The Examined Life 4, or “It ain't what they call you, it's what you answer to.”

Here is my latest report from the front.

Parents are now not only giving their children ridiculous names (Chardonnay, DuBonnay, Chlamydia etc.) BUT THEY ARE SPELLING THEM WRONGLY TOO. Here is a typical scene: registration. Such is the nomenclaturial nightmare of this once simple activity that with a new class I always ask kids to correct me if I get their names wrong.

Me: “Antweaune.”

Antweaune: “Yes Sir.”

“Brooklyn.”

“Yes Sir.”

“Peckham.”

“Yes Sir.”

“Vladivar.”

“Absent Sir.”

“Thank you, Grosseteste. LaShagga.”

“Yeah.”

“Try again, LaShagga.”

“I said yeah.”

“And I said try again please, LaShagga, or by Christ I will employ this Argentinian bullwhip to deliver the most almighty thrashing you have ever had in your life.” *

[Rolling eyes extravagantly] “...... Yes SIR.”

“Liela.”

“It’s pronounced ‘Leila’, Sir.”

“Ah, I do apologise. I must have a word with the office at break: they’ve spelt it L-I-E-L-A.”

“That IS how it’s spelt, Sir.”

“ ... ah ... I, I ... I see. Er, right, er ... Hydroceffalus.”

“Yes Sir.”
"Vettriano."

I could go on.
But I weaun't.

  * I made the last bit up.

·  

The Examined Life 3: Bring back Fat Books

Yesterday I was astonished to discover that GCSE English Literature pupils at a prestigious local grammar school don't study Hardy, Dickens, Eliot, Austen, Lawrence, any of the Brontës, Thackeray or ...

... in short, they don't read any English novel fatter than my little finger. Their set book (sic: just the one) is 'I'm the King of the Castle' by Susan Hill, 224 pages, published in 1971. I haven't read it, but I have read Hill's 'The Woman in Black' which in my opinion is mediocre, in no way subtle, with a thin character (appropriately thinly played by Daniel Radcliffe in the recent film) and not even that scary.

I went to a London comprehensive in the 1970s and we read both 'Far from the Madding Crowd' and 'Great Expectations'. 

We may not all have enjoyed the experience, and not all of us who did may have liked it all of the time, but we at least put our little toes in the water and now many of us can swim.

Reading literature is a bit like swimming: it's better to be introduced to it than to discover it by accident.

Coming over here, taking our jobs!

The CBI, discussing employment policy and immigration within the EU on Radio 4's Today: "Britain needs our Polish and eastern European engineers."

Forget the immigration question for a moment and ask what we in Britain were doing during the decades when these nations were languishing behind the Iron Curtain and we weren't. How did we educate our kids? To do what?

How do we educate them now, and to do what?

Poll in the Dark

After the UK election several commentators have made a good point: the pre-election polls were wrong that Labour and the Tories were neck and neck, but parties' campaigns and voters' responses were based on and compounded the error.

This was a fine example of a means of measuring something becoming confused with and thus distorting the thing being measured.

Firstly, we should ban the publication of speculative pre-election polls for an agreed period before the vote.

Secondly, people in public-, private- and independent sector organisations, and especially those which annually rip up and replace last year's "robust" and "objective" measurement tools, should regularly ask themselves whether they are making the same kinds of self-perpetuating mistakes. If they think they are, they should say so.

Many people tend not to, you see.

SCAM ALERT!

Major companies are scamming their employees in order to cut their salaries, bonuses and other benefits as follows.

When you visit, say, a car dealership or a phone company, the person who has served you will often say something like, "If you receive an online survey asking you to rate my performance out of 10, please try to give me 9 or 10."

What sounds like impertinence is the expression of a legitimate fear.

Here's how it works:

• The company sends the survey to all the customers Billy has served over a given period, asking them to rank his service from 1 to 10.
• If you reply and rate Billy at below 9 there are consequences for him. The lower the number, the worse they will be.
• If you are fantastically enthusiastic about Billy's service and give him - as many inexplicably do these days - an 11 to emphasise the fact, his score will actually be 1. This is because the company's computer doesn't recognise numbers above 10 so it records only the first digit.
• If you don't reply - and the company knows full well that only a small proportion of those receiving surveys at distance ever do - this is taken as a negative response, also with negative consequences for Billy because he's measured against the number of surveys sent out not the number sent back.
• His employer also knows that if Billy does well but you're unhappy with the company's performance, you'll be tempted to give him a lower score however good his service. In other words Billy will pay for his employer's failings.

I therefore recommend that, unless an employee actually punches you in the face, you always reply to any online survey about their service, and you always give top marks for service received, even if you don't think it fully merits it.

You may also want to use the opportunity to complain to the company as part of your reply.

Does this ring a bell?

It's not only bureaucracies and politicians who warp language and meaning - and, in the end, people; who, living beyond the reach of human agency, are constitutionally impervious to acknowledging let alone acting upon the bleedin' obvious. Here's the text of a complaint I sent to a major phone corporation today.

Dear Orange UK,

This isn't a complaint about the employee below, who acted within obvious constraints, but against your Company.

I’m a long-standing Orange customer. I lost my mobile recently and ordered a new one, paying £9.98 for a next-day delivery. I gave my email and landline details but received no confirmation of the order by either.

The phone didn’t arrive and no note was left. I waited a few more days. After over a week and several phone calls to Orange at my expense, I spoke to Ms Xxxxx at the Xxxxxxx office today. She said the phone had been returned to you. I asked why Orange hadn’t let me know either that it couldn’t be delivered or that you now had it. She put me on hold, spoke to her manager and said he would refund the delivery fee while I could collect the phone from my nearest Orange shop.

We returned to the matter of the non-delivery. Ms Xxxxx said that Orange policy is that your delivery company always sends customers a text with the approximate delivery time. This is an automated system and there are no other ways of doing it.

I said that this seems odd: if I had a phone the firm could text, I wouldn't have ordered a replacement for it. Therefore it was futile for them to try to contact me. That's why I gave Orange alternative contact details in the first place.

Ms Xxxxx observed that it was unfortunate that I didn’t have a means of contact by text.

I didn’t think that Ms Xxxxx had quite understood my point, so I rephrased it: I didn’t have a means of contact by text because the only phone to which a text could have been sent was the one that Orange were trying to deliver to me.

I then asked whether the policy of texting delivery times to people who can’t receive them would be looked into and, if she couldn't do this herself, whether there was there anyone else I could talk to. Ms Xxxxx consulted her manager and then repeated the fact that it was a pity I didn't have a phone on which I could be texted.

She seemed unable or unwilling to acknowledge the problem or pass the matter upwards, so I asked to speak with her manager. She said he was unavailable. I noted that he'd been available twice in the last few minutes, but could I have his name so I could ring him later? Ms Xxxxx seemed unwilling to give a name, so I asked whether it was company policy not to allow her to. She appeared not to want to answer yes or no: again I had a strong impression that she was constrained, perhaps by the fact that, as phone conversations are monitored, she'd be in trouble if she departed from the company line (whatever that is: I remain no wiser).

In the end I lost patience, hence this complaint, which I stress is against you, Orange, and not her.

As long as (1) the £9.98 is credited and (2) I’m also credited 10 days’ payment against my mobile account because of the delay, I won’t seek further compensation for my long phone calls, wasted time or lost business unless you are kind enough to offer it.

But I would like you to give serious thought to the texting issue as this is central to the problem and, as a policy, may well affect others too. Please reply swiftly, candidly, and don't fob me off. If I've misunderstood anything, I’ll appreciate the correction.

Yours etc. ...

The Examined Life (2)

Me: “Right Sir, you’ve been asked to write some lyrics for an inspirational song, we’re half an hour in but there’s not much on your ideas sheet. In fact, unless your pen runs on lemon juice I’d say there’s nothing at all! Can I help?”

Him: “I dunno what to put.”

"Is there anything that inspires or excites or really interests you?"

"No."

“Well don’t worry. Think of ... think of somewhere you’ve been. Or somewhere you’d like to go, even if you've only seen a picture of it. Something you saw or did once that’s special to you."

.....

“Maybe something you want to achieve one day? Or something you think is only a dream but might just come true if you give it a push...”

“Uh?”

“Tell you what, think about this: behind you and me — sitting here, right now — are thousands and thousands of years of human history. You know, cavemen and Romans and Saxons and William the Conqueror and Henry’s six wives and two World Wars and the rest of it. And ahead of us are ... well we just don’t know because it hasn’t happened. But I’ll tell you this: all those great people and events are long gone. But here WE are: right on top of the wave of all that history, rolling in with the future ahead, and not Alfred the Great or Napoleon Bonaparte or Winston Churchill with a word to say about what happens next. But we’re lucky: we’re riding that wave, so maybe we can have a say ...”

....

“So think of something that means a lot to you. Anything!”

"Uh?"

"Anything you like! There are no right or wrong answers to this one!"

“Is it alright if I write a song about a computer game?”

“Er ........ yes ........ Yes, OK.”