The world of Information Technology overflows with its arcane jargon and acronyms, but it is by no means, the sole offender of creating inpenetrable and mysterious language.

I was recently driving along and saw this displayed on the dot-matrix on the back of a bus...



...and whilst admiring the rendition of the letters on the display and pondering dot densities and the like, I then spent precious minutes attempting to work out what it was actually trying to say, and where was the bus going?

There is a lot of talk about reducing street clutter at one moment, and then, again, increasing confusion within the driver's mind to make them slow down

coincidentally, Hans Monderman , the proponent of "Shared Space", died earlier this year, but that is another tangent

but this new FLA certainly did the latter, and none of the former for me!

As I overtook and looked in my mirror, Eureka, the bus was heading for the depot, and proudly displaying "Sorry, Not In Service" on the long display at the front.

Yes, the transport types have invented a new word-thing and foisted on us unsuspecting general public who really didn't need it and shouldn't be spending our time working out what it means. This particular word-thing should really only be used amongst consenting transport types and anoraks, and I don't really mind if the bus people use it as a verb,

"OK, guys, we'll SNIS this bus and bring on the relief"

just as long as they don't do it in front of the children.

In my humble opinion, this display below would have worked better, and would probably have meant more to a large part of the world that uses the Roman alphabet...

I stayed in an bizarre hotel in Kensington last week and was rather struck by the immense length of the central corridor, and odd green-ness of the lights, creating an institutional, Soviet/Stalinist feel to the place, and the sense that you could walk and walk and never find your room...



...which brings me, of course, to carpets of which this place had many, many hectares.

Carpet stores have always seemed to me to be one of the last hangouts of stone-age man, well, stone-age marketing anyway.

Apart of the never-ending sales, and boring adverts, they seem to harbour troglodytes who have not worked out that it might just be better to treat their customers with a little bit of intelligence. The most insulting manifestation of this is the latest wheeze, the "cut, and then cut some more" sale pricing.

Carpetright have a great deal advertised at the moment at the local store...

An interesting aside is that if you go to the Carpetright website and right-click your mouse, instead of the normal menu, you get a big Copyright notice, not obvious what they have to protect so assidiously

50% and then 20% more is, of course, supposed to make us think they are cutting prices by 70%, but, no, by a clever trick of arithmetic it is only 60% (the 20% only applies to something already cut in half).

"Carpet Stupidity" more like...

Over the weekend, I was very nearly forced to hand out an "Unhappy Voucher"  after a foray into Mobile madness.


Not quite in Norse saga territory, but after getting my daughter's mobile phone replaced three times (cracked keys, random turning-off, etc., etc..), I finally gave in, consigned the not so old phone to Silicon Heaven, bought a new model on some cute subsidised deal, put the SIM in the Box of Many Identities, and handed over the new toy.  

So imagine my surprise, when,  a week later, I was ambushed whilst staggering to the kettle for the first coffee of the day: "My phone's dead, the display has gone"..... I said "Hnnh"

So there I was, standing in the shop, bristling..........it had all kicked off after the Sales Slug had rejected  my reasonable replacement request, and I asked to see the Manager, and  Dismal turned up...

Me: ....phone broken.....screen blank......Slug......packaging......not necessary.....in the bin.  Please could you replace it for me?
Dismal: Sorry,  we can't replace the phone without all the original packaging
Me: ...gone in the bin ...
Dismal: Well we can't replace the phone without the original packaging
Me: Yes, you can
Dismal: No we can't
Me: Yes you can
..
Dismal: We could go on like this all day.  You're not listening to me
Me: Yes, I am, I just think you're wrong
Dismal: Are you calling me a liar?  - Great customer service, this, I thought
Me: No, just mistaken

(Dismal taps on keyboard)

Dismal: I've typed here - advised customer of policy, blah, blah, .no packaging, need to order a handset and battery - OK so they can replace the phone without the packaging, but he's going to make me wait a long  time

(Tapping, more tapping, grunt, much more tapping, visit to the stockroom, more tapping, another visit to the stockroom - comes back with new phone in box looking unhappy)

Dismal: We haven't any handsets and batteries in stock, so I will have to take a new phone out of its box and send back the old one...

Yesssss!

Humanity - 1, Forces of Customer Service Evil - Nil

In an idle moment in a place I cannot recall, but may have been the local takeaway, I read the Daily Express, an unusual event.  And I read an article entitled "CANCER RISK OF JUST TWO GLASSES OF WINE A DAY"  which demonstrated exactly why not the read the Daily Express if you wish to retain your sanity.

This is how the Express sensitively rendered the story...


The particular issue raised by this non-news story has been rolling around the back of my brain for a while, however the creative forces have been battling with perfectionist tendencies, fending off a full research project on the many different life risks, probabilities thereof, and the mechanisms of converting annual probabilities into life-time ones, and all manner of analytical delights.

So to break the log-jam (and get a life in between), I have crayoned  the issue, rather than the full Powerpoint...



You can find all sorts of stats around the web about the probability of different life risks if you look - here and here, for example, and tease out interesting, contrarian nuggets.  Such as,  drowning is much more likely than a fatal dog attack, yet  there are many strait-jacketing laws on dangerous dogs, but no UK inland rescue force to save people who fall in the water, which paradox seems to defy common-sense.

The issue in the case of the Australian report is that the risk that is being increased by 75% is diddly-squat to start with, and (Diddly-Squat * 1.75) = Sweet FA (in the Maths of Pointless Numbers).  It is undoubtedly bad if it actually happens, but the probability is not something you can, or should, let dictate your life.

I suppose headlines like "Medicos issue report about irrelevant statistical findings that don't matter" don't sell papers, so  there must be people who enjoy a little frisson of fear, panic and anxiety over their breakfast corn flakes, and prepared to read the Express to get it....

The human brain is constructed so that it is very good at seeing patterns (even where there are none), and so "coincidentally" after my previous spat on the same topic, I have been suffering my own version of Call Centre hell this week - just trying to book an engineer to come and mend our ailing tumble-drier.

Last year, just about this time, I fell for the pitch of Domestic & General who sold me a three-in-one policy for kitchen equipment breakdowns. And so it came to pass that the Tumble Drier started thrashing itself to pieces, just after the renewal letter came through.

All should have been smooth: "direct debit", "you need to do nothing", "renew automatically" were the comforting phrases in the letter. Tchah!

To cut a long story short I lost a few precious hours of my life listening to on-hold music and all that other stuff, and then when I got through it was "that fine, just call blah on this number, oh, thats strange the policy has been renewed but the equipment shows it is lapsed, let me put you on hold"...

So clearly the renewal process had gone all agly, creating an insurance curate's egg, in fact.

But the cherry on the cake was when I received a very cheerful automated email from D&G below...



Renew for a penny? Hmmm, aha, the light dawns, something has gone wrong with their arithmetic. Last years price was £119.88, nicely divisible by 36 (3 boxes x 12 months), this years price (up, of course) is £131.88 - oh dear, divide that by 36 and you get lots of 33333333333333333333333333s on the end. Add in a bit of truncation and you have a nice little problem building up. If they had charged me £131.76, maybe things would have turned out differently.

Nothing as serious as the Patriot missile failure, or crash of Mars Climate orbiter (Imperial/Metric System confusion), or others of that ilk , but my very own personalised, computerised, automated rounding error.

Aside: Spreading the cost of the £0.01 by direct debit. I laughed so much I nearly died....

I clicked on the button, of course, I had to, in for a penny in for a penny, so to speak; to see if I could make the whole problem go away, but a "technical error" on the web-site prevented me from completing the transaction!

So here is a little sign for the D&G development team to hang from their office wall to act as a reminder as they ply their daily toil...