get back to my email - which rather (and worryingly) implied that a single bloke was actually dealing with this landslide of email interest.
Needless to say, by Saturday 16th I've heard nothing back. I tried ringing the national number, only to find that it's only staffed Monday-Friday 9-5. So how are people in work supposed to access a) the boiler scheme and b) the wealth of energy efficiency information the EST claims to be able to bestow? Not through the online forms on the site, that's for certain. I clicked through the same series of links I'd followed on the 7th, only to find that the instructions page has changed, and there is now a link to an application form for the scrappage scheme. Wahey! I thought. Yes, there is a question as to why everyone who sent in an expression of interest couldn't have been auto-emailed to tell them that this form was now up, but never mind. Now I can just apply...
Can I buggery. I fill in the form, not one but three times. Each time it all seems to go fine, I fill in the requisite fields - some of them dropdown menus, some typed fields. I tick the necessary disclaimer boxes. I press 'submit.' And then every single field on the form sprouts a kind of burgundy-purple message saying 'Please provide some information for the above field it is a required field,' or similar. It's not my browser - I fill in online forms all the bloody time.
So, I think, I'll at least let them know their form isn't working, and maybe I'll get something back telling me when it is. Or some such vain hope. So I go to the EST's standard contact form and write a little message to this effect. I also have to fill in a bunch of fields with my name, address, phone number etc, including one of those ones where you fill in your postcode and it finds your address for you. This works successfully. But when I press 'submit' - it all goes tits up again. Despite the form identifying my postcode enough to find my address, it's refusing to admit it is actually a postcode for the purposes of submitting the form. Great.
My last salvo is to try and email my message to the generic email addresses, which appear on various EST leaflets, ads etc, mail@ and info@. Neither of these are working either. There are completely unfunded organisations campaigning for the preservation of species no-one's ever heard of with more efficient communications than this over-funded shower. Withholding tax because irresponsible governments will just spend it on nasty nuclear weapons is a fab idea. But withholding it because their quangos are completely unable to perform basic tasks feels like an even better notion at this time...

Writing: Gaza, Freelance Hackery

Sharyn and I did our first book event this evening, to a small but warm and interesting audience at Manchester Muslim Writers – hopefully a good intro for Sharyn for the substantial tour she has booked all around the UK.
One of the audience was a guy who, on his Manchester Evening Snooze blog, has done a neat analysis of the Sky TV 'documentary' about Ross Kemp's trip to Gaza. Congratulations to Azaad on sitting through the whole thing. I should make it clear I haven't seen the programme. But I'm putting inverted commas around the word documentary because it has Ross Kemp in it. Maybe I'm a crashing snob. Probably. But I've never quite gotten the point of him.
Anyway, our advance order of the books turned up last week, and what a strange experience that was. A real book, rather a nicely designed one and on nice looking-paper. With our names on the front. Bizarre. Both of us had similarly bemused, slightly stunned reactions, and then have had to keep going back and remind ourselves that the product of that frenzied chunk of work last summer really happened. I had another Oh! moment today when I had to find something from the book and realised I could look in the index. It has an Index. Somehow that made it more real too. As did having people buy it and ask to have it signed for their friends and mums. Very odd.
Reading the accounts of the same days a year ago, from the depths of the hellish bombardment and invasion, is also very odd. But not in a good way.

On a completely different note, I came across a link to this more parochially depressing article today, analysing the state of the freelance writing market. Last week one of my regular (and better-paid) sources of work informed me that they have had to impose tight constraints on their freelance budgets, so no more work for me for the moment. It's not a surprise – it's a publication which is substantially dependent on public-sector advertising for its revenue. But it's happened sooner than I expected.
So the LA Times overview of some of the developments in freelance writing markets is interesting, looking at the risible sums paid by many of the contractors on freelance job sites like oDesk or peopleperhour, or by pay-per-hit 'news' sites like Allvoices. Many of the advertisers on the contract sites make it abundantly clear that they're not interested in the quality of the writing they commission – they simply want search engine-friendly-text that will lure people to their websites, selling whatever kind of tat they're in the market for. And the huge amount of free stuff on the web means there is no incentive for them to pay anything approaching a proper rate. But, as the LA Times writer points out, it also behooves writers who actually want to make a living out of their writing to see themselves to some extent as business people, offering a service, rather than as creatives who are owed a living for churning out our chosen art form. Hmm.