{"id":14625,"date":"2022-06-18T13:43:44","date_gmt":"2022-06-18T12:43:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=14625"},"modified":"2022-06-18T13:45:35","modified_gmt":"2022-06-18T12:45:35","slug":"the-blame-game-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=14625","title":{"rendered":"The blame game (2)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was recently on a course. It was a fairly detailed, low-level geekery course run by the Open Software Foundation\/XOpen\/The Open Group (you can take the boy out of geekery, but you can&#8217;t take the geekery out of the boy).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The course was a Teams thing. About halfway through the morning we had a break and there was a bit of socialising. One of the delegates, Martin (not his real name) said this was his second course in two days, the previous was a speed awareness course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A couple of people asked what that was like and whether he got anything out of it. He said it was dull, a waste of time, and didn&#8217;t really give him anything new. Someone said at least attending that course would teach him to keep an eye on speed limits. He said he doubted that and moved straight into a litany of &#8216;it wasn&#8217;t my fault&#8217;.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Apparently it wasn&#8217;t his fault that he was speeding because the speed censors were obviously incorrectly calibrated, and anyway he always drove at 40mph down that road and it was perfectly safe. And he was in a rush. Anyway there were no pedestrians around and hardly any other traffic. And maybe the speed limit on that road was set too low and it should be 20mph higher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Unsurprisingly, his winge turned into a rant about, well, everything. And I mean everything. It included (but wasn&#8217;t limited to):<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Cyclists on the road not on the cyclepaths or pavements (though I bet if he were a hardened pedestrian, he&#8217;d have a complaint about cyclists on the pavements too)<\/li><li>Road works when there&#8217;s no-one working there, and<\/li><li>Speed limits at roadworks when there&#8217;s no-one working there<\/li><li>Pedestrians (nothing too specific, just a winge about pedestrians being in his way when he&#8217;s driving places)<\/li><li>20mph speed limits<\/li><li>Lorries being too slow and, finally<\/li><li>Horses being on the road<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He was well into his stride by now. From the way he was going on I guessed that Martin was a Daily Mail reader so I took a punt. I asked him if he felt the 70mph speed limit on motorways was sufficient these days. Martin said it was ridiculous, although 100mph might be too high, he felt that 90mph was a reasonable and safe speed to travel on motorways, dual carriageways, and some single-carriageways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I suggested he write to the people who mounted the national campaign to introduce speed limits on motorways, and who advocated (initially) for a 60mph top speed, though when the legislation was introduced at their insistence, it was brought in at 70mph.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Martin looked the camera square in the eye\/lens and said if I knew who the bloody fool was who did that, he&#8217;d certainly write to them advising them they were idiots and needed to update their thinking. So I told him it was the Daily Mail. He went a bit quiet after that. I think my guess as to his newspaper of choice was accurate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And then the course resumed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was recently on a course. It was a fairly detailed, low-level geekery course run by the Open Software Foundation\/XOpen\/The Open Group (you can take<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":14629,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14625\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}