Inanimate equipment, Angels and Devils

Goodness, it’s already Wednesday and there are loads of things I want to say. Back to the weekend first. We seem to be falling apart, here at home. Not including my teeth. M spent a large part of Saturday re-installing our spare room loo. It’s one of these processor units that can be installed without easy access to the soil pipe, but I never quite trust them. The thing went wrong again with my daughter in residence, so M had to do a unpleasant repair job. Rather like Eddie Grundy in The Archers. When he was congratulating himself on completing it, I pointed out to him that there was water on the floor of the utility room. No connection with the previous job. I thought it might be a good idea to run the water softener and see if that was the cause, and set it going. When I returned, water was pouring on to the floor, so I turned off the power to the water softener. M put a bucket to collect the drips. Only problem was, because there was no power, the thing carried on filling ad infinitum (or till I realised) by which time, we had a mini flood. So a lot of mopping ensued before the repair could take place. And in the mean time, we turned off the mains water – a more sensible option than turning off the electricity.

On Sunday, M left early to go to the rugby final at Twickenham. You may recall, he had won tickets, purely by registering his name on our electricity and gas provider's websites, and he was meeting his brother and friend at the game. I in the mean time was going on to a family birthday party. Mid-afternoon, as I was trying on my entire wardrobe, my s-i-l arrived to take us both the party. We also had to collect an elderly aunt. S-i-l turned on her Sat-Nav, but immediately decided to go a different way. The Sat-Nav, known as Jane, protested vehemently; I thought at one point she would have hysterics. ‘Do a U-turn,’ she kept saying. We ignored her; eventually, we got to Auntie, near Maidenhead, and then had to go on to Bushey. Most of this went OK, until we got to the road where we should have been able to find the hall where the party was to take place. ‘You have arrived at your destination,’ said Jane, when it was quite obvious we hadn’t. We had to go back to basics and ask people, and you know when they say, ‘first left, second left, straight down the road and round the bend,’ and you know you’re only going to remember the first bit, and then you’re going to have to ask again. That happened too. But we got there in the end. Moral: Don’t put your complete faith in Sat-Navs, even when you have fed in a postcode.

M was there before us, but had fallen asleep, after the hot afternoon in the sun. We enjoyed the party, and were able to sit outside in the early evening. It was a roastingly hot day. S-i-l left early, as she’s a definite lark (as opposed to owl), and M & I delivered Auntie home, and arrived home ourselves at 1.00 a.m.

Early in the week, I listened on the radio to Philip Zimbardo, who is known to psychology students for his famous experiment at Stanford University in the seventies. He has been involved in the defence of one of the soldiers who was part of the disgraceful episode at Abu Ghraib. Philip Zimbardo has shown that in this situation, well balanced, ‘normal’ people in the role of prison guard, or similar, can easily carry out bullying and humiliating acts on prisoners. In the experiment, all the participants were college students, but were divided randomly into ‘guards’ and ‘prisoners’. The experiment was forced to end early, because of the behaviour of many of the ‘guards’. Zimbardo says that one or two people might, in this situation, be the ‘angels’, some will be the ‘devils’ and many will just go along with what’s happening, possibly regarding it as a ‘bit of fun’. I was reminded once again of the stink bomb incident. Not quite the same situation and we were 14 year olds, but our attitudes were exactly that.

As far as the ‘angel’ is concerned, in the New Scientist, which also mentions this, it’s reported that one man sent a CD of the events at Abu Ghraib to superior officers. That is greatly to his credit, but his reward for this is that he and his family have had to go into hiding.