Train Strikes
Posted: Thu 13 August, 2009 Filed under: Cynicism, Stupidity, Travel 1 Comment »While I can’t deny I’m pleased to see that the current train strikes that have been affecting us in Norfolk/Suffolk have been suspended, in a lot of ways I think it’s a great shame that National Express East Anglia have capitulated to the union’s demands at all.
Interestingly, neither the RMT or ASLEF sites actually detail what the deal was that they were trying to get. That in itself says to me that they know it was unreasonable – after all, why not try and gain support and understanding from the public if they’re really so hard done by?
The BBC mentioned some of the requests in one story, as follows…
National Express managers say the unions want a 2.5% pay rise, a four-day working week and a 4% increase in the number of train drivers.
Although as that’s from National Express managers, I can’t really say it’s 100% accurate, obviously. This story from the Guardian in 2002 suggests that the average train driver’s salary was around £30,000 seven years ago, along with 35-40 days holiday a year. MySalary estimates an average train-driver’s salary in 2009 as £35,000.And that’s before we consider overtime etc. as well.
That £35,000 is a good figure. In this area (excluding Cambridge) the average salary is around £19-20,000. Hard to have sympathy for people striking about wanting more money when they’re already on nearly double the regional average, isn’t it?
Additionally, the strikes of the last three weeks have been counter-productive in other ways. I don’t know of anyone who’s had sympathy for the train drivers, and I wonder how many people have decided that actually it’s more reliable to use their own transport (or car-pool or whatever) rather than relying on the train “service”. If that’s the case in a significant number of people, the train service has fewer paying customers, reducing the income to the company – which reduces their ability to pay the drivers.
How much have the strikes cost National Express? I don’t know – but again it’s going to be a significant figure. It has to be, due to dropping all but a handful of services. (I think they ran six to/from Norwich each day, instead of the usual 60+) Roughly speaking, that’s 10% of the income they would normally get. Yes, I know it’s a rough figure, but it’ll do.
If I were on the board of National Express, I would do three things.
- Tell the unions to get stuffed, that their actions had cost National Express £x00,000, so that was the figure that we’d be cutting the salary budget by.
- Look at how I could get extra drivers in (even perhaps train-drivers from the continent, or ones who had retired, but wanted some extra cash for a few days work) in order to run the service still. Hell, I’d possibly even look at organising a pool of standby-drivers – casual labour, but trained up and fully current.
I wonder whether you could get away with offering train-drivers a cash sum or extra money to break the strike and do their job. Not a salary-rise, but just a loyalty-bonus for sticking with the company. That one would be fun… - Finally, I’d have been completely up-front, and made it highly public about what deal National Express were offering, vs. what the unions wanted. I’d put the entire deal in the public eye, and see what the reaction was then.
I think that if those things had been done – and particularly number three – it would’ve made for a really interesting situation, where the unions could see what the public thought of them.
Mind you, that’s probably why I’ll never be on the board of a company like National Express – I suspect my way of handling things would be a bit confrontational for their tastes.
It’s still a pity that they seem to have compromised to any degree with the demands, though.
Cutting Down on Waste
Posted: Thu 6 August, 2009 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Green, Stupidity, Thoughts 3 Comments »In the news today, there’s a piece about a Plymouth dairy that’s encouraging its customers to use “Milk Bags” – recyclable bags of milk, and a reusable ‘jug’ holding the bags.
According to the story,
Dairy spokesman Richard Pryor said customer research showed people wanted inexpensive and convenient ways to reduce the amount of rubbish they put in their dustbins.
“This development is another important step in reducing the environmental burden of the 130,000 tonnes of plastic used in milk packaging every year,” he said.
Obviously, Dairy Crest in Devon are using plastic bottles for delivering milk.
But it occurs to me, surely the single best way of reducing that tonnage of plastic used in milk packaging is to go back to using glass bottles instead of plastic ones?
Our milk gets delivered every other day (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) to the door in glass bottles. At the same time, the driver collects our used (and washed) bottles, and takes them to be reused. No ‘rubbish’ relating to the milk – the foil bottle tops go in the recycling bin.
On the (exceptionally rare) occasions when a bottle breaks, it gets put into the glass box, to go to the local bottle bank next time we’re in that direction. Again, no landfill, no waste – it’ll get recycled into a glass ‘something else’.
So, who is it who does our milk deliveries? Yep, it’s Dairy Crest – the same ones who deliver in plastic in Plymouth.
Migrating Contacts
Posted: Mon 3 August, 2009 Filed under: Geeky, Getting Organised, iPhone, Stupidity, Technology Leave a comment »As I said yesterday, one of the more interesting challenges with Herself’s new iPhone was getting the contacts to transfer across from her old Samsung G600 phone to the iPhone.
When it comes to contacts and phonebooks, Samsung are – to be polite about it – bloody awful. They don’t support useful standards like SyncML (basically a standard set of markup for addresses, contacts etc.) and instead stick to their own proprietary method. And their phones really don’t like giving up their data. In this case, it wouldn’t even send the information via BlueTooth, or save the details from the phone onto the SIM in order to transfer that across.
In short, a fucking abysmal experience when it comes to transferring away from a Samsung phone to anything else. (If memory serves, even Samsung to Samsung is a pain in the arse, let alone Samsung to anything else)
On my Sony-Ericsson phone, I can regularly sync the phonebook up to an online service called Zyb, who make the entire process pretty painless for phones that support SyncML. It also gives you a backup of the entire contacts database, which can be useful if (for example) you lose your phone, or have it stolen. They’re now owned by Vodafone, but in a fit of surprising sanity, Vodafone haven’t locked out non-Vodafone users from the service.
Through Zyb, when I upgraded my phone at the end of last year, importing the contacts etc. took ten minutes, and was one of the smoothest examples of that procedure I’ve ever done.
Anyway, on checking, it turns out the Zyb supports the iPhone – so that seemed to be the way to go.
After that, the process was fairly simple.
- Sign up Herself with an account at Zyb
- Install the iPhone app for Zyb (they even provide a link to it in the sign-up process, so it includes all the information necessary)
- Type in all the contacts from Herself’s Samsung, setting it up with correct addresses, merging mobile/contact/home/work numbers into one contact where necessary
- When done (about an hours work) sync the Zyb contacts onto the iPhone
- Job done.
Of course, if Samsung supported SyncML (or any other decent service) then it would’ve been a max of ten minutes to sort out. As it was, it took an hour. It could’ve been worse – far, far worse – if we’d been trying to do it via SIM or BlueTooth and then had to reorganise everything on the iPhone.
How not to do it
Posted: Sat 25 July, 2009 Filed under: Advertising, Customer Services, Cynicism, Geeky, Security, Stupidity, Technology, Toyota IE | Tags: ian corbett, toyota ie Leave a comment »This post has been deleted, on the request of Ian Corbett, Marketing Manager of Toyota Ireland, and his legal advisers.
For more explanation, see here.
Mis-Spelling
Posted: Fri 24 July, 2009 Filed under: Cynicism, Security, Stupidity, Thoughts 2 Comments »Yesterday, I got three spam emails attempting to go phishing for my log-in details.
Now, as I’ve said before many times, I feel that anyone who responds through these phishing emails deserves everything they get for being a bell-end and clicking on links in random emails. (Particularly when they then go to some very odd URLs that have nothing to do with the bank in question – in this case www.mybank.alliance-leicesterXXX.com)
And if anyone responded to any of these particular three emails, then they’re even more deserving of getting ripped off. In fact I’d then go so far as to simply term it as an idiot tax.
Because the subject line for all of these email addresses was :
Secure Message from Alliance & Liecester
And if you don’t spot that in the email, and still click on the links, you damn well deserve to lose your information/money.
Overheating
Posted: Tue 21 July, 2009 Filed under: Animals, News, Stupidity, Thoughts Leave a comment »I didn’t comment at the time when the story first broke, but I’m really pleased to see today that the police officer whose dogs died in a car outside the headquarters for Nottinghamshire Police is to be charged with causing unnecessary suffering to the animals.
Obviously no-one outside the situation knows the full story of what happened – yet. Regardless, it’s hard to imagine any dog owner – let alone the owner/trainer of two police dogs – just leaving their dog(s) in a car on a hot day. Personally, I don’t understand how anyone can let it happen.
I don’t care whether you’re in a meeting, or get called into something “important”, if it’s that hot and you know you’ve left dogs out in the car, you say so and then get out to make sure they’re OK. It’s that simple. Of course, ideally you’ve not got dogs in the car on a day like that anyway, but sometimes it does happen.
But whatever happens, if your job is based around animals, you simply don’t let those animals die (or suffer) needlessly.
Think 25
Posted: Mon 6 July, 2009 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Security, Stupidity 2 Comments »Over the weekend, I noticed that Sainsbury’s (and, I assume, the other supermarkets) are now operating a “Think 25” policy, where if you’re buying items that are prohibited under a certain age, you’ll get asked for ID first.
What items are we talking about? Well, to my knowledge – and this isn’t a comprehensive list, although I could probably find one if I tried – it consists of :
- Cigarettes (18 or over – it used to be 16, but changed in October 2007)
- Alcohol (18 or over)
- Blades – knives, razor-blades etc. (18 or over)
It used to be that if you looked under eighteen, you’d be asked for ID. Fair enough – 18 was the limit for most of the age-limited items.
Then the stores started getting paranoid about customers who just “looked” 18 getting through the system, so they invoked the “Check 21” policy, where even though you were legally allowed to buy said products, if you looked up to three years older than that, you would still get asked for ID – and not allowed to purchase the products if you didn’t have ID.
Now they appear to be even twitchier about it, and the “ask for ID” limit is 25 – and that’s if you look 25, not whether you are or not. So a whole seven years more of being asked for ID.
And the really stupid bit? The entire thing is voluntary – which means it’s perfectly legal for the only-just 18 till-person to sell the (for example) beer, but ask ID of someone who looks up to seven years older before they can sell it.
Totally barmy.