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You can imagine the scene, a boy and a girl standing in the corridor by the toilets in the club. They are both a bit too young to really be there, but the doorman knows he needs as many young girls as he can get in these days. The boy got in because the bouncer couldn’t convince her to leave him at the door.

They are standing in the middle of all that noise and sweat and he asks her if she’ll come back to his. He’s planning to get lucky, and she just doesn’t want to know. She steps back and slightly further away. He knows he only has one more chance so he says, “but… I love you”.

It’s a parting shot, a last ditch attempt to save things, and while I keep you in suspense* about the outcome I’ll explain why it isn’t really a parting shot, in fact it’s a Parthian shot.

Back at the height of Roman times, the Roman Army felt pretty darn good about themselves. They thought they could really do anything. At the particular time of this story they had just conquered Gaul which was all of the land that they cared about to the west of them, but if they really wanted to rule all of the Mediterranean then they would have to conquer the lands to the left. These lands were held by the Parthians. And these guys were a little bit different than the Gauls.

The Parthians, came from the area which is modern day Iran. And their civilisation was so far ahead of the Romans that the Romans didn’t even understand how much trouble they were in. When they invaded they were suddenly faced with a cavalry something that wasn’t seen in Europe for more than 1,000 years.

The Romans ran is as they always did but were in big trouble, pretty quickly. The Parthian horsemen fired on the Romans from horseback with bows and arrow. And the Romans just didn’t know what to do. They were in big trouble. Then after a short time of this the Parthians played another trick. They fell back. The Romans felt they had suddenly started to win. The Parthians fell back and the horses started running away. The Romans started running after them to start the killing. But when you’re running you aren’t holding up your shield. The Parthians kept riding away but the men turned around and fired back into the approaching Romans. It was a concept that was completely alien to the Romans, up until then anyone retreating was.. Well… in retreat not attacking at the same time. This was the Parthian shot.

And over the years it has been turned into the parting shot that we know today. So really it is a Parthian shot.

So how are our couple doing? Well of course she came back towards him. With all the noise in the club it was difficult to hear exactly. He might have been saying he loathed her. But when she came back towards him and leaned in for him to repeat what he had said he used the opportunity to kiss her on the ear, and one thing led to another and they got to hook up. So happy ending?

Well unfortunately they were young and reckless and didn’t use protection. So she fell pregnant at the tender age of sixteen. So sad ending?

Well she dropped out of school to have the baby, but despite what her parents said the boy would do he too dropped out of school and got a job to pay for her and the baby and they got married. So happy ending?

Well after a few years of scrapping through, the boy had gone to buy his lottery ticket (like he always did every week) when he suddenly realised that he didn’t have any cash on him. So he didn’t buy a ticket. And that week his numbers came up. He was so distraught that he killed himself. So sad ending?

Well actually although the girl had appreciated the boy taking care of her for the first three years of their babies life it hadn’t been a happy time. He had become a drug user and was an angry drunk. So while she was devastated, in many ways it was a relief for her and the child. So a mixed ending? Yes.

* How do you keep an idiot in suspense? I’ll tell you later.

Sometimes by the side of the road you see people holding a sign up, begging for cash.

My friend US Nick* swears blind that he saw two kids holding up this sign by the side of the road:

Parents killed by Ninjas,
Need money for Kung fu class.

* This is to differentiate between US Nick who came to visit recently and UK Nick who you may have seen mentioned before.

I was reading an article on the guardian website the other day: Leave me alone… which talked about how corrosive interruptions are to modern life. My job is at the extreme end of this as I’ll often have three people vying for me to talk to them all at the same time standing around my desk while I’m trying to do something for myself. The average according to the article seems to be that most people are interrupted every three minutes which is pretty bad, but my question is about how many of these interruptions are things that we actually have to deal with now?

In the situation I described above you have to respond. Somebody has wandered over into your space and asked you a question. It’s the same thing with a phone call. If you don’t answer then the other person won’t go away (especially if you don’t have voicemail). But what about a text or e-mail? Or a reminder in Outlook. All of these make noises and stuff but then we’ve chosen that they do. None of these things actually have to be dealt with instantly. We can respond when we want to respond. We could put them all on silent. And then remember to look at a scheduled time (but without a popup reminder of when this scheduled time is how would you remember)?

The reason we don’t have all of these things on silent is that we like to be interrupted sometimes. And sometimes the thing interrupting us is important enough that it should be considered more important than what we’re doing. We kind of need a way of being able to judge where that importance level goes. The only problem is that you need a two way level of priority because if we left it up to the people who want us to do stuff for them then it would always be level 1 priority.

I’m not sure how it would be organised, but it would be something like this. You want to be able to rank people by a level of how much you know them, so junk mail and cold callers have a rank of zero, firms that you have signed up to deal with have a rank of one. Above that you have colleagues and then friends and so on up until you get to say your partner right at the top. Then each of the people sending you stuff can add a priority level to the stuff they are doing and if they don’t set anything then it defaults to zero.

We already have the capability for receiving e-mail. We could set complicated rules and automatically downgrade anyone who didn’t set an importance level to the e-mail that they were sending (if they don’t care enough to assign an importance level then they aren’t important enough to listen to). But what about phone calls? What about people just walking up to you and not noticing that you’re in the middle of something?

Perhaps the only solution is the one suggested at the end of the article… I’m off to saw off a bit of all of my chair legs. Oh wait a minute. Sadly it turns out that I work in an office in the modern world and all of the chairs have wheels on the bottom.

I was at a theme park some years ago in up state New York and I was standing on line* for a slice or two of pizza and a beer.

I was standing with a friend of mine and we were looking at the choices available. The line was long and so we got to discussing what was a better deal: two small slices or one big slice. I was suggesting that the single larger slice was a better deal. No, my friend argued, it couldn’t be because you actually got less pizza. No you didn’t I argued, although the diameter numbers looked that way you had to take account of Pi. I almost certainly made a joke about how Pi was a factor in choosing your pizza pie.

It was a pretty geeky conversation, I know that I probably don’t come off well from it, but somebody comes off less well in a moment, just hold on.

Suddenly a voice from about three feet below me calls out up to her father, “Dad make that man stop talking, he’s making my brain think”.

*Look I was in America so I was on line. If this really upsets you then feel free so substitute queuing although it’s not really the English way.**

**Generally in English if there is are multiple words that can be used in a situation that’s what becomes adopted. Although that can seem counter intuitive actually it makes sense because our language much more flexible. Although some English speakers deride people’s splitting of the infinitive it is to the fundamental benefit of the English language that we are able to do it and still be understood. Variation is the spice of life***

*** indeed, variety is the point.