Article: 262040 of talk.bizarre Newsgroups: talk.bizarre From: Ken Johnson <kenj@bim-mail.napier.ac.uk> Subject: Back from Bangladesh: My diary, part 2 of 2 (Long) Message-ID: <DJ7uq5.4GF@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> Sender: usenet@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (C News Software) Nntp-Posting-Host: 146.176.56.6 Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK Date: Thu, 7 Dec 1995 12:30:05 GMT Lines: 65 Status: O X-Status: Sorry I had to split this in two, but this newsposter won't post the whole lot at once. Don't ask me why. Ken Johnson Saturday 2 December A new Dutch colleague has arrived on assignment. He is Theo, an expert in small scale brickworks, here for a two week feasibility study. Most important, he has brought with him supplies of coffee, cheese and sausage. All very welcome. The airline has sent his luggage on to Sylhet by mistake, and it will take several days to get it back. This is pretty good going for the airline, as there is no airport in Sylhet. Visiting the office in order to telephone the airline about his luggage for the fiftieth time, Theo notices that a fax has arrived for me from Hunterskil, the employment agency, saying that they have a short term job in London going. This could yet save me financially: I will be replying enthusiastically. C programming, HTML, Internet experience, graphics. They also want something called Java, which I have never heard of, but you can't have everything. Suddenly it becomes vitally important to read "Ace That Interview!". Sunday 3 December This is the last chance for the Novell Network to arrive, and it doesn't. Maybe I'll be invited back if ever it is installed. Aslam has planned a farewell party for me tomorrow, so this being my last free evening I ask Alamgeer if he would be kind enough to take me to see Mithila again. I teach her some silly songs but she says she sang a lot yesterday and doesn't feel like singing any to us. She feeds us with sliced papaya and sweet croutons, and we exchange addresses. Auntie, a skilled dressmaker, offers to make a dress for Louise and we discuss colours and costs, and I say I'll send on Louise's measurements and some English currency. This, of course, means that we have exchanged addresses. Monday night's party has been arranged at my residence but entirely without consulting me: it was announced to all the other staff at yesterday's Staff Meeting while I was trying to fix a misbehaving version of Excel Five. I don't know how much of a success the party will be, but at least the Excel Five is now running normally. Tuesday 5 December Even as I leave, the Opposition Parties are calling another extended Hartal, to start in two days’ time and apparently to continue indefinitely. There used to be an election commentator who appeared on all the BBC election programmes for many years. In one of those rare lucid intervals when he stopped waving his arms about and his brain appeared to start working, he once observed that the wonderful thing about democracy is not that the party with the most votes takes power: it is that the other parties give up without a struggle. Bangladesh does not seem to have reached that point yet. On returning to Britain my first telephone call is to Hunterskil, to ask about the job. Yes, I had all the necessary technical qualifications and yes, they had forwarded my application to the company. But no, I had not got the job. I’m too old, you see, it’s a young company, I just wouldn’t fit in.