Baby Talk21.com
Our son received his first email this weekend.
Nothing particularly fancy: just a message of thanks from his Grandfather for a letter we'd sent. I was going to write back and thank him on Joshua's behalf, and then thought it would be a nice idea to do it in his voice. And then I had the brainwave of getting him an email address.
Another sub account on our B.T. plan opens the door for more unsolicited junk about penis enlargement, Viagra and Nigerian business deals. That said, I'm this close to handing over ownership of the desperately-needs-updating church website to Jon - which means that my spam intake is likely to plummet overnight, as the Really Faithful Group webmaster's account tends to receive nothing but garbage these days. I barely even look at it anymore.
So I logged into our profile settings in order to register another address, and tapped in his details. Our email addresses tend to follow the initial.initial.surname@btinternet.com format, but the potential for mix-ups between j.m.baldock and j.d.baldock was fairly high, so I went for a simple firstname.lastname instead. I'd feared that joshua.baldock would have been snapped up, but that - as it turned out - wasn't the problem. Instead, I found my application rejected on the grounds that he's too young: B.T., it seems, won't give email addresses to anyone under two years old.
Maybe it's just Monday Morning syndrome, or maybe I'm just dumb, or maybe I don't see something that they see very well, but this sort of cut-off makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. I could understand if it were four or five, perhaps - the sort of age you'd start to get into the wonders of ICT in nurseries and reception classes (these days occurring in the form of glitzy multimedia presentations with lights, video and all the trimmings...a far cry from the days of moving that wretched turtle around with the LOGO command prompt). But as it stands, you're not allowed to give an email address to a baby - who is too young to use a computer unsupervised or understand email - but you *can* give one to a toddler (who is still too young to use a computer unsupervised or understand email).
We've recently encountered a similar sort of technical bureaucracy from the passport office. Anyone who has applied for a passport in the last year or two will know the increasingly strict standards to which photos must adhere: no smiles, no headgear, no sunglasses. Such attention to detail is necessary as all photos are now scanned, in order to create an up-to-date, high-quality passport, and also a comprehensive database of accessible mugshots to aid in the ever-tedious War On Terror. We've all read the horror stories about six-month delays to passport applications, and building a computer that could do a lot of the legwork did make sense, at least in terms of freeing up personnel to deport Iranian sex slaves who will be thrown into forced marriages when they get home, while granting Visas to conniving East Europeans (etc.) who merely want to sponge off the state.
So enter the computer: a top-of-the-range scanning device with impossibly high standards, all of which are entirely necessary in order to produce a useable passport. This is all well and good, but it's also the case that we can no longer put very small children on an adult passport: they have to have their own. And what this technological marvel fails to realise is that while it's comparatively easy to get an adult in the right sort of pose for a viable passport photo (thanks to hi-tech booths that enable you to fit your head into an on-screen circle to ensure that it's positioned correctly), getting a small child or baby to sit properly is quite another matter.
The first set of photos that Emily sent were rejected because Josh was "too low down" in the picture, and that he wasn't wearing a top. Never mind the fact that the instruction manual said absolutely nothing about where he should have been placed in the frame - only that his head needed to occupy between 75 and 80 per cent of it - and that it was similarly vague on clothing. Em duly took another set, only to be informed that there was a 'shadow' over his head. In both cases, the rejection itself came from an apologetic woman in the office, who said that it really wasn't her fault, just the computer's. We can assume that the photos are placed under the glass, and either scanned correctly, or that a large cross appears on the screen while the speakers emit the noise from Family Fortunes - or, better still, the voice of a disinterested bank clerk mumbling "Computer says naaah....".
At least the passport office had the decency to call us up themselves instead of relying on a by-the-numbers rejection letter - but after Em had told me that the second lot of photos had been turned down I felt like calling them back and saying "If you want a photo, come over here and bloody do it yourselves!". Josh is a notoriously wriggly child, and while it's theoretically possible to put him down on a towel for just long enough to grab the camera and get a couple of photos without him screwing up his eyes ('eyes must be open'), putting his hand in his month ('face obscured'), breaking into a big smile ('doesn't really matter, but we're being picky') or urinating all over the camera lens, actually doing this is not terribly easy, even for someone of my wife's multitasking expertise. How she eventually managed to get the barrage of shots that she did is a marvel.
So she took a few more pictures, checked for shadows and head-to-body ratios and made sure that the background was the precise pantone they needed, and then sized and resized until they were pixel-perfect, and then sent the lot with the words "I hope that some of these will be usable!". And lo and behold, his passport arrived a couple of weeks ago. The saga is ended, but I can't help thinking that it's been a complete waste of time - for one thing he's changing so quickly that in six months he'll look nothing like his photo, which will no doubt bring about some raised eyebrows at the airport, along with long interrogations, calls to Interpol to check that he's not a known fugitive and threats of a full body cavity search (which is fine with me, although I take no responsibility for what they may find when they get his pants off).
This leads me on to my second point: does Josh really look like a terrorist? I know that he has a wicked grin sometimes, and you read all sorts of apocryphal tales in the press about children's prams being used to hide shoplifted goods (and, in some cases, the subsequent incarceration of one-year-old Mexican infants who've been accused of aiding and abetting their thieving parents). But I seriously doubt that my son is genuinely capable of any act of violence greater than his antics last Sunday at his dedication service, when he bit the vicar's index finger while we were posing for photos. That said I've often thought that he might be carrying Weapons of Mass Destruction in his nappy - all the more terrifying when you discover that they can be deployed within 4.5 seconds.
Anyway. Rants about passport control and internet pedantry aside, I somehow doubt that we're going to receive threatening letters or follow-up calls from the lads in the British Telecom administration department, checking that Joshua is indeed the age that he says he is. I can't help thinking that they're too busy working out ever more tedious automated menu systems and devising new ways to screw over their customers to care about who's *really* using their online services. But should it come to pass that they decide to investigate, I suspect that a forged letter would be in order.
"Dear B.T. people,
This is to confirm that I am, in fact, two years old. I celebrated my second birthday very recently, and having reached this milestone, I sensed a growing awakening - a sort of maturity, if you will - coupled with an overwhelming desire to immediately log on to a computer and email everyone I know. It was lucky that I was instantly able to get an email account, thanks to your sensible decision to use two years old as the cut-off date, thereby denying email to anyone who is younger than me (and therefore Just Not Ready Yet).
I thank you for granting me the opportunity to get involved in the information superhighway so quickly. I also promise to use it responsibly and legally, and not to access pornographic pictures of exposed breasts (which I get to see all the time anyway), nor to look up websites about how to be a stroppy toddler, or obtain information about acts of domestic terrorism, such as scribbling on the walls or crapping in the bath.
Yours,
Joshua Baldock (handprint in lieu of signature, as I can't write yet).
P.S. Please find attached my latest daubing, in PDF form."
| Back to Soapbox Index | Back to Main Page | Email me |