2018 Formula 1 Predictions - Australia

Mercedes. Toto Wolff has a moment of clarity on the way to Melbourne. Realizing he has exhausted all challenges in F1 he becomes a Mormon and marries Carmen Jorda and Tatiana Calderon. Smoke emanating from the Mercedes garage fuels rumors they are trying to reproduce the new Ferrari engine mode until it is traced to Susie Wolff "throwing a wee wobbly."

Ferrari. Ted Kravitz conducts a freewheeling interview with Maurizio Arrivabene in which he suggests the Ferrari smoke is designed to obscure self-stabbing voodoo dolls of Adrian Newey installed under the revolutionary side-pods. On race day a mumbling Kravitz comes to a complete halt in the middle of pit lane from where he is taken to the medical center and diagnosed with ketamine poisoning.

Red Bull. Due to an alleged blueprint mix-up in Adrian Newey's office, Verstappen's side of the garage contains an RB14 whereas Ricciardo's unexpectedly has a 1/10th scale model of a catamaran. When asked by Craig Slater if this may suggest some preference for Verstappen within the team, Ricciardo breaks Slater's nose thereby winning the 2018 Smash a Scot in the Face award sponsored by the England national rugby team.

Force India. The rumors swirling in Barcelona about a team buy-out intensify when the pink panther emerges from the garage with the legend "Force Liz" and a crown logo in a bold royal blue. The Daily Mail reports that HRH QEII bought the team at twice true value in order to have India's support in the Commonwealth Council for the accession of Prince Charles to the position of the Head of the Commonwealth. The story is widely ridiculed but turns out to be the only thing the Daily Mail has got right about F1 in the hybrid era.

Williams. Early signs that the FW41 is less than competitive appear to be confirmed when neither Frank nor Claire Williams travel to Australia, both citing "previous commitments." Nevertheless, the team continues in the tradition of a family member sitting on pit wall when they introduce Arthur Higgenbottom, a third cousin once removed previously employed as a Barnsley pipe-fitter.

Renault. Sainz and Hulkenberg are seen trading punches in the back of the garage sparking rumors of internal conflict over who gets new development parts. Rachel Brookes tweets "the boys were fighting over me." Federica Masolin subtweets "Nei tuoi sogni, culo grasso," and immediately receives a lifetime achievement award from La Gazetta dello Sport.

Torro Rosso. The FIA convenes a special meeting to discuss whether STR mechanics and other personnel have brought the sport into disrepute by pointing and laughing whenever they see anyone wearing McLaren team gear. Honda awards performance bonuses to all STR employees at the track.

Haas. Gene Haas uses the team principal press conference to announce the opening of his new chin. Asked by Dieter Rencken if the dearth of sponsorship on the VF-18 indicates a lack of commitment to F1, Haas picks up his phone, buys Autosport and F1 Fanatic and fires Rencken from both. Haas then buys Youngstown, OH.

McLaren. At the same press conference, Eric Boullier asserts that the MCL33 will be competing for podiums as soon as priests have removed the demons from the R.E.18 power unit. After several probing follow-up questions from new Torquay Gazette columnist Will Buxton, Boullier denies that he is Eric Boullier.

Sauber. In a unique display of team unity, possibly spurred by Calderon's marriage to Wolff, Ericsson and Leclerc marry each other between FP1 and FP2. An NBC exclusive links smoke billowing from the Alfa-badged Ferrari power unit to the sudden death of a childhood friend of the Pope.

Alles Gute zum Geburtstag

This feels a slightly formal way of wishing my dear daughter a happy birthday, but enmeshed and limited as we are by ongoing legal matters I am sure you understand.

I am told, Sopiko, that you are following this page, as no doubt are your mother's attorneys who are far more devoted to every word I write these days than were my fans at the height of the popularity of "Siebenburger Mysterien," but this is about you and not the means by which you afford to be you, including your ability to transform to "Sally" as effortlessly as your mother's little helpers sift through the contents of my recycling bins.

I have mentioned before, dear, that your mother and I went to a considerable expense and effort to determine the perfect name before you were born, thus you will appreciate your input on this matter at this or any other post-natal stage seems a little tardy and frankly redundant. Indeed this is one of the few points on which your late  mother and I agree. However we both acknowledge receipt of letters filed by Koenig and Koenig of 21st last and thus you will be referred to henceforth in birthday greetings and lawsuits as Sally von Wehrlof-Strunkel, although, sweetie, your mother pressed me not to hammer on about this, but "Sally"? Really? Zoe and I spent a full seven minutes trying to recall any "Sally" of distinction and all we came up with was that unusual Miss Timms from The Mekons who sang at your birthday party and then released all the geese.

Now, Sally, while your mother and I have disagreements (currently between 1.5 and 1.8 million, fyi, I really am not made of money) we are united in our sympathy for your current plight, particularly our inability to liberate you from Kansas. Oh! It's the sunflower state! I just looked. Not all that bad is it?

Sweetie. Sally.

Speaking purely for myself, I am convinced that your remarkable fecundity while at school in the beautiful heartland is simply your personal contribution to a Marxist-Leninist insurgency against that unspeakable pile of dung in the Governor's mansion. I forget his name but I met him in Iquitos and the idiot couldn't even bribe a Peruvian diplomat. That's not an idiom, dear, he literally could not bribe a diplomat. He tried.

It turns out in ways which even your mother's coven of advocates cannot crack that this business with the moron from Topeka and Peru is central to the current woof and weave of suits, counter-suits, recusals and the complication brought up by an assistant attorney general in, I believe, New York, about which we sent you the explanatory press clippings and a photograph of a yak.

Suffice it to say, my dear, that while agencies such as the FBI and ATF, both of which have more attorneys than either your mother or myself combined, which thankfully will never happen again, not that I mean to diminish the sole joyous product of that union. "Sally." Anyway, while the feds feel it is in the best interests of national security for you to remain, just for a little while, at your new apartment in Leavenworth, neither your mother nor I feel it wise to interfere.

Now, Sally, as you can tell I am doing my best to keep this upbeat, but even on your birthday I think a couple of words are in order about your attitude towards Zoe. Clearly your first meeting with Zoe was always going to be difficult, particularly given this ongoing Kansas business which Zoe feels absolutely terrible about, by the way. So. Can't you give her a chance? I understand that due to some oddity involving chronology or time-zones or something you are, in a purely quantitative sense, older than your step-mother, but I fail to see why you cannot regard this as a positive. It's almost like you're getting that little sister you wanted that cost your mother and me (mostly me) a pony every year for seven years until you finally obsessed about something else. Anyway, neither Zoe nor I have a strong feeling on how you should address her provided none of the words in that little screechy temper tantrum are ever used again.

Happy birthday, dear.

Your loving father.

Dr. F. Wehrlof.

Up/Down

It's funny the things you remember when you're spending a night in a twenty-fifth floor hotel room in Vegas for a life-nit reason connected to “gift-wrap points” overlooking that structure that is absolutely not a “Ferris wheel” because, well, I forget. Vegas is classier than that? No idea.

And because you're spending a night in a twenty-fifth floor hotel room which does not include your cat, Louis, because Vegas hotels are really weird about cats (and Louis is equally weird about hotels), even though the The Linq, which you can see from your twenty-fifth floor window, maintains the old Imperial Palace dog “rest area” which is probably why, despite all the renovations, it still smells of pee, you cannot sleep.

Fortunately hotel rooms in Vegas include little note-pads and pens, so after I had carefully inscribed “All Hail Eris, All Hail Discordia,” in the book left behind by that Gideon dude, I got to scribbling. Which is what I do when I can't sleep, largely because I have a diagnosed mental health issue.

And the scribbling led to the memory of a promise.

Partly because of my diagnosed (by two independent mental health professionals and eight ex-girlfriends) mental health issue, I am the first to admit that my memory for details is both scant and susceptible to embellishment that typically casts me in a better light. So I somewhat indistinctly recall finding myself, somewhen around 2006, in an auditorium on the campus of the remarkably generic state university that sent me a monthly pay-check, with a guitar and no plan and sixty honors students.

I didn't really do plans from 2003-2007, possibly as a result of my diagnosed mental health issue; technically a “disorder” which is a term I am okay with since it dovetails nicely with the Eris business.

I suspect that the faculty coordinator for the honors program was either an anarchist or had simply decided that she couldn't take the shit anymore either, so that inviting the professor of astrophysics, who had recently seriously annoyed ADMIN (they think of themselves in block caps) by announcing God was a product of the insufferable hubris of humankind and saying “fuck” a lot in an interview in the city's leading indie newspaper, would help get her fired, thereby freeing her to do something useful with her life.

(People still think I'm making this up, but half-way through my “performance” the aforementioned faculty coordinator of the honors program left the auditorium to throw up, not because I am that bad on guitar but because she had recently become a future parent.)

So I'm in this auditorium with a guitar and all our 18-22 brains, who I check for brain-ness with a knock-knock thing:

“Knock-knock.”

“Who's there?”

“To.”

And they all reply “to WHOM” so I guess they'd heard it, whatever, Jim, I was an astrophysicist not a stand-up comedian, you know. And so I'm planless and just talking to them and my ex-colleague is curled up in a nearby bathroom stall vomiting, and there's this energy because some of the kids have this look like maybe this is a bit off-the-rails and dangerous and conceivably what university was supposed to be about before those unspeakable bean-counters in ADMIN fucked it up, and other kids are ignoring me because they're figuring out how they're gonna get laid this weekend.

And I play four songs.

One is about gin and friends.

One is about a specific transgender friend of mine who was fatally stabbed.

And, yeah, I forget, I coulda done the one about my junkie girlfriend Jessica who smelled of death (that's not a metaphor, it's opiates) and probably... oh wait. It was “Waiters.” The song about one of the times I went mad.

Which I did periodically due to my mental health issue.

Anyway, everybody claps and I look around for Prof. Puking and this is the first time I notice she's not there, so I wish everyone happy feral cat awareness day and I guess we're done here.

And writing this now I realize it was rare days like these that made dealing with ADMIN and CURATORS and PROVOST'S OFFICE almost worth it because as I vaguely dismissed somebody else's honors class a handful of students coalesced around the podium where I was bolting my Taylor back in its shell and hung out for a while asking questions about everything from astrophysics to Marxism to my mental health issue to whether Johnny Marr was so fucking good with his fairground hands and unearthly riffs that he was living proof aliens had engineered some post-punk guitarists.

Then there is just one young man in front of me. And I realize we have the same eyes.

He asks me how many milligrams of Lamictal I am on a day and it turns out he is ramping up to the same target dose as me, but you have to be careful and go slow with the stuff because of Stevens-Johnson syndrome, and we laugh because like me he is constantly checking himself for rashes on the not unreasonable grounds they are an indicator for imminent death if you are one of the unfortunate 0.5%. And then he tells me he has been worrying he is not going to amount to anything, but today he discovers a tenured professor of astrophysics is in the same boat as him, and to be a tenured professor you must be doing pretty good, right?

I have this realization that of the sixty students today I have entertained maybe half of them and, right on the verge of leaving academia, I have helped one.

And I drive home and cry my eyes out because I am not strong enough to deal with that kind of responsibility.

Ten years later. I look out of the twenty-fifth floor window at that not-Ferris wheel and remember the promise. Cats. That's going okay. I'm helping them. But somewhere along the line I forgot the part about helping vulnerable people.

This post represents the beginning of my re-engagement with that process.

The next morning after three hours sleep and the knowledge that three hours sleep is exactly the sort of thing that aggravates my diagnosed mental health issue I leave my twenty-fifth floor hotel room for the elevator. It stops half way to the casino level and the doors swish open.

“Up or down?” asks a man in a suit and lanyard.

I explode into laughter.

The doors close.

The less things change the more they stay the same

In which we conclude that WSOPcom isn't even trying.

Those of you who read this blog with far more care and attention than it is written may have noticed that Part 3 of this series seemed to peter out unexpectedly. Specifically, neither the problem of mine that had been "escalated" nor its resolution were ever described.

Believe it or not, there was an excellent reason for this. Almost two years to the day since the problem in question arose, it re-arose [1]. And since I wanted to wait and see how everything panned out the second time, I decided to save the details for this final installment. Not surprisingly, the waiting took a while.

Rewind to a few weeks after the WSOPcom launch. Word began spreading [2] that the online site would "tier match" the loyalty level players had reached in the bricks-and-mortar properties of the Caesars Empire [3]. Of particular interest was the fact that the higher your tier level at WSOPcom, the higher your rake-back. (As I described in "A tale of two sisters" the more action you give a room, real or virtual, the bigger the benefits.)

Many of us who play poker at Caesars properties put in enough hours to earn the coveted "Diamond Card" which gives customers daily access to free chicken wings. We quickly ran the numbers and realized that a tier match to Diamond at WSOPcom would be worth enough to pay for a couple of dinners a month at a more pleasant venue than our usual choices [4].

I promptly wrote to WSOPcom support asking for a tier match.

Support thanked me for my e-mail and cut-n-pasted a bit from the website describing how many APPs [5] were required to reach each tier level.

I replied to the e-mail in considerable detail.

The reply to my reply made it clear the customer rep had no idea what I was talking about.

The topic appeared at the WSOPcom 2+2 thread in which the forum rep suggested we e-mail support with our Total Rewards number and WSOPcom screen-name.

Seventy-three posters found different ways to tell the rep we'd already tried that, six of whom also managed to work in flattering remarks about Allen "Chainsaw" Kessler.

A mere forty-eight hours later the rep returned with new, exciting information. After a couple of paragraphs that seemed mostly concerned with how hard the rep had worked doing this wonderful thing for us (i.e., giving us access to a promo his company had allegedly launched), and several other innuendos that we had no idea how lucky we all were, the exciting information was revealed. It was an e-mail address that was to be used specifically to request the tier match and for no other purpose.

Nobody asked why this was necessary.

Actually there really wasn't time for much further discussion because almost immediately we all discovered exactly the same thing.

The fucking e-mail didn't work.

I don't mean that sending the required information to this new, super-special e-mail address failed to produce the desired tier match. That would be wholly unremarkable and frankly par for the course. No. The e-mail address didn't exist.

I forget how this was eventually sorted out. I think we were advised to e-mail regular support again and ask them to forward the e-mail to "bonuses and promotions." Suffice it to say that even once the correct party got the information it took another seven days for the tier match to go into effect. And during the intervening period none of us were getting our increased rake-back. It was costing us money, and costing WSOPcom action and any remaining credibility it might have had with its customers.

Then we found out the tier match was only good for a month.

It almost appeared that WSOPcom was doing its best to be so utterly incompetent that it forced its fuming customers back to its own bricks-and-mortar card rooms. Which is where I was a few weeks ago when a fellow grinder mentioned to me that the tier match was back on! It was again for a limited time, with the boost to rake-back applying for the calendar month in which it was granted plus the entire following month.

Being something of a nit, I e-mailed in my request for a tier match a few minutes after midnight, June 1st.

I won't reproduce all the e-mail exchanges since some of you may have just eaten, but here are the salient details and a few excerpts.

June 1st: I requested a tier match and sent all required information.

I got a response within a few hours which I will include in full because it hopefully demonstrates I'm not making this up, plus getting such a speedy response is something of a record.

Hey Meowlzebub,

Thanks for contacting us; my name is Brandon and I'll be helping you today.

I understand you would like to have your WSOP.com status matched with your Total Rewards Account.

Please be advised, I have escalated your request to our Promotions team to be reviewed. There is a timeframe of 7-10 business days for this to be completed/ an update sent to you.

On another note, I have reviewed your account and see you have been doing well with us so far. I would like to wish you continued success at the tables.

It's a pleasure to have you as a player, and we look forward to helping you again in the future.

Okay, I included it because Brandon for some reason felt it was necessary to look at my win-loss record and frankly I'd been crushing it.

It occurred to me that if WSOPcom employees chose to mind their own business it might cut down on the 7-10 business days required to comply with this simple request, but I was so surprised to get a competent response at all I let it go.

It was a little disappointing to not hear from them again until June 8th, when I was sent instructions on how to link my WSOPcom and Total Rewards accounts. Since they were already linked (the former shows up on my monthly summary from the latter), it was apparent to me that we were in the early stages of a fuck up. However, in an effort to minimize any further delay I followed the supplied link to an obscure part of their website and filled out a form linking the accounts that had been linked for the last two years.

On the third attempt at pressing the button I did not receive a stream of C++ and a browser freeze. Instead the pop-up told me I'd been a good boy.

On June 10th I received an e-mail apologizing for something and which informed me my accounts were now linked.

I replied that they had been linked for the last two years and that what I actually wanted was a tier match.

One June 11th I received another apologetic e-mail:

Hey Meowlzebub

Thank you for contacting us. My name is Marcia and I will be assisting you today.

Let me take this time to commend you on being at Gold status. It is indeed a pleasure to see you doing so well.

In regards to your query, the Tier Credits for a given month will be credited by the second week of the following month.

This is why you are not seeing anything as yet.

Nonetheless, for every 1 APP earned on WSOP.com, you will be given 1 Tier credited.

It's a pleasure to have you as a player, and we look forward to helping you again in the future.

I appreciate that if you don't live in this sort of hell it may be a little difficult to follow the details here. You may therefore simply prefer to take my word for the fact that what is being described in this e-mail has absolutely nothing to do with getting my WSOPcom tier status matched to my Total Rewards Diamond status. And while you, the reader, may not know that, it is something that customer service reps for WSOPcom would readily understand if only they were given the necessary training and information.

I explained that the APP-TC exchange rate was completely irrelevant to what I had, for the past eleven days, been trying to accomplish, and got another e-mail:

Hey Meowlzebub,

Thanks for contacting us; my name is Clinton and I'll be helping you today.

With regards tyo your request, I have forwarded this off to be looked into. Please allow up to 72 hours for an update on this. 

We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience in this matter.

Forwarding things off to be looked into sounds like sending a tissue sample to a lab for a biopsy. Except for a WSOPcom tier match it apparently takes longer. And by the morning of June 13th I was steaming:

This matter has still not been resolved. It's absolutely pathetic that you offer a TR/WSOPcom tier match for a month and nearly half the month has already expired without the match being made. Either discontinue the promotion or expect to explain this laughable incompetence to the Nevada Gaming Control Board.

Seventeen minutes later I received the reply:

Hey Meowlzebub,

Thanks for contacting us, and please accept our apologies for the delay in responding. My name is Imani and I will be assisting you today.

Please be advised that your WSOP account matched to your Diamond status on your TR.

I logged on and found that, indeed, my WSOPcom account now showed as Diamond.

And I concluded that WSOPcom is just fucking with us. Getting this tier match should be as simple as pressing a button, even if it takes three tries. It should not take thirteen days. And I can only speculate how much more time and money I would have lost had I not uttered the magic incantation.

Nevada... Gaming... Control... Board.

That's how you get your problem "escalated" kittens. You threaten them with the grown ups.


[1] I tried that word without the hyphen and it looked like a reference to some sort of colonic irrigation therapy. Since I feel I have conclusively demonstrated that WSOPcom can't (or won't) get its shit together, this struck me as overkill. 

[2] I use this construction deliberately. There was considerable doubt as to the reality of this offer for a couple of weeks because it was apparently announced on part of the website that would periodically disappear.

[3] I'm sure I'm not the only one to imagine departing, corpulent supremo Gary Loveman wearing a toga and playing a violin as flames from The Mirage volcano set fire to the roof of the Forum Shops.

[4] Most of us can only afford to eat out if we use comps; typically a pastrami sandwich at Nosh.

[5] I have no fucking idea.

Escalating Problems

In which we discover that the customer is always wrong

There was a time in the not too distant past when businesses put a premium on customer service. I'm told that this fundamental principle began to erode around the Reagan era, when Americans were so busy standing tall that they frequently tripped over things and spilled soup in the laps of patrons [1]. 

I've spent a significant fraction of my life in bars, night clubs and casinos, and have dated several cocktail waitresses and hair stylists. Consequently I feel I am on pretty solid ground when I acknowledge that the customer is not always right. Based on direct experience as well as listening, occasionally with genuine interest, to former girlfriends complaining about "work," I can safely say that the customer is frequently an overbearing, rude, drunk scumbag with all the charm of a dozen live leeches that have been poured for obscure reasons into one's underpants. 

The puzzle, however, is which MBA programs are recommending that customer service personnel should endeavor to sink to the same depths as their worst customers.

I suspect part of the problem is outsourcing [2] which, as noted in part two of this series, is how WSOPcom has elected to handle customer service. If you are careful in preventing your reps from having access to pertinent information, compound this with a website that is vague and frustrating to use, and finally build in long delays between all communications with complaining customers, you cleverly guarantee that, by the time these customers find outlets such as the 2+2 forums or a personal blog, they are spitting equal measures of nails and vitriol.

Within a few weeks of WSOPcom joining the market, it became impossible to avoid the conclusion that the truly spectacular incompetence was not some highly-sophisticated, level-four thinking developed to charm and amuse us, and that the outfit really did intend to insult its paying customers either by ignoring them, directing them to e-mail addresses that didn't actually exist, or by having reps in the far-flung reaches of the American Empire cut-and-paste responses from arbitrarily-chosen pages of their ghastly website.

It was at this point that I was introduced to the concept of escalating problems.

Many of the cocktail waitresses and hair stylists that I dated were also alcoholics [3], and as a result the word "escalate" has almost exclusively negative connotations for me. All the manuals and counselors made it clear that the desired goal was de-escalation. Thus it was with considerable trepidation that I received the news that one of my problems with WSOPcom was going to be escalated.

It turns out that in this Orwellian business lingo, escalating means the person who received the problem is not getting paid enough to solve it, thus they pass it on to someone else. What is less well advertised is that in order to get something escalated (which you will have to do since the customer service reps have no useful information at all), you have to make a real nuisance of yourself on social media and/or at the sponsored forum on the 2+2 boards [4].

When WSOPcom established its official presence at 2+2, the reps, apparently having joined the company from FedEx, immediately adopted a defensive position, parrying most complaints with business-speak that roughly translated as "you have no idea how difficult it is to run a poker site," and "we don't see why anyone would want that feature."

So I learned that escalation could be... well. not terrible, and I learned that WSOPcom treated its customers as if they were parasites that were scuppering an otherwise well-oiled machine [5], and I concluded I wasn't going to give them a wooden nickel.

And then their competitor went tits up.

And I went back to WSOPcom.

And, as I'll detail in part four of this series, absolutely nothing has changed.

[1] For brevity I'll restrict my observations to the USA.  In the United Kingdom, customer service does not technically exist, unless one includes the bizarre blend of unctuous obsequiousness and pomposity personified brilliantly by the two sides of Basil Fawlty.

[2] One notable exception that deserves special mention is the remarkable performance of the FedEx company. This odious collection of goats and lizards does not outsource its customer service department, nor its recovery mechanisms when, as is usually the case, the parcel it is entrusted with is lost, stolen, destroyed, eaten by bears, or falls into a volcano. Nevertheless, in a complete volte-face to pre-Reagan principles, FedEx customer service reps begin phone calls by making it abundantly clear that, irrespective of the details of your complaint, it is you, the customer, who has done something terribly wrong. And they will shout at you until you apologize or hang up.

[3] Before any former girlfriends in these professions stumble across this piece and contemplate legal action, I should point out that many of them were not alcoholics. I did, however, during a hypomanic episode, become fascinated with the correlations and intersections of career and substance abuse choices, and summarized my research through Venn diagrams made out of fuse wire to which I would attach silver posts and give them to the relevant girlfriends as earrings. 

[4] I have to say I initially had some sympathy for the WSOPcom reps at 2+2. There is a long tradition of posters there being assholes, almost as if there is a monthly competition. Expecting reps to field customer queries when their promotions and products were so poorly-conceived and executed was never going to be pretty.  That sympathy soon evaporated thanks to the imperious and condescending tone of the reps. The WSOPcom 2+2 board was abruptly closed a few weeks ago. I suspect they didn't want the bad publicity it tends to generate right before the World Series of Poker kicked off here in Vegas. Customers can now share ideas, complaints, and be alerted to improvements at a brand new WSOPcom forum which is worse than their website and almost completely deserted. Oh and the bricks-and-mortar WSOP needn't have worried about the 2+2 forums generating bad publicity - they have done that themselves through their completely predictable incompetence, such as making players who cashed in the Colossus stand in line for several hours to get paid. Frankly it's embarrassing to be part of a profession that has a huge build-up every year to its annual jamboree and then, regular as clockwork, royally fucks it up.

[5] I'm offering a $5 reward to anyone who can find the metaphor I was trying to use here. I think it has something to do with rust. Also possibly a boat.

Indian Atheists

For some mysterious reason, Facebook has deemed the "Indian Atheists" page as "unsafe." This means one cannot share posts from the page, nor can one link to it from within Facebook. If you would like to check out the page and judge for yourself, use this link.

Oh no. Technophobia. Even the machines hate me.

I have just spent over an hour trouble-shooting an audio problem on my computer. Now, as will shortly be revealed, like most retired theoretical astrophysicists I am not the most practical person on this or probably any other planet, and in an attempt to compensate I try to be at least methodical when such issues crop up.

So

1. Check jack is firmly inserted into hole on tower with headphone symbol.

2. Check other jack is firmly inserted in headphones.

3. Check media player is not muted.

4. Try a different media player.

5. Fuck about endlessly starting from the Control Panel and wandering and winding down paths I never knew existed for an hour and give up.

6. Shout about fucking Microsoft and how everything was much simpler in the days of VMS and record players.

7. Make executive decision to listen to music on iPhone instead.

8. Remove jack from tower.

9. Attempt to plug jack into iPhone but discover port already filled with jack.

10. Follow wire from jack in iPhone and discover it terminates at headphones currently perched on head.

11. Discover jack previously in tower attached to back-up iPhone.