Yesterday morning, as I was putting groceries in my bike bags outside the supermarket, I caught myself singing along to In the Bleak Midwinter coming from the muzak speakers. The muzak at that shopping mall is mostly “easy-listening classics” — not so easy for me, because I know most of the music and I keep waiting for the twist, the surprise, in every piece that they’ve carefully edited out to make it suitable for muzak. But never mind about that.

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Just after nine in the morning, nasty slushy weather, around freezing. As I come out of the supermarket with a box of groceries and am about to put it in my bike bag a small woman wheeling a shiny blue bike speaks to me.

Small woman: Excuse me, do you know whether the bike lanes are clear?

Me: Well, I used the main lane, I didn’t dare risk the bike lanes.

Small woman: What about the thoroughfares? Did they salt them?

Me: I’m sure they salted [road A] because that’s the way I came, but not the bike lanes. (In fact, an hour and a half earlier, when I had almost reached the swimming pool, I was overtaken by a huffing and grunting municipal snow-plough which not only swept and salted the main lane of the road but also threw any snow that was in its way on to the bike lane; no wonder it was impenetrable. But I didn’t tell the small woman that, because she clearly didn’t listen.)

Small woman: What about [road B]?

Me: I only saw the first part of that at the roundabout, but it was clear all right.

Small woman: As far as [apartment complex about a mile up that road]?

Me: I don’t know, I didn’t pass that way, I turned right at the roundabout. But the part I could see looked completely clear to me.

Small woman: You didn’t pass that way?

Me: No, I didn’t go everywhere!

Small woman: (genuinely surprised, it seems) You didn’t? (thinks) I was thinking of taking the bus instead.

Me: Yes, that’s a good idea, take the bus by all means!

Small woman: Oh, thank you, thank you!

I really shouldn’t read the supermarket magazine, Allerhande, because it doesn’t fail to make me shake my head in vexation.

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At the supermarket yesterday: a girl of about seven, all pink frills and pigtails. She was carrying something that looked like a digger made of construction kit and tried frantically to interest her mother in it: “look what I’ve made!” The mother kept making don’t-bother-me noises and finally killed the daughter’s enthusiasm completely with “That’s not a toy for girls, anyway!”

Grr.

I was tempted to Say Something but I didn’t trust my post-cold voice. (Also, I’m really a coward in that sort of thing, especially when I don’t have the girls with me to be brave in front of.) I’ve always thought of construction kit as a particularly gender-neutral toy, but then I grew up building Lego houses with my father. And for my fourth birthday, I asked for and got a sand lorry. It had a yellow cab and a red tilting skip and I remember it as whopping big, but that’s from a four-year-old’s perspective, of course.

I never attempted to force gender-neutrality on my girls— except avoiding pink like the plague when they were small. When they wanted girl things, they got girl things. (But also lots of Legos!) Nowadays they buy their own girl things, wear makeup, have school planners with frills and lace, but they’ll never be told (at least not by us) that something is not for girls. Even if they aren’t gonna be engineers.

In a way I wish it had been closer to Ada Lovelace Day so I could have interviewed the little engineer and taken pictures of her digger, but I don’t know how I could have explained it to her mother. I just hope she’ll be strong enough to stand up to the world, and not give up geekiness out of frustration.

Click the picture or this caption to see the full size scan. Names and signatures obscured to protect the guilty as well as the innocent.

Prima brought home a note from the chemistry teacher, asking our permission for her to taste the beer she brewed in class. Sensible (though slight overkill), as almost everyone in that class is under 16, the legal beer-drinking age, and some parents might object.

The wording of the note, on the other hand… I said “it makes me want to take a red pen to it!” and Prima not only encouraged me, but suggested that I blog about it, too. (The 1 out of 10 mark and some of the punctuation are hers.)

On hindsight, I should probably have done it completely by the book, but I was having far too much fun scribbling “Number doesn’t match” (twice) and “Write out abbreviation” (twice), correcting run-on sentences and marking a buzz-phrase as “woolly”. Two things stood out even more than the rest of the mess: “The last subject of this school-year in chemistry had as its subject…” and “We ask your permission, by completing the form below, that your son or daughter [tastes the beer (s)he brewed]”. Who is completing the form? Apparently ‘we’, the sender of the letter, not ‘you’, the parent-or-guardian. And I couldn’t resist taking the red pen to the form itself: I don’t want my daughter to have to taste the result of his experiment.

If the teacher objects to the markup, Prima will tell him that I’m a professional editor and I’ll gladly offer my further services. I know that it’s not a science teacher’s job to produce great literature, but I think they do have an obligation to write adequate Dutch. When I complained to another science teacher last year about a syllabus, she said “I’m not responsible for that one, thank God”, with a grin that suggested that she’d read it and shaken her head over it.

I intend to rewrite the note completely— that’s why I scanned it in the first place, before Prima suggested blogging.

They’re in no particular order, and I may think of more, but these are the ones that come to mind immediately.

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We get a reminder invoice from the dentist (actually handled by a separate billing company) because apparently our insurance hasn’t paid the bill on time. I distinctly remember filling in a claim form, putting everything in an envelope, ticking “Dentistry” on the envelope and posting it, so I call the insurance company to find out what happened.

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Here’s an update on the case of the teacher who confiscated Linux CDs, which I wrote about yesterday. It seems that she and her critic have come to an understanding.

Congratulations on being the first to cold-call my fledgling firm to propose a business solution. Unfortunately, I had to say “sorry, not interested”, and if you knew that the firm in question is at the moment €71,42 in the red you’d likely be “not interested” either. It’s true that I’ll be in the black again when the people I’ve just sent an invoice pay up, but I don’t expect to be more than a few hundred in the black any time soon.

Quite apart from that, I’ve been with Other Bank for thirty-mumble years and I see no reason to change. They’ve done some stupid things (does it really need a dozen notices to change the address of a family of five? do they really expect someone recently turned twelve, and addressed henceforth by you as Ms Initials Surname, to be interested in this great offer for a learn-to-play-with-money gadget aimed at seven-year-olds?) but they’ve never done anything bad to me on the banking front. If I do suddenly start earning great sums of money I may reconsider, and I may even end up with you (you seem to be an okay bank as such, and I understand all banks are a bit desperate at the moment), but your cold call did bump you to the bottom of the list.

I must concede, though, that you employ a higher class of call-center people than the run-of-the-mill ones who try to sell me double glazing or mortgages at 6:30 pm when I’m having dinner, even though I’m privately on the don’t-call list (note to self: find out if there is a business don’t-call list). That’s why I didn’t tell her “no, I’m unlikely to ever become interested in something that’s pushed over the phone”: she was far too nice and polite for that.

If this is true (and I’m afraid it is) it’s outrageous. Executive summary: teacher confiscates Linux CDs from student (US middle school, I think early teens) who was demonstrating and distributing to friends, and threatens with the law because “no software is free”. (Here’s a really sensible comment from a good teacher, by the way)

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