Reburgered
Posted: Mon 17 July, 2017 Filed under: BurgerCrawl, Customer Services, Domestic, Food, London, People, Solo Dining, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »Last weekend, I went to one of my favourite food places in London, Mac and Wild. (OK, I went to a couple of my favourite places, but that’s a different story) They had a special burger on, which was only happening ’til yesterday, and I wanted to try it.
I ordered it (along with their cocktail of the month) and everything arrived and was lovely. As expected.
But then I saw other people’s photos of their Murray burgers, and mine was… different. I had assumed that the black pudding was mixed into the patty, which gave it a really deep meaty taste without being a dollop of black pudding – but all the photos had a layer of black pudding on them.
So I mentioned this to Mac and Wild on Twitter, along with the above photo. And within a couple of hours they’d come back to me, saying “Oops, looks like you had the Highlander instead of the Murray Mound. We’re really sorry – if you can make it in before the 15th, we’ll do you one for free“. Note, I hadn’t asked for this, nor expected anything at all. So already I’m pretty impressed.
As I was already planning to be back in London on Saturday, I took them up on that offer.
And bloody marvellous it was, too.
Now, I did pay for the burger – because I insisted on doing so. Mistakes happen, and I’m fine with that. And I don’t feel like it was fair to get a freebie for a simple mistake – I love Mac and Wild anyway, so it was actually the simple offer, and the speed of it, that impressed me, rather than getting free food.
It’s that service (well, and the excellent food!) that keeps me going to places like Mac and Wild – they always give the impression that they give a damn. To have gone straight to “Oops, sorry” rather than arguing the toss, to accept and own the mistake and make amends for it, that’s impressive.
And long may that continue.
PIDU – Ill-prepared
Posted: Mon 10 July, 2017 Filed under: Domestic, Getting Organised, I Don't Understand, London, People, Thoughts, Travel, Weirdness Leave a comment »As I’ve said before, I tend to be ridiculously early for things, primarily so I know it’s all sorted well in advance.
However, I find it utterly amazing how many people appear to be so chronically ill-prepared for just about anything and everything in their lives.
My primary office is near(ish) to the local test centre for the theory part of the UK driving test. By “nearish” I mean “it’s walking distance, in a straight line, but over a significant road, so maybe five minutes walk”. On a regular basis I get stopped outside my office, and asked where the test centre is, by people obviously already running late, and get this “Oh shit” look when I tell them it’s still five minutes away. These tests are renownedly run punctually, and they don’t have much tolerance for lateness – but from memory, it makes all that very clear on the paperwork that tells you where the test is to be taken.
So because they haven’t checked where they’re supposed to be, they’re now running the risk of not even being allowed to take the test – and you don’t get a refund on it for being late and/or disorganised. I’ve never seen it as all that difficult to do, to be in the right place at the right time, but it’s obviously an issue for some people.
Similarly, a couple of weeks back I was with friends in London, and their son was meeting other friends of his so they could go to a concert/festival thing in Hyde Park. We’d got other plans once he was in the venue, but they were somewhat dependent on the friends actually having IQ points of their own. They’re similarly pathologically early to me, which helps – but the son’s friends…. weren’t.
Despite the concert tickets telling them where they needed to be, which entrance to use and so on, they decided to turn up to the wrong Underground station, at the wrong time, and at the wrong entrance. There’d been no preparation, no thought, not even an understanding of how best to get around, yet still left it all to the last minute, as if expecting some fairy godmother to wave a wand and everything would be All Right.
And it kind-of was. They got there, and we got to where we were going, but a couple of minutes late. (Anyone else, it would’ve been late by twenty minutes or more, but we can all shift our arses when necessary) So it did work out OK, but only because we knew more about where they were than they did, and walked the extra to find the fucking idiots.
All told, it’s just an attitude I don’t understand. I know I’m at the opposite end of the scale, but still, it never seems that difficult to me, to be prepared, to know what you’re doing, and get wherever on time. But obviously it’s more of a challenge for others…
Fixing Things
Posted: Wed 5 July, 2017 Filed under: Bankruptcy, BT, Business, Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Rebuilding, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »So far, this year has involved a number of customer service clusterfucks, some of which I’ve mentioned on here, and it looks like a number of those issues are now on the way to being sorted, thankfully.
That list includes
- The Cat boots – successfully returned to manufacturer, and a replacement pair are (apparently) on the way
- The Credit Card company – seems to be sorted, with outstanding issues rectified.
- My Accountants – this has been something that’s been ongoing for a year or more, where they’re just ridiculously slack and uncommunicative. If it weren’t for the fact that they’ve been free (for the last 18 months!) then I’d have moved on well before now.
The free stuff is a story of its own, but basically when I complained to director level at the end of 2015, they told me I wouldn’t be charged until they’d fixed the issues. Eighteen months later, the issues are still there, although having had some productive conversations with the Operations Director, I think they’re turning the corner at last! - BT – Hopefully, that’ll be sorted today. The engineer is due between 8am and 1pm, and fingers crossed things will be sorted.
There’s a couple of other things coming up that so far seem positive, but I’m waiting for them to come through properly before I write about them.
All told though, yeah, it’s all feeling a bit more fixed and positive.
Slow Roads
Posted: Wed 21 June, 2017 Filed under: Business, Domestic, Driving, Getting Organised, M1, People, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »Every so often I have a day where I just want it to be over – not in any kind of self-harm way, just when a lot of things have turned to shit, and all I want is to go home.
Unsurprisingly, today has been one of those days.
It started OK – it was cooler last night, so I actually got some sleep. I’d got a meeting down near Reading, so once I was awake at 6am, I left to get down there while avoiding the worst of the rush-hour traffic, and aiming to be down in Reading before it even really started. That mission was kind-of successful, in that I was down there by 8.30 – but still, it took two and a half hours to do a journey that I can do on a weekend in an hour, or just over.
The meeting itself went OK, and I’ve got a bundle of work to do, which will make life entertaining.
Afterwards, fortunately I checked routes home on my phone, and found that the M1 had been completely closed due to a fatal accident. It’s an area I know pretty well, so I knew I’d got a bundle of cross-country routes I could take, and that’s what I did.
However, it seemed like every single part of that route, I was preceded by slow-moving drivers who had nowhere to go, or no desire to get there. The entire way back was spent going at 30 or 40mph on roads where the limit was 60, and all on what turned out to be the hottest June day in more than forty years – warm to the point where even the car’s air-conditioning wasn’t really managing anything. (I may need to look at re-gassing it, but we’ll see)
All told, the journey home took two and a half hours – most of which was just due to being so much slower than I would’ve been on quiet/non-busy roads.
So, by the end of it, I was just wanting to be home, for it all to be over and done with.
It’s going to be the first day in several months where I haven’t achieved my steps-per-day walking target – I could still have done it, but frankly, with the temperature and everything else, I just couldn’t be arsed. In fairness, I’m already well up on the week’s target anyway, so a day off is perfectly doable (and I’m doing a bigger walk at the weekend too) but still, it’s also the first time in ages where I’ve had a day with such levels of failure to be arsed.
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
Posted: Fri 16 June, 2017 Filed under: Day Trips, Domestic, London, Reviews(ish), Theatre, Theatre, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »Following on from a friend of mine seeing it, I decided to have a look and see if there were any tickets still available for “The Resistible Rise of Arturo UI” at the Donmar Warehouse on the date I was available in London with no solid plans. (Last Saturday) As it turned out, there was – just one ticket apparently “near the back”. That’s OK, I’m tall, so yep, ticket successfully obtained.
As usual with my theatre trips, I knew absolutely sod-all about the play. Indeed, I’d never even heard of it before the previous weekend. That doesn’t bother me anyway, and armed with a decent review from someone whose opinion I tend to trust, I was willing to go for it. All I knew was the name, and that it was by Bertolt Brecht.
And I’m really glad I did. The original play is an allegory based around the rise of Hitler in Germany, but using the gangsters of 1920s/1930s America to tell the story. It’s been updated a bit – there were lots of references to Trump and his collaborators, along with an (odd but effective) sung intro to each major scene, using modern(ish) songs.
It’s very hard to not see the parallels between Nazi Germany and Trump’s rise, so it all felt very relevant. But still interesting in a lot of ways.
The entire of the Donmar Warehouse has been changed for this production, and it’s been made into a 20s/30s speakeasy. As you walk in, the actors are already on ‘stage’ talking, dancing and the like. It certainly made things more interesting, having Lenny Henry come round in character as the club owner, talking to – and shaking the hands of – all the guests, as well as other cast members doing the rounds.
As an aside, one thing that was great was that a lot of the audience around me were a group of visually-impaired people, coming to the theatre for a play that would also be audio-described for them by a company called TalkingSense – and as it turned out, I got talking to one of the narrators, who was sat next to me for the first half, before going to narrate the second half. I thought it was brilliant to open up theatre in this way (and I also liked that Arturo Ui managed to use one of the visually-impaired people as his ‘witness’ for one section)
Ah yes, the audience participation. This was something really interesting, and not something I’d expected at all – this version of the play makes great use of the audience. In the photo above you can see a gallery with people on it – in the second half, these become the jury for a court case, with the judge sat in the middle. Another audience member became the railroaded ‘accused’, and by the end of the play everyone is involved, either standing in support of Ui’s bid to be the main gangster (sorry, “protector”) or sitting – in which case their votes don’t count.
Note – I’m not giving away anything major here – and the production ends tomorrow!
Lenny Henry is particularly impressive as the titular gangster, developing through the production. But he’s also well supported by a generally excellent cast – all of whom also seem to be enjoying taking part in the play. (Which isn’t always the case)
All told, it’s a very dark vision of life – yet also extremely funny. I laughed a lot more than I would have ever expected to, in a play based on the rise of Nazi-ism. If the run were longer, I’d probably enjoy going to see it again. It’s quite a thing.
Parking Distances
Posted: Fri 9 June, 2017 Filed under: 1BEM, Cynicism, Domestic, Driving, Milton Keynes, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »One of the things I like about working (and travelling) in Milton Keynes is their attitude towards parking, along with a nice dose of apparent cynicism and understanding of human nature/lazyness.
Milton Keynes has been pretty much designed around the use of cars (I know, it wasn’t originally so, but the New Town concept pretty much was) and thus there’s a lot of parking available. Sure, the city gets busy, but there’s usually parking spaces available.
The great thing though – in my opinion – is that they organised (and priced) the parking according to proximity to the main areas that people use. So the parking spaces that are the closest to the high-footfall areas are the highest-priced. If you go a bit further out – by which I mean a block, not miles – then the price is about a quarter of the highest-rate, which seems like a valid reward for being prepared to walk a bit more.
Note : I’m aware that this could also affect those with disabilities and mobility issues, but there are mobility and disabled spaces right next to the main areas, and they’re not at the high rates.
Down near the train station, there’s a great example. The closest car-park to the station now charges £8 for the day. But if you go to the next one – literally, the other side of the (dual-carriageway) road – then it’s £4. And if you’ve got a Milton Keynes Employee permit (which will be the subject of a separate post) then it’s even less – £2.40. So an extra distance of maybe 20 yards can save at least 50% of the parking cost.
As a plan and concept, it understands human nature and lazyness, and take some advantage of it. I think that’s brilliant, to be honest.