Entries from August 2007 ↓

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Just when you think today will be a looooong day, up pops Misty over at By The Way with a splendid example of very strange Swedish supermarket custom/tradition/behaviour.

Yes folks, if you lined up your purchases like the ones have been in the photo above, I am certain the staff at Tesco would call for the men in white coats to come and whisk you away.

Oh and barcodes have to be aligned too.

Read the full article here

Swedish Checkout Etiquette

Myth #2: Ask for permission before bringing up difficult issues
By Geoffrey James Copyright CNET 2007

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM:
You want your boss to be in a good mood when you deliver bad news.

Why it’s a myth:
Thanks to email and cell phones, word travels faster than ever. If you don’t tell your boss the bad news, somebody else will, and then you’ll look evasive or stupid—or both.

Try this instead:
Deliver bad news in the context of what you’re doing to fix the situation or make it better.

Example:
“The Acme sale fell through, so we’re launching a quick sales campaign with the other customers to make up the revenue loss.”

2nd Myth about Managing Up

Myth #1: Always be in the office before your boss arrives
By Geoffrey James Copyright CNET 2007

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM:
If you’re even five minutes late, the boss will think you’re a slacker.

Why it’s a myth:
In an age of flex time, telecommuting, Blackberries, and instant messages, bosses care more about whether you’re getting the job done than whether you’re warming your seat.

Try this instead:
Make sure the boss knows you’re putting in extra hours at home or on the road, both by maintaining a rapid-response email or instant message presence, and by hinting at when you’re putting in those extra hours.

Example:
“I had to work over the weekend on this report, but I think you’ll agree the extra effort was worth it.”

1st Myth about Managing Up

Part of any organisation’s process should be first to instill in their workforce a strong and robust sense of self-worth and then execute the company mantra and get the message instilled as a support to workers’ growing self-esteem.

Without either of the values, mediocrity or worse will prevail.

But first comes the important and difficult objective - getting the workforce to strongly believe they do have value and purpose. Is there anyone out there who thinks that to achieve this across an organisation with a 5000+ workforce will be easy? Or s it easier to instill these important values in a company who has less than 100 staff?

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On 5th August I went online at Amazon.co.uk to order and pay for a Dell Axim X51v Powered Speaker Mount for the car. Having recently loaded TomTom v6 Navigator onto the Dell X51v, the speaker mount seemed the appropriate ‘extra’ to purchase.

Afterall it’d be nice to hear if I am supposed to turn or to go straight on. Also, I wanted to be able to listen and shout back at John Cleese and confuse him by taking the opposite direction to what he commands you do! Small things please small minds, particularly on long roadtrips to Scotland.

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Complaining customers are a business’s best friend. Happy customers are a business’s worst enemy. Why? Because they do not complain.

Like it or not complaining customers are a business’s best friend. Regrettably, most businesses fail to recognise this. To their peril. Because businesses that ignore criticism and complaints never get to hear about where or how they fail the customer.

However, dissatisfied customers keeps the business on its toes and forces the business to be at the ‘top of its game’ and to keep on fixing problems and striving to perfect their service or product(s).

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This blog follows on from Seth Godin’s article titled “Lying to your customers”.

Seth went into the UK equivalent of B&Q called Home Depot in the USA. See my post here about Home Depot.

It’s scary that the two largest DIY chains on different continents have the same corporate colour schematic - orange. Or as I call it FF6600 because I use it too. And as you in the UK know the third multinational to this blog who uses orange as their corporate colours is - Sainsbury’s. Please - no conspiracy theorist responses required! But then…

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On October 15th - Blog Action Day, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind. Climate Change. Ho hum.

To learn more click here.

As you well know I do not subscribe to the paranoia that surrounds Global Warming. I agree that humas did and do contribute, but no way near the levels even the most moderate Climate Change fanatic proselityzes about. Anyway let’s talk about the Heathrow Terminal 5 protest.

I hear you ask why? Because I say so is why.

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Well as you can see over there on the right ——-> the sidebar is back!

It was GMK who suggested I let it ‘float right instead of left’, (which did not work) so I again went around the houses looking for answers only to eventually come back to review the same piece of code again and only a few minutes ago re-entered the 20em and BINGO the sidebar returned to its location.

Such a simple solution to a problem that baffled me for nearly 3 days .

Thanks GMK. Without your suggestion I would have ignored the relevent piece of code. A linkbadge will be designed and sent to you. I’d send a beer but you can get them cheaper from a bottle store near you than I can!

It is Back

[UPDATE]:
Digging A Deeper Hole 101
You will recall that I have a problem with the sidebar. It should be there ———->

It isn’t there. But not for the lack of trying. I even donned a suit, white shirt and blue tie to go about correcting the problem in an almost professional looking way. Perfection was prevented by running out of hair gel!

But I have ended up digging a deeper hole for myself. I have scoured all my recent posts and deleted unnecessarily long URLed links, cut out surplus words, snipped any italics, closed open tags, corrected bad tagging, mile long sentences have been edited and punctuated correctly and graphics reduced.

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Today Web 2.0 and me are not.

Where has my sidebar gone? What’s going on?

Sorry folks, I suspect the site has succumbed to a hack that has impacted the templates or some other workings within the coding. As you see the sidebar has slipped ungracefully to the bottom of the page.

Yesterday, my amateur attempts to rectify the situation has only worsened the position and resulted in me overwriting the CSS and losing all the customisation work I’d spent a lot of time over previous weeks and months tuning and tweaking. So you can guess where I will be this Bank Holiday weekend. Not on a beach in South France or camped out in a wet field in the Lake District. But I will be in Henley-on-Thames tomorrow!

So for me today Web 2.0 is not. I will be trying to get the fault corrected ASAP. Not even Wordpress can help me on this!

Web 2.0 Sidebar Blues

The free prize. Seth Godin wrote a book about it. He called it “Free Prize Inside”. Buy it. I did and now I am perplexed. Anxious and fidgety too. What free prize can iScatterlings give you?

The more I think about it, the more confused I become. I mean I know I am meant to provide you with a free prize and I very much want to. It’s the ‘what’ that is getting to me.

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Thanks to Ben Tamblyn I would never have found out that I am addicted to blogging. Incredibly I scored 81%. Wooohoooo! I am such an addict. Yeah baby!

So do you want to find out how addicted you are? Go on. You know you do! Just click below.

81%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Addicted to Blogging?

When your present life gets you down, you can always change to Life 2.0

Extensive surveys by the manufacturers of Life 2.0 suggest that more social interaction using Mouth v38.9, Vocal Chord v1.01, Tonsils Lite, Lips 2.0, Lungs Airexity ™ with a mix of either Skype, Standard Landline, mobile/cellphone with or without Hand or Headset as desired, may lead to a more fulfilling and happy state of being.

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A naartjie by any other name is still a naartjie

Or so the British supermarketers should have us believe.

See the photo and take note of what they do to naartjies in UK.

First they dress them up in a label which is enough to rob them of their dignity and then to top it all, see what they call them? Clementine. What name is that to call a naartjie? The British supermarket chains delete their given identity and rebrand them with this awful human name. Clementine.

If I was a naartjie and some jerk in a foreign land wanted to dress me in a label and call me Clementine, I’d go ballistic.

Surely if you are going to apply a local name to one of South Africa’s best loved fruits, at least have the courtesy to survey the growers for consensus on a suitable replacement! Given what naartjies are used for outside of gracing our fruitbowls and being rapturously devoured, these seemingly dainty fruits are deserving of a more robust name that projects their status among us who use them each Saturday at rugby fields around S Africa.

Maybe Tesco or Sainsbury’s and even Morrison’s can review these options and settle on one of the following - Sipho, Frik, Hannnes, Blatjang, Petrus, Sakkie or if these don’t conjur up the requisite stature of a naartjie how does Vulcan, Kudu, Conqueror, Splatter or Fokjulle sound?

You can submit more names and we can take a poll and submit the result to the supermarket buyers for their input and reaction. Please submit more names for naartjies in UK. You can use the wtf above or the comments below. I want naartjies to be naartjies wherever they are displayed on a fruit n veg shelf at supermarkets around the world.

Naartjies are naartjies and deserve to be known as this and nothing else. Clementine sounds so…..scrawny and puny and like all naartjies had their balls chopped off.

Naartjie Robbed of Identity