My Twenty Sixth Week as a Budding Author

If you were to review my CV the following things would strike you:-

• I’ve worked with Leslie Crowther
• In the past twenty years I’ve only ever had three jobs, including this one

Working with Leslie Crowther may be a slight exaggeration. Many many years ago I was charged with leading a project to develop a public “self-service” fax machine to be located within Post Office Counters. It’s one of the most interesting projects I’ve ever undertaken as this machine was to have a direct interface with the British public which in turn presented it’s own set of challenges. An industrial designer undertook the vast majority of the design which we reviewed with several postmasters.

They all looked at the drawings and then asked “What about the fluids?”. We scratched our heads a lot and stared back at them for a while before asking “What fluids?”.

“Listen lads, what you learn about working in a Post Office is that the general public will bring and spill almost every liquid known to man over its surfaces. Coke, squash, puke, piss, nitro-glycerine the lot. You need to design a method of wicking away the fluids”.

Dave Langman, our industrial designer, then spent days fretting over tubes, gulleys, seals and runaways in order to channel the piss away from the integrated fax machine and onto the floor where it belonged. Eventually we finished the design and manufactured a staggering four units for a test launch in a carefully selected set of Post Office locations (we studied geographical incontinence data for weeks to arrive at this set). Our marketeers searched high and low for a figurehead to launch the latest hi-tech innovation bursting from Royal Mail Research and Development, clearly all fingers pointed towards Leslie Crowther.

For those that are not aware, Leslie Crowther was a TV presenter whose CV included; Crackerjack, The Price is Right, Stars in their Eyes and even The Black and White Minstrel Show. Clearly he was the man to educate the British public upon the benefits of transmitting paper documents over the wire whilst staring at pensioners queuing for their bingo money. Or alternatively, for a modest fee he was prepared to say nice things about anything that smelt of piss. For some reason the public fax machine didn't go viral and like Leslie, the service died in the nineties. 

On reflection my name dropping is in division four when compared to others I’ve encountered. They can reel off Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee, royalty, Lord mayors and dictators. Whilst I’m stuck with alcoholic TV presenters, Emu and tenuous connections such as once playing in a band with a bloke who now works with Andy Partridge from XTC. I guess I need to use my noddle more if I’m ever going to get anywhere, my ingratiation skills are clearly lacking.

Putting Leslie aside, let's look at the other point, only three jobs. This means that I have resigned twice and when you resign sometimes your colleagues will club together and buy you a little leaving present. I’m never sure whether the message conveyed by these is “Good Luck” or “Good riddance”. On leaving my first job I was presented with a GPS wrapped in my P45, if I was paranoid I could have read this as “Dave, please use this to leave the premises and navigate yourself as far away as feasibly possible”. The second set of colleagues generously gave me a gorgeous Cross fountain pen, could the message have been “Dave, step away from the keyboard, go back to basics and learn how to write properly”.

Regardless of the motives for their gifting I could not carry out my current job without these important recording devices, so let's take each in turn.

Many people think of a GPS as a device for telling you where you are, and they’d be correct, it is pretty good at that. That's as long as you a happy with turning to the wife and kids with “It’s OK we’re at 51.709711,-1.781931 I know where we are”. Actually that's a little flippant as these days they have maps and arrows that display a dirty great “You are here” on the screen. But for me the GPS is a critical recording device as it not only tells me where I am, it tells me where I’ve been.

As you may have gathered, I spend a fair amount of time riding around the countryside gathering information and turning this all into fluffy wank.

Having done this for twenty six weeks, I must doff my cap to the authors who have gone before me in the lo-tech days. Their process would have gone something like this:-

1. ride along a bit, almost get killed by a charabanc, see something pretty
2. stop, remove pen and notebook from saddle bag
3. tear out soggy page, retire to phone box out of rain
4. remove Ordnance survey map from saddle bag
5. remove compass from saddle bag
6. take bearings from hill to the left and church-with-a-steeple on the right
7. triangulate bearings on map to identify current location
8. notice that there is no phone box at calculated location
9. leave phone box, re-take compass bearings away from ferrous objects
10. re-calculate location
11. open notebook, scribble notes concerning “something pretty”
12. stare at blank page
13. retrieve inkwell from saddle bag, insert pen into inkwell, draw ink into pen
14. scribble notes into notebook avoiding multiple areas of splodged blue ink
15. replace all items into saddle bag
16. ride onwards
17. return, pick up pen, notebook, map, compass and inkwell
18. replace all items into saddlebag
19. fasten saddlebag straps
20. ride onwards
21. return home
22. laboriously transcribe soggy notes onto Basildon Bond whilst struggling with multiple Ordnance Survey sheets

You get the picture. In the old days of paper and pen it must have been laborious in comparison to the way I do it:-

1. ride along a bit, almost get killed by BMW, see something pretty
2. wipe rain from GPS, note current distance
3. pull dictafone from jersey pocket, speak distance, repeat the word “um” five times until inspiration strikes, speak description trying to avoid the word “alpine”
4. replace dictafone, nod at bemused pedestrian ride onwards
5. return home
6. download the track ridden from GPS into mapping package, hold head in hands when noting the calculated average speed
7. play dictafone, relate distances to the electronic track displayed on screen and easily transcribe locations with descriptions into word processor

As you can see I’ve got it dead easy and when my book is published (please note the huge degree of optimism beginning with “w” in that sentence) older authors will turn to me and give me the “You had it easy lad, in my day...etc...” speech. To make things even easier for myself, I’ve spent significant time this week building a computer program to read the GPS logs and automatically generate route description graphics for the book. I attempted this in week eighteen but to be honest rushed it. So this week I’ve spent some “quality time” putting aside all other tasks and concentrating on tool making. This is how man evolved and it is how I’m hoping to evolve in this job as a cycling author by using as many tools as possible to increase productivity.

You’re expecting a tale of woe, disaster, late evenings and frustration aren’t you. Well sadly you’ll have to read weeks one to twenty five for that, as week twenty six has gone pretty damned well. I have a piece of running software, it’s analysing rides and creating diagrams and will soon be doing all sorts of other jiggery pokery. It even does scaling as shown by the pictures below (please note this is BETA software devoid of fluffy wank).

This may seem trivial to the untrained eye, but take it from a hamfisted IT veteran that this is a major step forward for me. (Any IT experts reading this, please no comments just nods of appreciation, we need to keep the complexity myth rolling. I’m sure it may be easy for you, but if you state this publicly we may have problems with future client estimates.)

So, I’ve blathered on about the GPS, but what about the pen? Well strangely the pen has become an integral part of the arsenal of techniques I use to convince myself that progress is being made. Further up the page I latently “dissed” the old school pen and paper way of doing things. Yet here I am with a Moleskine journal and a fountain pen, scribbling in it every day about the things I have done and the ideas I’ve had.

I simply can’t find a better way of doing this. There are loads of bits of software that allow you to mind map, document ideas, write to-do lists, keep a diary, scribble down notes, store names and addresses and doodle diagrams. But they all suffer from the following problems:-

• there isn’t anything that does all of them well
• they have instruction manuals that need to be read (I’m a male last time I looked)
• they can disappear in a puff of nothing during a power cut
• you can’t use them on the loo

And so I resort to the tried and tested world of pen and paper. At the end of every day I write a little note reassuring myself that I actually did something useful. Sometimes I even cross off items from a never ending “To Do” list and occasionally there will be a little “*” which indicates that I’ve had a moment of genius. Most of these starred ideas don’t seem so clever a few days later, but it is satisfying to flick through the journal and see that in the past 6 months I’ve actually done stuff and thought of the odd mad idea. This alone keeps me sane, the illusion of having made progress and something physical to back it up.

It hasn’t all been roses this week though, on Sunday I dropped my phone and like a buttered slice of bread it fell onto a stone glass side down. The screen shattered and rendered it next to useless. A frantic google session made things worse with a replacement looking to cost over £300. Ebay to the rescue where I found a brand new replacement screen for £17. I wasn’t sure how easy this would be to install until I found a youtube video illustrating each stope of the process, and so I decided to give it a try. The screen arrived very quickly and with trepidation I sat down an initiated the repair. All went well until the video narrator informed me that now was the time to use the “case opener tool”. I ferreted through my tool kit in vain, there were plenty of unusual tools but nothing labelled “case opener”. Therefore, like all great men of DIY I retreated to the kitchen drawer and came back with palette and steak knives. You’ll be surprised to know that they make ideal substitutes for case opener tools and the replacement went without a hitch. Bingo a fully working phone with a new screen for £17.

After carrying out a long and intricate repair I vowed to really look after the phone thereon and kept this promise by dropping it today and putting a small crack in the brand new screen. There’s a moral in there somewhere but personally I blame gravity without which this would not have happened and also cycling would be so much easier.

Dave

1st July 2011

WEEK 27 >>>>>>