Cleared

Salik is a joy to the hearts of many Dubai residents. There are few things that make me happier than passing under that smashing RFID-tabulous gate and hearing the sound of another four dirhams going 'ching' into the giant cash register that is Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority, or RTA. It makes me happy.

Recently I started to get text messages telling me that my Salik balance was low. And then I realised that I really had to do something about it: I was in danger of triggering... gasp... violations. So I went online to try and pay.

The RTA website is a bit of a mess, if I'm honest. It hasn't really been updated since they launched the whole Salik scheme and much of its functionality remains 'under construction'. Online payment doesn't work if you use Firefox, either - only IE is supported. Which is a little Victorian if you ask me.

So I loaded (with a shudder) Explorer and got on with making my payment. It's enabled through the Dubai e-Government 'Epay' site and the mechanism is a little, well, Victorian. Worse, my attempt to pay 'em Dhs 250 (good for a while, about 62 'chings') bombed out: the transaction failed. I tried again, keying my card details in very, very carefully. Failed again. And then I noticed an error message:

“Server was unable to process request. ---> uspEPayResponseUpd: OKCannot insert the value NULL into column 'dtUpdTime', table 'dbDTS.dbo.tbEPayTrxn'; column does not allow nulls. UPDATE fails.”

This didn't look good. I left it a while and tried again, same error message. Three attempts, three failed transactions. I called 'em, but they won't do credit card transactions over the 'phone, which struck me as a little, well, Victorian.

You know what's coming next, don't you? I logged on to the Salik website next day to see how much trouble I was in with those potential violations and... ta da!!!! I've got Dhs750 credit on my Salik tag.

The RTA call center won't process a refund because it's not their policy and anyway it's epay I have to talk to and not them and is there anything else I can do to help you?

The Dubai government helpline ('Dial one to stick knives in your head, dial two to eat lightbulbs, dial three to speak to a human being and solve your problem. Thank you for dialling three. Sorry, nobody's answering that line. Dial one...') says I should go to the RTA because they took my money. Great.

Having lost the plot with both, both have agreed to 'escalate' the complaint to 'the concerned department'. This has been followed by a long silence, but I'm not giving up. Even if it takes me as long as 187 crossings of Salik to sort it out...

LOLcats – Beware the Children of the Meme

Am I the only person in the world who thinks that the only thing less funny than the much discussed LOL Cats is being boiled to death in your own tears? I freely confess to failing to see the purpose or humour in this most pathetic of memes. Cutesy, dumbed down and with little originality or witticism, they synthesise the worst of ‘Ahhh, look at kitty!’ with a touch of ‘Who loves the naughty kitty then?’ It’s enough to make you puke.

The Web has spawned many a meme before: a meme is a shared item of cultural information, a fancy way of explaining an oft-repeated joke, catchphrase or other aphorism. Think, ‘I’m not bovvered, does my face look bovvered?’ or ‘No but yes but no but well Lara Hopkins was having it away with Dwayne Pipe behind the bikesheds and I said no way you fat slag when her sister asked if I had any blurkers cos Lara din’t have none and she wanted to go again wiv im.’

Although a number of the people that think it’s funny to do bad impersonations of Vicky Pollard usually stop at the ‘No but yes but no but’ bit, the people that like Internet memes will eternally invent new things to put on the back of ‘Yes but no but yes but’ that perpetuate the joke. Most people would get bored after three iterations of the same fundamental gag, but not the Children of the Meme. You know how there’s always some spotty little Herbert at parties that takes the joke too far? Some jerk that does the Parrot Sketch or bits out of Black Adder, then calls you Baldrick all night until you take ‘em outside and beat 'em until they stop twitching?

Well, they’re all on the Web and they’re all chuckling over the LOLcats.

The LOLcats started with a mildly amusing idea: combine a picture of a cat or two with a caption that has the cat talking like a gangster rappa. You know, picture of Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s cat with the caption: ‘Iz cuz I’m black, innit’

The gorilla of LOLcat meme stores is ‘I can haz Cheezburger’, but please don't blame me if you choose to follow the link...

Mild smile the first time, for sure. Well done, good gag, move on. But how many more variations of that gag can one put up with before involuntarily losing the contents of the upper stomach? In case you’re wondering, the answer is four. If you are a Child of the Meme, the answer is four million.

Other, I would submit marginally funnier, memes that the Web has spawned over the past few years include The Tourist of Death and All Your Base Are Belong To Us. I blame Gianni for introducing me to both of these. Thankfully, he didn't mention the LOLcats to me, otherwise I'd have deleted him from my contacts.

Meanwhile, although his relatively famous and celebrated guitar playing cats are funny, I guarantee that Joel Veitch’s Spong Monkeys will make you laugh. Joel is arguably not a well young man and needs to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act, but there are few things more absurd and wildly funny in the world than the Spong Monkeys' Moon Song. Perhaps the Middle East policy of the current US administration...