One of the blogs I follow is by a remarkable young lady, named Jill Homer, living up in Alaska who’s feats of endurance cycling make my triathlon exploits seem like sunday afternoon outings. She has cycled the course of the Iditarod dog sled race, more than once. This summer she cycled the Great Divide mountain bike route from Canada to Mexico (2,700 miles) in an astonishing 24 days. She has a wonderful approach to life that I admire greatly, but today she posted a comment that stopped me in my tracks because it resonated so much with how I currently look at my life.
“I don’t want to ever become the kind of person who doesn’t dare to fail and fail spectacularly. I don’t ever want to be unwilling to approach the unknown. I don’t ever want to live a life free of risk.”
Too often we are afraid to attempt things because of worries over how we might appear to others or too ourselves. It’s a timely reminder and one that I intend to write out and put up on my notice board. Thanks Jill, for reminding me of how important that is.
It’s been a while since I posted and, once again, I’m singing the praises of Vodafone. My contract ran out a few weeks ago and I’ve been waiting to see what happened with my work before I renewed. I phoned Vodafone yesterday and asked how much they could get my monthly bill down to if I didn’t get a shiny new phone, and they said £19.57, which is pretty good.
However, one of my friends pinged me about an offer with O2 where I’d get the same deal for the same cost, but with £100 cashback, bringing the 12 month contract down to £11.57. Much as I’d love to stay with Vodafone, that’s a significant difference. I told the customer service guy (Matt) this, and that I needed to keep the cost down as I’d recently been made redundant (which is why I didn’t go for the new phone) and he said, ‘hang on a moment’ and went off to talk to someone.
When he came back it was with a very interesting offer. Apparently Vodafone have a customer retention unit that are authorised to make occasional extra special offers to customers who would otherwise leave the network, and that they could get my bill down to £14 a month, on a 12 month contract. I was happy with that and I get to stay with Vodafone for another year.
Now, the thing that struck me most about this is that not many people know about the retention service, but it’s there and obviously something they will use to keep their customers. They’d rather get less money and keep a customer than have them go elsewhere.
Think about that for a minute, let it really sink in.
How many companies do you know that are as committed to keeping their customers and keeping them happy. Given the appalling level of customer service that is the norm in the mobile phone world, the personal stories I have from T-mobile, who I’d never, ever consider going back to, and the stories I hear from friends on O2, this strikes me as a rare and precious thing. Customer service that is there to help customers, treat them respectfully and maintain the brand loyalty.
We always complain when we get crappy service somewhere, but we don’t often give praise where it’s due. Over the past two years I’ve been with Vodafone they have repeatedly shown that they have an attitude to customer service that is second to none in the mobile phone market, at least as far as this customer is concerned.
Over on my other site I’m blogging my project of building a tiny off-grid house and that has recently brought John Wells to my attention, as he’s also building a tiny, self-sufficient house but he’s out in Texas, where I lived for several years a little while ago. I’m enjoying reading about his adventures, and thought you might too. He’s just posted a poem on YouTube that sums up what he’s been doing and I hope he won’t mind if I link to it here. You can learn more about his project by visiting The Field Lab. The most surprising thing is that he bought 40 acres of land for $8k, oh for the big open empty spaces where land is cheap.
This isn’t new, but I just ran across it the other day and it seemed relevant and interesting, especially where he says the Whole Earth Catalog (1967) was “…like Google in paperback”: Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement speech in 2005. Following is the last part of a very short speech:
“When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. Thank you all very much.”
A couple of my best friends Denny & Helen have recently set up this website in the aftermath of the recent G20 demonstrations. Both of them are politically active bloggers who decided to put together somewhere they could share their ideas and opinions beyond their regular blogs read by friends. The idea is to raise consciousness and encourage discussion on the matters relating to modern day policing in Britain. It’s well worth a look if you’re at all interested in what’s going on.
It now comes to light that Ian Tomlinson died from internal bleeding after being assaulted by a police officer, manslaughter charges have been brought. I saw the following picture today, a spoof on the posters that the Met have put up trying to make us paranoid and telling us to effectively spy and inform on our neighbours. There have been several other spoofs, trying to highlight the ridiculousness of these posters, but the following brings a much more sombre warning. I have no idea who to credit for this, but I think it’s very well done.
After having planned to attend the demonstrations for the G20 conference, I ended up not being able to make it. Part of me is relieved given what went on but part of me is angry at myself for not going and standing there, if only to witness first hand just how far the powers of the law and police are being ever further abused.
Several of my friends were there and I heard first hand about what went on. I’d say it’s hard to believe some of the stories but, sadly, it’s really not. Peaceful groups of protesters being violently assaulted by baton wielding police is only too common worldwide nowadays, but having the police use a law designed to quell violent disturbances to remove all press photographers from an area, on pain of arrest for non-compliance, while they ‘attempt to resolve’ a peaceful protest is terrifying in it’s implications. Doing so basically shows that they are prepared to silence a free press while doing exactly what they like in the way of violence and there will be no evidence to show what really happened. All those surveillance cameras are only of use to them not the public, and you can be pretty sure we won’t be seeing much of that footage coming to light.
I must admit that I kind of expected it to kick off the way it did after hearing on the news before the event that a senior officer in the met (I don’t know who) was stating that it was going to be a violent protest. We know now that it was primarily violent due to the police instigating most of that violence. We’re now starting to see the video evidence of this, much of it contradicting police statements of what happened, and some simply showing outright abuse such as hitting peaceful protesters in the face for no reason, allowing dogs to attack protesters who are simply talking to policemen and others just randomly battoning non-violent demonstrators.
Now, don’t get me wrong, in general I admire the police for doing a difficult job in tough circumstances. However, with that comes a great deal of responsibility, and it will be interesting to see just what comes from it all in the way of prosecutions of officers. From the mounting evidence there seems to be plenty of scope for those, just take a look at the videos being compiled by the Guardian here, it’s horrifying.
Some people have said that if you’re not prepared for that then you shouldn’t have been there, but protesting is a fundamental part of democracy. We have a right to voice our concerns, we have a right to protest at injustices. Many people have lost their homes, livelihoods and life savings in the past couple of years through the greed of the banking system and then we’re asked to bail them out with tax money (an issue I’m not going to get into here). People are angry, and rightfully so, and we have a duty to protest, a duty to bring these people to answer for their mistakes.
Last year I was working around a bunch of city women who were discussing some of the financial packages they brokered and they knew that these packages were flawed, and that they were leading nowhere and would eventually lose people lots of money. They really didn’t care, they made their bonuses and just carried on. I wanted to shake them by the ears and make them realise that it’s other people’s money their playing with, that when the banks fail it’s the ‘little’ people that lose their livelihoods. I hope at least a few of those brokers are now out of work, though I doubt with their savings it will affect them greatly. I’d like, perhaps rather unfairly, to think that they find themselves out of work, with a big mortgage they can no longer pay and having to sell up at the bottom of the market. Maybe it will make them reassess their own lives. But I doubt it.
I’ll leave you with a rather good article about the day of protests from a wonderful ranty old chap I remember of old, Attilla the Stockbroker and his view from the inside of what went on that he put up on his myspace page, I hope he won’t mind me linking to it.
Well after 3 days of setup, the festival opened. Our section, I have to admit, looks great and we’ve received a whole load of compliments on what we built. We had glorious sunshine until yesterday when the heavens didn’t so much open as just slowly empty. I stood in the rain at midnight, listening to the Levellers in the mud. A perfect glastonbury moment. Mind you, when did they get old? Last time I saw them was 17 years ago. We’re of an age and it was something of a surprise to see them all grown up and now one of the fathers of festival music.
They may have got older, but the invective is still there and bouncing away to the encore of There’s Only One Way was glorious. I retired to my bed and listened to the rain.
I’ve taken a few photos, not many though and only on my phone as I’ve not dragged the big camera out yet. lI forgot to set up a feed from flickr so you’ll have to visit directly to see them, address is in the previous post.
Right, the sun’s come out so I’m off exploring, catch you all later.
