Look out, Miss Marple
May. 15th, 2008 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
todayiamadaisyOh, I am a sleuth! A super sleuth! Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden have nothing on me! By the way, f-listers, where did you stand on the Drew v. Belden issue? I was a Belden fan myself. In primary school, my best friend and I briefly called ourselves the Owls of Purnim in honour of Trixie's Bob-Whites of the Glen. We picked owls because they were the only birds either of us could imitate with any accuracy, although we never actually summoned each other with the call the way the Bob-Whites did. Nor could we could ever persuade our parents to buy us matching red jackets in order to cross-stitch "O.O.P." in white on the back of them. And we never found any mysteries to solve.
But other than that it was exactly the same.
Gosh, I haven't thought about that for years. I still have a clipboard with "O.O.P." written on the front of it in faded purple texta. It was for our meeting minutes, which probably went "No mysteries found. No mysteries solved. Practised hooting." Although I remember one meeting in which we had an argument about how to pronounce the word "laboratory" (as in, the place we'd have to send fingerprint prints if we ever found any or worked out how to take them if we did).
I should say, though, that while we were obviously impressionable nine-year-old idiots, we were still worldly-wise enough to laugh at Trixie Belden's friend, Dan, the streetwise street kid from New York, who objected to the Bob-Whites' matching jackets on the grounds that they might be a gang thing. I mean, The Jets and the Sharks in West Side Story were pretty sad gangs, what with all that finger clicking and such, but even they didn't wear matching red bomber jackets with decorative cross-stitch on the back. Now I'm older and wiser, I notice Dan didn't object to the jackets on the more sensible grounds that they were a bit naff, which makes me wonder just how streetwise and tough he really was.*
Anyway, I received an expense reimbursement claim yesterday from someone whose name was apparently Crthny Nedgem. And that clearly wasn't right. It's a cliché, I know, but doctors really do have terrible handwriting. Anyway, it took me the best part of an hour, but I managed to find the doctor's real name, based on the only two legible parts of the form (the post code and the first six digits of the eleven digit business number), using two helpful government websites. Take that, Trevor Surname-Withheld! Your bad orthography is no match for the long-dormant skills of O.O.P.!
Also, someone called Dante S. Durango emailed me offering a "part time hob". That'll come in handy.
* I've just googled to make sure I wasn't making any of that up and was reminded that, prior to meeting Trixie and co., Dan was involved with a New York street gang called The Cowhands. The Cowhands. That's his street cred lost, then.
But other than that it was exactly the same.
Gosh, I haven't thought about that for years. I still have a clipboard with "O.O.P." written on the front of it in faded purple texta. It was for our meeting minutes, which probably went "No mysteries found. No mysteries solved. Practised hooting." Although I remember one meeting in which we had an argument about how to pronounce the word "laboratory" (as in, the place we'd have to send fingerprint prints if we ever found any or worked out how to take them if we did).
I should say, though, that while we were obviously impressionable nine-year-old idiots, we were still worldly-wise enough to laugh at Trixie Belden's friend, Dan, the streetwise street kid from New York, who objected to the Bob-Whites' matching jackets on the grounds that they might be a gang thing. I mean, The Jets and the Sharks in West Side Story were pretty sad gangs, what with all that finger clicking and such, but even they didn't wear matching red bomber jackets with decorative cross-stitch on the back. Now I'm older and wiser, I notice Dan didn't object to the jackets on the more sensible grounds that they were a bit naff, which makes me wonder just how streetwise and tough he really was.*
Anyway, I received an expense reimbursement claim yesterday from someone whose name was apparently Crthny Nedgem. And that clearly wasn't right. It's a cliché, I know, but doctors really do have terrible handwriting. Anyway, it took me the best part of an hour, but I managed to find the doctor's real name, based on the only two legible parts of the form (the post code and the first six digits of the eleven digit business number), using two helpful government websites. Take that, Trevor Surname-Withheld! Your bad orthography is no match for the long-dormant skills of O.O.P.!
Also, someone called Dante S. Durango emailed me offering a "part time hob". That'll come in handy.
* I've just googled to make sure I wasn't making any of that up and was reminded that, prior to meeting Trixie and co., Dan was involved with a New York street gang called The Cowhands. The Cowhands. That's his street cred lost, then.