The 'On The Bright Side' thread..

[aliwood]

However will we live without mobile 'phones post-peak?

Sorry, I can't resist.


What's a mobile phone??


I've just been down town (yes, it's raining, but who cares), on the way there I passed a house where they were cooking th emost fabulous curry, by the time I got to the end of the street my mouth was watering. I almost went back to ask for some.

When I got to my destination - Middlesbrough Cycle Centre, they are nice enough to give me all their old newspapers to make cat litter with, and I was explaining this to one of the chaps there and he asked me how I did it. So I mentioned that I had a shredder, and then he said "Do you know that they've invented shredders for credit cards now?". to which I said (you've guessed it)

What's a credit card?

So I explained that I didn't have one, and he asked me "How do you pay for everything?"

How soon we forget.

On the bright side I found a beech tree on the way home, spotted mainly by the worrying crunching noise coming from under my front wheel and the cycle path turning into some kind of assault course from all the nuts.

[SherryMayo]

Fortunately I no longer work in a call centre and am largely trusted to account for my own time in the form of "soft reports" and timesheets. One of my pet hates is this apparent obsession with performance measurement that every corporate organisation seems to be adopting these days - the "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" philosophy.

Middle managers now are seemingly so concerned with how their stats look in front of senior managers that they encourage inhrerently less efficient ways of working just to suit the measurements.

French economics students started protests against just this obsession with numbers and measurements a couple of years ago:
http://evatt.labor.net.au/news/95.html
The storming of the accountants
By David Boyle

"It may work fine in practice," goes a joke that the French make at their own expense. "The trouble is, it just doesn't work in theory." So it is strange that Paris has become the birthplace of a revolt against the pre-eminence of theory over practice, of economic abstraction over reality, and statistics over real life. Called "post-autistic economics" - "autistic" is intended to imply an obsessive preoccupation with numbers - the revolt began with a website petition in June 2000 from students at the Sorbonne. They were protesting against the dogmatic teaching of neoclassical economics and the "uncontrolled use" of mathematics as "an end in itself".

Within weeks, the call was taken up by students across France. Le Monde launched a public debate, and Jack Lang, the education minister, appointed the respected economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi to head an inquiry. Fitoussi reported last September, backing many of the rebels' points and recommending sweeping changes in the way economics is taught in French universities. The movement has had a worldwide impact, with Cambridge students drawing up their own petition - although most were too scared for their future careers to put their names to it.

Could this episode prove the beginning of the end for the whole cult of measurement, statistics, targets and indicators that has become such a feature of modern life, not just in the Blair government, but around the world?

[Joe]

You're not an INTJ type like myself are you?

Well, I can't claim to have ever heard of an INTJ type before today, but I've just read this and plenty of it rings true. Plenty of it doesn't though, but then nobody fits snugly into these little boxes do they?

[newmac]

This flirting is becoming compulsive reading

[Joe]

One last chuckle for you: one girl who worked in our call centre used to answer the 'phone, "f*ck you for calling member service" instead of "thank you . . . ".

Brilliant!

[skeptik]

What's a credit card?

So I explained that I didn't have one, and he asked me "How do you pay for everything?"

To which my answer would have been 'With a Debit card, you nincompoop!'

Ditto I do not have a credit card.

They are the work of the Devil

[RevdTess]

Ditto I do not have a credit card.

They are the work of the Devil

Back in the days when I was 'aspiring' I got a GM credit card which gives you points based on your spending that you can use against the purchase of a new GM/Vauxhall car.

After many years I now have about ?1500-worth of points sitting there just taunting me. I am trying to be car free after all.

I think probably this site is the absolute worst place for me to find someone who'd like to pay me to buy a Vauxhall for them at a discount.

But other than that, I quite like credit cards. Plenty of fraud protection. I'm much more scared about debit cards with their instant access to bank accounts and cleared funds.

[Joe]

This flirting is becoming compulsive reading

[Joe]

http://evatt.labor.net.au/news/95.html
The storming of the accountants
By David Boyle

Yeah, this article sums it up perfectly. Interestingly, the conclusion is that the antidote to this measurement obsession would be to decentralise power and create more human-scale institutions... sound familiar?

[skeptik]

But other than that, I quite like credit cards. Plenty of fraud protection.

It the combination of me and the credit card that I do not like, (the ease with which debt is run up) anymore than I like 5 year olds let loose with a loaded shotgun in public places.

... Get thee behind me, Barclaycard.

[RevdTess]

... Get thee behind me, Barclaycard.

I was in a hole with just the dole to keep me in the black,
My letterbox was full of bills and I began to crack,
I shouted at my TV and my TV answered back,
'If you join the New World Order son, there's nothing you will lack'

They offered me that mastercard they call 'the golden gun',
It's universal plastic, it's every card in one,
Spends your money for you then tells you what you've done,
and debits you a pound of flesh for every hour of fun.

Chorus:
I ain't gonna take that card, I ain't gonna drop my guard,
I ain't gonna lose my right to choose although the times are hard,
I ain't gonna punch my profile in so they can tell me where I've been,
Ain't gonna take that bastard mastercard.

etc etc etc

('Bastard Mastercard' by Seize the Day)

[aliwood]

That's great, I'm planning to make it my theme tune from now on.

[RevdTess]

It reminds me of phycisist Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle - "the more precisely the position of a particle is known, the less precisely its momentum is known"; the very act of measuring something alters it's behaviour such that you can never fully understand what it's doing, rendering the excercise futile (in a business context).

To briefly return to this... did you know that this was exactly the findings of the Hawthorne Studies in 1924 which led to the naming of the "Hawthorne Effect", the understanding that openly observing a group of workers doing their job could (tho not necessarily would) inherently change their behaviour. It was apparently one of the key results that led management theory away from Taylorism to the so-called human relations school of management. Seems we're back with an uberfascist form of Taylorism in some cases (call centres, sweat shops, fast food etc) these days though.

still revising for monday, yawn.

[peaky]

Oh yes, I've been there.

Joe - thank you. Well, I for one reckon you should be a comedian post-peak. That's the best laugh I've had on these boards, and I've had quite a few. I now have a picture of what's going on behind the scenes on those very odd occasions when I've actually managed to get through to NTL's 'support' line.

And the management descriptions are superb. 3 years on we've just replaced our total rebrand as we were told that it's "old and tired" - not that we'd noticed but it surely must be true. In our client newsletter sent out today it says of the new branding, and I quote:

"The new ****** identity is strong, simple, timeless and memorable - recognisable, confident and reassuring, yet beyond fashion. It is authoritative yet approachable."

Yea, right They're obviously going to require a little more creativity when they ditch the current branding in around 5 years as we've got its perfection guranteed in hard copy this time!

Marvellous. Thank you again.

[Joe]

"The new ****** identity is strong, simple, timeless and memorable - recognisable, confident and reassuring, yet beyond fashion. It is authoritative yet approachable."

Sweet Jesus.

What have they done - changed the shade of one of the colours in the logo from "aqua dream" to "sky trails" or something?