20 east

I wrote about this elsewhere but it really is worth repeating after my experiences today in the office.

I’m exploring cultural differences in relation to the operation of lifts with a sub-section devoted to finding seats on planes and general understanding of buttons, numbers & letters.

Take my office. After passing through security, a term loosely applied to those people who get in the way between the front door and the lifts, you are faced with three lifts. The right hand lift is admittedly a mystery even to me. It has two buttons, the lower one is a picture of someone in a wheelchair, the top one is a Zlote Tarasy logo. I’ve pressed them both and they have the same effect, no lift arrives. Moving on to the left-hand two lifts. Between them are up & down buttons a bit like this, only more obvious:

I arrive at these lifts. There is someone else standing there, let’s call them “Clueless”. The down button is already pressed. I want to go up so I press the up button. Clueless looks at me, then the lift buttons, then shifts a little uneasily. The first lift arrives, going down. If you’re lucky it will be the middle lift, which will even tell you it’s going down (why are they always female voices?). Clueless does not get in but starts shuffling around again. The first lift goes. The second lift arrives, going up. Clueless and myself get in. I press my floor number, Clueless stands there. We arrive at my floor and I get out. Clueless stays in and I see the beginnings of a worried expression, possibly confused, as the doors close.

This exact scenario happened today, five times with five different Cluelesses. In my last office, the same thing. In the office before that, even worse because the buttons were less clear. I really don’t know what else to say. I have tried making excuses for them that they live in older blocks that have no lifts, blah blah, but come on, they never visit any buildings with lifts? They don’t understand up and down arrows? Modern technology (elevators invented in 1850) frightens them?

Boarding a plane. You are given a boarding pass. On this very important document are clearly printed a number, like 18, and a letter, like C. You get on the plane. Over every row of seats are signs that have numbers, like 18, and letters, like C. So why are 25% of the people on the plane either sitting in the wrong seat already or holding everybody up because they are unable to find their seat?

You go the post office, Poczta Polska. Everybody, except me for about 3 years, knows you need to find the magic box, press A, B, C button and it gives you a ticket with a letter and a number on it, usually A947 in my case. The trick is to match the letter and the number with the same letter and number that will appear above one of the windows behind which sit the always happy postal-peeps. Everyone in the Poczta manages to do this without blinking an eye. They are so sharp at this test that they are even able to see what your letter-number is and tell you you’ve just missed your turn.

What, prey tell me, is the problem here?

We have a local chain of coffee shops here called “Coffee Heaven”, aside from rather indifferent service, rather too often, they do as good a job as most better recognized names do. I was struck today though by the amount of marketing they throw behind every new cup design they come up with. Each season they produce a new cup. So the summer one had bits of a palm tree, this new one has snowflakes and so on. Each time a new cup comes out they market the cup, not the coffee, very heavily. I noticed in there today a “table topper” that said something like “Last in our line of limited edition cups – collect all four of these special cups….blah blah”. Now. I could understand if these were china cups, or even plastic and the cup was actually an item you might, were you desperate enough, want to collect. But all I can see is that these are the regular paper cups that you get in any coffee shop, so I can help wondering if I’m missing the point or if this is marketing gone mad?

I mean, who wants to clean and keep an old paper coffee cup? Are people taking them home and displaying them inside the glass fronted cabinet in the front room? Do they ensure guests are moved past said cabinet so the hostess can say “..and here is our collection of limited edition Coffee Heaven paper cups…”?

They must be spending a fair amount of money on producing, distributing and marketing these ’special’ cups, but I’d be very surprised if they have made any impact on the bottom line.

Okay. While I’m on the subject. To anyone from Coffee Heaven Inc – if you have two tills, please use them. We (yes, I am not alone) are tired of waiting in line 10 minutes or more for a fast take-away coffee and sandwich. We know what we want, we don’t need to wait behind six people who don’t (and all have to fish around for small change). It is doubly annoying to be waiting when you actually seem to have enough people behind the counter, they just all prefer to gather away from the tills and have a natter. This is an issue all the time but the summer months were a joke. It’s no suprise that regular staff want a holiday in summer so please get more staff or more training before next summer arrives. Thanks!

Thanks also to Colin for this (click):