During the course of a computer science research project (or even a DPhil) it is highly likely that a researcher will have to generate at least a couple of lines of code. Most researchers fall into a number of well-defined categories when it comes to programming. This handy guide for supervisors, other researchers or the plain bored helps you to identify some of the prime suspects...
Disclaimer: this was written when I should have been concentrating on my current research project, the one my previous contract was for AND my DPhil thesis! No resemblance to individual researchers alive, dead or at York is intended.
Firmly believes that he is the greatest programmer to have walked the earth and has the three-line version of Tetris to prove it.
IATG spent most of his undergraduate days in the terminal room and only got a degree because he could break security and decrypt the exam answers. Thinks in a mixture of C and assembly language, thinks Real Programmers are sissies, has memorised even the unwritten volumes of Knuth (who he believes sold out the moment he started writing TeX) and has most of the source to obsolete Unix kernels in his room. Has VMS source on microfiche, mysteriously acquired. Knows what the Lions Book is and has his own n-th generation copy of it. Has played a Plan 9 distribution CD ROM through an audio player for fun.
Nobody else can understand IATG's code, which suits him fine, and absolutely nobody can use his customised environment, which also suits him because it means he doesn't have to answer questions about it.
Absolutely lethal on any project which involves collaboration, documentation, theory, or distributing code to other sites; IATG is best steered away from research and into hacking for GCHQ or similar.
Probably spent most of his early career sitting next to IATG in the terminal room but was reading the news instead. IV brings a new approach to research programming. IV has a near religious belief that the Internet is infinite in size and therefore must contain, accessible via anonymous FTP, precisely the package which is needed to solve the problem at hand. The problem is of course that it either won't run on any of the machines on site and necessitates wholesale upgrading of software and hardware, or requires "just one more" patch to be obtained via the net. When it does work, often IV is instantly disappointed by the vast shiny new package and throws it all away in favour of some other package which "may well do the job". IV knows where to get an infra-red weather map of Hawaii for 1963 and a program to display it on a TI 99/4A emulating a Commodore-64.
IV can survive at sites with tolerant sysadmins and good connectivity -but use of disk space is tremendous and demands for OS upgrades, net bandwidth and new disks phenomenal... once in a while IV finds something useful but is usually too busy looking for something else to actually install it or port it.
RP has read all the books on software engineering and believes that you should build things incrementally and use prototypes. Unfortunately, RP takes it to extremes and re-starts from scratch almost every day, trying new approaches, new user interfaces, even new languages, in an attempt to achieve a design of such amazing elegance that all who see it shall be awe-struck. Unfortunately, every time RP has a new idea it means all the old work is thrown out, and in many cases this happens before any decent components are written.
RP tends to have an arcane knowledge of Unix tools like lex, yacc, Perl and Awk and RP systems are usually held together by the most incredible array of plumbing since an Italian hotel water closet.
With someone to catch the pieces thrown away by a good RP things might actually get done, and it can't be denied that they often have good ideas, but the sheer lack of commitment makes them impossible to cope with for any length of time.
GNU, as suggested by the name, believes that there is One True Source of good software and it's the Free Software Foundation. Not content with the perfectly good utilities and compilers shipped with the system, GNU has to have gnu-cat, gnu-rm, gnu-everything before any work can be done. Of course, because gnu-anything usually requires gnu-everything else to build, you always end up with a complete set of gnutilities filling your user disk leaving no space for research work. Come to think of it, because GNU is always applying patch 9.4.32.4.4.12 to the gnuseless programs he needs to build more gnuseless programs, there isn't any time either.
On the rare occasions when GNU actually does write some code it'll require the entire GNU CD-ROM to be shipped with it before it'll even compile on a standard machine.
Useful to have at least one of them around, but beware getting two GNUs, since they'll inevitably both want their own collection of software...
SPRH wrote a good program a couple of years ago, which solved a problem nicely and had some useful bits in it. Since then, however, SPRH has moved to a new project with new objectives. This doesn't matter, since as far as SPRH is concerned ALL software is reusable.
The old program will either grow enormously into a multi-modal, immense crock held together by hidden parameters, mode bits, recondite options and obscure data types, or will shatter into a disk full of libraries, macros, class hierarchies and fiddly little separate programs which used to fit together but now need so many intermediaries to communicate that they've become incomprehensible.
SPRH often looks productive, but that's because most of the work was charged to another project five years ago, or whatever work is going on is just another attempt to bludgeon code into an alien Weltanschauung.
OO experienced a Road To Damascus situation the moment objects first crossed her mind. From that moment on everything in her life became object oriented and the project never looked back. Or forwards.
Instead, it kept sending messages to itself asking it what direction it was facing in and would it mind having a look around and send me a message telling me what was there...
OO thinks in Smalltalk and talks to you in Eiffel or Modula-3; unfortunately she's filled the disk with the compilers for them and instead of getting any real work done she's busy writing papers on holes in the type systems and, like all OOs, is designing her own perfect language.
The most dangerous OOs are OODB hackers; they inevitably demand a powerful workstation with local disk onto which they'll put a couple of hundred megabytes of unstructured, incoherent pointers all of which point to the number 42; any attempt to read or write it usually results in the network being down for a week at least.
MFTL knows the solution to the problem. The only problem is, we haven't got a compiler for the language that it should be implemented in. MFTL knows only two languages; his favourite toy language and the language you need to compile its compiler. (If a language can compile its own compiler then it isn't a toy!).
The problem with TL compilers is that the code they generate is often inefficient and impossible to debug; however good MFTL is as a programmer the system will be huge and clunky... in many cases the TL also needs extensive runtime libraries and support tools to be distributed.
Is more likely to spend time tinkering with the TL compiler than actually working on the project; dreams of the day when TL is implemented in TL, and will probably resign as soon as it is, unless it's a Functional Programming project - almost all of them are about writing compilers for someone else's TL.
GUTT already has the software to solve the problem. Whether custom-written or commercial, it's excellent stuff and works nicely; it's robust, it's simple and neat. It often originated from the last site that GUTT was employed at and there's the problem...
It doesn't run on any of our machines. GUTT seems to have been living in an alternate reality in which Scrotely Whizzbangs running ScroteOS and StainedGlassWindows are the most popular computing environment and has begged, stolen, borrowed or even written software to suit.
The problem is of course that outside Ruritania nobody on Earth has ever heard of Scrotely Systems and the software isn't worth a row of beans to anyone...
Since Scrotely went out of business five years ago, truly great GUTT people spend months trying to write a Scrotely emulator on your local machines; mere mortals spend their time posting to comp.sys.scrotely and comp.sys.foobar to ask whether anyone has ever tried porting anything to a Foobar 250...
Macro Magician believes that programming is obsolete because you can make any program sit up and beg via use of its command or macro language; MM can solve your problem with a quick macro here and a bit of shell script there to hold it all together. There are two types of MM; the Unix Macro Magician (UMM) and Micro Macro Magician (MMM).
Whether it's solving the Towers of Hanoi in vi or sorting lists in TECO, UMM knows how to do it. UMM pipes his .profile through the C pre-processor and watches it rewrite itself every time he logs in; the vast majority of UMM systems are implemented in Emacs Lisp and require all 2.5Gbytes of the latest distribution before they'll even think about running. They usually take at least as long to run as to write.
...at the other end of the scale MMM is into HyperCard, ToolBook and other BiCapitalised pieces of syntactic sugar, although also relishes the chance to delve into the macro languages of word processors, databases and spreadsheets, preferably all at the same time; ideally using everything to build an application which takes a week to start up and keeps flashing up obscure menus and dialogue boxes.
No cure for either of these, sadly. Best bet is 240v through their chair.
NN relishes complexity. The database runs on an IBM somewhere in Canada; the X-windows front end on a Hewlett-Packard in Switzerland, the inference engine on a Cray in Indonesia and the program itself on Voyager II... each part of the packages employs different comms protocols depending upon a wide range of factors including the phase of the moon...
There is no doubt that NN can create a system which works, but it's impossible to explain to mere mortals and keeps getting more and more complex. NN firmly believes that "it's all virtual anyway", unfortunately including such things as execution time and network bandwidth.
NN can be exhilarating to work with but also infuriating - never let NN tinker with your workstation because in no time flat it'll be running EBCDIC to SixBit translation software routing X.500 address requests from Uzbekistan to Ouagadoudou via a steam powered TCP/IP to Alohanet gateway in Auchtermuchty... Best relegated to a support job if at all possible.
Never produces anything remotely useful, but has all the crud that he has ever written under a wonderful change-management system. Literally everything he's ever written, from "fank you leter to aunty doris by me age(6)" to his underpants, is stored under RCS with proper versioning etc. Want version 8.2 of his O-level English essay? There it is.
Somewhere in there are 14000 versions of the source to the current project; CU saves and generates a new build every time a single character changes because "you can never be too sure"... CU is also an archive freak and his office is habitually filled with magtapes, QICs and Exabytes containing a complete backup of the revision notes about the versioning policy of the document identification scheme for the change-management procedure for the backup procedures for the system.
Words like "anal retentive" have been used to describe CU but he can't look them up because there's no longer enough space for the online dictionary...
Impossible to work with and to get any work out of. Is more likely to be out spotting trains or collecting stamps than working in any case.
Two types of AS researcher exist and both of them are hell to live with. The more traditional type spends most of the day counting parentheses in epic Lisp programs and trying to tell Prolog systems about families. If he gets mixed up he just fires up Eliza and tells it about his family until it crashes with boredom... Truly great AS researchers get their Prolog programs to talk to Eliza about their families and spend the rest of the time at conferences.
The new type is into Neural Networks and spends hours (and megabytes) with kludgy, flaky software creating arrays full of zeros and the odd one here and there for good effect. Interminable programs generate huge files with these in, in an attempt to prove that you can tell the difference between margarine and butter in less than ten hours... Occasionally has video cameras and image processing software, run like the clappers when this happens because invariably it will be unable to distinguish you from a picture of Cecil Parkinson or suchlike.
The problem with AS researchers is that the systems they create are at least as stupid as the people who create them. Avoid at all costs.
NC knows the solution to the problem - it's a couple of seventeenth-order non-stiff bloody hard integral equations, and there's a routine somewhere in the NAG library to solve them. Isn't there? Unfortunately NC isn't much of a programmer (strictly FORTRAN or the most K&R-ish C you've seen for years) and isn't quite sure which routine, or which parameters, or for that matter which library...
NN is often not a computer scientist - physics or maths backgrounds are common - and tend to have the clunkiest working environments on machines you've ever seen. Keep all their files in one directory and name them F44433232.DAT and suchlike. Almost always have a Julia set as their screen wallpaper (Mandelbrot is a bit old hat and doesn't take up enough processing power...)
Knows a lot about the likes of Uniras, GINO-F and similar. Can be relied upon to have the floating point format for the machine tattoed inside her eyelids and mumbles Denormal, Abnormal, Inf, NaN! in her sleep (while the system recompiles). Is the only person in the office who can remember O-level maths and as such is occasionally useful.
Believes that the problem can be solved by either finding a solution to a well-known problem which can map onto your problem, or by creating a tool which can generate a program to solve the problem. MPS usually knows a lot about automata, language theory and obscure algorithms and revels in complexity.
Often sounds plausible, but the meta-problem which MPS keeps trying to solve generally generates a whole slew of meta-meta-problems, and the meta-meta-problems in turn infect the project with meta-meta-meta problems, and eventually MPS either disappears up his own rear end or ends up having to solve the Halting Problem before he can get anything else done.
An MPS on the team can be extremely exhilarating, but most of the time it's downright difficult. Many MPSs were formalists or mathematicians in another incarnation, which can make them difficult to deal with. Their programs often run better on a whiteboard than on a computer.
The deadliest of the deadly, WACF drifted into the Department from some other planet and still believes that computers are magical, strange, contrary beasts. Every login session is a strange and terrible adventure. Has a filespace full of .dvi files, editor backups, text files called aaaa, bbbb, cccc, xxxx and suchlike and a few core dumps (usually caused by the window manager or kernel, since WACF rarely programs). Generally uses one or two killer applications which hammer the fileserver or the net, but forgets to kill them off and ends up with seventeen text editors, eight window managers and a dozen or so clocks running at any one time.
As long as you can convince WACF not to do any programming you might have a chance of getting something done. Ideally one should buy them a PC or Macintosh which isn't attached to the net. Oh, and protect the system files, because WACF has been known to delete things like MSDOS.SYS to save space.
Used to be the best programmer in Ruritania, where computers run on steam and use trinary deontic logic with lots of don't cares. Regards 8k of memory as a paradise of unheard-of proportions and doesn't trust windowing systems. Speaks fluent Ruritanian and starts off seeming to speak good English, but gets confused whenever the phone rings so doesn't bother answering it, only believes things other Ruritanians tell him and insists on using the office as an informal Ruritanian social club.
Some ICFRs are actually excellent programmers by any standards, but the effectiveness of their work is blunted rather by the fact that (A) if you can persuade them to write user documentation it will display a choice of grammar and vocabulary which is at best idiosyncratic and at worse somewhat like a Sun manual; added to this the code is of course all commented in perfect Ruritanian. It's often fun to dig out their CVs or read their mbox files, which they often seem to leave unprotected. Unfortunately in several cases ICFRs have left their girlfriends back home unprotected just before coming to the UK; being present at the birth by email is a difficult option.
Every institution has one. OFAP has been around since (as a bare minimum) the mid-sixties and regards such arriviste architectures as VAX as being unproven and too modern. OFAP regards the PDP-6/10/Decsystem-20 line as being the One True Architecture and reckons characters are six bits wide, never mind all this ASCII rubbish, let alone Unicode. Delights in explaining the CAILE instruction at coffee breaks and maintains an FTP archive of old PDP-10 operating systems. Was mentioned in HAKMEM and is delighted when he finds anyone else who's heard of it.
OFAP has occasionally been convinced to port some of his code to Unix, but of course never got further than V7. Once tried to port Spacewar to a modern machine but it wasn't fast enough. Knows that Sketchpad is the greatest drawing program ever. Knows what all the funny mode bits in obscure TECO Q registers are used for, and exploits them in his programs, which are an unholy mixture of assembly language and TECO macros. Dangerous, usually has a beard (even if female), but is useful to have around because s/he has seen it/done it all before and knows the tricks - just don't let OFAP implement anything.
ICDT tends to be an enthusiastic new graduate and mistakes user interface for functionality. That is, once ICDT has seen a program running he believes that he can "knock up a quick hack to do that in a week". Four or five years later the "quick hack" is still unfinished, because ICDT doesn't understand the underlying semantics or data structures.
Combining an ICDT with another programmer is often a damn good idea as long as someone can curb his enthusiasm. There is a slight downside in that most ICDT programs are predicated upon a huge and unreliable user interface class library - InterViews is particularly popular for creating mock-ups of programs that will never work, although in this enlightened day and age Visual Basic and Visual C++ are starting to take over as media for creative delusions.
May be a useful member of an HCI group or some other motley crew in which programming skill isn't important but getting pretty pixels on screen is vital.
Has read all of the books on HCI and believes all the contradictory stuff that's contained in them. Always has a more expensive machine than you, usually with a very nice colour screen, sound card, Dataglove, voice recognition equipment etc. - and no keyboard, because WCSTB can't (won't?) type. Is more likely to be a psychologist or sociologist than a real computer scientist.
WCSTB basically prefers tinkering with typefaces, colours, screen layouts and window-management policies to programming, although most WCSTBs have a working knowledge of some of the surprisingly grubby depths of either X or Windows, in order to facilitate the above. A typical WCSTB "Hello World" program is four hundred lines long and takes up a meg and a half when linked, but is essentially a complete multimedia experience with a non-threatening user interface and configurable options; at that rate it's perhaps surprising that none of the WCSTBs ever get anything more substantial written.
ISC is the barrack-room lawyer of the research community. Since the application areas in which he works are closely allied to blowing things up/stopping things from blowing up he takes a considered and principled approach to software development for safety critical systems - his claim is that "all software is unsafe and I'm damned if I'm writing any to complicate the issue".
In theory this is fine, but occasionally ISC is forced into writing some code by whoever holds his grant. Depending on what sort of safety critical project he's involved in, this will either be low-level bit-twiddling in C, PL/M or assembler on a single-board computer (which ISC secretly loves because you basically don't have to do any V&V on it) or will involve interacting with twenty different CASE tools, eight design notations and four formal methods with subtly incompatible semantics. Tends to be employed on long contracts, and with a development process like that can you blame him?
Pete Fenelon, 31/3/96, updated 2/10/96, updated 6/12/96
Readers of various other of my ramblings or those of you who've visited the humble abode of yrs trly will be only too aware that 39 Broadway is flanked by some of the flakiest people in North Yorkshire. For the benefit of those of you who don't already know, Fulford in general is a sleepy and fairly respectable suburb of York, and Broadway a fairly unremarkable semi-detached tree-lined suburban street. So why am I surrounded by the loonies?
No. 41, from whom we're semi-detached, features a large and dysfunctional family who specialise in clomping up and downstairs in what seem like very large boots, and then playing The Game With Nails, often at about 3am.
But this tale of woe is not about No. 41. That's just there to give you some atmosphere.
This tale of woe is about No. 37. Every street has one house that looks like it's not been repainted since it was built, where the curtains never open and the woodwork is mouldering away -- the sort of house serial killers, "people who keep themselves to themselves" and loners live. 37's it.
No. 37 is inhabited by a curmudgeonly old chap whose main eccentricity seems to be urinating in public, either out of his back door or onto the walls of his own house, his wife, who is rarely allowed to see daylight, and a seemingly variable number of sons and/or their friends.
The sons (hereinafter referred to as Young Loons to differentiate them from Old Loon) are the really dubious ones. They are very much of the mentality which says that unless a night includes twenty pints, a kebab and a fight, followed by some pornographic films, it is completely wasted.
Alas, by the time they have returned from their nocturnal doings, they are usually what our Australian colleagues might refer to as "full as a seaside kharzi on a bank holiday". Alas, their craving for alcohol -- and indeed you can normally smell it on their breath from about 20 feet -- is unmatched by their ability to cope with it.
So, they usually get home and re-enact bar brawls in slow and incoherent motion in their back garden at about 2am. Which is not too bad, I suppose, because it keeps them off the streets. You get the odd snippets of strange conversation, mostly of the four-letter variety, delivered in gravelly Yorkshire baritones, at the weirdest hours... but they weren't too bad until recently, with the possible exception of one Sunday morning when the normal feeble Yorkshire sunlight was subtly altered in its passage through out kitchen window by copious amounts of vomit. (It wasn't us they were singling out, they'd also bowked all over their own house, and in any case I felt that that was karma repaying us as at a party some months before someone had parked a tiger in a pint glass and poured it into someone's front garden. C'est la vie).
Things started getting weird when Young Loon 1 and Young Loon 2 decided they wanted to borrow a video from me. Quite why they needed to pull a replica gun I don't know, but I lent them it anyway -- only for them to return it within 20 minutes. Perhaps they thought Pulp Fiction was dirty. ("Tall one always borrows us Pulp Fiction, 'ee's our mate ''e is")
Then, a week or so later, they decided to start playing football with a bench in our back garden, which unfortunately does not have a fence separating it from theirs. Well, after they'd hung it from the washing line for a bit they put it back and it was none the worse, so I suppose that's forgiveable.
The weekend after, I was away, but I was informed by the miscreants with whom I share the house that Young Loon 1 had been arrested for some breach of the peace; presumably his fight re-enactments became a bit vigorous, though I also heard bits about kicking doors and suchlike. I thought nothing more of it. About time.
Waking up a few days later, the first thing I saw on opening the curtains was a police car. The second, third and fourth were an ambulance and two fire-engines respectively. After checking that the house wasn't on fire and neither of my housemates had neglected to inform me of the fact, I realised that the most plausible explanation was that a Loon had immolated himself. My joy knew few bounds. Imagine, then, my disappointment when I discovered that it was a minor chip-pan fire that resulted in little more than the destruction of their ancient and rancid cooker and the minor singeing of Mrs Loon's hand.
Oh well.
Many of you will be familiar with my devotion to the products of Domino's Pizza, which often provide me with much-needed sustenance at obscure hours when I lack the raw materials to formulate anything approximating a tasty meal. Tonight happened to be one of those nights, and at about 8.45 I phoned an order in. As usual, their phone line was crackly and all-but-inaudible, so it was with considerable trepidation (you don't want to end up with *anchovies*, do you?) that I waited for my pizza.
At about 9pm the usual Young Loon moaning and groaning in the drive started, though with perhaps a tad more obscenity than usual. I thought nothing of it, putting it down to the usual youthful high-jinks and Tennent's Super. It did seem to go on for a while, though, and I started to worry about the eventual arrival of my pizza in the midst of what sounded like a rough night in Beirut about ten years ago. Sod it, though, Dominos are always late.
Thinking of the pleasures of said pizza, and carefully avoiding eye contact with Young Loon 1 or 2, I nipped across the road to the off-licence and bought a 660ml bottle of Beck's which I put in the fridge.
At about 9.30 there was a knock at the door. Expecting comestibles, I grabbed my chequebook and opened up, only to be faced by an irate middle-aged gentleman and his wife. They asked me if the young man rolling around swearing in the drive lived here. "No," I replied, "He lives next door and he's usually like that." The gentleman asked me if I knew him; I was able to provide a name and confirm that he lived at No. 37, but that was about all.
"He's just been beating my car up in the car park. The police will be here in a couple of minutes."
"Ah, good, excellent, thanks.".
Well, Broadway's no more than half a mile from the divisional HQ of North Yorkshire Police and within a few minutes a couple of panda cars were parked outside. Parked outside 39, of course, not 37. Fortunately, having been there many times before, the rozzers had the right address and the sounds of struggle soon filled the night air. Oh crikey, I thought (or words to that effect), if the pizza moped arrives now he'll take one look and drive straight past. Young Loon 1 could, for all I care, be a violent axe murderer, but if he was disrupting my digestion, I might have to Get Angry.
After what can only be described as a low-key scuffle (after all, the police would hardly find it difficult to arrest someone that smashed...) Young Loon 1 and his friends from Fulford nick departed, leaving me to await the arrival some minutes later of my dinner...
The pizza was, of course, cold, and what with all the excitement the bottle of Becks I thought I'd put in the fridge went into the freezer where I discovered it at about 1am, frozen near-solid. Upon opening it, what little liquid there still was in it (the rest being a block of ice) frothed up in slow motion, taking minutes to do what a bottle of beer usually does in fractions of a second and making curious noises. So that went straight in the bin. Hohum. And the serial ports on my 486 don't want to play ball since I fitted the new CDROM and sound card.
Well, it's a few months later, I've changed ISP, but my domestic arrangements are still fairly similar.
First thing's first, the 486BL3/99 motherboard went infavour of an AMD DX5/133 and jolly nice it is too).
The Large Noisy Family at No. 37 has recently bought a new clock. Alas, it's one that plays the chimes of Big Ben on the quarter hour. This is not something I find restful, least of all at 3am. One assumes that the attitude is "we've bought it, we're damned well going to listen to it".
But more fun is happening
Mad Mick (for that is the Loon's name) and his bizarre lifestyle are still very much a part of the local colour. There was one immortal late-night conversation, at about 3am, out in the street, where he and Young Loon 2 were discussing their philosophy of life (that or something similar induced by Much Lager). "Yer me best mate, you are, but I f---in' hate you, I don't like you, right." Alas, this was summer and the volume of the conversation was such that it could be heard even with headphones on. Then came the precious quote, the wonderful, priceless line that made being kept awake by loonies outside all worthwhile. "You're going right up that tube, you are. RIGHT UP IT. You are. You're going RIGHT UP THAT F---ING TUBE!". Greater linguistic minds than mine have been quizzed over whether this was an insult, a term of approbation, or a statement of fact related to drainpipes. The conversation continued in this vein for about half an hour, until Mrs Loon decided to intervene. "MICHAEL! Come in now!" "I'm f---ing talking to my f---ing mate, OK?" "COME IN!" "He's talkin' to me!" "GET IN!". And he did.
It went rather quiet for a while after this.
The next incident tied in to the whole cooker thing (remember that from further up this tale of woe?)
I was again away, and rely on the evidence of those who were there at the time. Mad Mick had evidently procured a pizza which he wanted cooking, Rather than letting Simon, one of my housemates, cook said pizza, he insisted on inviting himself in to cook it himself (we don't always have much luck with pizza -- Richard, my other housemate, once managed to cook one whilst leaving the polystyrene tray beneath it on in the oven; he scraped this off and fed it to his ex and himself). Simon and his girlfriend Hester were in the throes of eating their own meal, accompanied by Mad Mick sitting there telling them that he had a shotgun and a baseball bat at home and if there was anyone they wanted sorting out he'd take care of it. He also invited those present to hit him "'cos I don't feel no pain, me", and started saying bizarre things about genital mutilation best left unrepeated. Well, not content with sitting there while it cooked, he also decided to eat his pizza with his new-found friends, suggesting that we didn't see enough of him and we should get together and watch some videos (presumably not Pulp Fiction). Naturally this didn't take place.
The next incident involved me. There was a knock at the back door at about 11.30 one Sunday night. Since our neighbours are of the social class that uses the front door only on high days and holidays, this could only be one person. I was dispatched to see what he wanted. What he wanted was booze and as much of it as possible. Carefully positioning myself vis-a-vis Mad Mick in such a manner that he couldn't see any of the extensive array of wines, beers and spirits in the kitchen, I told him we had no drink in the house. "Where can I f---ing get some?" he asked, several times. I pointed him at a couple of illegal after-hours off-licences, and for the next couple of weeks was "his mate".
I think we stopped being Mad Mick's mates after the next incident. It was a Sunday afternoon, one of the fortunate ones with a Grand Prix to get me out of bed before mid-afternoon. Richard and I had watched the race, noticing a certain amount of noise and garden bench football fuelled by large amounts of cheap cider. After the race "f---in' full f---in' contact karate, yer pouf', with the proponents clad merely in tracksuit trousers, took place between Mad Mick and his friend for a couple of hours. This actually consisted largely of making animal bellowing noises and throwing each other to the grass. Annoying, yes, but not actually likely to cause us any actual damage. This carries on for a long time, and the noises become ever weirder (at some point they stop using words entirely -- "hit me, yer b-----d" is rapidly replaced by something that sounds lime "mrrrrrrrruuuuuuuwwwwwwwgh"). The violence becomes more incoherent and apart from the fact that they're in our garden and making a bit of a racket there's not much of a problem (well, there is, but we're immune to it now).
So, later on, Simon's cooking for his friend Helen to this wonderful summer accompaniment. I'm watching TV, Richard's upstairs. There's an almighty crash. I look up to note that the ever-so-pretty wheelybin has tipped over, disgorging most of its contents across the garden. Mad Mick is standing over it like an ape-man who just smote his first gazelle with a rock (very 2001), bellowing.
I decide that this is not on and move to open the patio doors (I forgot to mention we have these; whenever there's what's termed "loon activity" the blinds behind these are shut!). As I get to them, Mad Mick approaches.
Oh dear, I think. This isn't going to be good.
I have second thoughts about opening the doors and start to gesticulate at the crap which is now liberally strewn all over the garden.
Mad Mick spread-eagles himself against the glass, nose squashed right up to it, drops his trousers and starts to rub his genitals against the glass of the patio doors. It's amazing what cider does to stunt development, let's say. So, he's standing there rubbing his meat and two veg against the doorway making "WWWWwwwuuuuuurrrrrgh" noises, while I'm trying to find the phone number of Fulford nick. Simon finds it.
"Hello? Fulford Police station? We're at 39 Broadway and we've got a problem with our neighbour. He's drunk, he's violent, he's abusive, he's in our garden and he's naked!"
Well, within minutes a Transit van pulls up, disgorging two alarmingly young coppers who knock on our back door. Mad Mick is nowhere to be seen. We're a bit shellshocked, as you might expect. The coppers, for what it's worth, clearly fancy Helen something rotten.
"So, what's the problem?"
"Well, our neighbour's extremely drunk and out of control. Can you go next door and shut him up?"
"No problem."
The gentlemen of the law wander away and we lock ourselves inside again. The next segment is reconstructed from what Richard heard.
There's a knock at the door of 37. Mad Mick answers and starts asking the policemen how old they are. "I'm 24," he tells them, "do you want a fight?"
The policemen naturally don't like this idea. They don't look all that useful, it must be said.
"No, no, take yer shirts off, you won't get into no bother, we'll have a fight".
No dice.
Sharp words are exchanged, with the result that Mad Mick returns to his house and the policemen return to ours.
"We can see you've got a problem with your neighbour. He's a bloody nutcase. If you get any more trouble, give us a bell and we'll lock him up until he's sober".
So, the rozzers toddle off to their van and drive away slowly.
Within a couple of minutes there's a hammering on the front door. I'll give you five or ten minutes to guess who it was. Not Lord Lucan, put it that way. It's none other than our dear friend Michael. Richard answers. "What the f--- did you f---ing call the f---ing police for? We wasn't f---ing doing anything!"
Before he has time to give a reply, guess what drives past? You've got it. A police Transit van which this time disgorges our two youthful guardians of the law and a battle-scarred and deeply unimpressed Sergeant.
"You. Get inside, get a shirt on and get in the van" (by this point, I suppose I should mention, Mad Mick is conventionally betrousered again!). I don't know if it was just an illusion, but the van looked as though it was swaying a little as it drove off taking Mad Mick away for a few days to sober up in the cells.
So, Mad Mick's a local character. The delivery people from all the takeaways know and dread him, and often express sympathy to me whenever they deliver anything, or commiserate when they know they have to go there later on in the evening... all I can hope is that when I move house in the near future, I get sane neighbours. What are the chances?
pete -- Peter Fenelon - Research Associate - High Integrity Systems Engineering Group, Dept. of Computer Science, University of York, York, Y01 5DD (+44/0)904 433388 Email: pete@minster.york.ac.uk ``Art is a science with more than 7 variables''