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.

Our nod in the direction of independence today was a visit to the exhibition called “Wojenne rozstania”, which is held inside the university library. It chronicles the lives of various families that were forcibly relocated thanks to the ever changing moods and allegiances of that time. Some of the journeys are quite incredible.

Following that, and safely after all the pomp and circumstance had died down we wandered around the town. It was cold, dark (considering it was only 16:00), wet and windy. Not the ideal conditions for photography but I took the G9 along anyway.

Flying the flag

Parisian kiosk

Family admiring the Canaletto

One of my favourite views of Warsaw, across Piłsudski square

And rather ironically, given the yawning gap between Polish and British sense of pride in their nation, the only Union Jack was a broken umbrella laying with the trash!

Poland’s foreign minister has said the nation should knock down its socialist realist symbol, the Palace of Culture in Warsaw.

Radek Sikorski says Warsaw should tear down the Palace of Science and Culture – a gift from Stalin in the 1950s – which still dominates the Warsaw skyline, just as Germans destroyed the Berlin Wall 20 years ago.

In Sikorski’s opinion, the Palace of Science and Culture is a symbol of communism. Therefore, its demolition should also be symbolic, as was in case with the Russian Orthodox Church in Warsaw, which was demolished when Poland regained independence in 1918 after 120 years of partition.

PKiN, on shaky ground?

Here we go again! Will this debate never end? For as long as I’ve been here there has been a constant back and forth debate about whether the Palace of Culture and Science (PKiN) should be destroyed or not. For the same time there have been assorted options put forth as to what to do around the PKiN, assuming it remains standing. The net result is that nothing at all has been done to either the palace or the vast area surrounding it and so we’re living with a gradually deteriorating mess right in the heart of the city. I’m now at the point of saying “Make your minds up and do something, for goodness sake!”.

The PKiN is massive with internal volume of over 800,000 cubic metres and including 14,000 m2 of office space. It is in poor condition and so to keep it means spending a large sum in renovation costs. To remove it means spending a larger sum in demolition costs plus the cost of putting up something else to take its place. All this debate about whether to keep it or not is just the governments way of avoiding having to spend anything at all. They’re not even attempting to sell the thing for 1 PLN to a private developer to allow someone who will have the desire and funds to make it happen. Shame on them!

A few people have asked how Nelson the cat is. Well, he’s fine thanks. He’s now 14 months old, getting bigger every month and still a nutter!

Some pictures from this morning (click for larger version).

Zosia trying to strangle Nelson

Nelson and the doorstop

“Look, I’ve got a clown nose!”

Whilst on a business trip last year I took the opportunity to stay with some friends of ours who live in London. Their child was 4yrs old at the time and I was quite shocked at breakfast-time to see him all dressed up in full school uniform being taken for a day of “proper” education. It was such a contrast to where Zosia was at the same age, still at playschool, no uniform, quite informal.

Seeing things like this gets you wondering who’s got it right? Is Zosia missing out on a few years of well structured education that will prove to be an essential difference between her and her British counterparts, or is my friend’s child missing out on a few important years of just ‘being a kid’ without the formality of uniforms and geometry?

I can’t say we’ve been exercising any scientific process to determine how Zosia’s education is progressing in these early years but we do keep an eye on it. There have been the regular meetings at school with the teachers, which have given a good foundation of understanding that she’s doing well. More important has been to see her attitude at home evolving, her interest in reading, writing, maths, knowledge generally growing as time goes by and we try to help her to explore those things as and when she appears to be ready to do so. It does seem that the schooling she is getting here is matching her own development quite well. Zosia is therefore getting an education that is almost in tune, perhaps slightly behind, her own natural development, whereas my friend’s child in London appears to be getting a very much state (or parent) led education. (not unexpected for the world’s biggest nanny state!) What I don’t know is how the child is responding to that, nor what the longer term benefits or drawbacks of that will be. I’m sure he’s doing well, but is it natural and does this going against nature give any real benefits in the long run?

I then noticed this UK article in mid October, which really struck a chord with me:

Formal schooling should be delayed until children reach 6, according to the biggest review of primary education for more than 40 years. The Cambridge Primary Review, published today, says that five-year-olds should continue with the play-based curriculum used in nursery schools. Trying to teach literacy and numeracy at such an early age is “counterproductive” and can put children off school, according to the committee that produced the report. Successive governments’ insistence on the earliest possible start to formal schooling went against the grain of international evidence, he said. Children who started school at the age of 6 or 7 often overtook English pupils in tests of reading before the start of secondary education.

The UK government, from what I can tell, has been promoting a policy of pushing kids into formal education two years earlier than in Poland. In Poland the general rule was playschool ages 3-5, age 6 was ‘zerówka’ (zero class or what the Brits call ‘Primary reception class’) and then formal education starts at age 7. This year there has been a slight change with a suggestion that zerówka should be held in formal schools rather than playschools, as Zosia is doing, and I’d agree with that by way of ‘acclimatisation’. The UK however, is promoting the equivalent of zerówka in formal schools for 4yr old kids, which in my opinion is ridiculous.

Dame Gillian Pugh, who chaired the review’s advisory committee, said: “If you introduce a child to too formal a curriculum before they are ready, you are not taking into account where children are in terms of their learning and their capacity to develop.”

A separate review, by Sir Jim Rose, that was commissioned and accepted by the Government, called for four-year-olds to go straight into primary reception classes. But Sir Jim recommended that parents be able to defer their child’s entry to school by up to a year if they felt they were not ready.

There’s no way Zosia was ready to begin her formal schooling at age four and we need to remember that although zerówka is only a preparatory stage it is still a big change from playschool. Far more emphasis on preparing the children for the rigours of formal education (timing, discipline, structure) and therefore far less on socialising with her friends and just having fun. I fail to see how anyone can get a 4yr old kid to grasp the importance of most of the things they wish to educate them about, let alone get them to concentrate long enough for it sink in. Even if they were concentrating, are they really able understand what they are being taught? For sure at that age I would say they don’t really want to be educated nor do they care about how important any adult might think the subject is.

I therefore think the Polish system is just about right for the majority of kids. Let them be kids and socialise until age five. Let them transition age six, preferably in a formal school environment because the transition will not be complete without that – a sort of “school-light” – and then let battle commence at age seven. From our own experience anything more rapid than that would be unnatural, bring no benefits and possibly a few drawbacks in terms of social skills and general “happiness factor”.

Of course, your kid may well be a child genius who needs special treatment and I’m sure there are many of those around, at least in the parent’s eyes!?

It was 21C and sunny. Kaka, Ronaldo, etc, were stuffed 4-0 by “Farmhands United” in their last match (in the Kings cup).

The taxis are New York style with a bullet proof plastic barrier between passengers and driver. Within 3 minutes of leaving the hotel on the walk to the office I was stopped and asked for a cigarette (made me feel at home)!

Had some ‘jamon’ from special hairy black pigs that are fed nuts, this was accompanied by some nice cheese, bread with a tomato paste on it and a bottle of Rioja. The tapas lunch yesterday was equally tasty, if only you could get such a lunch here in Warsaw. Lunch hour seems to start at 14:00 over there.

The city gives every impression of being hit hard by the munch-crunch, largely because of their excesses in boom times. Nevertheless, I saw my first ever Porsche Panamera, so not everyone is suffering.