fornax.net

I said recently that we were never rude to our customers back when I was working at Adelaide Uni.

However, I must confess that I did once lose my temper, and while I didn’t exactly shout, I did raise my voice and speak in a somewhat unkind way.

I think, however, it was justified. The person in question came in, and asked to use a computer. About five minutes later, they asked for some help, because their files had “disappeared” from their disk.

So, I went over, and took a look. The first thing I did was to check in the file manager that the disk really was empty – I saw plenty of cases where an “empty” disk was simply a symptom of the customer not knowing how to display the contents of the disk. That’s fair enough – not everyone knew how to do that on a computer that wasn’t set up the same way as the one they would normally use.

However, when I did this, the floppy disk drive made an odd noise. Not the kind of noise you expect when reading a disk, and not that kind of “chunking” noise it makes when a disk’s FAT is corrupted. It was a different noise. Kind of, well, slow sounding. I ejected the disk. It was sticky.

It turns out that they’d had their disk in their bag along with an icecream, which had melted. I suggested that perhaps they should have given more thought to how appropriate it might be to put a wet, sticky, icecream covered disk into an expensive computer.

Only, perhaps not as kindly as that.

I spent something like seven years at university, and for most of them, I worked for the Adelaide University Union’s Computer Resource Centre.

At the time, the University of Adelaide didn’t provide any kind of centralised, standardised computing facilities – it was up to each faculty to provide computers (as, and if, required) for their students. As a result, the Resource Centre was the one place where students who struggled with technology could turn to for help, and for specialist services like document binding, cheap photocopying onto overhead transparencies, and helping PhD students recover their one and only copy of their dissertation — due next week — that they have saved on a $1 floppy disk that’s now gone bad.

Apart from the satisfaction of helping other students, and the fact the job paid my rent, the best thing about working there was the camaraderie with the other staff. We had these little rituals that we’d all follow – like using certain phrases to relieve the stress of dealing with some of our more challenging clients (without ever being rude, of course!). One of these rituals was to always correct people who came with a stack of printed sheets, and would ask "Ummm, can I get this binded?" We would always reply "No, but you can get it bound."

As a result, seeing this in the Metro recently made me a little nostalgic…

Every season in The Sopranos, Silvo becomes more and more of a parody of the stereotypical mafioso.

On Saturday, I went into Currys (uuuugh), to pick up a cheap DVD player for Cathy – so that she doesn’t have to try and deal with mucking about with my Archos just to be able to watch a simple DVD – and I found myself confronted with a sales assistant who, apparently, is the greatest parody of the clueless, uneducated sales assistant who could care less about you ever conceived.

Me: “Excuse me please, I’m looking at DVD players. There are two here that I am interested in, but only one of them has a price tag. Could you please tell me what the differences between the two models are?”

Him: “Well, this one’s more expensiver, innit.”

On enquiring what the differences were other than which one was the more “expensiver”, he simply walked off without saying anything, leaving me to try and figure out the differences by myself for 10 minutes. On his return, a series of blank looks and shrugs suggested that he had been unable to find out anything about either model in this time, so I simply asked for the “cheaperer” one, assuming that any place staffed by people this clueless would be easy to push about if I had managed to buy something that wasn’t suitable.

The player is great.

There are reasons why giant companies crush the little guy, despite the fact that everyone likes the little guy, and wants to see him do well. It all comes down to giant companies being cheap, and convenient. That’s why you shop at Tesco instead of the corner grocer, baker and butcher, right? It’s got everything you want to buy, and it’s cheap. No running about to different places to get everything, no wondering if it’s going to be cheaper elsewhere.

Of course, if the giant can’t get it right though, you’ll go back to the little guy, because you’d rather see him do well, and if you’re not going to get the benefits that come with killing the little guy off, there’s no way you’ll continue to do so.

So, with that in mind, today I say goodbye to Amazon. I got an email from them telling me they were unable to deliver my books. You’re kidding, right? To me, at work? We have our name on the door, for crying out loud, with a little button beside our name that you press, and an office with 50+ people to answer that button when you press it, and let you into the building to come to reception, where someone will take packages from you and sign for them, even if I’m not in the office at the time. How can you possibly manage to be “unable to deliver”?

Right. I’m off to the local bookstore.

It’s Monday evening. It was a long day, after a big weekend. You didn’t get a chance to have your coffee. You’re tired, and grumpy. You’re arguing on your phone with your girlfriend. The streets are busy. I’m in front of you, and I’m annoying you, because I’m not going fast enough, but you can’t get past because of the people.

Finally, there’s a gap. You step around me, as I stop. You grunt, clearly even more annoyed now than you were before.

Somehow, despite all those distractions and annoyances, your brain does something remarkable. Your feet stutter, and you stop too.

But you ignore the amazing thing that your brain has done without you even thinking about it, and you override it, and you start walking again.

Luckily for you, the driver I’ve seen racing down the street, trying to make the green light facing him before it goes away, is paying more attention than you, and with a scream of rubber on asphalt, your life carries on.

When walking around town, try being more aware of the cars – the next driver you try that trick on might have had the same day that you just had.

Genius!

From the Guardian:

"This was a collective freeze not seen since the last Ice Age, although you suspect a woolly mammoths XI might have fancied its chances of putting on more than 60 runs for the last nine wickets."

Along with all programmers out there, I’d know how to change what I do during the day to meet performance goals if my pay depended on it. Sure, I wouldn’t be happy that I was spending my day faking it just to get paid – I’d much rather be working on something useful and interesting. But if the boss wants performance targets met, the boss will get performance targets met. That’s why setting targets won’t make things better.

(No, work hasn’t done anything crazy like setting performance targets! )

Of course, I’ve never thought the phenomenon of performance goals reducing performance would be limited to situations where people are sitting in a office. Inspector Gadget writes:

"Chief Inspector at the briefing: ‘I donit want any further arrests for Section 5 of the Public Order Act in this town. This offence gets counted as a violent crime, and we
are over our targets for violent crime. Just get in between them and push them apart if they start fighting.’"

Yep, that sounds exactly like what happens when you set performance targets to me.

From the Guradian:

"…it was still like watching a bunch of mountaineers trying to scale Everest wearing Speedos and flipflops. They managed to pass a few landmarks in the foothills, but they ran out of oxygen just past the halfway mark and long before the summit was in sight."

Congratulations, David!

I wouldn’t have worried about the maths and science though, mate. I did do them in year 12, but I’d forgotten it all by the time I needed it.

Of course, I was only working part-time when I did my degree, so that’s pretty impressive.

So, once again, nice one!