I'M TRYING TO TELL YOU NOW, IT'S SABOTAGE [523]

NOTE: I wrote the following in 2023 – my work-life balance has since improved.

“I have only formed one idea for my next article, and I have realised I don’t have enough of an idea to last five hundred words, so I’ll have to leave it for something else. What I was trying to form was ‘the call centre as Hitchcock film’. Just as Alfred Hitchcock talked about inserting the idea that a bomb could go off into a scene, in order to build suspense, could be translated as the tension of the phone waiting to ring, from when you have to put your handset on your head at the beginning of the day... in fact, the phone doesn’t ring, the call just comes through without prior warning, like something hitting you in the face. I still think an article exists here, I just need to think more about it first.”

 

Well, the inverted commas containing spare moments from my diary mean I didn’t get too far. 

 

I am a writer, and I sometimes make videos. I work as an administrator, where my strengths are in “back office” processing, and after a particularly bad week in more of a front-facing customer services role than was really comfortable, my mind wandered back to Alfred Hitchcock, who once forgot his own edict that, after winding up tension in the audience, the bomb should not go off – there has to be relief. Hitchcock had a boy unwittingly take a bomb onto a bus in his 1936 film “Sabotage”, and he was castigated in reviews for letting the bomb go off, which he accepted was his error.

 

I would be much happier having this to think about during my work week – administration is my job, but writing is my vocation, and being creative is what I do.

 

“I don’t want the last week to force a decision to take a break, a thought I am wrestling with - it is like having a chance to salvage the last week, but not having the week to do anything about it... I still need to find a way to write these articles during the week. What I do need to do is make plans for future articles, instead of coming up with them almost at the last moment. I need to have another book where I can write ideas, adding notes and plans as I go - saying it is one thing, doing it is another.”

 

There should come a metaphor at this point linking Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense narratives to my dealing with work-life balance – something about stopping bombs from going off. I tend to take stressful work days home with me, and stress takes time from everyone. Until that resolves itself, this metaphor is To Be Concluded.

 

“I am doing my best at improving the quality of my writing, which usually results in finding ways to say the same things with fewer words, but it shows that I am not done with the form of the five-hundred-plus-word article after nearly seven years. Will that come after ten years, or will it come once I can make video production easier, or at all?”

 

“Never” was my answer, closing my diary for the day.

 

WORDS TO MAKE THE FIGHTING CEASE [522]

I still think that knowing how to write a letter is a very useful life skill, even when most letters are now e-mails. Writing well makes you taken more seriously, no matter how the recipient’s e-mail reader presents it to them.

However, form continues to matter more than content for some letter writers, beyond even whether you indent paragraphs, double-space at the end of sentences, or use “Yours faithfully” if the addressee’s name is not known. 

To that end, the US Secretary of State has mandated that diplomats use the Times New Roman font over Calibri in both internal and external correspondence, reversing a change made in 2023. The bulletin said this was “to restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful [diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility] program[me]”. The story reminded me of a 2019 story about former MP Jacob Rees-Mogg’s staff issuing a style guide for his letters, including banned words and rules on spacing, although no requirements for font usage was reported. One person’s decorum is another’s pretension.

In branding my website, YouTube videos and social media, I have seen my name in Futura Extra Bold for so long that I cannot imagine changing it. I had considered changing to Albertus, the woodcut-like font used throughout the TV series “The Prisoner”, but I like Futura’s presence as a clear, unambiguous typeface, regardless of how thick or wide you make it, coming from a Modernist, European tradition. It also happens to predate Times New Roman by five years, having first appeared in 1927.

The rounded ends of Calibri, contrasting with the ornate serifs of Times New Roman, were easier for people with certain sight conditions, and easier to read on a computer screen. I know the latter is correct, because regardless of how I start writing, my finished articles are saved on Microsoft Word in Calibri, a much easier choice for me to scan when typing and editing. Even after Microsoft replaced it, as the default font in Word, with the Helvetica-like Aptos in 2024, every new document I open in Word starts with changing the font back to Calibri. I use Arial when posting written articles online because, again, it is the clearest font available on the hosting software I use. I do not understand the use of Times New Roman on a computer screen except in large sizes, styling details becoming lost when made smaller.

Times New Roman, as the name suggests, had the very specific use case of being read on a printed page. When “The Times” introduced the font for the first time on 3rd October 1932, it acknowledged the reasons for the change to thicker lines and tighter spacing: “When it was founded, The Times was read in coffee-houses; in the nineteenth century, it came to be read in trains; to-day it is largely read in cars and airliners. Reading habits, dependent on social habits, will not remain constant. Neither must newspaper typography remain constant.”

Indeed, “The Times” only used Times New Roman until 1972, with each of the subsequent five “Times” fonts addressing changes in printing method, the paper used, and legibility concerns. The irony may well be that, for the perennially stuffy “newspaper of record” tradition in which “The Times” trades, the font in which it is read is the most progressive thing about it.

Meanwhile, If I know I am printing a letter, the font I use is Courier New, like I have used a typewriter. If in doubt, use a font that can be read from outer space. 

LISTEN TO THE MUSIC ALL THE TIME [521]

Sony Walkman NW-A45

With my sister deciding to ditch paying Spotify to stop interrupting her music playlists with advertisements, in favour of using an MP3 player to listen in comfort, we were surprised to find that a moderately-priced MP3 player, one that supports high-definition audio, no longer appears to exist, and there is no easy way to fill the gap created by this situation.

When I say “MP3” payer, it may be more accurate to say “personal media player” or, in my case, “Sony Walkman”, having owned an NW-A45 model since 2018 that plays my CD collection in a lossless format that streaming services would require me to pay a premium to access, providing they licenced the songs to begin with.

However, searching Sony’s website reveals that, if the bottom has not fallen out of their MP3 player range, the middle has: apart from low-end, low-storage devices that can only play lossy MP3 and WMA formats, and Android-based wi-fi-compatible models made with premium components that cost hundreds or even thousands of pounds, no mid-range device like my NW-A45 is available, with “Out of Stock” messages  for these being repeated on other online stores to the point where I believe production may have ended. Perhaps Sony are concentrating on publishing and owning the music instead.

Searching elsewhere produced similar results: Amazon either had a number of cheap MP3 players, from unknown brands that give no indication of their quality, or expensive devices by Astell & Kern or Fiio, while UK store chains Currys and Argos had either a cheap in-house brand MP3-only player, or CD players that can play MP3-encoded discs.

Streaming has not killed off the demand for devices that plays the music people own, although I do wonder if some people who junked their records and cassettes in previous years have since deleted their MP3s in favour of streaming. Pretty much everyone has a device that fulfils the job of playing music files stored to it: their smartphone. Apple guaranteed this by adding lossless FLAC playback to iPhones in 2017; discontinuing their final iPod, the iPod Touch, in 2022; and consistently increasing the available internal storage of iPhones into terabyte range. The next question is how to play the files: do you want the Apple Music app to access and subsume them, or play them from “Files”, which lacks the functionality of the dedicated app, or download a third app to keep things separate? 

This circles back to the desire for a dedicated device, and why I have not downloaded my FLAC files to my phone yet. For all that a phone can do in software, and most can do most things well enough, having a dedicated device geared to produce an optimum experience for a specific task is still appreciated where they can be found. The hardware in my Sony Walkman was made like you expect a decent hi-fi system to be made, instead of like a computer that can impersonate one. 

But I know I have not been using my Walkman full-time. I have referenced here a few times that I have used YouTube to listen to music, trading the quality of the audio for convenience, listening to music ad-free there being a by-product of paying to remove ads from videos. In some cases, those songs have been uploaded unofficially by any old person that had their own copy, so I have now found myself recently tracking down and buying CDs of those songs, so I no longer miss out on the quality I am currently sacrificing. Do I save those to my phone or Walkman, and will do so push me to use one or the other in future?

I am prepared to admit that this may all be just me, that I want something that doesn’t exist. But it used to exist.