Dad here LOLing, LMAOing and ROFLing all at the same time

Saturday, the day my father often calls me. You might know Clive he has appeared on these pages before, mostly being angry about some uncouth customer with a tattoo and an Arsenal shirt wanting to know why they don’t have ketchup or why the sausage roll had chocolate inside it.

‘It’s a pain au chocolat!’

Aside from this my father is a very ambitious, driven and passionate man. But he is also frustrating, completely disorganised and well, a bit mental. He owns something called the Town Mill Bakery; a company which ‘puts fresh bread straight back into the hands of our customers by bringing baking and bakers back to the high street and away from soulless, faceless industrial units and lorries trundling up and down the motorways’.

‘Yeah whatever mate, have you got any sticky buns? No? Well this is too poncy for me; I am off to Gregg’s for a cheese and ham slice and a can of Coke.

Anyhoo, being the pioneering businessman that he is, he knows that he needs to use Internets to get his message out there on how they bake bread in an organic, fair trade, all the ingredients contain real artisan baker’s fingers in type way. And my Dad fucking loves the Internet, he thinks it’s brilliant and by far the most significant invention of the last 50 years. Trouble is he has not got a single fucking clue how to use it.

The best analogy that I could come up with today, is that he is like a 13 year old boy with a hard on, £100 and a date with Kelly Brook. He knows what he wants to happen, so desperately he can visualise it in his head, but has no idea whatsoever on how to get there or where to even start. In short Dad has no strategy. For Dad, strategy is an obstacle not a means for getting from A to B.

Now this can be charming, people say ‘oh he’s a bit out there’, ‘he’s an enfant terrible who lives life by his own rules and consequences’. For me, who has dealt with this for the past thirty odd years, it’s just psychological equivalent of rubbing your knuckles on a cheese grater. Not least when we have our Saturday talk and he asks how Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr works and how he can get one. His logic for asking me is that as a teenager I was able to tune in the telly and therefore am an IT genius and a social media expert – well why not, everyone else seems to be?

Have you ever had to try and teach someone in their sixties how to use a social networking site? Then have you tried it with someone who is as belligerent and impatient as my father? I think only probably bomb disposal in Helmand Province might beat it for stress levels. All the little niggly bits that we are use to doing to get these accounts, like put in your email address (’I don’t know it, I never use it’), some pictures and set a password that you can fucking remember are the norm, but Dad does not see why HE has to. So then asks me to show him, then gets bored and asks me to do it for him, because according to him I am good at this sort of thing and like it.

His timing is impeccable when asking for this advice. I am normally in the middle of a meeting, making dinner or (ahem) otherwise engaged. In other words, doing things that are of personal interest, but these are of no concern as he needs know to how he can register his Oyster card right now. He lives in Dorset but still has to have one. No, me neither. My default response has now become ‘JFGI’, which I had to explain means ‘Just fucking Google it, Dad’. Now, Internet abbreviations that’s the next minefield for us to cross, as not only is Dad dyslexic but he has whole a new language to learn.

To give you an example, when I told Dad I was writing this blog I sent him the title. He responded with:

‘Very funny, when I read that I laughed out loud’

To which I responded

‘You mean you lol’d’

Eight hours later I got another email saying

‘Lol…I just got that!’

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I just needed to get that out, you know, like when you’re really desperate for  a wee. All the way home on the bus, I was thinking you self-righteous cow. I wouldn’t mind if I was a repeat offender, but this was the first (and now only) time that I forgotten to give that shitty token in. Bring back the card operated lockers  we used to have, the ones we liked remember, and none of this would have happened. Anyway I have one of those little pound replacement tokens that you use in supermarket trolleys now. That’ll show her.

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