Cod Almighty | Diary
Many a true word spoken ingest
14 July 2021
BOTB diary has been relegated back to middling, muddling midweek mundanity, and about time too. My drivel is in stark contrast to Mark Stilton's 'Fenty Years 4 – A Newell Beginning' which shows what can be achieved with dedication, intelligence and a willingness to do some actual research. Actually, reading it made me wonder if Parker, the Thunderbirds chauffeur, was called Parker because it was a pun on the fact that the car driver would also be the car parker? That's only just occurred to me. If I have any more epiphanies related to cult 1960s puppet shows, you'll be the first to know.
One thing we hoped had disappeared with John Shelton Fenty into the sunset was the gobbledygook press release from GTFC. However, it makes a triumphant return with the following message to season ticket holders.
"Our staff have been working hard over the last 12 months implementing a new ticketing system to help ensure a smooth and simple customer experience for our supporters going forward. We appreciate your patience with us over the last few weeks whilst we have continued to migrate our systems across and ingest our databases across during this transitional season for us."
It's always nice to know that the club plan to go forward in time, of course. I spent a lot of last week worrying about whether they planned to create a smooth and simple customer experience for the 1996/97 season via the infamous GTFC time machine. "Migrate our systems across" is clearly bad English of the kind business chumps use in order to irritate ordinary people, but at least you can guess what it means. However, it is the last part of the sentence that fascinates me. Can anyone tell me what "ingest our databases across" means? The word "ingest" suggests that they possibly wanted to say "migrate" again but ironically thought that repeating the same word would be bad English. The word "ingest" may be predictive text gone wrong and undetected, or it may be some business jargon that nobody outside the press release writer's office has heard of, or it might be that they didn't know what the word meant or that they got it mixed up with another. Any guesses? Anyway, I've rewritten the release to make it clearer for the supporter in the street.
"Our staff has been working hard over the last twelve months implementing a new ticketing system to help ensure a smooth and simple customer experience. We would appreciate your patience with us over the last few weeks, especially BOTB diary who spent 33 minutes in the shop trying to renew his season ticket even though there were only two in front of him in the queue. We only had one lad at the desk and he seemed to be a new employee as he needed assistance with every single request that was made to him by the aforementioned two in the queue. Mind you, one of these two had the most ridiculous and pointless non-issue that took about 14 backroom staff to deal with and the 'solution' made no difference to anything anyway. This unhappy experience is still an improvement from the time a few seasons ago when the two women behind the counter, whilst printing out a ticket for a cup match for BOTB, had a very frank discussion about which types of trousers they couldn't wear because they gave them an unwanted cameltoe. Anyway, be that as it may, shifting our systems across to this card thing is a pain in the arse and is causing us delay, whereas we also have something to say about databases but no-one here is really quite sure what it could be. You'll have to work that one out for yourselves. We're hopeful that you'll be so dazzled by the exciting, technological and 21st century word 'databases' you won't question the rest of it. That's all for now, I'm off to migrate a packet of crisps. Look! Shiny new players!"
Have you recovered from Ingerland's defeat yet? I have trouble with international football. As Miss Guest Diary points out, it is a moral quagmire being on the same side as many of the complete arseholes who follow our national team. Having said that, I didn't want the dirty, cynical Italians to win either. Or anyone else really. I believe in being fair and sporting and the international arena is still a bit of a showcase for the whiner, the cheater, the feigner and the fraud. But national pride is like Town pride, it is in the blood. I love England and Grimsby but whether I actually like many aspects of them is a moot point. If I was Scottish I think the English would really irritate me. If I was from, say, Bristol I would think of Grimsby only as a place I never needed to waste time going to. Yet I am defined and governed by my own Englishness and my own Grimbarianity. I know, great new word - cheers.
Incidentally, does anyone think that if we didn't have Gareth Southgate in charge we would have won? It's an impossible hypothesis to prove or disprove, of course. Some see him as a master tactician, I see him as a man who has been given a generation of tremendously gifted frontmen but largely wastes their talents. I've also read Stan Collymore's autobiography which really doesn't show 'Nice Guy' Gareth in a good light at all. Of course, Stan Collymore is pretty gruesome as well, so there you go.
I'm listening to Peter Hook's autobiography, Substance, and that is giving me the same vibe. The author claims that Caroline Aherne (Mrs. Merton) was an appalling domestic abuser and alcoholic, but since 'Hooky' is a short step above being Jeremy Kyle fodder himself I'm unsure about the reliability of his narration. I try and avoid clichés when I can, but "you pays your money and you takes your choice" seems applicable here.
Anyway, Nick Drake! Oh hang on, I've run out of time. Maybe next week?