Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

Far be it from Feedback to doubt the journalistic integrity of the magazine
India Today, but the 15 February issue did contain an article that strained
our credulity somewhat. This was a story about a ‘big black goat’ in the
town of Jotana in northern Gujarat which is in the habit of stealing cigarettes
from people and smoking them.

‘The sight,’ says reporter U. Mahurkar, ‘is bizarre. The goat puffs
and inhales like any regular smoker . . . According to a local shopkeeper,
Ravishankar Raval, it smokes 20 cigarettes a day, all offered by local
people and visitors to the town – and sometimes snatched from unsuspecting
±¹¾±³¦³Ù¾±³¾²õ.’

The animal’s tendency to charge at people, ‘aiming for the cigarette
dangling from their lips’, can apparently be quite unsettling if you’re
not prepared for it. ‘Last fortnight, for instance, it scared the living
daylights out of a camel-cart driver passing through the town when it leapt
upon the moving cart from behind. The driver thought he was being attacked
by a panther or some other wild animal until he saw that it was actually
a goat that was just making a beeline for his ciggy.’

The article concludes by telling us that despite the goat’s nuisance
value, ‘the people of Jotana are unwilling to take any action against it
because they regard goats as holy animals’.

* * *

January’s issue of the journal Weather must be an interesting read,
judging by its contents page. Along with meaty articles like ‘Atmospheric
water in the National Curriculum’ and ‘The forgotten snowstorm – 4 January
1854′, there is the intriguing ‘Cumulus cloud analogue on a yoghurt pot
lid’. Feedback hasn’t had time to read this yet, but is looking forward
to it.

* * *

In the US they have a nice phrase to describe a silly bit of business
one-upmanship. ‘Telephone tag’ is the name of the game. Executive A wants
to talk with executive B, so gets his (this seems to be a male game) personal
assistant or secretary to place the call. But the call is taken by executive
B’s PA, who then has to get him on the line. The loser of the tag game
is whichever executive comes on the line first and thus has to wait for
the other executive.

Feedback is quite happy for executives to play power games with each
other, but is less happy to receive incoming calls which start, ‘please
hold on, Mr X would like to talk to you’, followed by a long wait on the
line while Mr X starts another job or call. Extensive tests have led to
a simple solution. When asked to hold on, start counting to 10. Then, if
Mr X has not come on the line, gently hang up. Do this every time the PA
phones back saying ‘Please hold on’. Finally Mr X gives up and dials his
own call. Then, if necessary, act puzzled and concerned and suggest that
Mr X get an engineer in to check his office phone system. So far it has
worked every time.

* * *

So, too, has Feedback’s method of dealing with power-players who call
from a loudspeaking telephone, thereby amplifying a personal conversation
for anyone at the other end to hear. As soon as you hear the telltale end-of-a-tunnel
sound of a speaker phone, say: ‘Sorry, I can’t hear you, please speak louder,
there must be something wrong with your phone.’ Speakerphone users soon
grow tired of shouting ever louder, so they give up and pick up the handset.
Now is the time to administer the coup de grace. ‘Oh, that’s much better.
Is it another phone? There is definitely something very wrong with the
first one.’

* * *

Feedback has learnt from long observation that odd bits of data sometimes
prove useful in unexpected ways, although too often their usefulness becomes
evident only after they have been discarded. So in the spirit that somebody
out there might need to know this, we report that the electrical capacitance
of a person of average height and weight is 80 picofarads. This, we hasten
to add, has been calibrated by students at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Donning a suit of medieval-style metal armour raises the capacitance
to 100 picofarads, ‘a bit higher than we were expecting’, says student
Jason Hintersteiner.

* * *

The microchip may be making telephone operators obsolete, but the species
isn’t extinct yet. The other day, Feedback was attempting to call a number
in upcountry Ghana. For more than ten minutes, the following were hanging
on the line: Feedback, the London operator, the operator in Ghana’s capital,
Accra, and the local operator in Obuasi. The result: a lot of amiable conversation
between us all and a number that didn’t answer.

* * *

It is not only humans who are allergic to aspects of the 20th century.
Dogs are as well. If you want to keep your canine companion sane, get rid
of the smoke detector, the fridge and the freezer, and sell off your fax
machine, particularly if it happens to be a Samsung SF 500 model. In a letter
to The Veterinary Record, R. E. Walker of Worcester warns of dogs going
into a panic when they hear bleats and whirs from these modern-day appliances.

‘In this practice,’ writes Walker, ‘a four-year-old black Labrador is
phobic about the failing battery signal from a variety of makes of (smoke)
alarm and notably averse to the beep of a Samsung SF 500 facsimile machine.’
She is also fearful of fireworks, crow-scarers and thunder, he adds. Walker
points out that the ‘clonks and whirs’ of fridges and freezers have also
been implicated in the promotion of canine paranoia, and adds: ‘In many
cases, careful inquiry will reveal an array of phobias in an anxious individual.’

* * *

Do veterinary surgeons have a strange sense of humour? Or was it something
more doubtful that made the organisers of next year’s 25th World Veterinary
Congress – to be held in Yokohama, Japan – choose as their official travel
agency the Kinki Nippon Tourist Company?