Absence makes the heart grow fonder -

or so somebody once said. My absence from blogging duties has been duly noted by enough people to force me back online. It is half past midnight and I'm alternating between checking the election results - I care that much I didn't quite get around to voting... - and making use of my latest distraction: online sudoku. Possibly the latest convert in the country to this dastardly game, I've sped through the 'easy' and 'medium' levels, am conquering 'hard' and fully intend mastering 'evil' before the weekend is out. I'm sure my tutor will regard this as a worthy pastime, and a valid excuse for distinct absence of essay on Monday morning.
It isn't that there has been a lack of rant-worthy subjects of late - goodness me, no. I just had a few weeks with no internet access, and the space between me and my blog grew... We quarrelled briefly on the subjects of Art, Style and Purpose, but Blog has finally submitted and agreed that it cannot control the contents I hurl toward it. I will therefore go out of my way to make this a particularly disjointed post, before settling back into more Rhythmic Ranting in the next couple of days.
Firstly, a brief query about the purpose of self-service checkouts. I have had the misfortune to use a few of these recently; shops seem to have installed them with the sole idea of aggravating their customers. The CONCEPT is marvellous - no talking to some cretinous dolled up check-out bird (me? stereotype? never) and discussing the weather, clubcards, and my ability to pack bags alone. I can sidle up to a machine that means I can have the fun of swiping barcodes and producing the Beep - but that Beep is all too often followed by an error message. 'Illegal Product In Bag, Please Remove', or similarly dramatic terms for a pint of milk. Buying loose fruit/veg is something of a nightmare, as one has to go through a selection process and in some instances bother to count the number of items. Does this really save time? And heaven forbid you make use of the 'cashback' option: the machine can't quite cope with that, so a human is dragged in from the depths of the Poultry Section or wherever they were, and wearily operates as a cashback machine for you, the heavy sighs implying you forced them away from something Really Interesting because you were Too Lazy to Queue Like Everybody Else.
God, I hate those blasted machines.
Second point. As readers should know, if they have studied each post carefully (I look forwards to the day somebody chooses 'rantingjane' as their specialised subject on MasterMind), I am a member of Linacre College, Oxford. As with all colleges, Linacre has their own library facility, complete with array of suitably slow computers that function as and when they choose with total disregard to deadlines. Connected to one is a scanner, and a couple of weeks ago a friend of mine had reason to use said scanner. Now, scanners are funny things - for some reason, they save the last image that was, well, scanned. I could well make a few snide comments there about the potential to catch a few people out scanning things they shouldn't, but I'm actually rather miffed right now. Someone has used that scanner to presumably copy print-outs of two of my photos that were posted on this blog months ago. Why anyone would print out and then copy said pictures is beyond me, but there you have it. I don't particularly want to imagine what said images are currently being used for... I appreciate that I loaded them onto my blog and therefore they have become available to the world At Large (or at least the part connected to the internet in general, and RantingJane in particular).
I'm working on the assumption that whoever it is responsible for this action is a reader of my blog. In which case: make note of the point that I'm fairly certain that a certain I.T. bod in college would be able to work out who was responsible for the action, were I to ask them. And I could make everything rather embarrassing for that somebody, were they tracked down. Just a thought...
On a considerably more positive note (from my view at least), Conservatives are currently up 50 Councillors, and Labour down 46. Awww... do people not trust Labour any more? None of those honest, upstanding citizens that are the remnants of the Front Bench? Shucks.