Category: Uncategorized

A few weeks ago, I was becoming increasingly frustrated with the diminishing speed of my little sliver of glass and plastic that came on every journey with me. It slept next to me, came to work, the pub, to gigs,  and saw and captured my son growing up and my adventures with Mandy.

Now it lies in a draw, redundant and for the most part, forgotten. So why have I taken such dramatic steps to eliminate what most people now can’t imagine life without?

The turning point came when laid on my bed, waiting for Jasper’s bath to run, with him playing on the floor. I was mindlessly scrolling through the social oblivion that is the book of faces, or more accurately, the book that used to contain faces, but now predominantly displays paid and increasingly less relevant content. While getting my feed-based dopamine hit, Jasper said “Daddy”. About five times. And I didn’t hear him.

Jasper wanted to show me something he’d built, and I was busy suckling at the unfettered data-teat of my smartphone, while casually ignoring real life.

In that very moment, I realised something was very wrong. A telephone, and indeed Facebook were both created to connect people. To facilitate meaningful conversation and encounters. I can’t help but think they’re now diluting that, all the while shamelessly capturing data and whole-selling it to large multi-nationals who in turn use it to put even more garbage in front of us.

So, I quit smartphone. I dug out an old BlackBerry, capable of phone calls, text messages and email and rang O2 to change my data plan. I’ve been doing this a month today, and I’m truly sold on it. At first I kept checking my BB (an odd 21st century reflex I’ve noticed a lot of people doing), but nothing changes unless an actual human being wants to speak to you, so within a week I stopped checking. My attention is no longer controlled by algorithms whirring in a data centre created by the blue-chips of Cali. On a train I now look out the window, walking down a street I admire the architecture and when Jasper’s playing next to me I’m enthralled with the amazing things he builds. This little dude Mandy and I created is now creating his own things, and frankly, Facebook can go fuck itself. Jasper is waaaay more interesting than a cat in Japan.

I’ve just got a new car. It’s pretty good. It’s got loads of buttons that do lots of things, and of course, because it’s new, it’s incredibly shiny. Nice.

But before this I was part of the commuting class that stands shoulder to shoulder waiting for trains and busses. I didn’t mind it actually, if anything it was refreshing. I stood and looked at the world. I watched people, I watched things happen and I watched an incredible trend in motion.

This isn’t a revelation by any stretch of the imagination; I’m making no proclamations that I’ve spotted a trend never before realised. In actuality, everyone’s talking about it and the BBC have even produced an article with statistics. However, I watched people stare into their phones. Endlessly.

I can’t believe how much conviction people show to staring at the their little portals of W³. When I was small, my grandmother used to take me on the train. I remember like it was yesterday the panicked instructions to mind the gap, and even now I always step an extra six inches when getting on or off a train. Just in case. I watch now as people don’t break eye contact in the perpetual download of information. Gap between the train and platform? Not important. Busy road crossing? Meh. Driving a car? OK, I’ll devote a bit of time to it…

My point here is. The world is bustling, there’s so much going on around us and yet we let overpaid teenagers filter what we see.

I’ve made a concerted effort to not using my phone. I want to watch the world in real time and not let facebook turn my life into a social experiment. In fact I’ve gone as far as diverting all my own phone calls to my blackberry where beautifully there are no streams or walls or trends.

I deal with sights, sounds and smells where once I concentrated on pixels, posting and profiles. And it’s wonderful.

Turns out, life is in real-time 3D!

I really do just hate it.

I’ve recently been delving into the world of crash for cash, and become immersed in the trivia and detail that is an insurance claim of any sorts.

I’m afraid to say that my dearest better half was the victim of a suspected crash for cash situation.

Whilst awareness is now rising it’s still very much a viable income for the couch-bound, Jeremy-Kyle-watching reprobates of this world when in need of some funds for single cans of Stella and 10 packs of Superkings. Other repulsive lifestyles are available.

For those who haven’t heard of it, it goes down like this. Car A breaks sharply for no reason, Car B breaks to avoid hitting it and the victim then hits the rear of Car B. Car A does a getaway act, thus placing blame on the victim at the back. It should be noted that they do it where there’s no CCTV, and in places where your attention is drawn elsewhere, a roundabout for example.

Cue a car full of urchins crawling out, all amazingly complaining of ‘chronic backache’ et al (shocking at a ‘bump’ of less than 10 mph) which can’t be recovered from without fifteen grand. Each.

Obviously taking time off their busy lives is a very costly exercise; I never appreciated the cost of drinking white lightning at 09:30 in the morning.

I got a call from my missus incredibly shaken up. It’d just happened and she was really upset, understandably so. She told me what happened and where, and then the line went dead. I grabbed my stuff and left the office, dispatching an ambulance on the way. In my mind’s eye, she’d gone into shock or worse… and was unable to answer her phone as I tried to call her back.

Just before getting into my car to head over, I got a call from her phone. Answered in foreboding I prepared to hear from someone wearing fluorescent material. Luckily it wasn’t, she reassured me she was OK and I should meet her at work. Which I did.

Turns out, and really rather luckily, no real damage was done. They’d balls’d it up and crashed into each other instead. Car A made off and left Car B to try and scrape anything they could. After a visit to A&E, the police, countless calls to insurers, and with countless calls from ambulance chasers I bring myself to the present.

Having a crash is perhaps the easiest bit to deal with. You heal, and move on, if you’re lucky.

However there are consequences that reach far into the distance. The anxiety it can cause, some people giving their driving licence up, the granular amount of detail insurance go to (rightly so given the morons out there who consider this a living), the endless phonecalls from everyone and anyone, and the enormous hike in insurance prices makes driving seem a ridiculous way to travel – given the risks involved.

Not just to your physical being, but financial and emotionally too. I wasn’t even in the crash and I regularly feel my blood pressure spike, this very article is probably knocking an entire day off my life.

But the worst part about this whole thing is this… The better looking half is the sweetest person you’re likely to meet, and she holds human nature on a very tall pedestal. I’ve read long and hard about crash for cash, and so in the same circumstances would have behaved with suspicion, distrust and probably anger. She was genuinely concerned for their wellbeing, asking them how they were are. That’s the bit of this that makes me absolutely furious.

Now I’m pondering how to proceed. Should I mount George my high horse and dive head first into battle. Or dismiss it and hope that the people that get paid to look at matters like this do so.

The problem is, I’m a firm believer that remarkably few people give a shit.

The labour leader, Ed Miliband is a blithering moron.

His latest political whim to force banks to sell branches to ‘help competition’ is a blatant exercise in leveraging banks’ poor reputation in the consumers’ eyes. “Hey, look at me guys, I’m forcing banks to sell branches, come and play for the red team because we’re having a go at banks now.”. Utter dumbfounded rubbish.

As a consumer of financial products, my clear priority is the affordability. I don’t take a mortgage because I’m jumping on a moral high horse and using a small hip ‘social-bank’ that’s diversifying the market , I take a mortgage with a provider because it’s cheap. Simple.

Now Mr Milliband, how do you get things cheap? I’ll refer you to the largest retailer on the planet… Wallmart. They are the cheapest provider of goods because they buy the most, it’s a simple equation, the more you buy, the cheaper it gets. WallMart and subsequently Asda in the UK can then pass on these smaller costs to us and in turn have become enormous – a self-perpetuating cycle. Yes, there’s a whole other debate on how hard suppliers should be squeezed, but as long as there’s other similar providers in the market, food will remain cheap and suppliers paid fairly.

Now onto my next point, the branch network of any high street bank attracts a proportionately small segment of it’s overall customer base. Will closing branches reduce the size of a bank? Of course not. If anything it’ll dissolution the customers not with the banks, but with the government itself. For example:

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Dear Mr Customer,

I’m sorry to have to write to you with bad news. After we’ve maintained a physical presence in your town for x donkeys years, Ed and his merry band of puerile followers have made us close your convenient local branch.

I’m sure you’ll be delighted to know that despite having all your financial products with us, including Mortgages, Loans, Credit Cards, Savings and a few insurance policies, Ed is putting a new shiny gover-bank here that’ll cost twice as much, the staff won’t know what’s going on and will have no established reputation for you to trust with the most expensive products you manage.

If however, this doesn’t sound like an acceptable proposition, you can continue to bank with us as you’ve always done. Don’t worry, we’ve still got a branch in the town centre that we’ll keep open for you at the weekend because of all this.

Feel free to vote Tory, just in case you can’t be bothered with the agro.

Yours ever faithfully,

Mr long established banker.

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Here we go, another ill-considered political fad, that will not result in any actual change. Just a whole bunch of effort.

Banks are getting there. Customer satisfaction is going up incrementally every month, and there’s a huge shift towards being a customer centric sector, making strides ahead of utility providers. A big push has just been through on increasing competition, the seven day switching proposition. Actually, as it turns out, people are generally speaking quite happy with their bank. They’re by no means delighted, but then who gets excited to phone the bank?

Go play with something else Ed, you’re trying to fix something that’s not actually broken.

I read today an interesting article about national debt and the deficit which in part caused it’s creation.

I suspect what I’m about to write may hold some inaccuracies, but as usual it’s my usual ramblings through my own thoughts, aired publicly for your amusement. And perhaps ridicule.

I find it odd that a country with wealth like ours can be so indebted. It is said that as you earn more, your lifestyle accordingly becomes more expensive, thus never really making you any more wealthy. I relate directly to that theory; I earn now perhaps three or four times what I did in my first full time job, but my proportionate disposable income doesn’t seem to be any greater. What with two mortgages, two vehicles, a menagerie of animals and a child, my turnover has never been higher, and my own money never been more scarce.

Does this relate then to how countries operate? Could it be that whilst astronomic in size, it’s much the same theory? We know we can afford more, but instead of being content with that notion we buy more, we effectively take on more debt.

I worry quite a bit about deficit. It’s a scary word. If I ran my accounts in deficit I wouldn’t be able to sleep, I’d have the bank calling, I’d have Mandy to answer to, but yet the country in which I reside has done it for so long. The very nature suggests an unsustainable pattern, which I think has gone on far too long. In 2007 the level of debt compared with GDP stood at 44 percentage points; last year it doubled to 88 percentage points. And it’s still climbing.

Don’t get me wrong, I fully believe that the current government are doing a sterling job of reducing it. By 2018 our deficit will be just two percent of the GDP, and the trend looks to continue until it becomes a surplus, and we can finally start to reduce the burden I often think about.

My worry is, rather unusually, democracy. Don’t worry, I’m not about to condemn it as a poor solution, but it does mean short tenures don’t ensure policies get followed through with.  We’re making great strides, especially in the welfare arena but I do worry that a change in 2015 may well undo a lot of the good already done.

An insightful person I work with now and again said when he comes to work, he is not creating a better business for himself, he is creating a better one for the next person to run and the person after that. I think in most roles, the majority of any good processes, procedures or models in place were created not by us, but our predecessors, we stand on the shoulders of their successes, and that’s my point here.

To make an entire country successful we have to selflessly ensure that the good we do today will be felt in five, or 10 years time. By creating a culture of helping the next guy do a great job will ensure that he in turn helps the guy after him. That, my friends, is how I would suggest a truly exceptional parliament to run. Enough of the bickering and name calling, enough pointing the finger and claims of “Please Miss, it wasn’t me, it was the one with the blue tie”.

Sustainable business works not only in business, but in every area of the world. It’s evolution, our bodies have being doing it subconsciously for us; we now need to do it consciously.

Get better with every iteration.

Like most amateur bloggers I feel I’ve become a little cliched in that I’ve not updated my blog for some time, and of course realise that it’s essentially pointless if I don’t update the darned thing every so often.

Sigh, I used to be so disciplined with my posts, if not a little eclectic with topic. So, dear reader, I suppose I should really give you a little insight into what’s been happening recently…

I think I’m justified in saying I’ve finally become a full, proper, bona fide adult. I asked a girl to marry me and as sheer good luck would have it she said yes. Not any girl I assure you, the one my entire world now revolves and the one to give me the best present I could possibly ask for; Jasper.

Now we’re not much into public displays of affection; I imagine so far as the wedding goes, Mandy is dreading that she will inevitably have to prove to the world that we are indeed a couple. But the show must go on, and I hope with every might that it will.

I appreciate there’s nothing ground breaking here, nothing you can take to the bank, but at least I’m back writing again. We’ve started planning the big day, and I’m sure as the inevitable stress of a woman on a mission culminates I’ll have more to say on the matter. For now, wish me luck…