20 east

That title should really be “Bad mail com” because that’s about all anyone has time to read these days.

Can I first rant, yet again, about the pitiful state of written English as used by people who were supposedly edgykated in Britin and for whom English is their muther tong. I read on a daily basis, and I’m not exaggerating, streams of text where the writers cannot distinguish between: to & too, your & you’re, there & their, which & what, where & were along with a host of other basic errors that I expect should have been clear by the age of ten, if not before. I can’t forgive but can perhaps overlook mistakes with more complicated words and grammar but to not be able to distinguish between ‘there’ and ‘their’ is just not on.

That’s not the point of this post though. Here I want to talk about how email is killing the art of communication.

As I understand it, email is the modern day equivalent of sending a  letter, something that used to be handwritten or later typed onto a piece of paper and then either handed or posted to the recipient. If it just stuck to being a more efficient way of doing exactly that then I’d be extremely happy because there’s no doubt that it is a vastly superior way to type, deliver and file letters. However, email has gone way beyond its core competencies and, encouraged by the users, has now caused:

1. A breakdown in people’s ability or desire to speak to each other face to face or via the telephone
2. An unnecessarily enormous increase in the amount of ‘letters’ being sent
3. An all-time low in people’s ability to communicate in writing
4. A very serious deterioration in recipients ability to read anything more than 25 words long.

The idea behind writing a letter is to “communicate” with one or more other people. The process of communication is generally explained as being the imparting or interchange of thoughts, opinions, or information, a way of transferring knowledge from one person to others. There’s a question to be asked therefore as to whether everything email now stands for is actually helping or hindering the art of communication?

I can only think of one argument that it is helping and that is that it does allow letters to be distributed faster, instantly in fact, and to more people. In terms of getting a message out there then, it is light years ahead of typing and posting. But what is the downside of that speed?

1/ Talking. Sending an email, assuming you’re at your computer, is easier than calling someone. It also has to be said that trying to get someone to answer the phone these days is pretty hard. The call is either not answered or answered by a robot. I’d say I’m successful one time in ten when calling people at our London office, whether it be desk or mobile phone, whereas sending the same person a mail quite often gets a faster response. That’s sad but true. It is however inescapably true that more and better communication can be achieved in a shorter time by speaking on the phone than by email. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve watched staff engage in a lengthy email debate and then, when the issue is still not resolved, ask “What do you think I should do now?”. My answer is always the same, “Did you try calling them?”. 90% of the time, the issue is resolved after one short call and yet, for some reason, this is not nowadys an obvious thing to do. How often have you noticed people even within your own office, people who are sitting no more than 50 m away from each other send each other mails instead of going over and having a chat? What’s that all about??!!

2/ Written diarrhoea. Because it’s so easy, people abuse it. I’d estimate that of the hundreds of mails I get every week about 50% of them need not have been sent at all and of that 50% a further 50% need not have been copied to me. People need to learn to read the distribution lists for emails and remove those who don’t really need to be involved in the ongoing debate. It’s just plain lazy to hit “reply to all” and not give a damn how many people then have to start reading the thing, realise it’s corporate spam and delete it. Perhaps if people had less junk in their mailbox they might have more time to read stuff properly. As a boss I also suffer from the ‘arse-covering’ mail disease – I’m copying you, my boss, so that if this all goes pear-shaped you can’t tell me off. Bullshit! If there’s something potentially important about a mail then I expect you to have a conversation with me before you send it. Otherwise, I expect you to get on with the job we pay you for without copying every man and his dog “just in case”.

Roughly every 6 months I send to all my reports a “name and shame” email showing how many mails I’ve received from each of them in the previous period. The results are quite staggering with some people sending almost none while others send 500 or more in the same period. As usual, the correct answer is somewhere in the middle although for my style the lower the better. This is surprisingly effective at cutting down mail, by the way, in case you want to try it yourself.

3/ This and the next point are at the heart of the matter. That communication, for it to work properly needs people to follow a few simple rules:

• Keep it to a minimum. We are all busy and therefore reducing the total amount of messages will allow us to concentrate on those that matter.
• Make sure your message tells the recipient everything they need to know. This cuts down on the never ending question-answer mail threads followed by the ultimate phone call to find out what’s really going on. All of which wastes more time than having drafted the mail properly in the first place.
• When you get a mail, read it!

Combining email with a Blackberry or similar grammar & text stripping device is the ultimate in gobbledegook generation. How often do you read something and not understand what on earth is going on? With me it’s at least 25% of the time. About another 50% of the time I may understand the issue but don’t have enough information to be able to answer the question or do whatever is being asked so that leaves roughly a quarter of the mails I get (the legitimate mails, excluding the spam) as being what I’d call communication.

I try hard to be different. I try to make sure that the recipient gets a good understanding of the issue and enough information to be able to come straight back with an answer, or get straight on with what has been asked. Unfortunately, I’m too often faced with either questions that have been answered in the mail already or claims that they don’t have time to read anything more than 4 bullet points. If the issue being communicated cannot be condensed into 4 bullet points, what is one supposed to do? Most of what I need to communicate is complicated, the simple stuff I just deal with myself.

4/ Attention span of a gnat. Why can’t people take a moment to read something these days? I can appreciate that my mail might not be the most important thing they have on their mind but then what they should do is respond saying “Thanks, I’m a bit tied up now but I’ll get back to you [whenever]“. Polite, short, no time wasted and I know you’re going to read the thing later. Fine with me. Instead, what people do these days is this – open mail, scroll a little, if it looks like you could read it in less than 15 seconds then read it, if it looks longer ignore it (unless it’s from your boss) or, even worse, read only the first line and then ask loads of stupid questions that have already been answered further down in the mail or, the worst, read the first line jump to the wrong conclusion and reply to all. Every one of the things people really do either don’t solve the issue or do but only after having taken much longer than reading the mail in the first place – eight short communications instead of one slightly longer one.

I understand that I’m a lone voice howling into a force 15 gale. I know I’m just a grumpy old man who’s not in tune with modern day living. I know this inexorable nose-dive into the murky sea where simple data transfer replaces communication is “where it’s at”, but that doesn’t mean I have to agree with it, like it or shut up about it. This is a topic close to my heart and I could easily start up an entirely new blog devoted purely to demonstrating my above points on a daily if not hourly basis but I don’t have the time for that. I do have time to read and write properly though and shall continue to do so no matter how much I feel I’m swimming against the tide!

I feel a little better having got that off my chest!

One of my happy readers asked for an update on the progress of this development.

In brief – bugger all is going on. Cranes removed. Orco flags removed. Site tidied up. Rebar going rusty. Dead as a doornail.

I’ll only post again if that situation changes.

Here’s a pic from 5 mins ago.

I like food a lot and having travelled a fair bit I’ve been lucky to experience a great variety of culinary delights on their home turf. For me, a visit to the food bazaar is as exciting as one to the art museum, cathedral or other famous landmark attraction and a good deal of my memories of places are food-based.

Naschmarkt Vienna

Let me squeeze my brain and see what food memories fall out. I’ll ignore Poland and Britain for now:

Istanbul – some great but simple food – cheese, pickles, fresh fish – in Bebek on the banks of the Bosphorus. An incredible chocolate soufflé also near the Bosphorus but further North than Bebek (can’t remember where exactly). The spices and sweet stuff on display in the Egyptian bazaar. Generally speaking, this is a surprisingly great city for good grub.

France – a restaurant in Paris that only sold things made from cheese (starters, mains and deserts). Those ‘fountains’ of seafood. A superb Coq au vin in a very understated and traditional restaurant in Paris. Fish and bouillabaisse in Marseilles. Choucroute and foie gras in Strasbourg. Yummy hot chocolate and croissant for breakfast everywhere.

Munich – Leberspätzlesuppe, Schweinshaxe and Weisswurst in various beer-gardens.

Jerusalem – ‘Jerusalem Mix’, not a favourite of mine but unforgettable as it is a sort of mixed grill of parts of the chicken you’d normally throw in the bin – hearts, livers, gizzards, kidneys, toenails, lips, arse-cheeks……yuk! Falafel, mainly because of the arguments I had when telling them that this was exactly the same as the falafel I had in Arabia, as was much of the food there.

Arabia – generally delicious grilled meat, fish, salads & pickles everywhere. ‘Um Ali’ (a delicious sweet bread pudding) in a big tent in Riyadh during Ramadan. Great shawarma, also in Riyadh.

Brussels – moules frites & waffles.

Amsterdam – chips with mayonnaise, those fast-food croquette things and a Thai meal that gave me Herpes, at least that’s what I put it down to even if it is impossible.

USA – In Florida – stone crab claws, delicious. Soft shell crabs, not so. Ridiculously sized portions. Maple syrup too close to my scrambled egg. Amazing steaks.

Porto – octopus in ink.

Italy – those two restaurants in San Gimignano this summer. Some Gorgonzola on a train between Venice and Florence. Spaghetti alle vongole. Olives.

Greece – loads of fresh fish, salads, bread, potatoes, olives, taramasalata by the beach in Thassos.

I’ll stop there because I’m aware there’s so many missing and I’m getting hungry!

This all started because I rediscovered the photo (below) of the ham shop we ate at when I visited Madrid recently. An amazing place and with so much delicious ham and other goodies that I could have stayed there all night!

The other photo is my own lament to the poor treatment given to vinegar in Poland. Banished to plain bottles and the lower shelf for the part it played in filling empty shelves in communist times. I was searching for a new bottle of vinegar (for the chips don’t-cha know) as the one I’ve been using for a while now expired in mid 2008, so I discovered when I finally read the label. In the end I did find some slightly better vinegar, but it’s not easy and you can forget about finding any malt vinegar, which is really what one wants with chips.

So close!

Zbigniew Pietrzykowski would have secured the 1960 Olympic light heavyweight boxing gold medal for Poland had it not been for the presence of a certain Muhammad Ali.

Poland needs to pick up more gold medals. In the combined summer/winter Olympic gold medal table, Poland is down in 24th place with 63 medals, below much smaller places like Sweden(185), Hungary(159), Finland(142), Switzerland(83) and Cuba(67). Not good enough, really. For reference, Great Britain has 215 and the top three are USA(1008), Soviet Union(473) and Italy(226).

So, when they next review the events included in the Olympics and my advice to Poland is to start lobbying for the following to be included:

SURPRISE

Poles are world beaters at being surprised. I give as my first example the case of standing in a queue to pay for your goods. Most people are ready for the moment they get to the front, they know what they are purchasing, how much it costs and whether they intend to pay cash or card, whether they need a bag or not. If paying cash they know how much cash they have on them, including drobny. They will have been checking out the display at the kasa and know if they are interested in the “special offers” or not. They are, in short, prepared for what is to come and ready to deal with it quickly. Not so with Poles who when arriving at the front of the queue start behaving like they they were just beamed down from the starship Enterprise! They only start thinking about all these things when they arrive at the front of the queue. Often they have even lost the item they wanted to buy and most of the time they seem to have lost their wallets, or at least are surprised they should need one.

Second example is traffic lights. Same deal. Most people know that the green light comes quite quickly after red and amber, that amber really means “get ready to go (or stop)” and is the drivers opportunity to get his/her act together. Not so with Poles. Poles sit there until the green light is fully illuminated before wondering what it is they were supposed to do next. The appearance of the green light is a surprise, every time! More dangerous is the fact that the red light is also surprising and rather than having this surprise spoil their afternoon, they decide to slip through on red. After all, nobody will be coming the other way because they are all too busy being surprised by their green light. LOL!

BYSTANDING

It just struck me the other day that it is very hard to be alone in Warsaw. Whatever you do and wherever you go there seem to be other people who are standing around showing an interest or poking their nose in. I think they do this partly to make sure they are not missing out on something and partly just plain old curiosity. By way of proof, try standing with three friends looking into a shop window and gesturing excitedly. My guess is that after about 30 seconds you will have at least doubled the size of the group. Even if the original three move off, the event will still have momentum and will probably peak at around six bystanders before they finally realise there’s nothing going on. You may find a couple of drunks are popping back to the shop window on and off all day.

Try digging a hole in the road. There will be two workers and at least two official bystanders (working for the same company but doing bugger all) as well as a growing group of casual bystanders. Is a hole in the road that interesting or do Poles have a deep rooted herding instinct?

Try having a car/motorbike accident. Rubbernecking happens the world over and is very evident here in Poland but what is more unusual is the gathering of a crowd of bystanders. People on foot who just wander over to enjoy the spectacle from beginning to end. That’s a Polish speciality!

It had to happen sometime, the top end of the slippery slope of computer addiction.

For the geeks, the computer is an Acer ‘Aspire One’, purchased at John Lewis in the UK last year and originally intended for M’s use as a light but functional work machine. M has not exactly been overusing it so I thought we’d try it out with Z and it seems to have gone down well if the last two hours are anything to go by. I like the idea of the Acer but the battery has never worked properly so I don’t think I’d recommend it to anyone. There are better versions of the same idea on the market nowadays anyway.

Z did have a computer earlier but it was a big old clunky thing I’d purchased from work cheap because it was being thrown out. It didn’t work too well and was not connected to the WWW so the best she could do was use the ‘paint’ function, which got to be very boring. That is now in the garage to gather dust before being thrown out. Side question – where is one supposed to throw things like old computers and TVs in Warsaw? In the UK we had communal rubbish dumps everywhere that allowed you to turn up and dump anything you wanted. They had separate areas for the different types of waste. In Warsaw I’ve seen nothing like that and so I have absolutely no idea what to do with the thing aside from leave it somewhere for ‘the borrowers’ to take it away.

This Acer has a wi-fi function so she can connect to the WLAN emitted by the D-Link router on my desk in the room next door. Seems to be working so far. Whilst I’m worried about her spending too much time on the computer, it’s hard to deny what a great tool it is for education and entertainment. Even now, on sites as simple as minimini.pl she’s having to read things to be able to play the games so it not only teaches her how to use a computer but also helps her reading skills and lots more besides. Right now she’s found a game where you can dress up a girl in all kinds of different clothes, including shoes and handbags of course! Oh well, it has to happen sometime. Next week she’ll be setting up her Facebook account I expect!

Any good recommendations on web sites for six year old girls would be most welcome.