Coffee, Tea or... Something Else?

Charity is always needed by other people. People in faraway, war-torn lands. People with horrific, incurable diseases. People who live lives that are inconceivably different to our own. Charity is never needed by us.

Until it is.

Until that terrible, devastating thing happens to us. Until our world falls apart. Until we don't know which way to turn.

That's when charities do what they do best. Offering help in practical ways when we're too broken, physically or emotionally, to help ourselves. They do the things that we never knew needed to be done, because they come up against these terrible, life-altering problems daily. Practical things. Advice and information. A hand to hold for those who have no other. Essential assistance.

On Friday this week I'll be helping out at a MacMillan coffee morning. I don't have much spare cash these days but I do have a little spare time. I'll make up my writing hours later. So I've been baking, and plan to bake some more. Some of my speciality breads and cookies and maybe even my sister's legendary apple cake. My Beloved's been doing the same. She'll be there with me, running a tombola, collecting cash and generally doing whatever is required on the day.

I'd love it if you could pop down to the Allotment Deli in Hoyland on Friday 27 September and sample some of my baking - or perhaps something much nicer baked by someone else. Or maybe there's  a MacMillan Coffee Morning nearer to you that you that needs your support?  See what they do and why they need your help - and money - here.  http://coffee.macmillan.org.uk

Or possibly you have another good cause that's closer to your heart, one that you intend to do something for one day, when you get around to it. Well why can't "one day" be today? And if not today, then when? The problem with "one day" is that it never comes around unless you make it happen.

Nobody wants to have to ask for help. But everyone can help charities for those who do.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Half a Job

I bought a new car this week. It's beautiful sitting on my drive where all the neighbours can admire it. It'll be even better when I get an engine to go in it. They had plenty in stock in the garage but none that fit my particular model. I was a little disappointed when he told me that, but never mind. To commiserate I went to a bar for a cocktail, a nice refreshing Sea Breeze. The barman gave me the grapefruit and cranberry juice with lots of ice. I paid him the full amount and tried to enjoy what I had but it didn't quite seem right. 'No sir,' he said. 'You need lots of vodka for a proper Sea Breeze. I'll send that on to you in a few weeks.'

Do the above scenarios sound ridiculous? Of course they do and you wouldn't put up with either of them if they happened in real life (sorry, I was telling fibs at the start there). So why do we put up with this kind of treatment when it comes to technology?

I appreciate that when I go to buy a car I can have optional extras like alloy wheels, kid leather seats or metallic paint. None of these things actually change the working of the machine, they're just posh add-ons to lift me above the crowd. I pay extra if I want something out of the ordinary, I get that. But if I don't want them I still get a basic vehicle that works perfectly well.

So it only makes sense when I buy a new laptop that I'd have to pay extra for a fluffy cover to keep it warm at night. But a power cable? Surely that's something that you most definitely need, not an optional extra? Nor are other connector cables, or internet connections, or a basic set of programs or, it could be argued, a printer.

I got a new mobile phone this week (really). I opened the box and everything that I'd expected was there, even a plug to charge it with - bonus! So I took the back off my old phone, removed the battery and took out my sim and memory cards. Then I tried to take the back off the new phone to insert them. After thirty minutes of doing the man-thing of trying to work it out myself I relented and looked at the instructions. They left me no wiser so I struggled on. After an our and a broken thumb nail I went to the internet. There I found a lovely video of some chap showing me how 'easy' it was. He had three goes, including one where the phone flew out of his hand and landed with an unpleasant tinkly crack on the table. So it wasn't just me, but at least he taught me the knack.

I eventually got the back off and the memory card inserted but then…  then I found that the sim card in my new phone was of a totally different size to the one in my old. it just would not fit. So back to the internet I went where I found that I had to get a new dual sized sim, then cut that one down to mini-sim size before I could use it.  *sigh*  Was life this hard when all we had to worry about was being fire-bombed by the Luftwaffe?

I carefully trimmed the card to the correct size and amazingly it went into my new phone perfectly. Except my number and all my details were still on my old phone. It turned out that I had to do something called an online sim swap. Of course? Why didn't I think of that, I mean it's obvious really. So I did the sim swap - which involved typing lots of different numbers and validation codes into a screen on my provider's website - and got it wrong. Fair enough, I must have mistyped a number somewhere. I tried again. And failed again. After the third attempt it told me that I'd had too many goes and, for my security, I couldn't try again until the next day.

For my security.

I checked that great font of knowledge, the internet chat forums, and found that I should have prefixed one of the codes with the number 8933442. Of course. It should have been obvious really. Or maybe it should have been in the instructions, I'm not sure which. But I tried the next day and it worked. I now have a lovely new phone that makes calls and texts to people that I know. It won't access the internet but hey, you can't have everything. I might have a go at that next week.

Is it too much to ask that things work straight out of the box?

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go and smash some looms.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Is There Anybody There?

I'll warn you now: this week's blog could turn into a bit of a rant. It's about a subject that we all hate but which has sadly become a fact of twenty-first century British life. I'm talking about business help desks that are manned at foreign call centres.

I know that it's unrealistic and commercially unviable to expect companies to employ hundreds of knowledgeable people on their switchboards, just waiting for customers like you and me to ring them. I suspect that this didn't even happen in the mythical golden days of my youth but surely we should be able to expect better service than the current system of "Press one to be cut off; press two to hear the complete works of Vivaldi; press three to listen to a repeating message telling you how important your call is to us"?

With this in mind I'd like any business leaders reading this to treat it as a blueprint for the kind of service that we, the customer, really want. After all, we're the ones who are ultimately paying for it. And for your wages.

1 - Don't force me to make any more than two multiple choice phone presses. Each time you give me another set of preference to pick from my anger levels rise a little more until I'm in dangerous 'Hulk' territory. Eventually I'm going to 'go postal' on one of your poor employees and you'll be responsible.

2 - Don't just tell me that my call is held in a queue - I already know that. Tell me how many other callers are ahead of me and what the average wait time is. And definitely tell me how much per minute the call is costing me. That way I can work out for myself whether I want to wait or not and maybe save both me and your call centre operative some time.

3 - Better still, make it a Freephone number. After all, if your service was as good as it should be, I wouldn't need to ring you in the first place.

4 - If my wait is likely to be a long one then give me the option of leaving my contact details so that you can ring me back at a time of my choosing. You can be sure that it won't be during my mealtime, which is when you usually seem to want to have a chat with me.

5 - Don't spent the first three minutes of the call telling me about the exceptional benefits of your online service and the wonderful things that I can find on there, especially when that same webpage has said that I should call this number for further details.

6 - Don't have your call centre staff use silly names like Danny or Sarah when it's obvious to us that they're really called Atul and Smita. I'm a grown-up. I know that it's cheaper for you to outsource this kind of work to Indian staff. Giving them fake names is an insult to them and me.

7 - Drop the light jazz elevator muzak! If you must keep me on hold for half an hour or more then at least give me a chance to pick what I listen to. The news, perhaps, or an archive recording of the Goon Show. I can only take so much Dave Brubeck.

8 - Don't tell me that my call is important to you when it quite clearly isn't in the slightest. If it was that important you'd have answered it.

9 - When "Danny" has been of no use whatsoever to me then instruct him to change his script. One of the things that's guaranteed to wind me up is the person at the other end of the phone finishing the call with "Is there anything else that I can help you with today?" when he's not been of any help already.

10 - Let me pick my own security password that doesn't have to fit the format that your I.T. staff decided was secure. I understand that 'G7w%98£R'  is an exceedingly secure password but I've got no chance of remembering it unless I write it down - which you've told me not to do. I have to pick something works for me, not you, and my cat's name doesn't include any numbers.

That's it, my top ten improvements to call centres conversations.

Now is that so hard?

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Who Nicked My Pick?

According to the font of all knowledge, the Oxford English Dictionary, a picnic is "an occasion when a packed meal is eaten outdoors, especially during an outing to the countryside". 

That's as good a definition as any. I've enjoyed many alfresco meals that match that description precisely. Sandwiches, cakes, a few token salad items so that I can say I made at least a bit of an effort and, crucially, as many different processed pork products as possible. As I keep saying, there is no foodstuff in the world that cannot be improved by the addition of bacon.

But all such delights must be earned. I like to edit my manuscripts outdoors. It's a little treat to myself after the days / weeks / months locked away in my garret writing a document. I allow myself the luxury of doing a (close to) final edit in the great outdoors. I know that if I've reached that stage then the piece is almost done and a different set of surroundings helps me cast a different eye over my work and, sometimes, pick up some problems that looked perfectly alright in the solitude of my attic.

My Beloved likes to take photos of scenery and nature so it works well for the two of us to partake of our passions separately - her snapping away and me spraying my red ink over sheets of printed paper - and then coming together at the end of our respective working day for a picnic. We have the full traditional kit - tartan blanket, wicker basket full of bright neon-coloured plastic crockery and cutlery (well, I don't want to be too traditional), and of course lots of different Tupperware boxes filled with goodies. We even have a tartan flask that once belonged to my dad, a relic of my own childhood picnics.

There's only one thing wrong with eating outdoors. It's in the outdoors. There are overfriendly farm animals and walkers' dogs, smelly by-produce left by overfriendly farm animals and walkers' dogs, other people's music (a term used very loosely) shattering the varying degrees of natural silence, wet grass that seeps through your blanket and clothes leaving you feeling a particular kind of damp unpleasantness that I (for one) haven't felt since I was a toddler. And bugs. A gazillion bugs whose sole purpose in their little lives is to annoy me in some way or other. Some bite, some sting, some crawl through the hairs on my arms making me judder and others just want to walk on my food with their little feet that have been tromping goodness-knows-where. Probably some of the aforementioned biological by-product.

And of course the worst among these is wasps. There's an old German proverb that loosely translates as "God made bees but the Devil made the wasp." That's about right as far as I'm concerned. I'm not one of these people who goes into screaming flapping fits whenever a wasp appears but I certainly don't weep when I see one dying of heat stroke in the window of a cream bun shop. It serves it right for trying to eat a sausage roll a thousand times bigger than its head.

What use are wasps? They don't pollenate things like bees, don't clear up dead stuff like beetles do, don't really do much at all apart from fly around looking for unsuspecting humans to sting. Their one job as far as I can see it is to ruin picnics, and they do it with gleeful malice.

But what about when it's raining and we have to resort to eating in the car? Does that still class as a picnic? I've spent many dismal hours, man and boy, sitting in a steamy vehicle listening to the rain drumming on the car roof while munching a smelly egg sandwich. At least the wasps can't get me in my metal prison but it sort of defeats the entire object of substituting the dining room for the countryside.

Or even worse, how about those times when you've planned a picnic but the weather's suddenly turned so bad that there's no point in even leaving the house? We've got all that food that we've already prepared the day before: if we spread our feast out on the living room floor can we validly call the meal a 'carpet picnic'?

I recently even had a picnic on the deck of an almost-finished boat that was still in dry dock. We were visiting the boat builder and stopped at a shop on the way for supplies. Just bread, meat, tomatoes and (naturally) a few processed porky products. Nothing much, nothing fancy, we just spread everything out on the roof of his half-complete barge, but it was one of the best meals I'd had in ages.

You can keep your Michelin Stars.

© Shaun Finnie 2013