8/30/2005 01:13:00 AM|||James O'Malley|||

What an evening! Once again, my parents have abandoned me to go off to Lincoln, of all places. The interesting twist this time is that they've left my sister Lucy, with me. This is good because it means I get all the benefits of not having any parents here, only without having to (attempt to) tidy up and so on- I can just bully Lucy into doing it!

Parents away? Surely this called for a wild party... or at slightly more sober gathering of friends. Who was here? The lovely Heather, the haxxor Matt, the "Beth from work" Beth, the controversial Soph, the dischevelled Dundas, and the "I get paid money to do techie lighting stuff" JD.

Earlier in the evening, it emerged that several important people from work know about, or have seen the very website you are reading now- my blog. The same blog where I allegedly bad mouth and "criticise" my co-workers and the company I work for.

So just to clarify: anything written on my blog is largely done so "tongue in cheek"- figuratively speaking. I exaggerate the truth and occasionally change the chronology of events to make things a bit more exciting. I love working as a cashier and respect my colleagues and their opinions. Honest.

But anyway, the best was yet to come. Flicking through the Sky channels as you do, you inevitably end up cycling through an uneven camber of bad channels- religious ones, teleshopping and quiz games.

After being mesmorised by this amazing "V" shaped cheese grater/chopping style device, and then by an equally amazing collection of knives, we found one of the many Quiz channels in the dark depths of the late 600s on the Sky programme guide.

Essentially, what these channels are, are a presenter standing for hours on end next to an unsolvable puzzle (or at least one with billions of interpretations of the answer), encouraging people to ring it to potentially win £x hundred at 75p per minute. In this case the question was "count the reds" and then the sentence on screen was "Red the dog went to a red forest with 52 trees", and so on- basically, the answer could have been practically any number, so everyone who rang in got it wrong. It's probably fixed and rung by crooks.

Quite who watches Quiz TV, which is broadcast in the downtime of generic American teleshopping channel at midnight on a bank holiday monday, I don't know- the people who ring in must be real nutters. Some rang in multiple times. Worst bit is, we were watching it... for about two hours!

Anyway, as my parents wern't in, we rang up and had a guess. Dundas was live on telly to about six viewers! He was wrong.

After checking the website, we discovered that you could enter for FREE. Rather than have to pay 75p a time, you could simply enter your phone number in and it'd call you back and put you on air! Excellent!

We knew these people were crooks, taking money off of the people who need money most. So we set about proving a point, albeit in a very childish way. The fantastic Burnt Face Man flash cartoons were our inspiration. It was at this point we remembered that Soph's brother had made a Burnt Face Man "sound board"- in other words, a series of buttons you can click which will trigger various pieces of BFM dialogue.

The phone rang! We were back on the air! "Hello, what's your name?", the female presenter, now in her third hour of asking the same question, enquired. "YOU BURNT SHIT GAY...", cried the caller! It was cut off after "gay". I believe the woman responded with a look into the camera of surprise followed by saying something like "okay, alright", and then moving on.

But we didn't care-we'd done it! We'd got a vaguely homophobic-sounding Burnt Face Man sound effect onto the television! It was one of those legendary moments that'll be up there with the time I met Kilroy, and the time I broke a world record.

In retrospect, it was probably more exciting at the time.

We nearly went one better, before realising it was after midnight and thus officially "late". The plan was to shout the "c-word" into the phone- get them to cut us off after, of course, but then complain to Ofcom about the obscene language used on TV! Getting Quiz TV fined would have been fantastic justice for all of the poor people who they keep getting to ring in, despite there being no answer.

But maybe that's an adventure of another day?

|||112536175171201109|||"Burnt shit gay face"