My New Girlfriend

After all the excitement of the guest blog on househusbandnot yesterday, I spent a few hours with my new girlfriend.

Don't get too excited. She is the woman who reads out some website software tutorials I have signed up to. (You pay a few squid and you can download these audio tutorials onto your PC, and sit there like a plank listening to this woman telling you how to use the software.) Trouble is, the woman who is doing the reading has a really boring American voice - kinda like Meryl Streep before she's had enough coffee in the morning. And there are no pauses in the 'conversation', so it also sounds like this woman has taken some really cheap speed to keep her going, or awake. Well, there are [pause] pauses, but in really strange [pause] places. (I think this must be where she is turning the pages over of her script or [pause] something.) And she can't say 'template' either (she pronounces it 'timplette'), which she has to say a lot because...well there are a lot of templates/timplettes to be discussed in the training.

I can do about three quarters of an hour of listening to Ms Streep Decaf before I have to take a break, partly to see how much I have actually learned of the software, but also to stop myself from falling asleep too. (And there are approx nine hours of this tutorial.) And being me, I get distracted and get to wondering about Ms Streep Decaf's life and if she is an actress who is down on her luck, or the guy who owns the training school's girlfriend, or if she actually wrote the software she is helping me to learn. (She kind of makes out that she is a techie person with a few "Here's a website I created earlier"s and "Take a look at this file I copied the other day"s. And what she is describing is being mirrored on the screen with cursor movements and opening of menus etc., so she must know roughly what she is talking about.) Every so often - usually at the end of a long section - she tries to sound excited by saying something like "And there you go. You know how to copy html now. Go for it." But it just sounds like a social worker telling you you can give up the drugs if you really want to - wooden and scripted rather than really interested or convinced.

In other news...well actually there is no other news. This new website I am working on is taking up a lot of time now. I'm off to do a bit of website networking tomorrow evening at the launch of a website development company's new website. I'm not sure what the evening will entail. I assume there will be a bunch of experts there mumbling about RSSs and their KEIs and stuff, and I'll be shuffling from foot to foot nodding sagely at them while I try not to be distracted by the waiter with the plate of cocktail sausages. And there is also that whole secrecy thing about websites which is a bit of a conversation killer. ("Yes, I'm developing a new website, but I can't tell you about it." And you are stuck looking at this person who might be about to be the next richest person in the world, or just some freak who has put a webcam in his sister's budgie's bird bath. "We are pretty confident that we are going to give Google a run for their money actually. What? Oh, I can't say how." Hey. I'll be over there with the sausages when you do actually have anything you can talk about dude.) We'll see. I'm taking mrs househusbandnot along because this web development company recently interviewed her to create a virtual client profile of her to use in their...well I assume it has something to do with websites. Will report back from this virtual evening later in the week.

Now, where were we Ms Streep Decaf...