In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Room 101 was, of course, the torture chamber, in which one would encounter their worst nightmare. In the protagonist’s case, rats.
However, I often find it useful to keep a Room 101 on my computer. Not a torture chamber, but a folder in which stuff is unceremoniously dumped from the internet, the network, and memory cards, if it doesn’t warrant a permanent place on my hard disk.
It’s a strange organisational habit, but one that does pay off: it means all the phlegm doesn’t get dumped onto the desktop, and when you want to clear it out, nothing you actually want disappears (hopefully). The first thing I do when acquiring any new operating environment is to create a Room 101, and then bookmark it or create a symlink to it on the desktop. On my old Windows machine, Room 101 actually lived on the Desktop, and certainly kept it very tidy.
Room 101 also insinuates its way into pop culture via a TV show inventively titled Room 101. It’s currently in a state of limbo (no new host has been found to replace Paul Merton), but the basic format was that a guest would come in and tell the host what they’d like to banish from their lives by confining to Room 101. Things that have gone in in the past include jellyfish, Ben Elton, negative TV shows like Room 101, dogs in cities, and the Welsh (blame Anne Robinson for that last one, you Cymraeg readers).
As I currently have nothing better to do (well, I do probably, but I can’t be bothered), here’s what I’d put into Room 101 if I was given the opportunity.
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William Hanson, the most Snobbish Man in Britain
Manners snobs. People who make a living off ‘claiming to be polite’, but in fact make a living off saying ‘everyone except me is stupid and vulgar’. A prime example is William Hanson, 18-year-old ‘dress and etiquette expert’. I know how to dress, and I know it’s rude to put your feet on the table and you should say thank you to the person who serves your food. I know where a knife and fork goes, and I don’t give a stuff if I need four individual knives for each species of fish, along with a cleaver for octopus sucker rolls. You use a knife, a fork, and a spoon. OK? And the bread knife does go on the plate. I don’t care if it’s American, that’s the way I’m doing it. Now eat your food and naff off.
- Software zealots. People who seem to have an unhealthy obsession with Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, GNOME, KDE, Xfce, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc and claim that anyone who doesn’t use their software is the biological equivalent of a sea cucumber.
- Shops selling hard disks with capacities of megabytes as 1,000,000 bytes. A megabyte is 10242, not 10002 bytes. OK?
- People in positions of authority calling people under the age of 21 ‘young people’. Awfully patronising and horrifically pointless.
- Blog posts which end abruptly. To me, it just feels like the author’s copped out halfway through the middle of a sentence and just left us to guess the ending. I find it very
