Business Woman of the Year

Laura (my stepdaughter) is now a business. It's official! It must be, because the government says so! So the world gets ever more insane and the Office for National Statistics is now inventing businesses that don't exist. [Must be something to do with the credit crunch]. I've heard plenty of people moan that they are now regarded as nothing more than a number, but I've never heard anyone complain that they have been turned into a business.

This interesting perspective on Laura comes to light because we have just received a very official form from the Office for National Statistics headed "Business Register Survey 2008". It is to be completed for "the business named above" ...... i.e. Laura. It must be returned by 12 June or "penalties may be incurred under section 4 of the Statistics of Trade Act 1947". The form goes on, "We hold details of your business ......". That's quite clever, considering this alleged business does not, and never has, existed. I shall be returning the form with a Freedom of Information Request demanding to know where they got this information from and what other information they hold about this fictitious business which is, in fact, my stepdaughter.

I knew the government was getting desperate, but to invent spurious businesses in order to prop up the ailing economy strikes me as really being a bit beyond the pale.

Identity Crisis

The cost of the government's identity cards has gone up by more than £160 million to more than £5 billion. In a time of recession such as we are in at the moment, with huge public debt, how on earth can the government justify spending this sort of money on a scheme that very few people seem to want and will only tell us what we already know ....... who we are. I have known who I am from a very early age and I expect most people are the same. Why should we have to keep proving to other people who we are? If they want to know, we can tell them. If they don't believe us it's their problem. They can take it or leave it.
Moses once asked God who he was. God didn't lower himself with "proof". He simply said "I am who I am". That was good enough for Moses ..... it should be good enough for everyone else, including the government!

Why can't managers manage?

Sorry for the long pause in transmission. I've been very busy and not having much luck :-
(a) Our cat disappeared on Easter Monday and hasn't been seen since.
(b) I have had serious back problems which wrecked our post-Easter holiday as I was hardly able to walk anywhere.
(c) I was short-changed in Superdrug to the tune of £5. Had it been just one or two pounds I wouldn't have made a fuss but I can't afford to lose £5 in one go. Just imagine if that happened in every shop you went into!
I bought a packet of Neurofen (for my back pain mentioned above) for three pounds something, gave the girl at the till a ten pound note and received change for five pounds. I remained at the till with my hand out and said "where's the rest?". Instead of admitting the mistake and giving me the rest of my change, she said "Wait here, I'll have to go and see the manager". She disappeared and quickly returned saying, "can you go and see the manager. He's in the middle of the shop". I went to see the manager and asked him for my £5 outstanding change. "Well I can't open the till now," he said, "it's lunch time. I'll check it straight after lunch and phone you." He took my phone number and I reluctantly left. Needless to say, he didn't phone me, so I went back to the shop on my way home from the office. The manager was nowhere to be seen. I enquired at the central till and they immediately put out a call on the tannoy - no response. They then sent a runner up to the staff room and manager's office - still no luck. Further tannoy calls and further waiting. After about 15 minutes he eventually turned up. No apology for not phoning or being so hard to get hold of. Merely an assertion that he had checked the till after lunch and found it was two pounds over. Naturally, if my claim was correct it should be five pounds over. He didn't directly call me a liar, but the inference was there. I pointed out that I was quite certain I had given the till girl a ten pound note as I had checked the money in my pocket before I left the office (to see how much I needed to get out of the bank) and I checked it again when I got back. Allowing for the money I had taken out of the bank and my lunchtime purchases, I was five pounds short. I further pointed out that this must mean that mine was not the only inaccurate transaction at that till today. The manager did not seem to grasp the implication of the last statement. Instead he said he would have to ask the regional manager what he wanted to do about it. Why? Was this a regional problem? - No of course it wasn't. It was a minor branch issue that should have been dealt with promptly by the very minor branch manager. So the obvious conclusion is that we have here an incompetent manager and either an incompetent or thieving shop girl.
Time after time in my professional life I come across managers of shops, offices, restaurants, pubs etc who are simply unwilling to accept the responsibility of a manager. They are really no more than the guardian of the key - to unlock the premises in the morning and lock it again at night. If anything goes slightly wrong they abdicate all responsibility to the area or regional manager.
My plea is simply this - please appoint managers who are capable of managing ...... or the state of the country will decline even faster than it is at the moment.

Banks - don't you just love them?

Every other day I get bombarded with financial junk mail trying to get me to take out a new loan, get a new credit card etc. At the end of the financial year they are mostly exhorting me to make the most of my tax allowances and invest in an ISA before it's too late. With all this money they spend on advertising you would expect them to make it as easy as possible to get their hands on your money ....... but not a bit of it. Having whetted your appetite, they then put as many hurdles as possible in the way to prevent you doing exactly what they were encouraging you to do shortly before.

On Saturday Mrs Journeyman and I went to Barclays to try to open an ISA account in her name (before it's too late). We thought this would be a simple process, taking out only a few minutes of our shopping trip to town. I had already primed Mrs Journeyman to make sure she had her photo-driving licence with her as it's well known that banks always want to know who you are and are never prepared to take your word for it, even if you go with a witness.

On enquiring at reception, we were told that they now operate an appointments system and there was a 40 minute wait. If we wanted an appointment we couldn't go away for a coffee and come back in 40 minutes time. We had to remain on the premises! We were ushered through to the waiting area which you could easily have mistaken for a dentist's waiting room. Forty minutes later we were summoned to a cubicle. Then the trouble really started.

Unlike any other bank I have been in, they didn't seem the slightest bit interested in seeing my wife's photo on her driving licence. They didn't even want to verify her address with a utility bill. This time they seemed to know exactly what we hadn't got ........ and that was what they wanted .... her National Insurance number. You know - the sort of thing that everyone carries around with them when they go shopping on a Saturday! We phoned home for someone to find it, but of course no-one was in. The man (surprisingly) was prepared to be flexible and allow us to phone it through as soon as we got home. But then there was another problem. We had a joint account at that branch and a transfer could be made from that. Unfortunately there was not enough money in that account to cover the full amount so I was intending to make up the difference with a cheque from my account at a different bank. "Oh no," said the man, "you can't do that! That's your money." He was afraid I might be exceeding my own ISA limit by paying some money into my wife's account. The fact that almost every other married couple in the country who have ISA's do this seemed to bear no weight at all. The fact that as soon as I wrote out a cheque with my wife's name on, it would technically be her money anyway carried no weight either. Nor did the fact that this account would be in her name so I wouldn't be able to get my hands on it anyway. The only solution, he said, was for me to pay a cheque into our joint account, wait until it had cleared, then go back to the bank and transfer it to the ISA. It didn't seem to worry him that as this was a joint account it would still be my money. He even said that my wife didn't have to go back as, once the ISA was set up, anyone could pay money into it! So that is what we had to do. After succumbing to their advertising which seemed to plead for our money, a simple job, which could have been done in five minutes or so, will actually take us a week to complete (and that's assuming that the cheque clears in time to get the money into the ISA in the outgoing tax year).

There seems to be absolutely no logic or consistency in the banking system, and absolutely no will on the bankers part to make the system helpful or efficient for the customer. With interest rates now down to virtually zero, I can see a mass return to people keeping their savings under the mattress. It takes no time at all to put it there and at least you know where it is!

Planning common sense at last in Essex

Have you noticed how horrible ghettos have been springing up all over the place in the past few years. This is largely due to the government's bizarre policy to discourage the use of the car by imposing anti-car planning conditions on new developments - not enough car-parking spaces, roads too narrow to park on, drives too short to accommodate the length of a car and (most stupid of all) garages so small that if you can manage to get the car into one, you then cannot get out because you can't open the door! As anyone with an ounce of sense would have forecast, this failed miserably to achieve its objective and just made life intolerable for everyone.

At last Essex County Council is having the guts to stand up to the government and issue its own planning guidelines which reverse this foolhardy trend. They should be applauded for this ....... but in fact they are having to put up with criticism from other organisations such as the Campaign for Better Transport who claim that they are "undermining a decade of work to help people become less car dependent". This is, of course, utter rubbish. You are not helping people to become less car-dependent by designing out parking spaces. Some people actually need a car. The only way you will reduce this need is to provide cheap public transport, easily accessible to peoples homes, which goes where you want to go, when you want to go there. ........ and that is still a long way off.
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/driving/article5920679.ece

More bad news for the atheists

Despite the recession, Amazon has recorded a 25% increase in bible sales in the UK during the past year. This parallels a rise in church attendance, the attendance figures for last Christmas being significantly higher than the year before.

These strange atheists

According to the Times an atheist wants to be the first person in Britain to be de-baptised, claiming that he wasn't consulted at his baptism in 1953 and does not believe in God. He has obtained a "debaptism certificate" from the National Secular Society and has paid £60 to record it in the London Gazette.

All this does is demonstrate to the world that he does really believe in God but wants to make a point of rebelling. If he really did not believe in God his baptism would be meaningless and there would be no point in trying to cancel it out .... it would just have been a load of "hocus pocus". This man obviously believes his baptism does have some power and that would only be true if there was a God behind it.