Tales Of Jim, #1: Hello, Jim! Is jim there?

The Tales Of Jim chronicle events that happened about a year ago when I got a new mobile phone. I posted them on a short lived blog I kept back then, but here they are again for your amusement.

Many moons ago, I got a new mobile phone. Exciting, eh? Well, not particularly. I cancelled my contract with O2 who refused to let me have the handset I wanted, and got a new, better value contract with T-Mobile. Life was good.

Then life got annoying.

Then life got quite amusing.

T-Mobile has a nice feature where if you miss a call you get sent a text message telling you that you missed a call. Very nice, especially if your phone has been off for a while. Usually these messages are accompanied by a message telling you that you have new voicemail, from the person you missed the call from.

One day, I started getting new voicemail. But I had no missed calls.

Someone else's voicemail was ending up in my voicemail.

And his name is Jim. Jimmy to his mates.

And his mates are getting more and more annoyed because Jimmy isn't returning their calls.

Call received on Nov 26th, 2:37pm.
From: a young sounding male, who I have called Colin.

Hi there, forgot to call ya at 2 o clock, bye.

Oh dear, young Colin! Jim isn't going to get your apology now, is he? I cry tears in my heart for you.

Call received on: Nov 26th, 2:43pm.
From: Man with Jamaican accent. I shall name him Winston.

Hi Jim, whats happenin bro? Just catchin up, wanna ask ya somethin, appreciate it if ya could get back to me. See ya man.

Winston. Please call Jim more often. Your voice is quite amusing.

There are two colours in my head

I guess you can never really be sure what's going on inside someone's mind.

Seaneen talks about her intrusive thoughts in a recent blog entry and it’s strange because I never knew, until relatively recently in my life, that not everybody has these type of thoughts and flashes. I have seen flashes of quite disturbing things, had thoughts that are just stuck in my head, heard voices, seen things that aren’t there etc. since I was a small child. I just presumed that it happened to everyone. Even now, I still don’t know what level of those type of things are “normal” and which I should be worried about.

For instance.

I was sat on my sofa a few weeks ago, absently staring at my foot. I suddenly got a flash of someone driving a chisel into the bottom of my foot. I mentioned this to someone at work and he reacted as if I said I’d spent the weekend drowning kittens. It was a bit of a reminder that it doesn’t happen to everyone and maybe, just maybe, next time I should keep my big mouth shut.

The law of averages

Statistics - interesting and insightful, or meaningless? (See what I did there?)

1 in 5 people in the word are Chinese.

Look around you. See 4 people that are not Chinese? Must be you, then.

On average, people have 1.999 legs.

Hurrah, I'm above average in the leg department!

16 percent of all traffic accidents are caused by drunk drivers.

That means 84 percent are caused by sober drivers. Should we lock them up instead?

Malt Loaf Saves The Day

Various mental illnesses run in my family, on one particular side. My father is schizophrenic, dissociative, and a number of other things. My grandfather started to decline into dementia at a relatively young age. My uncle was also bipolar. My cousin Simon, whom this post is mainly about, has Aspergers syndrome.

Simon would spend afternoons poring over bus timetables. On one such afternoon, my grandfather snatched the timetables out of his hands. "What on earth are you looking at those all the time for? You know nothing about buses. You don't understand these." He was astounded when Simon was able to recite the timetables perfectly and answer questions about the running times of nearly all the buses that ran in our area.

Simon would also spend hours standing in the street, seemingly staring at nothing. He would always do this with a pencil in his hand, waving it up and down with two fingers. This attracted the attention of various undesirables in the neighbourhood, who singled him out as the estate weirdo and started to bully him. They would ride around him on their bikes, throwing things at him.

One day, it all changed. All thanks to Malt Loaf.

Take a look at the picture of malt loaf on wikipedia. Imagine a very immature person taking a loaf of malt, and shaping it into a rough sausage shape. Perhaps the immature person would make it curl a bit, and taper it at one end. Then perhaps the immature person would leave it to stand for 30 seconds or so in a bowl of water. The malt loaf becomes a very, very convincing looking fake poo. So convincing that poor Simon retched and had to run to the bathroom when he saw the product of the very immature person (who shall remain unidentified) and the malt loaf.

Once Simon had calmed down and we explained to him that the dirty sausage was in fact just malt loaf, we hit on the idea that it could be the answer to his bully problem.

We stuck a lolly stick into the center of it and told Simon to take it with him when he went outside. If he saw the bullies, he was to wait until they rode up to him, then show the poop-on-a-stick to them, throw it at them if possible, or just chase them with it.

That afternoon, armed with the pooh-stick, Simon ventured out into the street to take his usual space-staring stance.

I like to think of what happened next from the bullies' point of view. There they were, ready for another fun filled afternoon of taunting the local mental. After a minute of highly enjoyable taunting, the mental produces what appears to be his own excrement on a stick. Grinning wildly, the mental chases them, pulling bits off the piped waste and throwing it at them.

Simon was never bothered by them again.

Brilliant Shopping

It was great to see in Stephen Fry's documentary, The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, that he too suffers from bouts of Brilliant Shopping.

Brilliant Shopping is perhaps not constrained to people who have bipolar disorder, but seems to come out more regularly in those who do. From a post over at Ladies Who Love Dinosaurs...

This is what I went into M&S for:
Single cream
Onion

This is what I came out with:
2 packets roast beef and horseradish Christmas special crisps
Pomegranate seeds (removed from pith)
Christmas pudding flavoured yoghurt
2 Pink Lady apples (which I wanted because they are pink on the inside)
3 bean salad
Tandoori naan bread
Instant microwave porridge
Single cream
4 organic onions

Sara from My Sad Alter Ego relates...

I got it into my head that I wanted a kite after seeing one in a toy store…and then I kept buying kites that I kept finding, one after another (same day), each one more spectacular than the last. I love those kites.

Brilliant Shopping is that urge that grabs you in a shop - you need to buy these things NOW. You need that DVD boxset. It's £20.00 cheaper online, but you don't care. It's simply not the same if you have to order and wait for it. The actual act of buying it is part of the pleasure.

The "impulse buys" that shops put by the counters for you to peruse while you wait to be served are to tempt the normal shopper.

For us, the entire store is the impulse buy section.

I bought a radio controlled helicopter. I gave the charger for it away to someone who had the same model, but a broken charger. Now I have a helicopter which I can't charge up to use, and will forever sit on my desk at work.