Smoking Kills: when did we lose the ability to communicate?

Communication between human beings has always been an interesting topic. I heard someone saying “the spoken word is not the received word” – basically meaning that what someone means to say isn’t necessarily what the other person hears.

That’s because of filters that people listen through. What I mean by that is that we all have experiences and preconceptions about situations or people which means we actually hear something different to what the person speaking think they’ve said.

However, that aside – recently there was an incident on a Megabus on the M6 Toll road in the UK Midlands which made me question whether we have lost the ability to communicate completely.

The incident in question was that “something” happened on the bus which caused a full scale terror alert. The bus was halted on the hard shoulder, armed police and ambulances galore turned up and everyone was escorted off the bus one by one by the armed police and made to sit in a cordoned off area of the now closed motorway. The motorway remained shut for 5 hours while “investigations” continued.

Obviously this was paraded endlessly on the parasitic rolling news channels with speculation about what might or might not have happened and what you could clearly see with your own eyes on the TV screen but presenters trying to “fill” have to keep stating the bloody obvious! Worse than that they also referred to the M6 Toll as “one of the busiest motorways in the country” – which means they’ve never actually been on it!

In the end it turns out that the “something” that happened on board this bus was an electronic cigarette that someone had which was creating artificial “smoke” (which I believe is just water vapour).

I have to ask why the hell didn’t someone on the bus just ask the person with the “smoking device” what it was? Surely this whole vastly expensive and time consuming operation could have been avoided with that simple question? Perhaps the Megabus and rural Staffordshire are known priority targets?

I would say you couldn’t make it up but someone already did. A few years ago the BBC had a fantastic comedy series called “Broken News” which was a complete lampooning of the rolling news channels and the pathetic coverage of anything and everything that they give.

That show had the story of “Union Air Flight 216 from Chicago to Amsterdam” which was the subject of intense media speculation about a possible hijack. When it landed in Amsterdam it emerged that the “situation” was that someone on board had a wooden spoon.

There are some ridiculous parallels here although the bus situation response was arguably much worse. If the authorities in the spoof comedy program had responded to the situation in the same way that the UK emergency services responded to the bus incident, the entire airport would have been closed for ½ a day while they examined the spoon. That wouldn’t have been believable – well, until now!

Unfortunately, too often people don’t communicate with each other openly and honestly. If they did then all sorts of things would be far easier but I think we’re too scared of what might happen if we tell people the truth. Sadly it seems to be getting worse!

The broken news BBC page for the hijack is here http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/brokennews/indepth/hijack.shtml

The Pina Colada Song

I was driving home the other night and a song came on the radio. It’s called “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)” by a guy called Rupert Holmes. It’s a classic (depending on your point of view) 70s song which tells the story of a couple who are bored with each other.

I have been aware of this song for a good while but it’s been some time since I heard it and this time I was paying particular attention to the words.

The first part of the song has these lyrics :-

I was tired of my lady, we'd been together too long,

like a worn-out recording, of a favourite song,

so while she lay there sleeping, I read the paper in bed,

and in the personal columns, there was this letter I read:

"If you like Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain,

if you're not into yoga, if you have half-a-brain,

if you’d like making love at midnight, in the dunes of the cape,

I'm the love that you've looked for, write to me and escape."

This got me thinking. There are relationships everywhere in life but in a business context, they might be with colleagues, suppliers or customers. Perhaps there is something we can learn from the song in a business context?

The song continues with :-

I didn't think about my lady, I know that sounds kind of mean,

but me and my old lady, had fallen into the same old dull routine,

so I wrote to the paper, took out a personal ad,

and though I'm nobody's poet, I thought it wasn't half-bad.

"Yes, I like Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain,

I'm not much into health food, I am into champagne,

I've got to meet you by tomorrow noon, and cut through all this red tape,

at a bar called O'Malley's, where we'll plan our escape."

Well, fair enough. Personally I don’t like where the song is going now. It’s not right to cheat on someone and everyone knows this, but it’s a nice tune so we’ll let it slide and use it to focus on the relationships between a customer and supplier in a business sense.

There are some interesting parallels here to the world of business where the whole situation is not morally questionable.

So in that situation, let’s imagine that we’re finding the relationship we have with an existing supplier isn’t going as well as it should. Things are looking up though because we’ve just seen an advert for a new supplier that we like the sound of. So we’ve arranged to meet them.

This is where the song starts going having some problems. It continues with :-

So I waited with high hopes, then she walked in the place.

I knew her smile in an instant, I knew the curve of her face.

It was my own lovely lady, and she said, "Oh, it's you."

And we laughed for a moment

Whoa there horsey! This is a HUGE problem! We’re in a bar for an illicit meeting with a new “supplier” and our existing “supplier” walks in. I can imagine blind panic would set in. What if the existing “supplier” sees me with the new “supplier” – we better hide quickly. We might even leave by the back door and try to reschedule our “supplier” meeting.

Ok, if we were really talking about business suppliers then there would be a bit less of a problem although,, it is conceivable that the existing supplier knows the new supplier you’re meeting with and this might cause the existing relationship to become more difficult.

In a business scenario you can imagine that this meeting would be a little awkward, but personal relationships are a lot more volatile than business relationships. So, if we go back to the original meaning of the song – I can’t really see either him or his wife reacting with “oh, it’s you” and then laughing for a moment. I think that world war 3 would instantly break out followed by a divorce!

However, the song ends nicely like this :-

"and I said, I never knew,

that you liked Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain,

and the feel of the ocean, and the taste of champagne,

if you like making love at midnight, in the dunes of the cape,

you're the lady I've looked for, come with me, and escape."

Luckily for them they are both much more enlightened than anyone else on the planet. They decide that actually, they just hadn’t worked hard enough at their relationship and they didn’t know all sorts of things about each other that could have helped things along.

That is where our tale ends but what can we learn from this song? Well, going back to my supplier analogy for a last time. Any relationship has ups and downs and there are always things we can do better and different. With a customer – supplier relationship it’s perhaps too easy to think “I’m fed up with that supplier, I’ll get a different one”.

This is often easy for something like printer paper or toilet rolls but there are lots of other relationships where changing supplier is much more of an upheaval. Perhaps before jumping ship completely – it would be worth talking to the supplier in more detail about what could be different and if the relationship can be improved. Remember, you will have to learn all of the foibles of a new supplier and they might be worse than the supplier you had before!

Sometimes a lack of change is disappointing

In a recent blog post I talked about how people don’t like change. Now find myself writing about the exact opposite!

I’d also like to clarify my last blog post. There are times when change is welcomed by a lot of people and in the software world that’s where the change is that something that was clearly not good enough before is improved and made to work either properly or much better. I think it’s when people are “satisfied” with the status quo that the change causes consternation.

Personally I think I’m much more open to change than most people – certainly in software and websites that I use. However, there are times when I find a lack of change disappointing. One instance of this is with smartphones.

Not very many years ago, getting a new phone was an exciting experience. For the first few weeks I would be discovering how it worked and how things were different to the last phone. Every few days I’d find a new feature or something and would think “wow, this is fantastic” but that all changed with the advent of the iPhone and Android phones.

I got my first Android phone about 3 years ago and was amazed by it. I loved installing new apps and playing about with settings to get it setup just the way I wanted (I am a techie after all!) and I’m now onto my second Android phone.

About a month ago I was excited to receive a notification on the phone to tell me that there was a system update available for me. I knew this was the latest version of the Android operating system for my phone. This was big news indeed (I did mention I’m a sad techie didn’t I?).

The problem was that I did the update and rebooted the phone and was…………. erm…………. well…………. pretty unimpressed really. It turns out that Android 4.0 looks very much like Android 2.3 that I had before. It’s a bit slicker and there are some new bits but nothing much.

This made me think about when I got my second shiny new Android phone. When I think back I remember I felt distinctly underwhelmed that time too because apart from a bigger screen and it being a bit faster, there wasn’t a fat lot of difference between that and my first Android phone.

The same can be said of a lot of devices these days. The latest iPhone or iPad might have a better display, a nicer camera or be a bit faster but apart from that, it looks and works exactly the same.

The trade off to this of course is familiarity and that means that as soon as you do get the shiny new device you can work it and know where everything is. Overall that’s probably a good thing but it has taken some of the fun out of it for me!