Archives for category: General
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The Genuinely Charitable Soul

September 7, 2016 //
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Many people are drawn to a charitable concern or cause because they are personally affected by it, or they know someone who is. Obviously there are degrees of interest and commitment, from following a cause on Facebook to actively campaigning and fund-raising for it.

People sometimes, sadly, are responding to a tragedy within the circle of friends or family – often in an area that they had no knowledge of or interest in – and can go on a crusade, putting all of their efforts into helping lessen the burden of others who fall victim to same poor hand of cards that they’ve been dealt. This might involve setting up a fund or a charitable cause in the name of the person affected, or it could be contributing to a cause or body that already exists. It is as a direct reaction to the events that people get involved, when they come face to face with the perspective of others who have had to endure the same fate.

This is, of course, laudable, super worthy and to be applauded. I’m not trying to denigrate the intent and the effort in any way. They are personally invested in the cause. Would they have got involved if someone they knew wasn’t affected by this condition or set of events? Probably not, but it doesn’t matter. They’re involved now.

Then there is what I call the genuinely charitable soul. The genuinely charitable soul volunteers on a regular basis and devotes their time into something that is unrelated to their own catalogue of personal experiences. They work for a cause they believe in because they feel it is worthwhile, not because of something that happened to them. They see an area where the playing field isn’t level, and they work to level it.

In this case it’s somewhat similar, though not the same as that of people who work in – ie are paid do deliver – the caring professions. To me the genuinely charitable soul is an extremely rare breed, and one to be cherished.

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Categories Customers, General

Three Years of Blogging

September 2, 2016 //
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Hello. Today marks three years of blogging at pauldilger.com. Exactly three years. To the day.

From humble beginnings on the second day of September 2013, to today’s humble ongoing efforts, I’ve been sharing my ‘musings on stuff I come into contact with’, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, come rain or shine, work day or holiday.

This is post number 471, after 157 weeks of 3 posts a week. 471 posts is a very large book. Can I say that I’ve written my first book? I don’t think so. It’s more a collection of thoughts, rather than something that is stitched together conceptually by a broad idea and physically by a spine and covers.

I started the blogging because I enjoy writing and sharing my thoughts, and also because I thought the discipline of having to post 3 times a week would be a good habit to acquire and would keep the creative juices flowing. I wasn’t sure how long I would last. After all, anyone can start something, but it takes a certain resolve to keep it going and see it through.

Through ’til when though? When do you finish something like this? Is there a natural end? Perhaps it’s when you’ve nothing more to say. But since my guiding strapline is musings on stuff I come into contact with, every passing day brings new insights and learnings that I think are worth sharing.

I will finish blogging at some point, I have to, although I’m not sure when and have no plans to finish soon. And, when I do, the end will most likely go largely unnoticed by the world, just as the start did when I published the first post and just as the middle does, from the stats I see on my posts.

That’s hardly the point though, is it?

Here’s to the next three years of blogging. Thanks for reading :-).

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Categories Communication, General

It’s All Relative

August 31, 2016 //
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We can’t stop the ageing process – well I suppose we can if we die, but for me there’s not an easy route back from that. This ageing process means that there will always be someone younger than us, always someone who to us seems really young, always someone to whom we must seem really old. Fact.

I was reminded of this ineluctable fact by a friend of mine, Mr Seamus O’Riordan, whom I caught up with on the phone recently. He was getting his eyes tested not so long ago and bemoaning the fact that it was time to embrace the world of reading glasses, the consequences of which were that people might get a reminder of his reaching a ‘certain age’, to adapt from the gloriously euphemistic French phrase.

‘Well,’ his optician rejoined, ‘I’m 65. You seem really young to me.’ A rather sobering postscript to this is that the older gentleman died a few months later.

It’s all relative. It all depends on your perspective.

So what do we do about it? Two things:

  1. Live for the moment, and
  2. Look after ourselves, so we remain young in body, young in mind, young at heart
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Categories General

Umbrella Wars

August 1, 2016 //
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Central London seethes during rush hour. The underground is maxed, the trains are wedged, the roads are swollen and the footpaths force pedestrians to bunch together against their will.

When the rain comes, however, the dynamic on the footpaths changes.

Up come the umbrellas. It becomes an occupational hazard waling around without one, as you risk losing an eye to the end of a scything spoke every few paces.

More than anything, though, rain in London allows people to reclaim their personal space. Their umbrellas effectively double the space around them as they jostle for space with other umbrella-wielding walkers.

And there’s nothing a Londoner likes more than their personal space as they do their A to B thing.

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Categories General

Off Your Desk

July 25, 2016 //
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There’s something rewarding about getting something off your desk, and onto someone else’s. There’s a palpable sense of completion, even if it’s a first draft or a small milestone in a large project. It’s an even better feeling if it’s the end of a project. You got it done!

These days, it’s not that it’s off your desk or in your out-tray. It’s usually in your sent items, not weighing down your inbox or your task list. For now it’s someone’s else’s problem. Someone else has to complete the next stage in the process.

And feeling that sense of completion is OK too. It’s often your internal customer or boss who’s requested something from you, and here you are, delivering it to them, for them to review and kick it back to you for the next stage.

After I’ve prioritised my work for the week and for each day, I allocate a certain number of hours or part-days to each job, depending on how involved it is. This allows me to hit my own deadlines and keep to realistic targets. This also means that if I’m on time with a job I can get it off my desk at the end of a morning, the end of a day, or before a break and the start of the next job.

When it’s off your desk, it’s a demarcation point, a chance to take a breather and re-set for the next piece of work. And when it’s off your desk, it’s on someone else’s :-). Speaking of which, I must click Schedule and get this post off my desk…

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Categories Communication, General, Marketing

Star Struck

July 22, 2016 //
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I get star struck, I admit it. It very rarely happens that I meet someone famous, but when it does I revert to excitable 12-year-old mode.

Many years ago I was at a computer software award function in Ireland and the well known designer John Rocha was there. I didn’t even meet him, but I was in his presence, within a couple of metres.

I was very excited. My girlfriend and my colleagues were wondering what on earth was up with me, as I pointed discreetly and mouthed the words ‘That’s John Rocha’ with a idiotic grin on my face. They didn’t get what all the fuss was about.

This is why. I’m English, from England, a country of 60 million people. Famous people are very, very thin on the ground. You occasionally see them in the street, but hardly ever, in my experience.

Ireland, on the other hand, is small, a fifteenth of the English population. Famous people are, comparatively speaking, all over the place. There are much fewer degrees of separation in Ireland. As a consequence, Irish people acknowledge – but don’t go doolally around – famous people. They leave them alone. I was walking down the main shopping street of Dublin about a year later and said to my girlfriend ‘bloody hell, that’s John Malcovich!’ rather loudly, just as he was walking past. ‘Can you say that any louder?’ was my girlfriend’s reply.

Perhaps that’s why famous people like Ireland. They are left alone – by Irish people. Bono can have a quiet drink in the back of a pub and he’ll get a few nods and ‘howyas’, but he won’t be mauled. That would only happen with foreigners like me – or ‘furners’ as we’re called in the west of Ireland.

Speaking of Bono, I heard a story about him drinking in a pub with a mate of his and he was approached by a couple of people and asked for a photo. His mate duly obliged and took the photo for them. They then left, not knowing that Bruce Springsteen was the volunteer behind the camera.

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Categories General

All Good Things

July 20, 2016 //
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All good things must come to an end, or so the saying goes. The implication being that they wouldn’t be good things otherwise.

This is usually my standard retort when my daughter is complaining about the limits on her screen time, the last day of a holiday, or the time she has to come back from a friend’s house.

Sometimes this is a hard argument for me to make, as it would take a long time for an extended holiday to become boring and not like a holiday, I think. To a child, the idea that all good things need to have an end-point is a hard one to grasp.

When this conversation was last revisited in our house, I offered my standard objection-handling response, to which my daughter replied, ‘Yeah, if they didn’t come to an end, they’d be great things.’

Which got me thinking: why should all good things have to come to an end? Furthermore, why do we even have that mindset, namely that if one thing is good then another thing we don’t enjoy as much can’t be good as well?

Shouldn’t we strive to make good things everlasting, for our customers, friends, family, so that they might at least last longer? Shouldn’t we strive to make the less good things good as well, by working harder to make them enjoyable and goal-oriented?

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Categories Communication, General

Sporting Nationalities and Planning

July 13, 2016 //
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Sovereignty and nationality are interesting concepts where sport is concerned. National lines seem to blur and vary – at least in the islands of Britain and Ireland – depending on the particular sport.

When it comes to Brexit, the question of sporting nationality – UK, GB, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, to name but a few – could get a lot more complicated.

I’m sure sport was the last thing on people’s minds when they contemplated both the Brexit referendum and its aftermath.

I’m sure also that there was no plan for it. There was no ‘what if’ plan to withdraw from the Euro single currency when it was conceived and executed, so when a country does decide that it wants to abandon the Euro and reclaim its sovereign currency, it’ll make for some interesting fallout.

Similarly, it seems abundantly clear that there was no plan for Brexit either, judging by the scrambling around and hasty senior resignations from many of the architects of the shambles.

To brighten your day, here’s a well observed take on the difficulties of sporting nationalities in the current political climate from Foil Arms and Hog, somewhat in the style of CPG Grey. Enjoy.

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Categories General, Language, Planning

Missed Opportunities

July 11, 2016 //
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Nothing rankles more and is harder to dismiss than a missed opportunity, I find. More than that, to have had the chance to do something, and to have passed it up, is hard to take.

Years and years ago, I was attending the British Open golf event (is there any better value sporting event than the first 2 days of the Open, over 12 hours of sport where you can get out for a walk, see some amazing shots, savour the atmosphere and get close enough to see what the guys are thinking and feeling?) as a spectator and wandering amongst the masses when my mate pointed out someone famous to me that has just walked past us. ‘Look’, he said, ‘there’s Ian Baker-Finch.’ I turned round to look behind me, as I walked, at this legend who had won the event a few years before, and bumped into a bloke who was much larger than me, but who, for some reason, came off from the contretemps in a worse state, one of those kind of knee-to-knee bump situations where one person can be unscathed and another in a bit of pain.

As it turned out, the chap I had bumped into was none other than fellow fan Ieuan Evans, who was a British Lion at the time and arguably much more famous than Mr Baker-Finch. I apologised and that was that.

Years later, I was invited to a corporate hospitality event by a mate of mine who was himself a guest of a logistics company. The event was the Ireland-Wales 6 Nations rugby clash in Dublin. One of the pundits who was booked to provide pre-show analysis and mingle among the guests was Mr Evans. I met him briefly, and was working up to telling him my golfing anecdote when our little enclave was joined by the event host, Keith Wood, himself no slouch on the rugger field. Mr Wood is a very charismatic individual, pronounced the group he had joined a follically challenged one – which was true, me and Mr Evans included, and proceeded to lead the conversation. During this, Ieuan left our group and went to mingle elsewhere. I didn’t get another chance to catch up with him.

Missed opportunities. To have failed to take the chance is far worse than to have taken it and failed.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General

Stansted-Standsted

July 8, 2016 //
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I had the misfortune of flying to London Stansted a while ago. It’s not my normal choice of airport; in fact, I hadn’t flown to it in a long time.

It looks a little bit tired. I flew in on a spectacularly normal Saturday, and landed on time, in fact a little early. For some reason we landed about a county away from the terminal, so we got a bus into the complex, passed through non-existent passport control and into the baggage area.

Where we waited, along with hundreds of other passengers, for our flight to be shown. The baggage area is organised in a way that from some positions you can only see a small fraction of all the baggage belts. The signs for each belt are too small, and the belts themselves are configured in a way that makes it hard to find your belt. I know, 1 should be next to 2, and so on, but not here, at last as far as I could see.

There wasn’t a member of staff anywhere to be seen on the concourse, who we could ask to chase our bags. I went to the Ryanair service desk after 25 minutes, who peddled the line that they’d only just been told of the problem. Really? Do I look like I came in on the last flight?

All you could do was stand around, so stand we did. We finally got our bags after a 45 minute wait. Unacceptable.

Come on Ryanair, you can do better, you practically own Stansted.  It’s all very well claiming the most punctual, on-time service and ringing your precious trumpet when we land on time or early, but if your punters have to wait an hour landing to get their bags and exit the building, it’s not really on time, now is it?

I suppose I shouldn’t have decided to bring enough stuff for a checked-in bag…

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Categories Communication, Customers, General
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