Category: oldblog

Slipping on peanut butter

Here’s a great bit of journalism on the mysterious death of dolphins in Cornwall:

There are several theories, including that the dolphins may have been upset by some sort of underwater disturbance.

So, er, the underwater creatures may – though we have no idea – have been upset by something under water that upset them.

I’m always reminded at times like this of my favourite bit in How to Get Ahead in Advertising:

Businessman 1: I see the police have made another lightning raid… Paddington drug orgy.
Priest: I suppose young girls was involved?
Businessman 1: (reading the newspaper) One discovered naked in the kitchen…breasts smeared with peanut butter. The police took away a bag containing 15 grams of cannabis resin… it may also contain a quantity of heroin.
Bagley: Or a pork pie.
Businessman 1: I beg your pardon.
Bagley: I said the bag may also have contained a pork pie.
Businessman 1: I hardly see a pork pie’s got anything to do with it.
Bagley: Alright then, what about a large turnip. It might also have contained a big turnip.
Priest: The bag was full of drugs.
Bagley: Nonsense.
Priest: The bag was full of drugs, it says so.
Bagley: The bag could’ve been full of anything. Pork pies, turnips, oven parts… it’s the oldest trick in the book.
Priest: What book?
Bagley: The distortion of truth by association book. The word is “may.” You all believe heroin was in the bag because cannabis resin was in the bag. The bag may have contained heroin, but the chances are 100 to 1 certain that it didn’t.
Businessman 1: A lot more likely than what you say.
Bagley: About as likely as the tits spread with peanut butter.
Businessman 2: Do you mind?
Priest: The tits WERE spread with peanut butter!

Posted on by Andrew Chapman

Will this do?

Five years on from the Personality Declaration Act 2009, we are in a position to evaluate the indubitable changes it has wrought on society.

A reminder of the background to the legislation – which itself obliges me at this point to declare my red status. Towards the end of 2008, the general populace was growing restless against the use of call centres for businesses to manage their customer relations. There was also a rising tide of complaints against shop floor staff in many retail outlets having no clear interest in or knowledge of the products they were selling (in the cases where they had not been replaced by electronic information points and automated tills).

In a White Paper, communications analyst James McCully proposed that customer service, from both sides of the fence, would be rendered much more effective if the customer were able to determine the level of sincerity of the salesperson or support operative and their personal investment in the matter in hand. He further proposed the use of Myers-Briggs Type Indicators, then still in vogue with human resources professionals, and ran trials in a number of large utility companies where software was used to determine the broad emotional nature of a calling customer (their emotional state was indicated by detecting stress patterns in the voice). The operative then appointed to handle the enquiry was chosen according to their own MTBI profile and how likely it was that they could help the customer (or get rid of them) without further emotional escalation.

To everyone’s surprise, the experiment was generally successful in terms of customer retention – but in practice around 80% of the work was allocated to only 20% of the customer service operatives. Only those with certain personality traits were likely to achieve a positive outcome.

The reader is likely to recall the next stage, a radical simplification of this process where all workers in a public-facing capacity – whether in person, online or as a skypist – were obliged to declare their ‘enthusiasm’, with the use of a statement such as ‘I am obliged to tell you I am personally invested in this company/product’, or its counterpart ‘NOT personally invested’. As with the MBTI experiment, the ratio of the former to the latter was something in the region of four to one. However, the new system threw up successful outcomes, even with the operatives ‘not invested’.

The simple reason was that customers could relate to an operative ‘just doing their job’ (as many were in the same situation in their own workplace) and forgive the lack of interest. To start with there were headlines along the lines of ‘STAFF URGED NOT TO BE BOVVERED’, but when the policy was enshrined in legislation, the journalists themselves were obliged to declare their motivation or lack thereof, and the threat of hypocrisy soon ironed out controversy.

The further simplification in 2012 of this system into a ‘traffic light’ system of ‘green’ and ‘red’ status (for enthusiasm or lack of it respectively) was even more popular and avoided the unwieldy jargon of ‘personal investment’ – although some foreign visitors for the Olympic Games were no doubt somewhat baffled.

Although ‘red’ staff achieved higher levels of customer satisfaction than hitherto, naturally the ‘greens’ remained more popular where detailed information or assistance was required, and they began to attract higher salaries. The occasional cases where members of the red group attempted to fake a green personality were soon weeded out with advances in the burgeoning field of neurorecruitment. Whether the minority of highly paid, ever-smiling and persistently helpful workers retains this popularity is for the future to tell.

This article was written largely with the assistance of Wal*Martopedia, “the free encyclopedia anyone green can edit” (TM). It took 20 minutes to compile and I have been paid 30 euros.

Posted on by Andrew Chapman 8

Three steps to heaven

Somewhere on the web today a young graphic designer ranted about how they hate their clients and the work they have to do for them, and wanted to know how to earn money by doing things they love and respect (they had a startlingly high opinion of their own skills). Someone responded with Hugh McLeod’s wise Sex and Cash theory. Today I give you a restatement of this in the form of…

Hat’s Three-Step Plan for Fulfilment
1. Do things you don’t like for money.
2. Do things you like for free.
3. On the occasions when you get money for doing something you like, count yourself lucky.

Anyway, I’m off to the pub for lunch now.

Posted on by Andrew Chapman 4

The music of the warming spheres

So, when I was coaxed out of the house last night, little did I know I’d end up discussing Borat with climate change guru Mark Lynas in a village pub.

It was after a talk he gave in the same village hall (Ramsden) where I went to a previous talk on climate change (which I wrote about here and here). Lynas is an excellent speaker and very accomplished at effortlessly marshalling bucketloads of data, as well as fielding complex questions without pause. He provides an admirably sane view of the whole issue, very much from the perspective of a scientist rather than a campaigner. My only worry is that he is over-optimistic about human psychology, ie a reliance on co-operation between nations (though I don’t really doubt that his solutions are at least possible). To me the issue smacks heavily of the prisoner’s dilemma, and the evidence from studies of that doesn’t suggest co-operation is a likely strategy for people in a world where fighting habitually takes precedence over common sense.

He’s also an entertainingly sarcastic sod, and it was fun talking with him. (I’ve only just discovered he was two years below me at Edinburgh, too). My lingering memory of the evening – other than the talk itself – is of the crazy, beer-filled notion of turning his book Six Degrees (a documentary version is being broadcast by National Geographic next week) into a musical. I can’t help thinking about it. It’s horrible, but it could almost work. Mark, get your people to talk to my people. Or, better, get them to sing.

Posted on by Andrew Chapman 12

I’m loading the gun now

So, in today’s post I had a letter from John Lewis, offering me insurance for our dishwasher two years after we bought it for ongoing “peace of mind”. Naturally, that the dishwasher might not have been covered any more has been nagging at me like something from Edgar Allen Poe, and it was only a matter of time before I went out and MURDERED SOMEONE WITH A TEASPOON when the pressure built up to an unbearable point.

But of course, what would really give PEACE OF BLOODY MIND is for people never ever ever ever to offer me insurance – which, like religion and charity-giving, I’m perfectly capable of seeking out when I bloody well want to, thank you, peace be with you.

So out of curiosity I googled for associations with the phrase “peace of mind” and the word insurance.

“peace of mind” insurance gives 1.98 million hits
“peace of mind” -insurance (ie excluding the latter term) gives 2.21m
“peace of mind” alone gives me 2.28m

I learn two things from this:
1. Insurance companies (or their copywriters) demonstrate a breathtaking embrace of cliché. Sadly this comes as no surprise.
2. Google can’t count, so it’s advanced search delimiters can’t really be trusted.

If someone could maybe insure me against Google giving me misleading results, perhaps then I would truly have peace of mind.

Posted on by Andrew Chapman 3

Self-portrait

Inspired by this morning’s discussion on Today between Prof. John Sutherland and Will Self about the merits or demerits of Harry Potter, I’ve taken the liberty of imagining a new Harry Potter story written by Self. You can listen to it here.


HARRY POTTER AND THE VISCERA OF KITTENS

By Will Self

Harry’s scar, like the brand of an adulterer, throbbed as he looked on with distaste at the shell-suited proles who fed him and longed for boarding school. As some weak, flapping archetype flew through the window and summoned him to Hogwarts, he cantered out onto Privet Drive in all its Ballardian glory with relief. He leapt onto the Knight Bus, only to see its ritually, colonially decapitated Jamaican helmsman steer it directly towards another coming in the opposite direction. “Wizard prang,” said Harry.

As luck would have it, in this Saturnalian world where children wield the wands heedless of Freud, the buses merely merged, and Harry found himself in the company of Ron and Hermione. Hermione’s grotesquely enlarged intellect pulsed as she summoned a spell to take them directly to Hogwarts in the blinking of a bat’s eye: Congestion chargium.

On the wuthering heights of the Hogwarts bridge of sighs, Voldemort dangled the flopping remains of Dumbledore over the edge of the abyss.

As the triumvirate arrived at Gryffindor, offered the password to the animated image on the wall and entered the warm incubator of their leatherine protectors that was the common room, they noticed an eerie silence in the place and sensed that darkness had come early this Christmas.

On the table was a baby cat, pinioned with a letter knife and accompanied by a note, which simply read: “Open me at the close. Sirius.” Ron’s face twisted into the rictus of a tractor-mangled squirrel in echo of the kitten’s plight. “It’s no good,” said Hermione as if suddenly blessed with the facility to ratiocinate, “we’ve got to do what must be done.”

Harry took the knife and weilded it from nose to tailtip, spilling the warm entrails in a single movement as swift as a Nimbus 2000. There upon the table, in the calligraphy of giblets, the augury was clear.

The trio flew at once to the bridge where Harry’s tritely externalised darker self held sway, and chanted together the incantation inspired by the kitten’s last sigh: Applicatum myxamatosis! The eyes of Tom Riddle, cypher, grew rheumy – but so did Harry’s as they merged into oblivion together.

The end.

Posted on by Andrew Chapman 4

Methodism in the madness

A few weeks ago someone suggested to me what’s needed to make people really wake up to climate change and the root-and-branch alterations to daily life it will inevitably demand is a new religion. I think, in a sense, we already have it.

Last night we went to Tom Dyson‘s excellent talk on climate change, which neatly summarised the main issues, tackled some of the criticisms, and advocated personal carbon rationing. Sitting there in Ramsden Memorial Hall, a beautiful converted barn with ancient beams gnarling across the ceiling, not to mention aided by the local brewery’s imaginative stimulant, I half found myself back in the 1740s. The occasion reminded me (I say ‘reminded’ – I mean, I’m getting on, but I’m not 300 years old) of the early days of Methodism, where small village groups would assemble to hear the new message.

The meeting had a mixture of locals of all ages, plus a bunch of us loyally going to swell Tom’s crowd, where most were already receptive or indeed converted to the message. In the Q&A afterwards, a few theological niceties, as it were, were discussed; and there were only one or two voices of dissent, notably one from a chap who thought the whole thing was highly suspicious, but nevertheless led perhaps one of the least carbon-consumptive lives of us all. I bet John Wesley met people like him too – people already living ‘the Way’ but deeply sceptical of imported justifications for it. One or two in the audience were perhaps even leaning towards the temperance movement in spirit.

Ever since the age of 12 when I harangued our school chaplain with unanswerable questions, I’ve been on the side of unbelief. But now, suddenly, that seems to have changed. All round the country, likeable lay preachers such as Tom are spreading the word; further afield, there are charismatic prophets such as George Monbiot (let’s leave aside Al Gore’s messianic tone for now). The difference, of course, is that the ‘revealed truth’ underpinning this belief system is a set of 928 scientific papers, and not a book written by a motley collection of marketeers a couple of millennia ago.

(I’m going to stop now as I’ve just been invited to expand on this theme in a paid article!)

Posted on by Andrew Chapman 16

Epi phenomena – do doo de do do

So, I’ve finally finished Hofstadter’s I am a Strange Loop. I is a strange loop. I am a strange loop.

This is something of an achievement for me as it’s the first time I’ve actually read all of one of his books – I’ve read most of Gödel Escher Bach, Metamagical Themas and Le Ton Beau de Marot, but never quite all of ’em. Anyway, that’s enough italics for now.

It’s a funny sort of book – essentially it rehashes the core argument of GEB, and forms a defence of epiphenomenalism, which is not exactly a new position nowadays (and GEB itself was written in the late 70s). It’s as much an ‘intellectual autobiography’ as anything, bringing in many personal tales, particularly the death of his wife, albeit with a big and slightly confusing chunk in the middle about Gödel’s revolutionary overturning of Bertrand Russell’s endeavours to bolster the foundations of mathematics. DRH makes the same points over and over again, sometimes superfluously: that we work at the abstract level of patterns and defining physical phenomena in terms of tiny little particles is no hope in our quest to understand ourselves – but that ‘we’ emerge from those nonetheless; and that consciousness is a ‘strange loop’ of self-reference inevitable when a pattern-obsessed organism has a sufficiently broad range of categories identifiable by it.

Although this is far from as dazzling a book as GEB, and is really an oldish man now saying ‘yes, but you weren’t listening the first time’, the way he tells things – anecdotes, analogies, allegories – is what makes him so much more interesting than most ‘philosophers’. (Though next time the publishers really ought to stop him thinking he can design the book as well – the pictures in here are pretty bad.)

Let’s hope he doesn’t get interviewed by Jim Naughtie, though, who was bumbling his way through whether a restored Cutty Sark is still the real one this morning…

Posted on by Andrew Chapman 6