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A World of Pure Imagination
I think and talk about the declining service industry a lot. Probably too much, in fact. The public looks down their haughty noses at service providers; organisations themselves see it as a necessary evil but underfund it as a form of passive-aggressive lip-service. A way to block, frustrate and demoralise customers into giving up. In…
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Good Moaning…
We’re not really complainers, here in the UK. Now I can understand that as we are very British. Polite and nobody wants to cause a scene. We have also never really got to grips with the concept of service. For me though, it is the abject hopelessness of complaints processes that pulls my proverbial chain.…
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On a Bicycle Made for Two
So, in Russia, Mr Putin has pulled a surprise rabbit out of his Ushanka and hailed the end of the so-called Tandemocracy. That’s a weird term for the arrangement, but I am certainly not one for smears whether they relate to character, a cervix, or a doorknob. We had a similar high-profile arrangement in the…
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Hitler’s Marketing Woes
Berlin, 1945. And Hitler is optimistic about Amazon book sales. He’s sacked the SS Marketing team, who kept dicking with the prices, and he’s got a new group of marketers on board. At a team meal with them, he explains his vision and his plans to trounce the Russian books on Kobo. But others are…
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Chug-a-Lug Along With Me…
Chugging – or charity mugging if you’d like me to get etymological (it’s a portmanteau of “charity” and “mugger’) – is back in the ascendancy. Skanky old meth addicts (well, that’s how they seem and behave) who steal eye contact and then (a few zany dance moves later) have moonwalked into your path with a cheeky…
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Hmmm…What Does This Button Do..?
A jet being blown out of the sky by a missile. A few hundred passengers instantaneously fragmented. You probably wondered whether the recent tragedy in the skies above Iran was an accident or deliberate. Well it turns out that the act of firing was deliberate but the assessment of the situation prior to the press…
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Inglourious Prices
Berlin, 1945. Hitler is stressing again about book prices. Himmler and the SS Marketing Team are dicking with the commercials, and Amazon sales are down… Meanwhile, Stalin is running a stellar campaign and rinsing it on Kobo… What can the Führer do to reverse the trend…? Read what all the fuss is about – Flypaper…
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Saved by the Bell
There’s something about our schooldays – and how we relate to them – that I’ll never truly understand. Particularly comprehensive schools, the like of which I frequented in the 1980s. When you were guests at these august institutions, the whole process felt torturous, and you couldn’t wait to leave. The desperation was palpable. Grey but…
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Let’s Eat, Grandma…
While we appear to be teetering on the edge of World War III (or at least that’s what you might be led to believe from certain online sources), I have been grappling with a far greater foe. English grammar. Now, I’ve always been somewhat a stickler for grammatical rules. And I’ve previously written in an…
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Who, Janus?
So, January 1st and a New Year. But it was not always the case that celebrations took place in the month of January. In Ancient Rome, the calendar followed the lunar cycle, so the New Year fell in March. For the January gig, you can blame a chap called Sosigenes – an astronomer – who persuaded…
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Fighting the Good Fight…
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