The future is now

The last laugh

The voice of the London subway system was fired recently after making spoofs of her own announcements for her website.

For the past eight years, Emma Clarke, 36, has been the soothing voice behind most of the recorded messages played throughout the London Underground.

But subway officials weren’t laughing late last year when they heard Clarke using those same smooth tones in fake subway announcements recorded for her website. The spoofs included:

• “Would the passenger in the red shirt pretending to read the paper but who is actually staring at that woman’s chest please stop. You are not fooling anyone, you filthy pervert”;
• “Passengers are reminded a smile is a friendship signal, not a sign of weakness”; and
• “We would like to remind our American tourist friends that you are almost certainly talking too loudly.”

The subway’s rather cheeky response read: “London Underground is sorry to have to announce that further contracts for Ms. Clarke are experiencing severe delays.”

Like they say, though, you can’t keep a good voice down. One week later, Clarke signed a contract with CoPilot Live to become the new voice of satellite navigation.

And wouldn’t you know it—she’s already recorded a new set of spoof messages. This time, however, they were all approved by the makers of CoPilot and published on their website. They include:

• “I bet Kit off ‘Knight Rider’ never had this trouble”;
• “If you hadn’t bought such a cheap car, you could have caught up with him”; and
• “You drive like my dad. On a Sunday.”

It’s getting harder to be lazy

While satellite navigation provided Emma Clarke with a new job, it’s having the opposite effect for a growing number of U.S. government employees.

That’s because more and more city administrators are installing GPS devices on government-issued vehicles. Officials stress that the primary purpose of the devices is to improve vehicle maintenance and operation and to design more efficient routes for buses, snowplows and trash pickup. But the fringe benefit of knowing where your employees are at all times hasn’t gone unnoticed.

Some are accusing the government of using intrusive Big Brother tactics, but city officials say that monitoring employees’ movements is saving quite a bit of taxpayer money.

Islip, N.Y., saved 14,000 gal of gas over a three-month period compared with the previous year after GPS devices were installed in the town’s 614 official vehicles.

And in Indiana, six employees of the Fort Wayne–Allen County Health Department were fired after an administrator secretly installed GPS devices in department vehicles and caught employees going to stores, gyms, restaurants, churches and even their homes on the clock.

Sometimes waste is unavoidable

Of course, not every problem requires a high-tech solution. Japan’s Kaneko Sangyo Co. didn’t need a single microchip to create the first portable toilet for use inside a car.

The new “Kurumarukun” toilet requires the assembly of a cardboard toilet bowl that houses a water-absorbent sheet. Made to fit in the backseat of a car, the $42 device comes with a curtain large enough to completely conceal users, along with a plastic bag to tightly seal waste for later disposal.

Prior to assembly, the Kurumarukun measures just 24 x 15 x 1 in., which also makes it a great option for the next time you’re stuck in a window seat on an airplane.