The perception that the English have terrible teeth is supposedly a myth, but we’re not so sure. Our ancestry is a mélange of Irish, Scottish, and English folks, and we’ve got the crooked teeth to prove it. Less than a week after we finally had our wisdom teeth out (our oral surgeon laid a big guilt trip on us for our not attending to this in our teens), we busted our jaw chomping down on a Bahn Mi sandwich. (It’s a French- Vietnamese fusion of pan-fried marinated tofu with thinly sliced carrot and chipotle mayo on a baguette – our taste buds are dancing just thinking about it.) Our jaw has been wired shut for the past three weeks. Some setbacks have their advantages though – it’s done wonders for our figure (we’re sipping meals through a straw), and now we can do convincing impressions of Stephen Hawking. On the down side, it’s a bloody nuisance. This might be karmic payback for something rotten we did in a previous life.
Teeth
If you’ve not had your wisdom teeth removed and you’re in your teens, now’s the time to get it done (ideally, you have dental insurance.) It’ll save you a guilt trip from your oral surgeon later. If you’re past your teens, you might want to look into it – it becomes more of a big deal the older you get. If the teeth are really impacted, you may wish to be careful and eat softer foods for the first month or so after you visit the oral surgeon – baguette isn’t exactly hard, but it’s rather chewy, so go easy on the chewy stuff.
Several days after this misfortune, we got a call from a guy (telephone number 1-156-566-5556) who said he was working with Microsoft and they’d discovered a lot of Internet traffic from emanating from our PC (or something to that effect – the upshot was that our PC had been taken over by others and he, concerned guy that he was, would tell us how to fix it.) He sounded like he was in a room with lots of other good Samaritans also making phone calls. It was clearly a scam, but we decided to play along. He told us to open a command prompt and run netstat -an. This command essentially shows you information about network connections. The guy offered this as proof that the computer had been taken over by invading marauders (it proved nothing of the kind.) He then asked us to run other commands which also did nothing to show that the computer had been compromised but were apparently intended to convince us that he knew what he was talking about. (He didn’t) We pretended to follow his instructions, waiting for him to get to the heart of the scam. By and by, he did, asking us to open a browser and visit some Web site that would cure our PC’s ills. At this point we got bored and starting making things up when he asked us to describe what was on the web page. We hadn’t even bothered to open the browser. Sensing he was getting nowhere, he said he’d call back when we were actually in front of a computer. We thought that’d be the end of it, but he actually called back several days later. This time, we weren’t amused and told him not to call back. (He hasn’t.)
This post has been brought to you as a public service announcement from the British Dental Association and the Society for the Prevention of Guys Running Telephone Computer Scams – exercise caution after oral surgery, and don’t believe some guy who calls you saying he’s going to ‘fix’ your computer.
Our man Lemming from the British Dental Association.
de jungle 