Good news! I’ve bought myself a new phone, and it’s modern – you don’t need both hands, a custom sling and a three-phase power supply to use it. Things started well; email pretty much set itself up, a trip to Fring provided instant messaging, but GPS was a whole world of pain. Typical, it let me down in front of Dr Ben – which is never a good idea. The last time he laughed this much was when my first sat nav took us on a  ‘short cut’ which grounded my car out. This time we ended up walking half a mile down a very busy road because he insisted on making random navigation decisions until I could demonstrate a reliable satellite lock – which didn’t happen. After several days of futile google searching and guess work, I finally modified the A-GPS settings to remove the http:// prefix. I don’t know why I did this, but it worked and I got a lock within seconds. A colleague’s handset  confirmed my guess-work, the http:// prefix was clearly not required. I must admit that, as a tester, I’m ever-so slightly disappointed that I fixed it.

I found myself watching an episode of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares USA the other night. As expected, it was not going very well and Gordon seemed to be getting more and more frustrated with one of the Chefs. Something had to give, but my heart sank when Gordon held up an apple and asked the question ‘What is this?’ Now I have come to respect Gordon’s approach to project recovery; he’s straight talking and gets results. Eventually the answer came, ‘it’s an apple Gordon’. Oh dear, maybe he’s just been working too hard.

Clearly the wrong answer! Gordon seemed to get quite upset. Apparently it’s not just an apple, it’s a bundle of flavour and inspiration for several dishes. This got me thinking, as testers do we just see test cases, or do we see crit-sits and outages prevented. If it really is just test case xyz, how can we get anyone interested in it?