Delivery Songs

Duration

Podcast Version

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Here in the UK, ice cream vans will usually play a tune to let you know they’re set up and selling1. So when you hear Greensleeves (or, occasionally, Waltzing Matilda), you know it’s time to go and order yourself a ninety-nine.

On a verdant manicured lawn under a summer sky, two parents walk barefoot after their young child, who is running towards a traditionally-coloured yellow-and-white British ice cream van with visible branding reading 'fresh dairy ice cream' and '99 flake'.
Bet you want a double-99 with monkey’s blood now, right? If not, maybe hearing the chime will make the difference.

Imagine my delight, then, when I discover this week that ice cream vans aren’t the only services to play such jaunty tunes! I was sat with work colleagues outside İlter’s Bistro on Meşrutiyet Cd. in Istanbul, enjoying a beer, when a van carrying water pulled up and… played a little song!

And then, a few minutes later – as if part of the show for a tourist like me – a flatbed truck filled with portable propane tanks pulled up. Y’know, the kind you might use to heat a static caravan. Or perhaps a gas barbeque if you only wanted to have to buy a refill once every five years. And you know what: it played a happy little jingle, too. Such joy!

A grey-haired man wearing a t-shirt and blue jeans leans casually against the open doors of a white van that's visibly filled floor-to-ceiling with 19-litre 'water cooler style' water bottles, plus a pallet lifter. The van is parked between red-and-white striped cones on an Istanbul street.
In Istanbul, people put out their empty water bottles to be swapped-out for full ones by the water delivery man2.

My buddy Cem, who’s reasonably local to the area, told me that this was pretty common practice. The propane man, the water man, etc. would all play a song when they arrived in your neighbourhood so that you’d be reminded that, if you hadn’t already put your empties outside for replacement, now was the time!

And then Raja, another member of my team, observed that in his native India, vegetable delivery trucks also play a song so you know they’re arriving. Apparently the tune they play is as well-standardised as British ice cream vans are. All of the deliveries he’s aware of across his state of Chennai play the same piece of music, so that you know it’s them.

Two men sit in the back of an open-backed vegetable delivery truck.
Raja didn’t have a photo to share (and why would he? it’s not like I have a photo of the guy who comes to refill the gas tank behind my house!3), so I found this stock pic which sounds a bit like what he described. Photo courtesy Aiden Jones, used under a CC-By-SA license.

It got me thinking: what other delivery services might benefit from a recognisable tune?

  • Bin men: I’ve failed to put the bins out in time frequently enough, over the course of my life, that a little jingle to remind me to do so would be welcome4! (My bin men often don’t come until after I’m awake anyway, so as long as they don’t turn the music on until after say 7am they’re unlikely to be a huge inconvenience to anybody, right?) If nothing else, it’d cue me in to the fact that they were passing so I’d remember to bring the bins back in again afterwards.
  • Fish & chip van: I’ve never made use of the mobile fish & chip van that tours my village once a week, but I might be more likely to if it announced its arrival with a recognisable tune.
'Howe & Co' Fish & Chip van, painted in white and blue and parked in a residential street.
I’m thinking a chorus of Baby Shark would get everybody’s attention.
  • Milkman: I’ve a bit of a gripe with our milkman. Despite promising to deliver before 07:00 each morning, they routinely turn up much later. It’s particularly troublesome when they come at about 08:40 while I’m on the school run, which breaks my routine sufficiently that it often results in the milk sitting unseen on the porch until I think to check much later in the day. Like the bin men, it’d be a convenience if, on running late, they at least made their presence in my village more-obvious with a happy little ditty!
  • Emergency services: Sirens are boring. How about if blue light services each had their own song. Perhaps something thematic? Instead of going nee-naw-nee-naw, you’d hear, say, de-do-do-do-de-dah-dah-dah and instantly know that you were hearing The Police.
  • Evri: Perhaps there’s an appropriate piece of music that says “the courier didn’t bother to ring your doorbell, so now your parcel’s hidden in your recycling box”? Just a thought.

Anyway: the bottom line is that I think there’s an untapped market for jolly little jingles for all kinds of delivery services, and Turkey and India are clearly both way ahead of the UK. Let’s fix that!

Footnotes

1 It’s not unheard of for cruel clever parents to try to teach their young children that the ice cream van plays music only to let you know it’s sold out of ice cream. A devious plan, although one I wasn’t smart (or evil?) enough to try for myself.

2 The official line from the government is that the piped water is safe to drink, but every single Turkish person I spoke to on the subject disagreed and said that I shouldn’t listen to… well, most of what the government says. Having now witnessed first-hand the disparity between the government’s line on the unrest following the arrest of the opposition’s presidential candidate and what’s actually happening on the ground, I’m even more inclined to listen to the people.

3 My gas delivery man should also have his own song, of course. Perhaps an instrumental cover of Burn Baby Burn?

4 Perhaps bin men could play Garbage Truck by Sex Bob-Omb/Beck? That seems kinda fitting. Although definitely not what you want to be woken up with if they turn the speakers on too early…

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Kebab Menu Accessibility

Hanging with my team at our meetup in Istanbul, this lunchtime I needed to do some accessibility testing…

(with apologies to anybody who doesn’t know that in user interface design, a “kebab menu” is one of those menu icons with a vertical line of three dots: a vertical ellipsis)

Trump’s Strategy

Portrait of Donald Trump in the style of the DOS version of 1991 strategy video game Sid Meier's Civilization, saying: "The Gulf of Mexico shall now be known as the Gulf of America."

Pixel art portrait of Claudia Sheinbaum in Civilization-style, against a background reminiscent of Mexico City, saying: "You're fucking kidding, right?"

Pixel-art of convicted felon Donald Trump, now saying: "We're also renaming the State of Canada, the State of Greenland, and the State of Panama. They all belong to me now."

Newspaper in the style of Sid Meier's Civilization, titled The Final Broadsheet, published February 1 2025 AD. The headline is "Donald Trump claims domination victory", with the subheadline "Google Maps now shows 100% of world is part of America". Below is the pixel-art portrait of Trump and a pixel-art world map with a stars-and-stripes pattern applied to the entire world. A pullquote reads "That's not how any of this works! - rest of world". A secondary story has the headline "Putin, Netanyahu, demand do-over: 'We didn't realise you could invade places by just renaming them yours!'".

What do you reckon? Is he trying to go for a domination victory without ever saying “MY THREATS ARE BACKED BY NUCLEAR WEAPONS!”? His track record shows that he’s arrogant enough to think that the strategy of simply renaming things until they’re yours is actually viable!

After I saw Mexico’s response to Google following Trump’s lead in renaming the Gulf of Mexico, this stupid comic literally came to me in a dream.

Adapts screenshots from Sid Meier’s Civilization (1991 DOS version), public domain assets from OpenGameArt.org, and AI-assisted images of world leaders on account of the fact that if I drew pixel-art world leaders without assistance then you’d be even less-likely to be able to recognise them.

Reply to short note on emoji text alternative variations

This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.

In an article about the accessibility of emoji characters to screen readers, Steve Faulkner said:

Note that there are differences in how they are described in some cases:

  • “grinning face” is also “beaming face”
  • “beaming face” is also a “smiling face”
  • “open mouth” is described by JAWS/Narrator but not by NVDA/VoiceOver
  • “big eyes” are described by NVDA/VoiceOver but not by JAWS/Narrator
  • “cold sweat” is “sweat” and also “sweat drop”

The differences don’t matter to me (but I am just one and not the intended consumer), as I usually experience just the symbol. Reading the text descriptions is useful though as quite often I have no idea what the symbols are meant to represent. It is also true that emoji’s take on different meanings in different contexts and to different people. For example I thought 🤙 meant “no worries” but its description is “call me hand”, what do I know 🤷

Steve Faulkner

What Steve observes is representative of a the two sides of emoji’s biggest problem, which are

  1. that when people use them for their figurative meaning, there’s a chance that they have a different interpretation than others (this is, of course, a risk with any communication, although the effect is perhaps more-pronounced when abbreviating1), and
  2. when people use them for the literal image they show, it can appear differently: consider the inevitable confusion that arises from the fact that Twitter earlier this year changed the “gun” emoji, which everybody changed to look like a water pistol to the extent that the Emoji Consortium changed its official description, which is likely to be used by screen readers, to “water pistol”, back to looking like a firearm. 🤦

But the thing Steve’s post really left me thinking about was a moment from Season 13, Episode 1 of Would I Lie To You? (still available on iPlayer!), during which blind comedian Chris McCausland described how the screen reader on his phone processes emoji:

Chris McCausland on Would I Lie To You
My phone talks, so it reads everything out. And just to give you an insight, even the emojis… if you use an emoji it tells you what the emoji is… and the smiley face – the main smiley face – specifically for blind people… that one is called “smiling face with normal eyes”. I don’t know if I’m expected to use the smiling face with sunglasses?

I don’t know if it’s true that Chris’s phone actually describes the generic smileys as having “normal eyes”, but it certainly makes for a fantastic gag.

Footnotes

1 I remember an occasion where a generational divide resulted in a hilarious difference of interpretation of a common acronym, for example. My friend Ash, like most people of their generation, understood “LOL” to mean “laughing out loud”, i.e. an expression of humour. Their dad still used it in the previous sense of “lots of love”. And so there was a moment of shock and confusion when Ash’s dad, fondly recalling their recently-deceased mother, sent Ash a text message saying something like: “Thought of your mum today. I miss her. LOL.”.

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Permanent Record

To:
****@fulwoodacademy.co.uk
From:
“Dan Q” <***@danq.me>
Subject:
Subject Access Request – Dan Q, pupil Sep 1992 – Jun 1997
Date:
Tue, 23 Jul 2024 15:18:07 +0100

To Whom It May Concern,

Please supply the personal data you hold about me, per data protection law. Specifically, I’m looking for: a list of all offences for which I was assigned detention at school.

Please find attached a variety of documentation which I feel proves my identity and the legitimacy of this request. If there’s anything else you need or you have further questions, please feel free to email me.

Thanks in advance;

Dan Q

To:
“Dan Q” <***@danq.me>
From:
“Jodie Clayton” <*.*******@fulwoodacademy.co.uk>
Subject:
Re: Subject Access Request – Dan Q, pupil Sep 1992 – Jun 1997
Date:
Fri, 26 Jul 2024 10:48:33 +0100

Dear Dan Q,

We do not retain records of detentions of former pupils, and we certainly have no academic records of pupils going back thirty years ago.

Fulwood Academy

Jodie Clayton | Office Manager with Cover and Admissions
Black Bull Lane, Fulwood, Preston, PR2 9YR
+44 (0) 1772 719060

To:
“Jodie Clayton” <*********@fulwoodacademy.co.uk>
From:
“Dan Q” <***@danq.me>
Subject:
Re: Subject Access Request – Dan Q, pupil Sep 1992 – Jun 1997
Date:
Fri, 26 Jul 2024 17:00:49 +0100

But, but… I was always told that this would go on my permanent record. Are you telling me that teachers lied to me? What else is fake!?

Maybe I will always have a calculator with me and I won’t actually need to know how to derive a square root using a pen and paper. Maybe nobody will ever care what my GCSE results are for every job I apply for. Maybe my tongue isn’t divided into different taste areas capable of picking out sweet, salty, bitter etc. flavours. Maybe practicing my handwriting won’t be an essential skill I use every day.

And maybe I will amount to something despite never turning in any History homework, Mr. Needham!

Dan Q

A Stupid Joke About Elephants

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This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

You’ve probably been taught that you can tell the difference between African Elephants and Indian Elephants by looking at their head and ears. The larger African Elephants have a rounded cranium and big ears (with a shape somewhat like the continent of Africa itself!), whereas the smaller Indian Elephants have a two-lobed skull and diminutive ears that tuck tidily alongside their heads.

An African Elephant and an Indian Elephant, with the different head & ear shape clearly visible.
If you’re inside the elephant or have access to an extraordinarily-large X-ray machine, you can also differentiate by counting the ribs: African Elephants tend to have 21 pairs, Indian Elephants only 20.

But suppose you don’t manage to get a glimpse at the front end of the elephant as it passes you. What hope is there of identifying the species? Well: you can look at its back!

Concave back of an African Elephant.
Never forget: this back belongs to an African Elephant.

African Elephants, it turns out, have a concave back, whereas Indian elephants have a convex back (a bit like a hump)!

Convex back of an Indian Elephant.
You could probably come up with some kind of mnemonic if you wanted, like “African Elephants back down when Indian Elephants back up.” But perhaps a better one than that.

I was having difficulty sleeping one night during the UK‘s current heatwave, so naturally I opted to practice my newfound ability to distinguish elephant species by their spines. Indian, Indian, African, Indian, African, African… etc.

And then I came across this one:

A flat elephant back, neither concave nor convex.
What is this thing?

African Elephant backs are concave. Indian Elephant backs are convex. But what does it mean when you see a flat elephant’s back?

It turns out…

…that’s a grey area.

Dan with a stuffed toy (African) elephant.
You’re welcome/I’m sorry. Delete as applicable.
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April Features!

I’m testing a handful of highly-experimental new features on my personal website using multivariate (“A/B”) testing.

Screenshot of the recent "Quickly Solving JigsawExplorer Puzzles" blog post with a new "Dark mode" switch hovering over it.
“Dark Mode” is just one of the new features I’m testing out.

If you visit within the next day or so you’re likely to be randomly-selected to try out one of them. (If you’re not selected, you can manually enable one of the experiments.)

I’d love to hear your feedback on these Very Serious New Features! Let me know which one(s) you see and whether you think they should become permanent fixtures on my site.

Loud Helpline

I guess installing a sign was cheaper than retraining the helpline operators not to shout at everybody.

A sign advertising a number for a "Customer Helpline" directly above a sign that advises "Ear protection must be worn".

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Where?

I’m pretty sure that Wally/Waldo, Woof, and Wizard Whitebeard must be out on this mountain somewhere, too.

Composite image showing (1) a woman at an alpine terrace bar wearing a red-and-white striped jumper, and (2) a skiier wearing a yellow-and-black striped snowsuit. They look somewhat like Wilma and Odlaw from the Where's Wally?/Where's Waldo? series of books.

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Installation of Windows has Stalled

I was told Windows installation should take less than 20 minutes, but these ones have been sitting outside my house all day while the builders sit on the roof and listen to the radio. Do I need a faster processor? #TechSupport

A pile of window frames, factory-fresh and covered with tape. propped against the side of a white house, on a gravel driveway.

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[Bloganuary] Paws to Hear my Scents-ible Idea

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

Come up with a crazy business idea.

Smell-based social networking for dogs.

Hear me out…

A white-and-brown bulldog lies flat, his tongue sticking out, on a rug.
“Tank sleepy. But Tank listen your idea in case it tasty idea.”

I’ve tried to explain to our occasionally-anxious dog that, for example, the dog-and-human shaped blobs at the far end of the field includes a canine with whom she’s friendly and playful. She can’t tell who they are because her long-distance vision’s not as good as mine1, and we’re too far away for her to be able to smell her friend.

If this were a human meetup and I wasn’t sure who I’d be meeting, I’d look it up online, read the attendees’ names and see their photos, and be reassured. That’s exactly what I do if I’m feeling nervous about a speaking engagement: I look up the other speakers who’ll be there, so I know I can introduce myself to people before or after me. Or if I’m attending a work meet-up with new people: I find their intranet profiles and find out who my new-to-me colleagues are.

A trio of small dogs wearing warm jackets meet in a mowed grassy field. They appear excited to have recognised one another.
“Oh! Is you! Hurrah!” /buttsniffing intensifies/

Wouldn’t it be great if I could “show” my dog who she was going to meet, in smell-form.

I imagine a USB-C accessory you can attach to your computer or phone which can analyse and produce dogs’ unique scents, storing and transmitting their unique fingerprint in a digital form. Your subscription to the service would cover the rental of the accessory plus refills of the requisite chemicals, and a profile for your pooch on the Web-based service.

Now, you could “show” your dog who you were going to go and meet, by smell. Just look up the profile of the playmate you’re off to see, hold the device to your pupper’s nose, and let them get a whiff of their furry buddy even before you get there. Dogs do pretty well at pattern-matching, and it won’t take them long to learn that your magical device is a predictor of where they’re headed to, and it’ll be an effective anxiety-reducer.

A laptop keyboard with a black man's hand and a cream-coloured dog's paw resting on it, seen from above. (Almost-matching) sleeves can be seen on the limbs of both.
Seeking investors for a genuinely terrible crazy business idea. Photo courtesy SHVETS production.

The only question is what to call my social-network-for-dogs. Facebutt? Pupper? HoundsReunited???

Footnotes

1 Plus: I get contextual clues like seeing which car the creature and its owner got out of.

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Inclusivity

Motivational poster showing a photograph from a Manchester street. A Pride flag banner is hanging from a post with the words "everybody welcome" at the top. Nearby, attached to the same post, a road sign has the words "except buses". The poster is captioned with the word "inclusivity" (in pride colours), and subcaptioned "the 'B' is not for Buses". The joke is that the 'B' in LGBTQ+ stands for 'bisexual' and not 'buses', although of course the real meaning of that street sign is to ban everybody from driving straight ahead except buses, so the joke isn't perfect.

Max credit to garry (@repeattofade) for the original toot. All I did was adapt it into a motivational poster.

The thing I’m wondering is whether that bus lane is one that a bi-cyclist like me can use? 😂

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