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Posted: **Thu Jul 31, 2008 1:49 am**

dr_bar wrote:
sv-wolf wrote:Jeez! Doc. Just don't torture me like this. Lakes and mountains - the ultimate antidote to living the last 30 years in a sardine can!
So, you've arranged the return trip home from your next adventure via Hong Kong, with a layover in Vancouver for a few weeks??? I'm sure we could find you a couch to sleep on and a bike to ride...

Tell me blues, is this guy a control freak or just a genuinely warm, welcoming human being?

Posted: **Thu Jul 31, 2008 2:21 am**

sv-wolf wrote:Tell me blues, is this guy a control freak or just a genuinely warm, welcoming human being?

He's the guy that put something like 10000 kilometers on his bike in four weeks last summer. When he puts his mind on an objective...........

Posted: **Thu Jul 31, 2008 2:50 am**

jstark47 wrote:
sv-wolf wrote:Tell me blues, is this guy a control freak or just a genuinely warm, welcoming human being?

He's the guy that put something like 10000 kilometers on his bike in four weeks last summer. When he puts his mind on an objective...........

14,000+...

Posted: **Thu Jul 31, 2008 6:24 am**

jstark47 wrote:
sv-wolf wrote:Tell me blues, is this guy a control freak or just a genuinely warm, welcoming human being?

He's the guy that put something like 10000 kilometers on his bike in four weeks last summer. When he puts his mind on an objective...........

If that's the case, Mr Stark, it looks like there is no hope for me. My fate is sealed.

So, Doc, a trip to the edge of the known world...? Hmmm! Yes, I think I could definitely go for that. I'll have to start putting some serious all-weather kit together, though - sealskin coat, pith helmet, spats.... Any advice on handling the natives up there in BC? Glass beads? Cans of Budweiser?

Not on this occasion though, unfortunately. My bank manager has started sitting on his hands every time he sees me walk into the branch office. ("Another trip, is it, Mr ...?".) Shame, if it weren't for the spondulics I'd be there like a shot... (Everything round here is beginning to smell of sardines and olive oil. lately. I need some space.)

But 14,000 in 4. That truly was some going, dB. I'll take my hat off to you for that one, squire! I guess you didn't use Devonshire clotted cream on that occasion. (

Interesting idea though...!)

(Of course, I know you only did it because wanted to get 'value-for-money' out of your licence fee - and there is nothing wrong with that, either!!!!!!!!!!! So don't let anyone tell you any different

)

Posted: **Thu Jul 31, 2008 2:16 pm**

sv-wolf wrote:(Of course, I know you only did it because wanted to get 'value-for-money' out of your licence fee - and there is nothing wrong with that, either!!!!!!!!!!! So don't let anyone tell you any different )

Nah... Just needed a picture of me and a light house...

Peggy's Cove NS

Posted: **Fri Aug 01, 2008 12:55 am**

sv-wolf wrote: Pet Peeve #3

People who use 'proactive' when they mean 'active' (I challenge anyone to tell me the difference.) Proactive means they "messed" it all up royally in the past, and want to make it look like they're doing something about it. Active means they're actually doing something
People who use 'implement' when they mean 'provide' or any of a dozen other things. Implement in my experience generally means force, not provide
People who use 'matrix' when they mean 'table' to be fair matricies can be 3 dimensional, tables can't. But yes usually the wrong word used
People who use 'fora' when they mean 'forums'never heard that one
People who use 'excellence' when they mean 'tick box' Ahhh but excellence turns "yes its been done" into "it's been done well" without giving people the option to say "it was "messed" up royally but they fixed it in the end" (usually followed by a statement containing proactive)

Posted: **Fri Aug 01, 2008 5:27 am**

Nibblet99 wrote:
sv-wolf wrote: Pet Peeve #3

People who use 'proactive' when they mean 'active' (I challenge anyone to tell me the difference.) Proactive means they "messed" it all up royally in the past, and want to make it look like they're doing something about it. Active means they're actually doing something
People who use 'implement' when they mean 'provide' or any of a dozen other things. Implement in my experience generally means force, not provide
People who use 'matrix' when they mean 'table' to be fair matricies can be 3 dimensional, tables can't. But yes usually the wrong word used
People who use 'fora' when they mean 'forums'never heard that one
People who use 'excellence' when they mean 'tick box' Ahhh but excellence turns "yes its been done" into "it's been done well" without giving people the option to say "it was "messed" up royally but they fixed it in the end" (usually followed by a statement containing proactive)

Hi Nibblers

I see your workmates have been cloned from the same linguistic dunghill as mine.

But are you sure 'active' means that someone is actually doing something...? It seems unlikely to me.

On second thoughts, you're probably right. I haven't heard any of my colleages use the word 'active' for years. Still, that doesn't prevent them 'actively' making a pig's ear of things on a regular basis. (They would claim to be 'proactively' making a pig's ear of things, of course.)

In the world of housing (as no doubt elsewhere) it is said that pigs' ears lead by mysteriously paths to the holy grail of 'customer satisfaction'. As far as I can tell, the plan (the 'golden thread'

) is to slash services but to answer the telephone in four instead of fourteen rings when customers phone up to complain about them. Customer satisfaction is then deferred to the moment when said customers put a brick though a neighbourhood office window.

Posted: **Fri Aug 01, 2008 8:47 am**

I'm curious at what point the phone became more important than in-person. When I was little, people paid attention to the customer in front of them, and let phones ring...or told a caller "I have to let you go, I have a customer."

Now people ignore customers who've taken the effort to actually go to a business when the phone rings. "Excuse me, I have to take this."

Maybe when I go to a store, I should stand in front of the clerk, whip out my cell phone and call the store, thus to have her undivided attention.

Posted: **Fri Aug 01, 2008 12:14 pm**

Pet Peeve #4 Call centres

noodlenoggin wrote:I'm curious at what point the phone became more important than in-person. When I was little, people paid attention to the customer in front of them, and let phones ring...or told a caller "I have to let you go, I have a customer."

Now people ignore customers who've taken the effort to actually go to a business when the phone rings. "Excuse me, I have to take this."

Maybe when I go to a store, I should stand in front of the clerk, whip out my cell phone and call the store, thus to have her undivided attention.

I have a view on this. (surprise! surprise!) A fairly venomous one, because I have a whole fistful of frustrations whenever I think about how our world is becoming increasingly commercialised, professionalised and depersonalised. (It always has been those things, I guess, but profit-driven technologies are more and more making it feel that way.) I can't tell you just how much I loathe this stuff.

Its an incontrovertible fact that people in the flesh are just damned inconvenient. They have problems and want to discuss them. Sometimes they are isolated or lonely or garrulous and just want to chat. They want acknowledgement and recognition. This all plays havoc with a company's 'efficiencies'.

A telephone caller can be despatched within 40 seconds - that's a standard call-centre target. The 'operative' can deal with sixty calls an hour, signposting every one so that there is no possible chance of a real time-wasting engagement. At the end of a phone, the customer can't see that 'Darren' or 'Tracy' are reading a programmed spiel off the screen. That way, they are less acutely aware that they are talking to a biological machine rather than a real human being who might conceivably want to help them.

The phone became the medium of choice when technology made it more profitable than a man or woman standing behind a counter. From that point on, Houdini-like, capitalist ideologies wriggled and contorted themselves into the required shape to show that this was all very much in the interests of the 'customer.' 'Professionals' have now started to believe their own spiels. Customers - the raw meat of 'communication strategies' - have now started to believe them too. The long, sure road to human ideological conformity has begun all over again.

When the guy at my motorcycle dealership starts reading a spiel over the phone to me, that's the day I give up riding and embrace despair. As professionalised as the motorcycle industry has become, there is still room for human face-to-face contact at the sharp end of it - and even time for a joke and a bit of time wasting.

'Efficiency' on the other hand is just another name for mass dehumanisation. Nausea sets in at that point. And it is not even that efficient. Some theores suggest it is not even very efficient at producing profit.

A hundred years ago, Paul Lafargue wrote a book called, 'The Right to be Lazy'. These days you are crying in the wilderness if you so much as demand the right to be human.

Hmmm! Do I make myself clear?

Posted: **Fri Aug 01, 2008 6:53 pm**

sv-wolf wrote:
Tell me blues, is this guy a control freak or just a genuinely warm, welcoming human being?

A little bit of both actually.

I can't believe he would offer a couch....(chesterfield, sofa, what ever you want to call it)
If you travel here, you will be given something more comfortable than a couch for sleeping.

We make good tour guides.

The Duffy Lake trip is awesome. You have to ride the famous Sea to Sky highway, go via Whistler (world class resort) and then Pemberton for the turnoff for the Duffy road. We can come back down the Fraser Canyon...

Then of course there is a circle tour...Sunshine Coast, then over to Vancouver Island and down to Victoria...we might be able to find you an afternoon tea there.

Or....we could guide you east through BC, the Kootenays, the Rocky Mountains, Calgary; home of TMW.....Drumheller; home of dinosaurs and hoodoos.

Better start saving those pences and shillings.

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