Archives for category: Communication
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The Cost of Being Ethical

October 27, 2017 //
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I’ve spent a few days clearing out and cleaning up the gardens and inside of a house we own in Ireland’s fair capital. It’s been years since a major revamp so the opportunity afforded by a break between tenants was welcome.

Part of this job involved removing a lot of used and partly used paint cans from the shed, abandoned by the previous tenants who, presumably, didn’t fancy the expense or effort of doing it themselves.

Ireland is pretty good when it comes to waste and recycling. We can recycle most things, and the local municipal tips will take large things like furniture, appliances and so on. One of the few things they don’t take for free are paint cans. For that I had to go to a special waste area where I was charged 70 cent per can. I emerged €13.30 lighter from the experience, but at least I had done a small part to make sure the contents were being disposed of in the best way possible.

I also had a large old plastic container of engine oil, mostly full. The plastic was free to recycle, but the cost to me to empty the oil into a large tank of similar oils was €3.50. I should point out that if I had brought 20 other oil containers the total charge would still have been €3.50, but I didn’t know that until I got there. What’s more, the oil took 10 minutes to empty out.

Add in the €5 for fuel for the 30-mile round trip and the out-of-pocket cost to me is approaching €25. This doesn’t include the depreciation to the car of about the same as the fuel, and the much larger opportunity cost associated with my time.

The cost of being ethical and living responsibly can still be considerable.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General

Autocorrect

October 25, 2017 //
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I’m going through a period of frustration with my iPhone’s texting function at the moment. With the latest release it seems harder, rather than easier, to get a quick text away.

The typepad is still incredibly small and the individual letters about a third the size of my finger tips. When you flip to landscape to use your thumbs it’s no better because although the letters are a bit larger, so are your thumb tips compared to your finger tips.

The autocorrect function seems to have had a wobble too. The other day I meant to type ‘did you’ and when I glanced up to the screen the application had offered ‘didymium’. Didymium? Is that even a word? Well, it turns out it is, and it’s unrelated to the small swinging parts key to male reproductivity – as in epididymitis. No, it’s some kind of chemical amalgam.

While I felt a very marginal gain in acquiring a new word, I also wondered why the autocorrect algorithm was set up to prioritise a highly obscure material ahead of a slightly mistyped ‘did you’ which must occur across devices a few million times a day.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Technology

When Call Centres Fail

October 23, 2017 //
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What do you do when a call centre fails? More importantly, what do customers do when a call centre fails?

I was trying to contact my bank’s call centre the other day. I needed to get a redemption figure for a very small mortgage and time was an important factor. I couldn’t use the online system because I had a specific question that wasn’t addressed by the FAQs section.

I kept getting lost in the call centre’s voicemail system. When I pressed the options to get down the various depths of the call centre’s Krypton Factor-like puzzle I would eventually run out of automated messages and the phone would ring out and then automatically cut out. At least that part of the automation was working.

I phoned a few hours later and explained that earlier in the day I’d gotten lost in the voicemail system a few times. The lady informed me that their systems had gone down for 2 hours.

What do the staff do when their systems grind to a halt? What do their customers do? In both cases it’s probably nothing. As I write this post the entire country is supposed to be indoors as a major storm passes over. The aggregated loss of our personal and commercial productivity on this scale is immense, but we need to factor it in when we do our macro calculations.

To a lesser scale we need to do that for periods of downtime like when call centres fail. Whether we feel as customers that it’s acceptable is another question.

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Categories Communication, Customers

Thanks So Much

October 16, 2017 //
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Over the last 5 years or so, a simple ‘thank you’ – surely one of the most powerful phrases in the English language – hasn’t appeared to be enough. I’ve often felt that it depends on how much you mean it, how you execute the comment, but that a ‘thank you’ or ‘thanks’ should be all it takes to express your gratitude.

Instead, over the last half-decade the phrase ‘thanks so much’ has crept into the verbal repertoire of folks, especially the younger ones. Is it a US influence? I don’t know, could be.

I remember being taken out for dinner by my folks for my 18th birthday, half a world ago. After every piece of cutlery, crockery and course was delivered, after every clean-up, I said ‘thanks very much’, feeling that I had to dsiolay my extreme gratitude at being waited on. Half way through the evening my Mum leaned over and whispered, ‘it’s OK to just say thanks or thank you, not thanks very much every time. Maybe save that one for the very end.’ Which I did.

I often hear grateful kids say ‘thanks so much for my birthday present.’ You know they mean it, unless the delivery is laced with sarcasm.

It doesn’t feel natural to me, so I don’t use it. I find it hard to make it sound sincere. Instead I try to show my appreciation for the little things by saying thank you like I mean it, which I almost always do.

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Categories Communication

Is the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook for Young People?

October 13, 2017 //
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A spent a few enjoyable hours the other day in the company of the excellently apostrophised and excellent Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook 2018. This weighty tome’s reputation precedes it, as you probably know, and justifiably so. This was my first owned copy and it is indeed an invaluable resource.

It’s true what they say, and it’s repeatedly endorsed by all the published authors who contribute guest articles: everything you need to know about publishing and getting published is in this book.

One thing that struck me though was this: is the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook for young people? You wouldn’t have thought so. In fact, the readership is probably on the older side. All those people who’ve promised themselves to be true to the notion that they’ve a novel in them, now with a little more time on their hands and a still-burning ambition.

My point is this: the book is over 800 pages long and packed with useful information. Packed being the operative word, since…

..the print is tiny, really hard to read, even with reading glasses on. It’s a book for young eyes. I know it’s not simply an option to raising the point size a couple of points and making the book 1,000 or 1,200 pages long, since that might price the book at the point where people are put off. It’s a good job, though, that the information is invaluable since the size of the type is a turn-off.

Also, I have a suggestion for improving this esteemed organ. Why not have a section listing the literary agents by genre? There is a section doing the same with publishers. It should be relatively easy to do, and stops the reader having to wade through every single agent blurb to get to the nub: do they specialise in my area? This might also stop the majority of agents from the lazy, don’t-want-to-miss-the-next-big-thing catch-all of listing that they cater to ‘all’ fiction and non-fiction genres, all of whom I ignored.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Organic Typing

October 9, 2017 //
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I wrote recently about how many of us are in front of a device keyboard all day and manage to get by with 2 or 4-finger typing, rather than potentially the 10 digits at our disposal. When was the last time you saw a job ad for an predominantly office-based role that wasn’t for a PA or secretary that said ‘since the majority of your time is desk-bound, you must be able to type 50 words a minute or more to apply’?

When I had a few months off between jobs about 15 years ago, I went to a typing course. I didn’t last more than a couple of weeks. Even though I wasn’t working, I couldn’t spare the lost productivity while my typing speed was cut into a quarter of ‘slow’. I didn’t have the time to engrain the behaviours to see the long term benefit.

Because I’ve probably typed a million words since then, I’ve improved my typing ‘organically’. I’ve made it up as I go along. My organic typing is now a flurry of activity as hands cross over each other and fingers overlap. I look like a piano player when I type, and it’s hardly a virtuoso performance.

Interestingly, one of my brothers can type properly, and he’s had some issues with RSI – repetitive strain injury. I wonder if the act of anchoring your wrists down more and being more regimented with the spaces your fingers occupy makes you more prone to these injuries of ‘isolation’ compared to the organic way of letting the fingers go where they want to and damn the downturn in efficiency.

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Categories Communication, Marketing, Sales, Technology

2-Finger Typing

October 6, 2017 //
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How many of us spend large amounts of time at a computer, device, smartphone or other digital device? What do we do on them? Well, principally we’re typing our part of some dialogue.

Isn’t it amazing that computers have formed the central role in our working and playing lives yet so few of us can type properly? What a bonus it would be to type as fast as we can talk, as fast as we can think even. How much more productive could we be?

Many of us continue to get by on 2-finger typing. I’ve graduated to 4-finger typing, with the occasional thumb for the space bar and the pinkie for the return key, when I don’t use the dictate function on my mac. It’s still painfully slow, but it’s progress of a kind I suppose.

I find it flabbergasting that the primary and secondary schools my kids go to don’t get typing and keyboarding lessons. Boys and girls both need it; it’s an essential skill for the modern world, even if we never type anything during our working day.

We’re all looking at the keyboard, when we should be looking at the screen. There’s a metaphor for life in there somewhere.

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Categories Communication, General, Marketing, Sales, Technology

Your Work Anniversary

October 2, 2017 //
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‘Congrats on your work anniversary!’ I got a couple of these from contacts of mine via the LinkedIn network last week. I get them occasionally and I’m always a bit bemused by them.

That’s because I have one of those portfolio careers, so I have a small basket of ‘jobs’ on my profile. When someone sends me a congrats note, therefore, I’m not sure which anniversary they’re congratulating me on.

If we have one job, chances are we know when we started it, and maybe we also use the anniversary of our tenure there to take stock, reflect on where we’re at and decide if we’re happy to stay or think about a move.

When you have three or four of them, the chances are you don’t remember when you started each of them, hence the confusion.

Don’t get me wrong: I like that someone has taken the trouble to congratulate me, and I appreciate the gesture. It usually precipitates a couple of questions in my head, however. Anniversary where? Which anniversary, how many years? How many occupations do I list on LinkedIn these days?

Perhaps LinkedIn is better suited to one-track careerists than their portfolio counterparts.

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Categories Communication

Free Lunch

September 29, 2017 //
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There’s no such thing as a free lunch, or so the saying goes. There’s always some implied barter or quid pro quo implicit in the donation of a free lunch. The donor is expecting something in return – usually.

I was on Liverpool Street in London the other day. There’s usually a homeless man selling the Big Issue near the pedestrian crossing across from one of the station’s exits. He’s not a British national, as you can hear from his extremely chirpy ‘Good morning, ‘ave a good day’, accompanied by a thumbs up, to hundreds upon hundreds of passers-by during the 2 rush hours.

I was feeling particularly virtuous, or so I thought and I went up to buy a copy of the Big Issue from him. Sometimes I will give the Big Issue vendors a quid or two and not take the magazine, but on this occasion I fancied a read. I hadn’t read it for a long time.

A young chap, late 20s I would say, got there first, so I waited behind him. Except that the young chap didn’t buy a Big Issue, or slip him a quid or two. He gave him a lunch, a lunch in a paper carrier bag that he had just bought, and walked off.

What a lovely gesture it was. Thoughtful, easy to do, and for a few quid he’s made the man’s day. I’m slightly welling up as I recount the story. I felt that my own magnanimity has been seriously compromised as I profferred my cash for the magazine, and rightly so.

If we all made the young man’s gesture once every month or two, what a difference that would make.

The lunch donor didn’t look for anything in return, except perhaps his own reflected feel good factor. Maybe there is such a thing as a free lunch after all.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General

To To and Fro

September 27, 2017 //
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One of the quainter English phrases is to ‘to and fro’, where fro is an old contraction of from. You can use the term ‘physically’, as in to go to and fro London, although I admit there’s the insertion of the verb ‘to go’ there. You can also use it figuratively, as in ‘I need to to and fro on this subject before I can make a decision I’m happy with’.

That’s fine, but how do you use the term in the past tense? Imperfect tense is OK – as in I was to-ing and fro-ing – although to hyphenate or not is slightly problematic. But what about the simple past tense, as in I did something? Here are some options, to my mind:

  • I to-ed and fro-ed
  • I to’d and fro’d
  • I went to and fro
  • I to and fro-ed

I’m not sure what feels right. Maybe the answer is context: if you mean it physically, then maybe use the verb to go with it. If your intent is mental, maybe it’s to-ed and fro-ed. Who knows, but this is the type of thing I think about and it’s one of very many small pockets of the language that I don’t have an answer for.

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Categories Communication, Language
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