Suburban Saturday morning

As The Telegraph notes today, councils have decided to justify higher council tax charges by reducing rubbish collection, which is about the only useful service they provide for the money, since everything else isn't under their control. Woking is no different. As a consequence, our house is occasionally surrounded by bags of rotting garbage because the council has decided that recycling the odd bit of cardboard (which we did anyway) is more important than preventing outbreaks of bubonic plague around Knaphill.

I'm quite unable to determine what it is that we pay our enormous council tax bill for. In the old days, the council came around and took away rubbish every week, while I put newspapers and cardboard in my car and took them round the corner to the recycling centre once every couple of weeks. Now, the council takes away the cardboard and leaves me to pile stinking garbage in the back of my car and take it round to the tip myself, effectively outsourcing half of its garbage collection council taxpayers. So many people were doing this at the tip today that there was a queue to get in! It's the new suburban Saturday morning.

Perhaps the council is assuming that middle class residents, having a basic understanding of public health and a passing knowledge of history, will continue to do their own rubbish disposal whereas in other parts of the district the Black Death will return to decimate the population, thus solving the problem of unemployment for a couple of generations as it did in the 14th century -- and that's on top of the inevitable increase in our environs following the closure of one of the major accident and emergency departments in Surrey (at the Royal Surrey Hospital in Guildford). I imagine a council sub-committee is working on new, politically correct, sumptuary laws even as I write. These were required because of the boom in the effective minimum wage (a natural consequence of the death of a third of the population) to stop the masses from spending too much of their money on luxuries (eg, sugar, salt, crisps, 4x4s). Surely, though, today we will simply replace the missing millions of workers with eastern Europeans, so the council's plan may not be a smart as the microchips they've put in our bins.

The voices may not be real, but they do have some good ideas.
[posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: moaning

Nothing says corporate slave quite like a Blackberry

As probably the only person in Britain, if not the entire world, who has stopped using their Blackberry, I've discovered an interesting new emotion, a sort of cross between smug, self-righteous superiority and sneering. You know how ex-smokers feel when they see someone smoking? No? Well, as an ex-smoker myself I can tell you. When I see someone smoking I feel really glad that I gave up and I still feel some of the resentment against cigarettes that I felt when I finally quit. But I understand why they do it, and I know that if I'm not vigilant I might one day fall off of the wagon. For all the good, intelligent and wise reasons for not smoking cannot mask the fact that there were times when having a cigarette was really, really nice.

But when I see people using their Blackberries on the tube, as I did this morning, I don't feel any of that. Using a Blackberry was never nice. Perhaps I'm just not important enough: after all, what kind of e-mails do I get... "the liver is ready for transplant"... not. Most of the e-mails I get are either "can you give X a quick ring about Y" or "can you have a look at this document". If it's the first kind I can read them on my phone perfectly adequately (my K800i has a good IMAP client on it -- for that matter, it has an RSS reader as well) and if it's the second kind then I'm not going to do it on the tube.

The woman I was sitting next to on the tube this morning was going through her messages, which were almost all (as far as I could snoop) either of the first kind ("call me when you get in") or of the corporate sort that I am generally spared ("please respond to let us know that you have recieved and read the new holiday entitlement rules addendum covering years in which the easter holiday..."). I won't say what the actual message was as that wouldn't be right. But she did respond in the affirmative and I bet she was lying.

The temptation to both read and respond to messages using the Blackberry was just too great. Instead of simply ignoring irrelevant e-mails (where I've been copied in on something that I'm no longer involved in or I've got something from some web site I used to visit four years ago) you find yourself going through them to delete them and free up inbox space. Worse still, you find yourself replying to e-mails in a frantic and ill-considered way, not giving the sender the respect of thinking things through properly.

Sometimes, only sometimes, I have a slight pang of jealousy when I see someone light a cigarette after a meal and a glass of wine. But I never, ever feel jealous of the guy on the train who thinks I'm impressed that he's e-mailed Julie to send the copy invoices to Martin instead of just telling her in the morning when she gets in.

The voices may not be real, but they do have some good ideas.
[posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: moaning

I haven't the foggiest

Went to Heathrow for a flight to the States. On the BBC news on the radio, Heathrow was reported as being in complete chaos because of fog, three-hour queues just to get into tents to wait to get into the Terminal etc. Yet on the way there was no traffic, when we got to Heathrow it was emptier than I have ever seen it, and the wait in the tent was 10 minutes before they called the flight number and asked people into the terminal. Because of on-line check-in, it was straight to the bag drop and on through security. I guess the deal is that if everyone else's flights are cancelled and yours isn't (it was all UK and some European flights that were cancelled, not the long-haul flights) then Heathrow is actually a convenient and efficient airport!

Technorati Tags: travel

Am I the moron?

I fly quite a lot for business, often three or four times every month. We travel a lot for leisure too: our household probably buys half-a-dozen international flights per annum for holidays, visiting relatives and so on. In the old days, all of this business used to go to British Airways, but now our purchasing in more mixed. For example, the family went to the States at the beginning of November on United. But I generally go to BA first, out of habit I suppose. But not any more. When we booked a flight to the U.S. last time, we got a blank web page back after entering a credit card number. We assumed that something had gone wrong -- now, in retrospect, I suspect that it was trying to display an error message along the lines "sorry, we're a bit new at the web thing and our programmers are too stupid to figure out how to make something that works on Apples as well as Windoze" -- so we just called BA to see if the booking had done through. After waiting on hold for 15 minutes they told us that, no, no booking was in the system. So we went back to the beginning and booked again. A few minutes later, there were two confirmation e-mails in the in box. Aaargh! Still, no problem. We'll just give BA a quick call and they'll sort it out. We called and we were held in a queue (on an 0870 number, which costs us money) for 55 minutes. When we finally got through, the guy told me that it was the wrong number, that my executive club "help" desk couldn't help with web bookings, and that he would transfer me to the right "help" desk (which had 31 callers ahead of me). Meanwhile, my wife had gone to run some errands. When I finally got through, they wouldn't help me because although my wife's credit card is supplementary to mine, I was not the named card holder. When my wife got back, she had to start all over again by phoning the 0870 number and sitting on hold again, at our expense, to get through. We should have just cancelled the flights completely and booked another airline, but we didn't. No wonder the service is so bad in the U.K. -- it's our own fault for putting up with it. Next time, it's United again. (Virgin's seats are too cramped). But it has given me an idea for a New Year's resolution: I will refuse to do business with companies that make you call an 0870 number for their call centre rather than an 0800 number. Conversely I will reward companies with 0800 numbers and good call centres. I'll begin with Morgan Stanley: I have one of their MasterCards and whenever there's been a problem I call an 0800 number and get through to a helpful call centre (which I imagine to be in Scotland) and things get resolved quickly.

Technorati Tags: service, travel

The good doctor

I know it's a bit childish, but I actually laughed out loud during a tube ride in London today. I picked up a copy of Metro, the free newspaper they have at tube stations. On page nine is a story "Circumcision halves the HIV infection rate" which quotes a World Health Organisation spokesman on the benefits of circumcision. The spokesman's name is (seriously) Dr. Cock.

iPlot

So I was on a British Airways flight the other day... I was testing out my current theory of travel, which is that the only way to make public transport of any form tolerable is by playing The Ramones over and and over again on my iPod. I was tired and bored and half nodding off as the plane was taxiing out towards the runway for take-off... pa pa pa-pa pa-pa pa pa-pa I wanna be sedated... pa pa pa-pa pa-pa pa pa-pa I wanna be sedated... when there's a tap on my shoulder. I look over and the male airhostess (airhoster?) is saying something so I take my Shure E3C in-ears out and he's telling me that I have to turn off my iPod for take off. "Why?" I said. "Because it could interfere with the plane's systems", he told me. I looked as bored and disdainful as I possibly good and told him that if I for one moment believed that that was true, then I wanted to get off now. Actually, I didn't. He's only following some dumb memo and it's not his fault. But think about it for a moment: if the miniscule electromagnetic emmnations from my Nano are really enough to send a 767 crashing to the ground, then someone should sue Boeing for building such an unsafe vehicle. If it were even faintly true, then should British Airways want to fly anywhere where there might be any significant electromagnetic emissions (eg, Earth) they would soon find themselves running short of planes and crewmembers. It did give, however, me the best ever title for a novel: iPlot, which I intend to start working on shortly. It will be the most inventive, most plausible and only British Airways fact-checked novel debut novel in history. The plot is this: a gang of dastardly suicide terrorists make their way through security at Heathrow with not so much as a 100ml of Colgate between them. Beyond suspicion, they make their way to Dixons tax free and purchase half a dozen iPods. They hide them under an innocent girlfriend's burkha (she gets to be the tragic lead, of course, and the burkha means that you don't have to pay anyone famous for the TV adaptation that will surely follow) and get on to the plane. It powers down the runaway. At 1000 feet, just at it heaves itself in a slow circle over Hounslow, the criminal masterminds simultaneously switch on their devil machines and to the strains of (and I haven't decided on this yet: obviously it depends on the narrative flow at this point) the live version of the ponderous Emerson Lake and Palmer "Touch and Go" ("come without a warning like a UFO... you're running with the devil... it's touch and go") it corkscrews into the ground taking all souls on board with it. At this moment, the camera pans out to show that planes are falling out of the sky all across London (in fact, all across the Western world) as the MP3 Mullahs hit play on one flight after another. Can't fail. Rock, rock, Rockaway Beach... rock, rock, Rockaway Beach...

Technorati Tags: travel

Christmas time, something and wine

I can't remember the words to the magnificent Cliff Richard Christmas no. 1, but that's because I've been drinking mulled wine at the Christmas fair in the Marianplatz in Munich... It was a really pleasant evening. The market goes back to the 14th century so it's obviously a well-established tradition. We ambled around in the market -- and even bought a couple of nice mitteleuropan (is that the word?) things there -- and then went to very pork-oriented restaurant for dinner. I don't know if there's going to be a Christmas market in the middle of Woking, but if there is I'll report back.

Technorati Tags: festivals, travel