Vadimus Post is LIVE!

Click here to be taken to my new web magazine.

Please bookmark it and visit again.

Best wishes,

Denis Campbell

I Am Chuffed (Excited) !

I just saw the final layout for the new site and we're rolling midweek with it.

I love Blogger. It was a great place to start and it is very limiting. I love The Huffington Post even more and wanted something in a more newspaper style but less busy that would give us a chance to dialogue on issues of the day.

We're changing our name from Outside the Boundaries to Vadimus Post.

Quo Vadimus is one of my favorite lines/questions from my favorite television and screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin. He wrote a television series called Sportsnight, a behind the scenes view of a major sports network (not ESPN) and what it was like to produce their daily news show (not Sports Center) - just like Studio 60 was not Saturday Night Live and thw West Wing was not the Clinton White House.

At the close of the second and final season there is a gem of an episdoe called Quo Vadimus - Latin, as you may have guessed, for "where are we headed?" A major acquisition specialist said he used it with his team and encouraged everyone to ask that question everyday.

I especially like the emphasis on the word WE. This is a collabrative effort and there will be many contributors here.

All of the URLs are covered so quovadimuspost.com (or co.uk for those here) and vadimuspost.com will get you there. We'll post a link here to help you get there when it's up.

Hope to see you soon...

Oxy-moron

Limited Immunity

In honour of former SecDef Donald Rumsfeld, who will, according to The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan on Chris Matthew's Hardball program, will likely face War Crimes tribunals (perhaps in absentia) for their Iraq War approval of "harsh interrogtion techniques" which The Geneva Convention and others would describe as "torture." Based on today's news of who was in the room, former AG Alberto Gonzales, former AG John Ashcroft and, in 284 days, former President Bush and former Vice President Cheney, SecState Coni Rice and others could also have standing reservations in The Hague.

Quotes

Former Vice President Al Gore of An Inconvenient Truth fame has an updated speech and slide show which he recently shared on the website TED.

When talking about oil shale exploration he said, "when junkies' veins collapse, they inject the drugs between their toes."

Former SecState Powell Weighs in Obama Experience Issue

Validation or Vindication?

From Yahoo/Reuters...

BT voted worst home phone povider

By Jennifer Hill Reuters - Tuesday, April 8 12:10 pm
LONDON (Reuters) - Consumers in a YouGov poll have voted Britain's largest home telephone provider, BT, the worst in the market.

The telecommunications giant, which has a 43 percent share of the home phone market, came bottom of the survey for the first time since 2005.

Some 30 percent of BT customers polled said they were unsatisfied with the service, 7 percent more than in July last year, the research for price comparison service uSwitch.com shows.

BT was found to have the lowest scores in nine out of 11 categories, including "value for money" for the fifth time running.

It also came last for "ease to interpret bill", "online account management", "ease of use" and "set-up support" and in the "best deal for you" category which assesses whether customers feel their provider has placed them on the most appropriate plan.

So that's why we never heard back from BT Ben...

Best Comedy Sketch of the Week That Was

Quote(s) of the Day

From the New York Times online...

Megan Simpson, a Penn State senior, had not been able to budge her father, a Republican. But the day before the deadline for registering for the coming Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, she handed him the forms and threw in a deal-sweetener as well. “I said, ‘Dad, if you change your party affiliation in time to vote for Obama,’ ” recalled Ms. Simpson, 22, an Obama campus volunteer, “ ‘I will get you the paperwork the day after the primary if you want to switch back to being a Republican.’ ”

Thus did Ralph E. Simpson Jr., 50, construction company owner, become a newly minted Democrat. “I probably will switch my affiliation back,” Mr. Simpson said, “but I haven’t decided who I will vote for in the general election. If Meg keeps working on me, who knows?”

Oxy-Moron of the Day

"Recorded Live"

It's either live or it's recorded. My faourite opening was to the semi-fictional (another oxy-moron, hmmmm) HBO series The Larry Sanders Show when the announcer says, "Live, on tape, before a studio audience, it's The Larry Sanders Show..."

T5 - Kermit cringes...

Denver International step aside, the crown for worst opening has passed 12+ years on to Heathrow's Terminal Five and this green guy is either rolling in his grave or laughing his tail off. He was most proud of the number five in his happy song.

BA Chairman Willie Walsh probably never wants to hear that number again.

Terminal Five has been in the news these last two weeks for everything but the pre-advertised technological wonder it was supposed to be. Much like Denver it was hoisted on its own poor planning petard. What is shocking is no one saw this coming.

I had a flight scheduled from Heathrow 31 March and when I saw T5 was opening moved my departure to Bristol because of Denver memories. No matter how well trained you think your people are, no one is prepared to shift 100,000 passengers and staff from one building to another overnight flawlessly. When we moved 700 people in Charlotte NC from one office tower to another, it took two weeks to get everything sorted. So how did BA expect to have a flawless transition to a building no one knew their way around?

The complaints are even more remarkable, no training for baggage handlers, no late night sessions and trial runs to ensure efficiency, silly limited compensation letters for disrupted travellers to add flame to kerosene. It just got worse and worse by the minute.

Several hundred flights were cancelled during the opening and 19,000 bags went astray, none more telling than Snooker player Jackie Bachmann's £700 snooker cue needed for a competition that evening in Scotland.

I can remember working the neighouring ticket counter in Boston in 1976 when a young rising musician by the name of James Taylor lost his $3,000 guitar. The reaction of the then BA station manager was a sarcastic, "whose banjo did we lose?" as the classic guitar sat in Singapore with him there in Boston for a concert. Corporate arrogance has long been a cancer within BA.

The problem is with 24/7 news everywhere, it's harder to hide when things do go wrong. But hey, everyone's bag got a holiday to Milan where baggage handlers and FedEx work night and day to unite passengers with their lost bags. Why Milan? Because they have a semi-permanent operation already in place there from previous difficulties over the Christmas holidays.

Sing-a-long with Kermit... "Oh 5 is such a pretty number..."

Don't Quit the Day Job

Hillary and John McCain on US late night telly charm offensives laced with alleged humour. You be the judge who is funniest.

69 to -2

That's the number of Super Delegates since February 5th that have declared for Sen. Obama vs. Sen. Clinton in the Democratic primary races. Margaret Campbell (no relation), a state legislator from Montana added yesterday to this growing group and trend. With Obama gaining about 1 Super Delgate per day and Mrs. Clinton losing ground, the "come from behind, I'm more electable" plan to lure prized deleates away from voting for Barack Obama grows slimmer.

Add the firing of chief strategist Mark Penn yesterday for doing what PR executives should not do, play both sides of any issue, the inability of her attempts to make Reverend Wright's statements stick as belinging to Barack Obama and the most recent poll showing the two candidates dead even in a state Mrs. Clinton should win by 15-20 points... well, the fat lady isn't singing yet but she is warming up in the wings.

This opera is, thankfully, nearly over.

Moving very soon...

We are coming shortly with a new website and e-zine which will link to a number of exciting sites around the globe. The growth in traffic and readers to this primitive full article only viewing format has been heartening. The problem is, as great a starting point Blogger has been, we need a format that gives the roughly 2,000 viewers visiting over the last month, the chance to more quickly browse and decide which features you want to view.

Like this little car passing the Ferrari, we have a big mountain to climb and even bigger dreams. We will not rest until this is the most entertaining, informative, interactive, 2-way and fun conversational space on the Web.

Our time with The Western Mail seems to be ending. Condensing stories and profiles of real risk-taking entrepreneurs and calling out poor performers to 600-words was never a strength and, in my opinion, robs readers of the richness of the story. The current US Presidential campaign is showing people will read and listen for longer than 10-seconds. UK media are litigation gun-shy about opinions. Misbehaving corporations have figured that out so rather than answering tough questions, legal teams worry about lawsuits. I'm convinced people want to see more than Britney Spears or Heather Mills.

When throwaway lines are taken as verbatim, humour is lost to sarcasm and everything except one's own behaviour is held under the light it's time to say thanks for the memories and hasta la vista. When one over-worries about the squeaky wheel, the family jewels just walk out the front door. I'd worry more about a 10% drop in circulation year-on-year during a month when the national side was winning the 6-Nations European rugby crown. Then again, I'm just a guest here in this country who was warned about writing there. And a US Congressman friend said, "never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel." Sage advice so best of luck to all.

I'll never though accept prejudice without first finding out for myself in every instances. Tilting at windmills, maybe... someone has to. Some days we'll get it right, some days not so but we will always be unpredictable.

We're getting ready for Pennsylvania, interviewing several interesting mean dna women and as customers demand better service, we will still call Sir Terry Tesco, BT Ben and others out on their company's behaviours.

Thanks for joining in on the ride. There will be the occasional post but mostly we will spend the next two weeks getting ready for the move.

Easter – Made in China

Easter morning the kids scurried around the house in search of sweets. They excitedly rushed around the house to find chocolate eggs and bunnies, jellied eggs, frosted cookies and a false-bottomed plastic form in their Peter Rabbit Collection bucket showing only 50% of the product one thought was there.

I walked into the local Tesco on Saturday, where there was a sea of green Easter product boxes. The common denominator was the length they had travelled.

The Peter Rabbit Collection was made in China. It travelled to Kinnerton Confectionary in Pymble near Sydney before being shipped to the UK and then sent by truck to each local Tesco store.

Conservatively, using statute air miles distances from infoplease.com, these eggs flew or were shipped then trucked some 15,600 miles from Shanghai to Sydney to a store just outside of Cardiff. We have no idea how far inland from Shanghai they were produced which could add up to another 2,000 trucking miles. The cookies appear to have travelled a slightly shorter distance, only 11,000 miles.

The Kindercare chocolate surprise egg products are as much a mystery as their content prize. Their packaging only says they were “imported” by a UK business but not from where – very clever indeed. The eggs have a plastic toy embedded inside and one might safely assume that those toys are made in China? We don’t know.

Only Thornton’s eggs were UK produced.

To add insult to this carbon footprint, each cookie was individually shrink-wrapped and sealed in plastic (requiring a knife or scissors to open), set in a form fitting plastic tray, sealed with two additional layers of plastic film and slid into a cardboard box sealed with plastic sticky tape.

And, the cookies and jelly eggs were produced 100+ days ago (before Christmas ’07) to begin their long journey across the ocean. According to them, they will remain edible until Christmas of 2008. What kind of preservatives are needed to keep something baked with flour, sugar and eggs edible for that long a period of time?

Was there not a single UK-based commercial baker that could produce three cookies for .59 - .99 pence?

Are we content having any company say it’s cheaper to produce and ship them across oceans than to truck 100-200 miles from a UK baker?

What are these doing to the environment?

What do these do to the health our children? We have more and more cases of severe nut allergies than I remember. How good can it be to have so many preservatives ingested into their bodies?

It certainly gave us pause…

Now, enjoy those Easter candies.

Ooops?

Just silly. No No No!

Put your cash in your mattress? Yes! Yes! Yes!

19 March Video Companion

I'm Here for Ashley

Grab a cuppa and take a 37-minute break that may touch you. Read and follow along here. It will open in another window.

Where there’s sport there’s big money

NEXT week spring training wraps and harkens an annual rite, baseball’s Opening Day, with the US regular season beginning in Tokyo!

Its annual 2,450-game slog towards October’s World Series, which, most duly note, isn’t a “world” series since only one team resides outside the US. But when you’re arrogant enough to foist so many commercials on viewers that they extend a two-hour break into a four-hour marathon, have £800m in television contracts, have players earning £15-20m before endorsements and merchandising generates £3bn to watch grown men chase a white ball … it may not be “World”, but it ain’t half bad either.

I’m convinced rugby and soccer never made it commercially in the US because TV execs could not figure out how to stop the clock every 10 minutes to sell something. But sport is a great international equaliser.

Wales sits on the cusp of ending an 81-year FA Cup drought and as a long-suffering baseball fan who waited 86 years for my Boston Red Sox to win a championship, I can report the sweetness of winning is worth the wait.

The sports differ but our common tie is the long-term suffering.

Sadly though, very early in my career, I helped to create suffering of a different kind.

Had I known then we were planting the early seeds for six-figure kit-naming rights contracts, eight-to-nine-figure stadium naming deals, merchandising that places team logos on every object imaginable and, the ultimate indignity… a £5 stadium pint of lager, I would, hand on heart, have just said NO!

Instead we now face the marketing madness of 2010 Ryder Cup corporate entertainment packages requiring a first-born child as collateral and locals letting homes for the week at 1970s house purchase prices and that’s before anyone starts on 2012 Olympic events in Wales.

It started benignly enough. My employer, The Bank of Boston was presented with an enticing deal. Jan Volk, GM of the NBA’s Boston Celtics wanted us to buy four end-zone banners at £5,000 a year for 10 years.

As bankers, we mulled it over, had our lawyers insert opt-out/review clauses (for us only) at years two, four and seven because, in the true spirit and definition of a banker … someone who lends you his umbrella when the sun shines and ask for it back when it rains… we wanted surety. Every year Jan (and his successor) wanted to re-negotiate our steal, er, deal. Today, stadium naming rights start at £125m (spread over 10-20 years) with New York’s baseball stadium opening in 2009 set to bludgeon that record.

The PGA tour called the same year Tiger Woods hit his first golf ball on The Mike Douglas Show (our Parkinson). Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson and Gary Player were starting to age and Arnold Palmer, well, he was born old. They wanted us to pay the equivalent of a Tiger-era fourth-place cheque, £175,000, to sponsor their event (you know it now as the £3,500,000 Deutsche Bank Championship, the last tournament before the Ryder Cup and £17m FedEx Cup crowning Tour Championship). £150,000 provided the purse for 72 golfers, the rest was to entertain clients. Sadly, £25,000 won’t get you inside the ropes, let alone buy a corporate VIP tent.

The NBA’s Miami Heat were the hot new franchise in 1988. As part of the marketing team, we knew the basketball product would be abysmal the first two seasons, so we set about creating events.

Audience participation was key as the team won 16 of 82 games played that first year and sold out every game.

I returned 13 years later to DJ-choreographed player introductions set to Phil Collins’s Tonight which included six strategically placed flame throwers pushing plumes 30ft skyward as my waitress brought a catered meal to my seat/table.

My head hung in shame over my Pinot Grigio and Caesar Salad sitting in that £200 seat for that evening.

As apeared in The Western Mail

P.S. The Western Mail ran this sports article a week earlier than expected and the sub-editor dropped the Wales tie-in. Below are the missing 3 sentences to the end of the aricle.

"So I naturally shuddered watching the video… “Cardiff’s New Stadium, future home to the Cardiff Blues and Cardiff City FC, announce the launch of the new 2,250 seat members’ club/corporate hospitality facilities, which are set to appeal to Welsh businesses and generate millions of pounds of revenue for the clubs.”

All I can say is, my bad.

And when the next brochure arrives selling you those club boxes, £10 pound plates of bangers and mash and £6 pints to wash it all down with, you know who to blame and, oh yeah, RUUUUNNNN!!!!!"

Make sense now? That's the newspaper biz, happens to us all. Memo to self: need to stockpile a few more articles for just such an emergency...

Keith Olbermann on the Ferraro Furore

When the line is crossed, it needs to be called. This was how he closed last evening's "Countdown" show.

It had to be very tough for him to do because he was an early critic of George W. Bush and the war (still signs off every broadcast with the words "that's it for Countdown on _______, the 1,xxxth day since Victory was Declared in Iraq").

Both Clintons very publicly supported his right to say what he was saying at the same time the far (out) right was decrying him as unpatriotic for saying it.

Can I Have Some Ketchup with that Candidate Please?

I feel like I’m watching one of those retro cartoons where the two characters are being slowly nibbled away from the ground up until the only thing left will be two talking heads and one of them disappears.

Yes, it is the most exciting and dramatic campaign in the history of modern US politics. Every Tuesday night, millions from around the globe watch the results and ad nauseum analysis on CNN and… the longer this intramural contest continues, the more damage it will do to the Democratic Party in the fall.

While convinced either candidate could defeat John McCain and have long enough coattails to sweep in a Democratic majority capable of bringing real change, the loss of either supporter’s camp will be devastating and many could stay home or cross-over to vote for McCain than support “the villain,” which is how the winner will be portrayed by the losers.

Yes, it was another impressive win for Barack Obama. Yes, we are about talking the historically racially un-enlightened American Deep South. Yes, Barack Obama took 90% of the black vote and 25% of the white. I am though quite disturbed though by two trends.

1. The radical right wing nut jobs are taking pot shots and because they are fighting internally no one is blunting them. Congressman Stephen King (no relation to the book author, we would not want to sully HIS good name) of Iowa said yesterday “Al Qaeda is rooting for Barack Obama” and that “the radical Islamists and their supporters will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11th. Because they will declare victory in this war on terror.” And that was his supposedly more balanced reply after being given a chance to recant.

2. The tenacious clinging though of the Clinton camp created two disturbing poll numbers. Obama supporters are 75% against Clinton and vice versa. The increasing polarisation means the longer this goes on, the more likely half the voters are to stay home in November.

Waiting six more weeks or longer will kill whoever is left standing. Just once, could a Clinton do something for the good of the party vs. themselves?

Weekly Video Companion

I really do wish I could do something about the audio pop at the beginning of each clip. Trust me in that I begin by saying, "Hello and welcome to Outside the Boundaries". Hey at least the clutter behind me is gone and I actually look into the camera. I'm not the YouTube old guy with a million hits and... we'll see what happens.

The Rochester Story - Part Two

The story ended just the other day with UPS again failing to deliver (yes, I know, a horrible pun) on their promise to refund the duty payment because, "they decided you are not entitled to the refund check as originally stated by them on 1/28/08."

And they decided also neither to tell their customer (Casual Male Group) nor me.

This is another unpleasant aspect of the slippery slide of customer service. I can use what ever rule book I choose to, especially to say no, not tell anyone involved and then hide behind the rule book a month later without ever needing to offer either an apology to a very large customer or an excuse because it's our policy ?!?!???

Holly's response, "I have issued you a credit this morning of $50.00 USD. I did not want you waiting any longer for money that is rightfully due you. I will address this issue with UPS. I hope this is an acceptable resolution for you."

Now, perhaps you understand why this company leads my hit parade.

It's not just Holly, below is a letter from their CEO David Levin. Theirs is a top-down commitment to service.

Are you listening BT Ben?



Click on the image to enlarge.

Why I am now soft putty in this wonderful sales woman’s hands

CASUAL Male Group’s Rochester Big and Tall chain has had my custom for 20 years. As my girth crept upwards, the US firm’s selection is hard to duplicate.

Their hallmark is providing exceptional one-to-one in-store service through dedicated and knowledgeable men’s fashion experts.

The online business though falls short because web business is often the poor relation of many a retail organisation and, like many, they cannot determine if items are in stock as various systems process orders differently.

Living abroad the last decade, I’ve become reliant on their online sales group since few EU merchants handle, as the Singaporean stalls merchant so indelicately yelled, “I have King Kong size!”

Which although direct, indeed true and convulsed me at the time with laughter, failed to win my heart or the sale, but I digress.

Every year, an email announces the big year-end sale and their system again accepted payment and confirmed my online order for merchandise... no longer in stock.

While some feel the answer is to never make a service mistake, the real answer is, how does your business recover when one is made?

Mistakes happen. So how do you empower your people to resolve them because the smile, shrug, policy recitation and blank stare, “what do you want me to do?” expression is not any more acceptable than spending time pointing internal fingers (your choice of digit) by way of explanation to me as the customer?

Like most businessmen circa 1995, I owned two types of clothing, dress suits with requisite neckties/nooses and my everyday knockabout rags.

The dotcom era brought casual Fridays so we had to buy entire smart casual wardrobes to dress down in style.

As an old girlfriend said to a salesman, “his taste is in his mouth”. It was learn to shop sensibly or die trying.

I filled my online Rochester cart and 36-hours later received an email saying all items were not available, so my order was cancelled.

I dialled the service department and reached supervisor Holly Roe.

She began by saying, “Oh, I’m so glad you called back. I had a bad phone number and was about to send an email.”

I gently released one set of my fingernails embedded angrily in the ceiling – She wanted to call me?

Holly said, “I’m very sorry, it must be so frustrating, please accept my apologies. Here is what I think we should do but I wanted to first get your thoughts.”

The other set of fingernails retracted and I dropped clumsily into my desk chair. I explained this seems an annual occurrence, why take my money if there is no merchandise?

“I don’t know but I’m going to find out for you. It sounds as though refunding your money is not the best option, so I will personally search the warehouse to find similar items, then you can then tell me how to proceed.

“Also we’ll refund the $36 shipping (£19) and when all is to your satisfaction, I will place an additional $50 (£27) on your credit card for the inconvenience.” (Deafening silence, followed by my meek and quiet “OK”.)

Sir Terry Tesco, are you listening?

I spend £12,000 annually with you. Your online group do a good job at swift refunds which do not solve my missing merchandise problem, but I always have to take the first step and pay to call you! We’ll devote another column to in-store treatment.

I am now putty in this woman’s hands.

Suddenly (insert your choice of horror movie theme music) duty and paperwork errors between UPS, US and UK delay my order six weeks. Have no fear, Holly is here.

With the patience of Job’s wife she manoeuvres the international morass, avoids diplomatic incident and all is resolved, but not before giving me a further refund of excess duties of £36 and browbeating UPS into refunding my £29 cheque and she even found and had an over-long pair of pants hemmed two inches to fit me!

Many would argue my order lost money for Rochester, something many a supervisor almost anywhere would be browbeaten over. Holly understood that over the lifetime of a 20-year relationship, I’ve spent thousands there. Losing $160 (£82) by fixing this was an investment in keeping a long-standing relationship thriving. She’s been well trained to recover situations.

So what would you do? Are your people empowered or procedure-bound when it comes to helping a customer? What recovery system do you have in place?

The market, especially in tough times, will demand you address this.

Why? Regardless of whether I live in Wales or Washington, there’s an Asda opening next month, Waitrose began delivering recently to my neighbourhood and we have choices.

We just need to start exercising them.

As appeared in The Western Mail

Still Waiting to Hear from BT Ben...

although I did have a long conversation with a lady in his office today. That has to be one of the most thankless jobs in the world, handling complaints that go to the Office of the Chairman.

In 1981 I sat two cubicles away from George Harland, the most even tempered person on the planet. He was the bank's Vice President handling complaint calls that came into the President's office. He never once raised his voice in the two years I was there and I often wondered where he went at the end of each day... whether he locked himself in his car and primal screamed his way home or crawled inside of a bottle from the pressure. He was never flustered and you could often hear the other end of the phone line buzzing in his ear. At a law firm in LA I joked with the IT guy who received grief from everyone (and we know solicitors to be of low ego strength and full of patience) that I was being extra nice to him because when he came into the office with the AK-47 I wanted him to briefly flash - "Denis - friend," and move on to the next target.

The BT conversation started as most do, quite tensely as there was the public face of a very public department defending the actions of the company by... explaining their policy. Having done some executive coaching, I felt in the unique position of letting her wind herself down. I was long past attempting to gain a financial settlement and really now just trying to get some answers and a conversation/dialogue with Ben.

After getting past bouts of "no sir, you are twisting my words, that is not what I meant at all," I hung in until we eventualy peeled away the outer shell and engaged in a meaningful discussion. The turning point was when even she admitted the recorded voice stating "we are VERY BUSY" was infuriating.

Indeed the people I feel most sorry for inside BT are the career employees of 10-30 years who remain consummate professinals and remember the days when a single person could and would work their way through the system to resolve an issue completely for a customer.

Since most of our conversation was off the record, I will honour that. There was a wistfulness to her tone I also heard in the voices of dedicated service team members like Chris and David in Sheffield and each engineer who visited the house. All truly wanted to get to the bottom of the problem and felt completely flummoxed by the system.

So my question remains, it is indeed broken, what can be done to fix it in a way that people have responsibility to help a customer? Calling those poor young kids in India who have one hand tied behind their back reading help screens, people working under such metrics pressure to handle x number of calls per hour to obtain passing grades for swiftly passing a call along but getting no credit or are chastised for taking the time to actually resolve an issue or indeed think logically may be efficient, but it does not earn points. We live in a call centre mentality world that does nothing to help where we are as customers.

I asked her if there was a way to have a dialogue with Ben as it seemed these were important questions. She said she would file her report on the conversation and pass my request onward. Here's hoping we get there.

I feel a bit like Michael Moore trying to interview then GM chair Roger Smith in the film Roger and Me. Stay tuned.

Obama Speech in San Antonio after Texas/Ohio Primaries

Fast Forward to 13:05 minutes where Barack Obama begins to speak of the 81-year old man from Uganda and understand my post below and why this is such an important election to the US and the rest of the world.

It’s Déjà vu All Over Again

For my 10-years as an American living abroad, I’ve had to explain my country’s inability to “get elections right”. In 2000 no one could understand why nine people in black robes ended Florida’s ballot count handing victory to George W. Bush. It was even stranger in ’04 trying to explain why, despite such near unanimous global loathing, he was re-elected by the narrowest of margins because of irregularities in Florida and Ohio. Last night Ohio was again the spoiler as American politics spun further down the rabbit hole prolonging the fight and virtually assuring that a 71-year old Bush apologist will likely win in November as the Democratic Party shows an remarkable ability to eat its young.

The 5 keys to last night…

The Karl Rove (former Bush Advisor) School of Attack Adverts.
A fear-mongering telly advert appeared this weekend in Ohio showing a beautiful sleeping baby and an ominous ringing phone whilst the announcer gravely intoned “it’s 3 am at the White House… there’s a global crisis, who do you want answering that phone?” (They were oblivious to the phone ringing unanswered for 7 rings, but I digress).

Can anyone imagine Alistair Darling running this type of an advert against Gordon Brown to wrest control over the leadership of their own party? That is what is happening in the Democratic primary. Going negative was usually reserved for attacks against your opponent in the general election (sadly, I can see either Gordon or David using this tactic in ’10 or ’11, as you seem to be learning well from the US).

How on earth will this party unite behind their standard bearer for the fall and no, there will not be another “Al Gore moment” where he rides in on his hybrid stallion to save the day and lead the party.

Alienating the Already Alienated
Millions of voters who feel disenfranchised by the grumpy old white men each party continues to propose as standard bearer will remain disenfranchised. Voters came out this year in numbers of 40-50% over anything previously seen in every state. The multi-coloured pastiche of faces standing behind candidate Obama will disappear in November if the choice is more of the same (only this time we’ll have a grumpy white woman?). These young people comprise some 15% of all new voters. They are jaded to begin with, feel the “adults” have fouled both the environment and political system and these results would only confirm their doubts. Go negative, whether it is factual or not, scare people and win?

Fuzzy Math Skills
800+ super delegates, not the voters determining who wins this election would be a travesty. Handing the nomination to either candidate via a smoke-filled room will guarantee a Republican fall victory. Hillary must win more than 60% of the remaining delegates from here until June to just pull even. Regardless of the harm she does to the party, she will stay the course even as Obama wins the remaining contests in March and put her eggs in another must-win Rust Belt state – Pennsylvania – in April.

Florida, Michigan and the Courts
These two states broke their party’s rules by moving their primaries to before Super Tuesday and (aside from kicking themselves as they could be king or queen-makers) the party bosses punished them by refusing to seat their delegates at the convention. (Imagine Birmingham and Yorkshire not being seated at a Tory party conference?)

They held primaries but no one campaigned and indeed Obama was not even on Michigan’s ballot. Now the courts may decide to either: seat these two states delgates, order a new election or anything in between. Too, the Obama camp went to court last night and obtained a court order allowing those standing in long voting queues in urban Cleveland to vote. So there will probably be a lawsuit there because a heavy turnout could cost Mrs. Clinton 1-2 delegates in Ohio.

Eating their Young
The Democrats have a remarkable ability to eat their young and last night was no exception. In his speech last night, Obama issued words of warning where he said the whole world is watching this election and how we treat each other. Spurious e-mail campaigns calling him Muslim, questioning his patriotism, a photo of him in Africa in tribal garb, attack ads, and other general silliness are usually the purview of the opposition party. The world cannot afford four more years of staying the course in Iraq because of yet another tainted American election decided by courts rather than voters.

The show goes on. Party unity in November is fleeting and Barack Obama, who has run an admirable campaign for his message of hope, must “go negative” to win. President Reagan ran a campaign called “Morning in America” and it showed him as sunny and optimistic.

This morning in America it’s cloudy, muddled and stormy.

Video Companion for 4 March

I've always felt there was a better way to reach people than static nature of wordy web blogs. There is a missing element of two-way communication because by its nature, the Web wants you to stop and read what I have to say as you plough your way through a mountain of words. A main urpose of this blog going forard is to engae in dialogue about issues of the day and help folks get behind the 750-900 words they see in the paper, magazine or online.

That is why for most upcoming stories there will be a video sement provided with additional background information on how a story came onto the radar screen and published in the Western Mail or wherever. This is an admittedly rudimentary attempt that will become more refined as my skill level improves with time.

Please let me know and hey, if you want to use YouTube to comment, I look forward to posting it and talking here.

Postscript to Today's Western Mail Article (below)

News editors often make cuts to submitted content because of space considerations. Sion Barry is one of the better and more thoughtful business editors I've worked with and missing from the BT article was the postscript which appears below accompanied by a letter from BT, received late Saturday and opened on Sunday, after Monday's paper was put to bed.

I really wanted to believe BT's press officer Mr. Jason Mann. He was very convincing and spoke from a deep conviction about everything they are trying to do at BT. Indeed, I've sat in a similar chair trying to stop fallout from the collapse of BCCI staining my then firm Price Waterhouse. I could not tolerate journalists who neither "fact-checked" nor cared enough to get the quotes right. In this case it was the system not helping him each step along the way and therein lies the problem.

There were several excellent and frustrated mid-level BT employees and managers with whom I spoke at each step along the way during the nine weeks. All were desperate to resolve the issue and yet the organisation is not structured to help even its own engineers who wait in the same call-in queues customers do.

In the words of many a person trying to find something to laugh at in the midst of a tragedy, I wish it were otherwise but thank you BT, I could not make up material this good... this article nearly wrote itself.

P.S. My February bill arrived the day after the fault was resolved and I spoke to the 150 lady about the charge for diverting calls to my mobile. (It seemed strange to me that a fault not of my making requiring calls to be diverted would not be something BT would pay for?) She read from her rule book… “I could have either the diversion or the line rental refunded but not both.” When I started somewhat disturbed to hysterical laughter she became a human being… then I spoke for 27-minutes to her colleague in India.

Indeed my calls to various BT departments over the life of this incident totalled more than six hours (you don't want to know what my billing rate for that amount of time is), the time spent entertaining BT engineers was extra.

Nine weeks of line rental costs about £47. Sijesh in India said, “I’m sorry sir but the system only authorises me to refund you £6.” He was a toughie but I negotiated him up to £10. When I asked if this was BT’s final offer, he bumped it up to £15.

When I asked him if I stayed further on the line might we get closer to the amount owed he said, "no, £15 was the 'absolute maximum'” and “a letter will be forthcoming.”

Even if we throw away the lost time, I’m still out £32.

Save the letter, I’ll take a cheque please.

P.P.S. On Saturday afternoon, this letter arrived, happy to confirm that my credit of £2.80 has gone into my account, again sending me to bt.com and clearly trying to sell me more services.

I dunno, where daily provision of basic telephony seems a challenge, does anyone know why I would consider additional services?

Again, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

What if you experienced life from our end of the phone?

Dear Ben,

I want to thank your team for resolving a nagging problem. I read your profile in KLM’s magazine and was touched by your personal service commitment. Your senior people do a good job of handling customer issues… of course I might also jump if an order came down from the corporate office.

I tried to call you, but the switchboard transferred me to your press office. I became concerned efforts by them on my behalf might seem improper. I repeated my real questions were about BT’s internal communications process. It was then that BT’s fault management policy was explained and how quickly you move to ensure all service is promptly restored.

I was surprised when the engineer scheduled to arrive 24 hours later, was here less than one hour later. He explained he needed to climb 1.5 kilometres of telephone poles to resolve this nine-week-old problem. An initial cable was replaced on February 4 but a lightning strike nearby caused other issues.

I had a follow-up conversation with your press office and a few questions came up; can every BT customer receive this level of service?

They marked the main fault as resolved on the 4th yet no one checked if things were sorted here. For three weeks I quietly fumed, waiting, as instructed, for it to clear and paying for a service I could not use. How can a fault show as resolved without checking with the customer?

Since you own the lines, you used to “pay” for my customer query calls. Not over the last nine weeks. But I was pleased to learn BT is doing away with their own 0845/0870 inbound numbers and will again provide free customer service calls.

Since you created the 0870 beast though, what can you do to influence other companies who continue to charge Me to talk to Them about My account?

While grateful my phone is operational, what about that engineer who magically appeared? From whose doorstep was he pulled because of the “squeaky” wheel? Can you assure me someone else did not endure a cancelled call to service me?

151 is the main BT faults entry point. Mention the keyword “broadband” under your breath and bingo! Call this 0845 number for your passage to India where young kids read computer help screens in the middle of the night. Have you ever found the specific answer to your question via a help screen? Might you consider dedicating resources to 151 to ensure satisfaction?

Please ensure strong blood- pressure medication and snacks are by your desk as it will involve anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour with the likelihood of 1-2 dropped connections midway through, meaning you get to start all over again. They have my number on the screen, could someone please figure out we were not finished and call me back? You would win a lot of hearts and minds with that simple gesture, it’s not like you’re paying for the call.

It may take a while, but like Walt Disney, what if you experienced life from our end of the phone. My least favourite is the disembodied, recorded woman’s voice chiding me with – “we are very busy” (I’m not?) who then tries to get me to go to bt.com.

Ben, can we at least agree to have your folks just stop, listen, examine the data in front of them, raise their hand and say, “I’m going to take responsibility, get to the bottom of your issue, resolve it and I won’t end this call or clear my screen until you are satisfied it is done.”

What a wonderful world that would be.

As appeared in The Western Mail

Time for "Silly Season" in Earnest

It's already beginning...

"I have heard that Obama has said publicly, that he does not salute the American flag and will not. The other rumor is that he was said to have admitted that if elected, he will not use the bible, but the Koran for his inauguration."
"Did you hear that Hillary Clinton was implicated in the suicide of aid Vince Foster."
"John McCain was involved in a "close" relationship with a lobbyist. (Implication is that is was sexual)."

Is anyone else as sick of these Internet e-mail based whisper/smear campaigns (from all sides) using ridiculous statements such as this and much, much worse.... to whip up fear?

We are blessed with a choice of three outstanding Americans for the first time in a long time for the Presidency. For the first time in my adult life I am NOT choosing between the lesser of two evils and wondering if this is the best either party can do - IT IS!

The process has been fascinating, energising, invigourating and hand over heart, I would be able to support any of the three and find it incredible that such small mindedness from a lunatic fringe element is accepted as THE TRUTH!

Did you hear...? somehow makes it gospel and aren't you sick of rumours without any editorial discipline or individuals otherwise exercising their due diligence to dig for facts?

I spent 84-minutes this morning glued to my computer watching last night's Ohio debate... in Wales... on the Internet. I am more informed this year than any because of the Internet and its ability to show multiple viewpoints. Let's get our heads out of our bottomsides and when whispers are started ask, does this makes sense and is it real? Only when we behave like discerning adults and engage appropriately will these idiot consultants creating stupid ads and e-mail campaigns appealing to the lowest common denominator smear be silenced once and for all.

We alone can make sure negative ads don't work this year and force to the unemployment lines all graduates of the Karl Rove School for Campaign Strategy.

The coveted ... Golden Toilet Seat

SO did you require an extra cuppa after watching Hollywood’s Oscars until 5am?

Who got your vote? How did you do against the other punters? Were you glued to the tube watching breathless reportage of celebrity parties?

The ceremony ends early in LA. As an objective past participant, I can assure readers most parties will bump into our afternoon drive.

While we’re serious business people above such triviality, in greater Los Angeles, a city where people watch end credits to find the names of friends, those golden statues constitute life and death news.

And after 80 years can Oscar be more tedious, pompous or predictable? Yes. And 1.5 billion people worldwide endure this marathon as the 3,000 members of AMPAS, who no one knows, dress up and congratulate themselves by telling us who they thought were best for last year?

And watch we do. From pre-ceremony interviews along a red carpet above which people slept overnight in bleacher seats to catch a glimpse of the stars, to the incessant post-game commentary.

How will last night impact grosses? Did the writer’s strike hurt the broadcast? Was John Stewart better with writers than without?

Movies must appeal to women to succeed so did a dearth of hits like Titanic (neither No Country For Old Men nor There Will Be Blood fit this category) and Keira Knightley’s snub in Atonement dampen Oscar’s appeal?

Who cares? The biz does. Oscar loves underdog indie films. In 1995, our law firm’s client Kennedy-Miller Pictures was a surprise nominee for best picture for the delightful Babe.

They walked away with a statue for best visual effects and parlayed that into millions in a theatrical rerelease and DVDs (if there was ever a category for best line, James Cromwell’s “that’ll do pig, that’ll do,” wins hands-down).

Last night’s excitement though pales in comparison with a similarly styled UK competition in December.

Most of us missed an awards show that nearly allowed the mighty team of Pencelli Castle Caravan and Camping Park near Brecon to walk away with a highly coveted trophy – The Golden Toilet Seat.

That’s right, we’ve all seen the signs in Moto Rest Areas, but once again we missed the 2007 UK Loo of the Year awards celebrating excellence in hygiene, an aspect of customer service we all pay attention to when driving, shopping or camping.

Never to be confused with Los Angeles’ Kodak Theatre, these awards were held in a lavish ceremony at The National Motor Cycle Museum in Birmingham. Some 1,500 establishments were, according to Pencelli’s website, “brave enough to throw their mops into the ring to be judged” (warning, the puns will worsen).

Gerwyn and Liz Rees, the park’s owners, faced stiff competition from five-star winning camping and caravan loos at: Argoed Meadow in Cenarth; Daisy Bank in Montgomery; Morben Isaf in Machynlleth, Powys and River View in Pontarddulais yet flushed away all comers in their category to walk away with top camper and caravan park honours and then – the overall national award for the cleanest loos in all of Wales.

Said Gerwyn, “We won this award in 2003 and to find ourselves in contention again for 2007 was very surprising.”

The Reeses dutifully completed an entry form last spring and waited for an official inspector to come, unannounced.

“They say very little,” said Liz, “they inspect and follow the same grading system for every loo in the UK.”

While her husband wants to learn from and offers to accompany the inspector, he learns this is a serious and solitary business and this inspector works alone.

Like the Oscars, the water level rises with each round. By the time dessert is finished only one company remains standing high above the golden throne, having gone from five-star to category winner to country winner to UK winner and holders of the golden toilet seat award.

When Pencelli moved into the best of Britain finals, they proudly carried the Welsh Dragon against heavyweights P&O Ferries (Northern Ireland), JD Wetherspoon (Scotland) and the giant food chain Asda (England) who, emerged as national winners.

No one though could stop Manchester’s Trafford Centre from walking away with the seat prize for overall best of show.

The Reeses were justifiably proud of their effort and kept their fame in perspective.

Said Gerwyn, “It’s funny what we are doing is tongue-in-cheek, yet as people queue up in our caravan park lobby and it brings a smile, it’s also important.

“Loos means so much to people. It’s a place you spend five minutes a day and it weighs heavily on where your frame of mind stays during the day.”

Indeed. These champions will be back and a word of warning, they will be doubly prepared as they also won a 1st place Wales in Bloom Award for 2007. Sometimes competition as life, is not fair.

Two important questions remained unanswered. Did the ultimate winner in their acceptance speech say, “You like me, you really like me?”

And where exactly does the winner display a golden toilet seat? We’ll keep digging.

(As appeared in The Western Mail - photo supplied by Gerwyn and Liz Rees)

Quote of the week...

"What Mrs. Clinton has that Mr. Obama does not have, Mr. Obama can get. What Mr. Obama has that Mrs. Clinton does not have, she can never get."

- Alec Baldwin (?)
Yes the actor/director is a regular blogger at The Huffington Post

And therein lies the Democratic Presidential primary race. The more people look and see, the more enthused they become for real change.

Senator Obama's victory speech in South Carolina, may be a turning point. Fast forward 11 or 12 minutes into the video, close your eyes and, those of us old enough to remember, picture Dr. King speaking. It is eery.

10-0

As a gutted New England Patriots fan superstitious about win streaks, this one by Senator Barack Obama over Senator Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party primaries to determine the nominee for the November general election is impressive by any standard.

Pressure builds daily on the 800+ party elder/insider superdelegates (28 January column in this blog) to do the right thing and vote for the candidate with the most electoral delegates vs. following their personal political loyalties.

The Democratic party is in danger of both a brokered convention and eating its young.

In every state, turnout has swelled by 40%-80% with thousands of newly engaged voters coming to the polls for the first time or returning after a long absence. The Democrats have not seen anything like this candidacy since John F. Kennedy ran in 1960 against establishment candidate, Richard M. Nixon.

Going back to the end of January and South Carolina, a state that normally attracts 300,000 Democratic Party voters, more than 500,000 cast votes this year. The party is wringing its hands hoping this issue resolves itself and knows that those young and previously disenfranchised voters will leave if the nomination goes yet again to the "establishment" candidate.

Because of the Internet one can watch the entire stump speeches of both candidates vs. 10-second sound bytes. Sitting and watching a complete 43-minute speech by Senator Obama from last night means the opportunity to have the most informed electorate in our history. Watching these, full-length speeches, it is hard for even a cynic to avoid seeing the sea of multi-coloured, multi-aged faces behind the Senator as he urges us to follow what Dr. King called "the fierce urgency of now."

Every poll over the last five weeks shows Republican Sen. McCain defeating Sen. Clinton while Sen. Obama defeats Sen. McCain in November. So the party has an electability issue to face with Mrs. Clinton and the added fear a fall campaign would unite a fractious Republican party against her. Too, with Al Gore and Dick Cheney on the sidelines, we are in a unique election where neither an incumbent President or figurehead party leader Vice President is on the ticket.

The Democrats invented superdelegates in the 1980s to prevent the party nominating someone who is unelectable (this was in the wake of two horrific losses by Vice President Mondale and Governor Dukakis). These delegates are the ultimate party insiders; elected officials and lifetime members of the Democratic national commitee who control 40% of the delegates needed for someone to be nominated. In the early primaries, the committed superdelegates gave Sen. Clinton a seeming insurmountable lead (indeed, despite actual election results, she still leads in this category), even though Sen. Obama had won more delegates as decided by the voters. The issue gained media traction after the Super Tuesday delegate dead heat and before this current momentum building streak by Sen. Obama.

Watching results this morning in the Wisconsin primary a few numbers jump out.

- Senator Obama is winning November electability polls over Senator Clinton 67%-33%.

- Senator Clinton lost the blue collar and white male votes in an essentially blue collar state (her base and constituencies) to the broad charismatic change appeal of Sen. Obama.

I was stunned when a year ago several respected friends quit their jobs to work on the Obama campaign. I remember another friend being invited to private fund raiser 6-years ago when a young state legislator was visiting a home in Maryland. This confident young man so inspired him that he wrote a cheque on the spot and knew then he was in the presence of someone special. It was Barack Obama running for the US Senate from the state of Illinois.

I am torn in this race because I think Senator Clinton is very bright and has the skills to run an effective administration and be a very good President. Most though are tired of the drama around this former first family. It would be nice to leave the scandals of Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky, Travelgate, Vince Foster's suicide and the attack dogs this family brings in on the sidelines this time.

Change of this kind will help us all recover from the disastrous foreign policies of Bush and Blair and bring back the good name and standing of the USA. We are fortunate that all three candidates remaining in both parties could do that. That is what gives so many whether red or blue state in colour, a reason to be excited. The USA needs to sit again at the grown-up table.

The fat lady may not yet have sung, but she surely is warming up offstage. A loss on 4 March in Ohio and/or Texas will bring her onstage. The question is whether the Clinton's will have the grace to stop for the good of the party as Senator Edwards did or vanity and hubris will prevail?

Shout Out About The Shocking Service We Get Today

In 1966, five years before the opening of his crown jewell theme park in Orlando, Walt Disney succumbed to cancer. His service legacy lives on through the Disney Institute where executives from around the globe come to embrace the Disney ethos and, in theory, bring Walt’s Way to their businesses.

Walt ensured Disney executives never allowed themselves to live in an ivory tower. Once each quarter they came to the park and worked a full day “on-the-firing-line.” They interfaced directly with customers and did everything from operate the Flying Dumbo elephants, clean loos, drive parking lot trams and serve food in theme restaurants. He never wanted anyone inside the Disney organisation to become far removed from the customer at any time.

Can you see Sir Terry Tesco or BT Ben and their managers devoting an entire day to any single store or customer in this way? (Sorry to make the coffee snort out your nose.) It’s a pity because one need not look far inside either organisation, often not even beyond the store or 1st supervisory level to see how far service has slid down the slippery slope. And we are as much to blame by our apathy to poor service… we mostly shrug and endure it.

Why have we allowed mediocre to seem excellent and become so predictably numbed that companies know we will still come to them no matter how outrageously they treat us? From discontinuing 0800 free numbers so WE pay the bill to call THEM via costly 0870 numbers to discuss OUR account (from which they then get as much as half the cost of each call) to booking entire service departments on a permanent passage to India… we are abused, given the run-around for hours until worn down by an impenetrable system that can have us getting an ASBO if we demand proper service!?!

35-years ago, I worked after-school in a family-owned supermarket. The early 1970’s was a time of perfect, square, paper sacks, 20 smartly-dressed cashiers and white shirt and tie “bag boys” under the watchful eye of manager Bill Gear. Mr. Gear’s “office” was essentially a broom closet. You’d never find him there because his real office was the shopfloor where all meetings and job interviews took place, on the fly, during his constant walks which he interrupted many times to greet customers by name.

His was a message and example learned early; “the customer is the most important thing in my day.” Mr. Gear instructed every new employee in the art and science of paper sack packing. We watched as he built a perfect square sack every time. “Build a solid base in the bottom with cartons, boxes and bottles, then fill the open spaces so the sack remains upright, rigid and supported by the load inside. Pack it too heavily and elderly customers cannot lift and carry them… too lightly, the order is not balanced and you waste bags. Place frozen items in a separate plastic bag (who knew then about global warming?). This keeps the sack dry. And always, ALWAYS ask the customer if they have a preference.” His mantra became ours.

Can you imagine this happening today? The scanner lady sometimes remembers to ask her rote line, “do you need help with packing your order, sir?” I was talking to a new scanner who admitted her entire training regimen was a ½ day of health and safety training and a ½ day observing another at their till before being thrown to the customers. When I asked if there was training on how to speak, interact with and solve customer issues, she giggled, “no,” with the unsaid, “why would we do that,” hanging awkwardly.

Uncle Walter Disney would spin in his grave at these antics. So it’s time to name and shame. This column will periodically look at the most egregious examples and, in the words of Peter Finch from the film “Network” get you to open your windows and scream as loud as you can, “we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!”

Trust me, you’ll feel better and like me finally be deserving of the strange looks your neighbours already give you anyways.

As Appeared in The Western Mail 18 February 2008

The Long and Winding Road to Service Hell

37-years ago, I began my first job working after-school in a family owned market. 89-year old founder Angelo Tedeschi was wheeled by pushchair through each store talking with customers and employees (most of whom he knew by name). He asked about everyone’s family and checked the condition of the store with his name on the front door. He’d long since “retired,” couldn’t sit around and so he and his sons started again.

The early 1970’s was a time of perfect square, paper sacks and 20 smartly-dressed cashiers and white shirt and tie “bag boys” all under the watchful eye of manager Bill Gear. Mr. Gear’s office was the size of a broom closet. He’d never sit in it because his real office was the store floor where meetings and job interviews took place, on the fly, during his constant inspection walks which he interrupted many times to greet customers. His was a living message learned early; the customer is the most important thing in my day.

Mr. Gear instructed every new bag boy in the art and science of paper sack packing. We watched as he built a perfect square sack every time. “Build a ssolid base in the bottom with a balance of cartons, boxes and bottles, then fill in the open spaces areas these so the sack remains upright, rigid and supported by the load inside. Pack it too heavily and elderly customers cannot lift and carry them… too lightly, then the order is not balanced and you waste bags. Always place frozen items in a separate plastic bag (who knew about global warming). This keeps the sack dry. And always, ALWAYS ask the customer if they have a preference.” His mantra became ours.

Can you imagine this happening today? The scanner lady sometimes remembers to ask her rote line, “do you need help with packing your order, sir?” My reply rarely varies, “would it make a difference if I answered in the affirmative?” As she tries to vainly figure out if I said yeah, but no, but yeah, but no, but maybe… her answer rarely varies, “no, not really.”

Thus begins the 180-second dash to ensure we climax this task at the same moment. She speeds items across the scanner as if the 20-seconds waiting for me at the end will be her break. I fill my blue recyclable back-breaking bags in time to hand over my card, pay for my order and then must gather everything up and leave breathlessly because she cannot start the next order until I am “CLEAR” of the belt. And God help me for holding up the next four customers in the queue who are glaring at me for taking precious seconds by disturbing her fragile concentration by engaging in conversation.

Of course her entire training regimen is a day of health and safety training (we don’t want to be sued!) and a day observing another at the till before being thrown to the wolves, so they get what they pay for? When I asked the young lady last week if there was any training on how to speak with and solve customer issues, she giggled, “no,” with the unsaid, “why would we do that,” hanging awkwardly unsaid in the air.

They have ME well trained. Their “service culture” includes several self-scan DIY paying lanes installed “for my convenience.” This “no nonsense” machine orders me to place each scanned items on the belt or the entire system locks up. The belt whisks items away at bowling ball speed crushing everything at the end like scattered 10-pins. Hint, scan the eggs last.

I expect that either my personal shelf-stocking schedule will soon be included in the bag (Mr. Campbell, you will work the baked beans aisle Thursday night, what’s that, a bad back, charge this man another £20 for shopping here!) or I will eventually have to swing the car around back and pick my items off of the moving truck, before then scanning them in myself.

Where did it all go so wrong?

Details mattered to Mr. Gear and to each of us, from how we were dressed to how we addressed the customer (“Thank you Mrs. Jones,” if possible) to how we carried their bags on our shiny carts and loaded them into the car so they would not fall over or spill out. Competition for these positions was fierce and we were evaluated regularly.

It meant something to work at Angelo’s.

Contrast that with the pleading voice heard every Sunday morning at 10:15 am over the PA at your local Tesco, “will all of the 10:00 am cashiers pleeeeaaassee come to the front immediately,” as each queue is now six-deep and most employees live by American comedian George Carlin’s mantra, “you may get there on time, but screw the company those first 20-minutes belong to you!” We then watch the “front-end manager” run around, looking worried, important and busy, palms extended upwards in the classic, “what do you want me to do about it” shrug as he has no answer to the question, “how long does the queue need to be before opening all of the tills.”

If screaming would help, I would. I simply want service people in this or any country to behave as if customer service was an important condition of their employment and, indeed, their job depended upon its quality. Instead I stupidly stand there contributing to the £80,000 quid a minute they make because there are no closer options. Is it too much to expect my custom to matter? Apparently, yes.

Service used to matter. It used to mean something to be a City of London taxi driver. You had to complete a battery of tests and compete to become one. Now cab drivers I encounter in The City are simultaneously practice their map reading and English speaking skills (said whilst pointing to the map “here?, here?”). Even with Sat-Nav you’re lucky to get within three blocks of your destination.

The final exam was the stuff of legend. A tester would hop into your cab and say, “OK it’s 16:15, we’re at Bank, there is a memorial service for the Queen Mum just ending at St. Paul’s, an anti-war demonstration in Trafalgar, Tower Bridge is jammed open and several horses broke free from a parade and are on the loose in Kensington Gardens with PC’s conducting rolling blockades until are all corralled. Your fare has to be to Heathrow’s Terminal Two in 26 minutes… GO!

Today service standards have sunk to where mediocre is considered excellent. Smile and shrug are the norm and getting angry at service failures (particularly in an NHS facility) has you targeted for prosecution as abusive. Emboldened, they now stand in a stare-down with you, one hand on the phone desperately wanting an excuse to call security whilst you are cowed silently back into your seat because your child who has a temperature of 104 and you have waited 90-minutes because of their error. So not only have we no voice, face an uncaring group of service personnel, but we also run the risk of an ASBO!

Businesses take advantage of this nation’s desire to not make a fuss. For decades they’ve grown cockier trampling over consumers’ rights. Just try to find a live human being to complain to inside any company with the authority to actually fix something or accept accountability.

Service booked a permanent passage to India where bleary-eyed foreign call centre kids (many supporting an entire extended family off of their meagre pay cheque) stare at computer screens at 4 am local time providing ‘service’ which mostly consists of reading the same computer Help screens we see at home. Has anyone actually had their question appear on a website’s FAQ list? These screens are written in a vacuum by people who spend their days writing and talking in the 1’s and 0’s of binary code vs. the English the rest of us speak.

Some of these kids even have their native Hindi names anglicised (as if the accent does not give me a clue I am talking to Bangalore!) and while they do try their level best, their hands are tied by UK head office control freaks who are afraid these off-site people might harm the relationship with their customers if they give too much information or are somehow allowed to think for themselves.

So people thousands of miles away, hired to provide me with service, have their hands tied and are not given the bare minimum of information to help a customer because the company just saved £3,000,000 by firing everyone in the UK, hiring this group and only wants the telephone answered by the third ring vs. actually doing something to help? These call centre personnel think if they repeat, “I am so very, very sorry for the inconvenience” enough times, that this will satisfy every situation?!? The simple fact is, they have no other words in their script, they are not trusted by the company and the game can volley up to 10 times! Try this next time. Be silent… … … It freaks them out.

I don’t want pity. Just answer the question and help me! In the words of Paddy Chayefsky’s protagonist played by Peter Finch in the film “Network” open your windows and scream as loud as you can, “we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!” At least you’ll feel a bit better and finally be deserving of the strange looks your neighbours already give you anyways.

(As appeared on tbd.com)

Enlightened Public Service

Twice in the last six months I wrote to members of the Welsh Assembly Government. Now before you think me some crackpot, these are probably the only two times I’ve written to a government.

The first foray was part lark just to see the answer I’d get. BBC Radio Wales weekly broadcasts “Wales@Work.” Each air date, an e-mail comes with the evening’s topic. The 30 October program during Small Business Week featured the Minister responsible for attracting and growing business in Wales, Leighton Andrews. Talking with the show’s producer I discussed my experience expanding a business two years earlier. She asked me to send a question:

Why do the WAG and its support agencies make it so tedious for people to apply for funding to help bring business and technology jobs to Wales and why is so much paper-based data needed? The process was so slow and laborious we binned the application and went it alone rather than wait for checkers to check one another.

Minister Andrews said on-air that if I wished to contact him, he would see that I got a more formal reply… I took him up on his offer. I sent the question in more detailed form to his press officer and also queried where return on investment data could be found for WAG investments. All I could see were claims of funds granted and wanted to see what success existed for the hundreds of millions of pounds funnelled through various consultancies. We are talking about business, so it should be easy to track progress against outlays? (I know, even I’m having a hard time here keeping my tongue embedded in cheek.)

His press agent promised a “speedy response” in a reply that, duly noted, came within 30-minutes of my submission. And then… they dropped off of the face of the earth, the electoral and fiduciary duty ended with that reply. An official e-mail arrived 8-days later from the WAG acknowledging receipt and stating their policy “it could take up to 17-working days for a reply.” A few days before Christmas, despite the earlier date on the letter and many more than 17-business days, (26 to be exact, plus 8 days after the press agent reply) the official non-reply, reply came.

(Click on each image to see a full screen version - note the handwritten date and salutation....)






Had holiday preparations not beckoned, I might have followed up and it seemed silly to throw good time and effort after bad. I made a stop-investment decision feeling, as a businessman, time could be better spent elsewhere. The WAG wants to be the main business entity for Wales. As a businessman and taxpayer I want to know how and why they are uniquely qualified to be in that business? How are our funds spent? What sort of return do they get? Alas though there seem to be many noses on this teat and nothing happen unless someone gets their cut of the action.

We’ve all witnessed less than enlightened displays of self-interest and nothing will stunt the growth of business faster than maintaining the status quo. As one who participated in trade missions from Miami with The Beacon Council in the 1980s (long before the allure of South Beach), the guiding principle behind those mission was always – no one person or body could ever stand up and say “look what I did” because there was an unspoken truth the Welsh business community still needs to learn – there is no “I” in team.

We participated out of a sense of duty and a deep love for our community. We wanted it to grow and thrive (as it does) and to be a true melting pot with its racial and ethnic diversity as the drawing card and focal point of pride. And… we knew there was enough business to go around and we all rowed the boat together in the same direction, captain-less but not rudderless, our businesses would benefit in time. The increases in both firms I represented at that time is evidence we were on the right track – do right and good first ultimately meant you would do well and not the other way around.

That is the lesson we must learn here if we truly want Wales to join in the EU boom rather than being a legend in its own mind. Otherwise, the over-arching business poverty consciousness where everyone knows the cost of everything, the value of nothing and no one moves unless seeing direct personal benefit is visionless, small-time thinking inaction (deliberate typo).

After reading the minister’s non-reply reply (and aside from wondering if Sir Humphrey was alive, well and working in Wales), I wondered why I bothered to ask in the first place?

Oh and the weblink he points to for success stories, yup – a 404 webpage not found error.

Fuzzy Super Delegate Math

How can the candidate, who has had a huge percentage of voters choose someone else in four primary contests, hold a commanding delegate lead? On Saturday evening Barack Obama won a landslide 2:1 victory over Hillary Clinton in South Carolina. The delegates as awarded by the proportional popular vote count in that state were:

Obama 25 delegates
Clinton 12
Edwards 8

So the people have now spoken thus far in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina and their math is:

Obama 36 (going in) + 25 (from Saturday) = 61 total delegates
Clinton 38 + 12 = 40
Edwards 18 + 8 = 26

Alas objects in your mirror are closer than they appear...

The delegate total pledged thus far including "super" delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention is:

Hillary Clinton with 224 delegates
Barack Obama with 148
John Edwards with 54

How can this be?

Because after 1972 very liberal George McGovern's thrashing by Richard Nixon, party insiders (who felt it was important until that moment that your vote be heard vs. handing the nomination to someone in a smoke filled room) decided that no, wait, you are neither smart nor mature enough to be trusted to select the right candidate with your own vote.

Therefore, your vote is now subject to this super delegate "safety valve" and only counts as 3/5ths of a vote whilst Democratic Party leaders and insiders control 42% or between 796-852 (depending on your math skills) of all convention delegates votes.

This is why Hillary can get away with a 1-line congratulatory blow-off of Obama's historic win while already in Nashville Saturday night and go right into her stump speech. She knows those super delegates are indebted to 8-years of her husband's rule and are beholden to no one but them. So super delegates can vote for whomever they wish without concern for the voice of the voters in their state.

Super delegates never used to matter because the nominee was known by or before Super Tuesday. Well in SC 3 of 4 voters, and almost 500,000 of them showed up blowing the old turnout mark of 300k completely out of the water, voted against candidate Clinton. Indeed in every state contested thus far between 60 and 73% of the vote has gone to someone other than Hillary.

If you try to make it a race thing, yes, Obama won 80% of the black vote and... 25% of the white vote. He also won 66% of the youth vote of all colours. History has shown that those new voters will disappear just as they did when their darling Howard Dean was sent packing by "the scream" and these super-delegate numbers. They will simply not show up in November if the status quo is the choice (Clinton v McCain, thereby handing the presidency to the Republicans again...).

Keith Olberham on MSNBC the other evening speaks about super delegates....

Using Super delegate crony insider fuzzy math these are the current committed delegate totals*
Clinton 184
Obama 87
Edwards 28

Super delegates are becoming the dirty little secret of this year's race and finally the mainstream media is beginning to awaken to something other than Britney Spears showing up at her kid's school.

Now is the time to express outrage and demand that super delegates from each state follow the voice of the electorate in that state vs. politics.

*Estimates from other news sources show Mrs. Clinton as high as 207 and as low as 184.

(As appeared on TBD.com)

Whoops Yet Another Financial Crisis

January, 2008

The US dollar is in free-fall and many think it was/is a deliberate monetary policy. It was OK to a point to have a weak dollar because, in theory, people will use their currencies to prop up (or buy) dollars and US goods.

The problem is that has not happened.

Indeed this is a case of globalisation doing its own thing, creating markets that the USA no longer controls by sheer might or fiat.

We relied on the Japanese to buy US debt (bonds) in the 80s and 90s and when they got into their own banking and liquidity trouble, the Chinese stepped in.

Simpler answer, we still spend too much, save/invest too little and rely on a bubble of more than $1.5 trillion dollars (with a 't') of consumer spending debt to bail us out.

The problem is now we have a global liquidity crisis because of these crazy sub-prime mortgage backed securities banks sold. This Ponzi scheme created great profits when the market went up. However, when it flattens or (gasp!) goes down, there is a real problem. Banks no longer have the cash to lend to each other and instead hold on to what they have.

So the housing bubble burst and the defaults on those sub-prime mortgages are just beginning to come home to roost in billions of dollars, pounds, euros and yen. So, banks no longer have the cash to cover their obligations and... no place from which to borrow.

Northern Rock bank in Newcastle England was headed to a liquidity failure a few weeks ago when the government stepped in and guaranteed all depositors (a risky strategy if there is more than one bank in trouble and... ooops, there are a dozen large global groups including Citi - who lost their Chairman over this - recently acquired Dutch ABN-AMRO and Barclays to name a few.)

Dollar and market watchers are losing a lot of sleep over this because they have no idea how big the problem really is or when it will hit. So while the US stock market continued until last week to defy gravity and bubbles, there is another shoe or three to drop.

The dollar is no longer the only game in town. China, Saudi Arabia and other cash rich nations are holding more balanced global portfolios to spread risk. In other words, we're being hoisted on our own petard.

We want globalisation when it benefits us and we can set or ignore rules. Truly global markets though fluctuate and we no longer hold the reins of power. While we're still the big dog, the balance is much more finely tuned and I enjoy cheap prices - basically 2 for 1 every trip.

This happened on Dubya's watch, so you could call it economic warfare but it is really the end result of greed, over-spending to fight a war with the coalition of the seduced, threatened and bribed and a lack of fiscal discipline on our part.

And it's much, much more than the sub-prime market. The global economy is a giant balloon balancing treacherously under a modern day Sword of Damocles...

There is a perfect storm brewing of recession, out-of-control energy costs, spiraling war costs, a greying market of disposable seniors unable to find senior positions because all has been outsourced in the global economy, an aging group of boomers who will likely have to work into their 80's to be able to afford to retire, an over-heated and over-priced global real estate market bubble, global tightening of credit, global overheated stock markets and central banks desperate to control interest rates to hold it all together. (Which is also why they ignore currency, they cannot control it, so why worry about it?)

We're exhausting ourselves chasing lifestyles and more, more, more... Blackberry's make us feel indispensable when the truth is if you keeled over at your desk, someone else would be there before your body was cold.

I would not bet the house on a recovery happening any time soon. Oooops we already did and therein lies the problem of the greenback.

Not sure I would bet the US economy on the COME line but that is exactly what our leaders have done. Now the question is how long before it's "7 out, line in..."

Crazy-making and all so crazy....

(From tbd.com)

Somebody’s Watching Me and You!

January, 2008

I've become hyper-cautious with Internet click-through ads. Unless I know the website to where I am being pointed, I just say no. Back in ’00 I pulled a team out of a web development contract because of the lengths a Dutch group was going to to mine and then turn around and sell visitor data as if it were their birthright. It felt creepy then and the technology was far more primitive than today's.

The privacy cost of surfing the web is becoming very high indeed. Nearly all websites immediately download some form of recognition software or "cookies" to your computer. If you go into your browser’s cookies list you see hundreds of them if you surf a lot of sites. Most are the recognisable sites you visit. And somewhere on the list appear names controlled by big ad company cookies. These are the ones that scare me because of their size and ability to share and mine my viewing behaviour on the Web.

Double Click - now owned by Google after rebuffing overtures from Microsoft their own scuttled merger talks with Yahoo! show that very large players are in this game and everyone wants to own both the search and advertising business sides of the Web. BT Broadband uses Yahoo! and I often think of changing to a more obscure ISP but the hassle of changing e-mail address accounts holds me back. They know this hassle will keep me in inertia.

Now cookies are mostly benign. They were initially designed to make return visits load easier on your machine and were created long before ADSL and cable. Since nearly all of us have abandoned 28.8 dial-up modems and now have 300, 700 or more bps from ADSL or cable providers, they've mostly outlived that functional utility. It’s one of those things no one bothered to fix (like keeping the NumLock key on after you boot your machine).

Then someone realised these cookies could work both ways and they became tracking cookies, little streaming snitches (for lack of a better word) that send your web viewing history into databases to be statistically mined. If you’ve ever noticed the little transmission icon between your machine and the ISP sending data when you have not yourself pressed send me a new page or received data, there's a good chance it is a microburst from a tracking cookie going off into some database.

It's getting out of hand though and is partly how an advertiser can tell your Internet Service Provider, computer type, operating system, processor and connection speed, whether or not you live in an affluent neigbourhood and then from these data profiles they get a scarily good guess of whether or not you are male or female, approximate age demographic, and it just keeps burrowing or mining data down until it finds a profile match for you, then retrieves a targeted advert and pops it on your screen and… it all happens in about a 1/billionth of a second.

This is the dirty little secret of the Web and whilst most protest a bit too much in their privacy policy statements... really, at the end of the day, who knows where this info goes, FBI, MI-6?

While the cookies are harmless to our computers, I'm getting tired of everyone gathering data on me and knowing where I go next on the Web. The "download these cute smiley icons" and flashing "you have won a free _______!" sites are the worst! (btw it was this type of company we pulled our contact from with along with their assorted sisters, cousins and aunts who accompany them wherever they go...).

My computer guy found both a nasty Trojan horse virus and after deleting/repairing it, it hid a browser hijack worm (the nastiest of tracking devils that can allow someone to manipulate your data from anywhere.) Now to their credit, Microsoft and others work very hard to the fix holes allowing these in and if they spent less time on marketing and more time on actually building a decent Operating system, but that’s a rant for another time…

The free programs: Adaware SE and SpyBot daily flushes them out and repairs them. Some of these though have longer half-lives than Uranium-235. Visit a website, they're baaaack.

Even fairly reputable and longer term players in the ad biz create things so insidious they where your cursor pauses on a page and for how long. In theory, this tells them your ad viewing time and the technology in this area is just becoming downright spooky. What's next? Micro-implant cameras on my screen to check my REM eye speed and subconscious behaviour/thoughts?

It's a bit too creepily 1984 for me and is it really the price I must pay to visit the Web?

As appeared on TBD.com

Subverting the Dominant Negative Paradigm

January, 2008

In 1994, when the ice hockey team from the city Boston fans hate to admit even exists won Lord Stanley’s Cup for the first time in 54 years, the celebration cameras lingered on a single fan in the upper deck holding a cardboard sign saying – “Now I Can Die Happy!” What an odd expression of delight that seemed until ‘04 when the Bambino’s Curse was reversed and our beloved Red Sox sent the dreaded Yankees and spoiler Cardinals packing to win the World Series for the 1st time in 86 years.

So here we sit, four weeks before pitchers report to Spring training and the question on everyone’s lips, even with essentially the same team coming back plus a few stellar rookies is: Can they do it again? Mixed in are early signs of Red Sox fatalism karma surfacing… “wasn’t ’07 great, but… it will be hard to repeat, we only won by a whisker in the LCS, we have to watch out for Cleveland, a lot of teams added great players, Schill is getting older and, and, and…”

Right up until Opening Day the news will be dominated by this can they repeat speculation madness that won’t be decided for another six months. Of course the Pats’ road to football’s Super Bowl and the sizzling hot Celtics will take some of the headlines but the: will they, won’t they, can they, negativity will dominate.

Last year they were lightning quick out of the box, 20 games above .500 by Memorial Day with the pinstripes in third, 11 games back. We were giddy with delight as the Yankees (a name said in New England with the same reverential fear as “Lord Voldemort” – gasp, the team that shall not be named) seemingly imploded. We giggled with glee at the demise and yet the collective, controlled, fear-based New England consciousness began to slowly take hold as they righted the ship and climbed back into the race.

I can certainly understand the roots, when you lose for 86 of 90 years… note the ’04 win was not even remembered in August when the slide was in full swing, nobody thought it just a natural swing of the pendulum back to centre or did they really think the Sox would win 130 games?!?! There is fatalism as dominant paradigm to being a Red Sox fan. It kicks in and takes over, creating a life of its own.

The collective consciousness no longer focused on how well we are doing, we have the best record in baseball, but gravitated instead to fear the dreaded “Y” team would steadily climb back into the race and catch us because no lead is ever safe if you are a Red Sox fan. The swing from aren’t the Sox doing well, to preparing oneself emotionally for the eventual crash became a disgusted… “yeah and they’ll probably blow it at the end” vs. the “We Believe” mantra of the ’04 comeback and win.

Folks, Red Sox Nation is global. I write this from Southern Wales where a group of expatriate fans watch the lads play on NASN (the North American Sports Network – a venture from Setanta in Ireland and part owned by ESPN) and UK Channel five. We get 261 regular season games from all teams but when it is a viewer’s choice game, Red Sox Nation always speaks so we get about 40 games plus the play-offs and WS. You want to see true fans, try holding your eyeballs open at 6:30 am when we won in ’04 or 4:30 am this past season. Even the Super Bowl kicks-off at midnight :30 so quit moaning about late starts, they affect us even more with BCS games beginning at 1:30 am!

So here’s my premise for the ’08 season. Your thoughts are things. They are real. What we think about we create in our reality. Now not wanting to sound too mystical or metaphysical (we’ll leave that to the Tuesdays with Morrie sportwriter), we create our reality in every minute. So if the entire Red Sox Nation goes orbital and runs to the dominant paradigm of fear if we aren’t 35-15 in May, we’re screwed.

This isn’t Monty Python where we need to whistle “Always look on the Bright Side of Life” whilst hanging from a cross, but we do need to keep it in perspective, shrug off a few losses and stop putting so much pressure on the lads, they have enough as it is. The one man whose shoes I would never like to walk a mile in is Terry Francona’s. I want the clubhouse Maalox concession for his office. I’ll retire a millionaire.

The American people spoke last night in Iowa for change in both parties. This ending could be a footnote in two weeks but by doing so they/we are subverting the nation’s dominant political paradigm. The least we can do is give it a try for the benefit of Red Sox nation, no matter where we live.


As appeared in January, 2008 Boston Red Sox Nation pages

Taunted Tiger Terminates Teen – Terrible Legal Dilemma Ensues

January, 2008

You may have seen it, Christmas Day, San Francisco, tiger mauls three teenagers, one dies. Now it seems the boys were taunting the tiger and the Zoo enclosure was three feet lower than it legally should have been. Everyone is lawyered up and so the blame game begins.

If it had happened in The Netherlands it would already be over. I remember walking through a store and slipping rather inelegantly on a patch of water. I said to my wife, "they need to clean that up or they will be sued."

My wife looked at me as if I had just landed from Mars in utter amazement and asked, "what do you mean?"

I said, "if an elderly person were to slip and fall and break a leg or a hip, they would own this chain with the lawsuit."

"Not in Holland. The judge would look at them and say 'you should watch where you are walking' and throw the case out. Everyone here is self-responsible."

Remove the plaintiff bar and you don't have this discussion in the US either. You fine the zoo significantly for not keeping the enclosure up to standard and you say "tough luck" to the taunters, you brought it on yourselves, now move along and take your media circus, lawyers, consultants, make-up people, PR firm and coiffed breathless anchor/reporters with you. Your 15-minutes are OVER!

I worked in LA for the law firm next door to those handling the Goldman civil case against OJ Simpson. He'd come in for depositions and below in the courtyard was this semi-circle of 20 or so camera tripods for the obligatory press opportunity before the evening news.

One day I had a visitor and we came back from a late lunch as a few of the live stand-ups were being broadcast. There was this breathless reporter standing four feet away as we walked by. She was exclaiming, serious as a heart attack - "that's right Tom and at no time during the deposition did Mr. Goldman make eye contact with Mr. Simpson!!!" We could not contain our belly laugh at the ludicrous nature of it all which I'm sure was caught on the open mike. She yelled some rather un-ladylike words at our backs when she was “clear” as we headed into the building... I blame the media for blowing it up.

Remember the only serious things about US local news, Fox and CNN are the music and graphics. I always tell my friends to watch the Beeb someday if you want news without breathlessness. The newsreaders use their entire lung capacity to project quiet confidence instead of prattling on with nothing new to say but hey, we’ll repeat it anyways!

There were mesmerizing interviews on 7/7 one with a quiet dignified reporter speaking to man with a bandage and blood stains covering his clothing and talking about what happened (and being given the time to speak) and then being asked by the reporter if he could please excuse himself to speak to the helicopter pilot standing on his other side who ferried a team of surgeons meeting that morning in his hospital to the bus bombing site and one of the Tube stations to do on-site triage which saved many lives that day.

Very matter of fact, nobody waiting to either interrupt or for their turn to speak or trying to outdo one another with inane lines such as, "what my colleagues was really saying here is...” and gripping, engaging television that told a huge story very well.

When will the media figure out we have more than a four-second attention span and that speaking intelligently might actually get us to stop and listen? In the US they say we get the government we deserve. I guess the same applies to our legal and media systems as well.

We deify celebrity. When Paris Hilton gets more manufactured ink than Dr. King on his national holiday birthday and the winner of American Idol receives more votes than any upcoming presidential candidates, will our problems ever run more seriously than "who let the tiger out? woof, woof, wooof, woof woof...."

It is but one symptom of many in a descent down a slippery intellectual slide. I love to watch everyone get churned up in the immigration debate when most are children of immigrants themselves. We’ve gotta stop those kids from coming to get engineering degrees in our universities.

That's not why the Chinese and others came to the US. They will graduate 5 million engineers in Beijing this year. They came to learn and build their own because we're certainly not producing quality PhD's in engineering, mathematics and science. Nope we've got kids earning degrees in media, entertainment and sports marketing!

The global playing field is now quite level, other countries are working smarter and harder and our egos cannot stand it.

Too, whatever happened to “I cannot tell a lie” and “the buck stops here?” Washington and Truman were known for those two. Now it's: deny, deny, deny, obviate, obfuscate and obliterate the truth so it fits my needs no mater what. Does anyone believe that if Watergate happened today we'd see a President resign like Nixon did? Hell no. They'd pull a Scooter Libby… Halderman and Ehrlichman take the fall then Nixon pardons them so they don't have to go to jail.

We have a system of situational ethics run amok. I want MINE and as long as I don't get caught that's good enough. No wonder it's a mess. When you see a liar or is it lawyer, I always get them mixed up, on the telly with bold-faced lies coming out of both sides of his or her mouth, what kind of example are we setting?

Just make sure I get mine and f*** all to the rest of the world. And if I get caught, I’ll just run off and hire the biggest, baddest most famous lawyer I can find to get me off.

Here in the UK I regularly see those caught lying in ANY court case having their sentences increased for "perverting the course of justice." I'd love to see that one in the next OJ trial.

When is anyone, anywhere going to ever stop, stand up, place hand over heart and say, I did it, I was wrong, I'm very sorry and I am prepared to face the consequences of my actions?

Not in this lifetime.

"Stupid is as stupid does." said Forrest Gump. There is enough stupidity in this tragedy to go around and around. Next group doing the fricasseeing will be the politicians adding their 2 cents. Maybe tiger enclosures become an issue in the CA primary and we'll hear what Hillary and Obama have to say?

It comes back to a basic formulae: Story Life x Personal Outrage = Media Time Given. If an editor wants to jig a story or find a new angle there are more than enough to go around. One only need look at Britney and company to see how that works.

The biggest EU-wide story has been the disappearance of a 4-year old British girl from a resort in Portugal. The angles are endless - parents are to blame for leaving her sleeping alone, police are to blame for bungling the investigation, paedophile networks are to blame, media are to blame... and the name of the game is... who to blame today?

Even the Princess Diana inquest (now entering its third month) has its own version of the blame game with news stories coming out each day about the driver, paparazzi, MI5, the Royal family, conspiracy theories, diaries, friend's confessions... The woman is dead, let her rest in peace.

The tiger story goes away if the kids stand up and say we taunted the tiger and the zoo says we should have made the enclosure higher. Because everyone hides behind their lawyers now all there is is speculation, finger pointing and an all too eager media (and blogosphere) to keep it all alive and kicking.

Meanwhile a boy and a tiger are dead and Madeleine is still missing.

(From tbd.com)

Eagles Don’t Flock

January, 2008

I used to give a talk about service personnel (ducks quacking away with their rule books), before that role became an oxy-moron. Now service is a lottery ticket roll of the dice.
My father ran the Boston station for BOAC for almost 35 years and there was a time when airlines hired and trained professional passenger service agents (as opposed to the out-sourced rent-an-automaton they have today.)

As the gap between passenger and staff knowledge began its ever steepening climb to the oblivion we now face, as a business traveller I would routinely ask to speak to someone paid much more money than you to take the kind of sh** I am about to give you. I long knew from example and experience the futility of talking to a duck.

As this person sauntered back to the giant swinging doors, I would say, “please stop! No. Don't go through those doors” (because I know that it's a giant duck pond back there and all I will ever hear or see from that room is a bunch of quacking and feathers fly through the crack).

“I would like for you please to go or call upstairs to the airline executive offices” (one could clearly see these high above the counter). “I want to speak to someone from upstairs” (because upstairs is where the eagles, like my Dad live).

After a few more minutes of quacking, I'd eventually get the person from upstairs to come downstairs. We'd have a cordial conversation which 95% of the time ended the same way. The eagle executive would say, “they did what?” with a quizzical look on his/her face. They would then step over to a terminal, punch two or thee keys and poof, problem fixed. They would return to me. Say, “sorry for the inconvenience, here's an upgrade, why not head up to the lounge for a drink on us for your inconvenience?”

Eagles serve, ducks complain. There is a simple rule of thumb when working with a company (or government entity). I always ask to see all of the rule book procedure manuals 1st. I view the company as a living organism where the health of it is directly related to the degree of respect and trust paid to each other and the customer. So, in a well functional organism or company rule books are not necessary. We know how to behave and work and play well with others.

In a dysfunctional organism or company, (say a body fighting cancer where there is always a battle and the cancer will kill the host body unless brought under control…) where there are myriad sets of rules and regulations and tribunals and complaint procedures… rules are unenforceable. They were either put in place to hide behind or because there is no trust.

I began my career working for the USA's oldest chartered bank – The First national Bank of Boston chartered in 1784 and now merged three times into oblivion. The blue-blooded Chairman handed us our regimental eagle ties (it was the logo) when we became officers. I remember it like it was yesterday when Mr. Hill shook my hand, congratulated me and said, "Denis, remember one thing, eagles never flock so don’t waste your time sending ducks to eagle school, we NEVER will, young man."

Amen.

(From tbd.com)

Visiting Home?

December, 2007

As an American living abroad the last 10 years I am stunned by every visit stateside. The polarisation of red vs. blue coupled with this seemingly blind Archie Bunker sitcom style "America Love it or leave it!" The phrase God Bless America is more demand than prayer and the pasting of the flag on every object moving or not coupled with the near rabid assertion that if I knew THE truth (i.e. their truth) I could not say what I say, drives me nuts.

When did the middle ground disappear and why? Where are the leaders of strength and conviction like Tip O'Neil who could reach across the aisle and find/forge compromise for the good of all. When did we forget that we row together or fall apart was meant to keep the ship floating?

Every time I ask an honest question to learn what motivates blind faith and ignoring the lies and distortions or worse seeing nothing wrong with them raises my blood pressure a few points.

I'd sure like the chance to have an open dialogue to understand how we got here and more importantly what it will take to get our land centred again without the radical fringe of either party calling the shots.

Living in the UK there are 10 major national daily newspapers and people read them. The populace is involved in governing and there are many more parties than our two. The greatest demonstration of democracy occurs every Wednesday afternoon when Prime Minister's questions takes place and members of each party ask difficult questions of Gordon Brown. Can anyone imagine “W” sitting still for a half hour and taking it on the chin publicly every week?

He should. It might have saved a few thousand lives and loss of global standing. How do we bring it back to centre and make govt. accountable to we the people?

Don't Drink the Kool-Aid

August 2006

Having worked closely with New Age gurus, Campbell issues a warning that all that glitters is not gold, despite the heavy price tag, and that we must do our own spiritual work.

THERE'S NO SUCH THING as a free lunch. A fool and his money are soon parted. There is a sucker born every minute but hey, maybe you were the minute in between? If it sounds too good to be true…

Grandma's hyperbole? A little too close a walk down memory lane? Feel like your eyeballs are melting as you scream, "Stop, you sound like my mother!"

You betcha Vern. Why?

Because in November of 1978, 913 followers of the People's Temple in Northern Guyana drank a cyanide-laced fruit punch in an infamous act of mass suicide following the murder of a US Congressman on the airport tarmac. The cult leader feared a US military reprisal and ordered everyone to drink up or be shot. Slightly less than 200 fled in terror deep into the woods where some lived to tell the tale. Of the dead, 276 victims of the Jonestown massacre (named after their charismatic spiritual leader Jim Jones) were infants and children.

While the corporation making the sugary drink points out their product was not involved, "don't drink the Kool-Aid" or "he/she drank the Kool-Aid," is a term derisively used to explain the behaviours of someone acting contrary to expected norms and showing an unusual amount of devotion or adulation towards a person, teaching or charismatic/spiritual belief.

Many very smart and successful people reach a natural place of vulnerability in their lives where whatever worked before no longer seems to work in their life. Some call it a mid-life crisis and whatever the label, they look outside of themselves for finding some meaning and peace in their lives. They spend boatloads of money looking for the magic pill to help them feel better about themselves.

And then there are the bliss-ninnies. Those beautiful, always giddily happy people time forgot. They live a never ending Summer of Love fantasy in tie-dye, poverty, spiritual openness, great sex and the ultimate search for unity consciousness, enlightenment and Truth. They bounce from fad to fad, partner to partner and spiritual teacher to spiritual teacher, searching for the 24/7/365 high.

Somewhere in between comes the indigo/crystal movement where every child is just a poor, misunderstood spirit. Now I'm all for banning institutional drug pushers pumping kids full of Ritalin, letting kids experience things other than Reading, 'Riting and 'Rithmetic, opening their creative potential and eliminating labels. What I object to is the use of this ultimate elitist spiritual label (like Gucci and DKNY) and using their kids to help them live out their own fantasies. This work is filled with the ultimate stage mother if you will, operating under a completely new kind of circus tent.

I recently saw a documentary programme about indigo children. Well, that was what was expected. It ended up being the story of one reasonably serious mother looking for answers and just not sure… while the other person was made to look certifiably crazy in her zeal to promote her own spiritual practice and daughter's powers. While I hope she had the highest of intentions, she was portrayed as an opportunist stage mother pimping her daughter on national telly. The rub is I'm not sure she got it that she was the joke.

The spiritual marketing world is full of people who start out with high intentions, and then they inhale a bit of success and spend the next 20 years trying to hold it all together, while remaining relevant and getting others to drink their Kool-Aid. With a charismatic onstage presence – many have theatrical or television backgrounds as former actors and actresses – they use group trance, hypnosis, Neuro-Linguistic Programming's positively embedded commands and the best can quite literally hold a room of 500 people at the end of their fingertip. They're skilled actors, likeable, charming, disarming, share their wounds (or at least a very polished re-enactment of them as part of the shtick) and are VERY believable.

Usually this charismatic person uses a variety of empathetic tools to disarm and lure you on board, there is deep structure to everything they say and they don't want or intend to hook everyone, only those most slavishly vulnerable and open. Because if your life is a mess and there is someone standing there holding the solution and 500 people in the palm of their hand, what chance does any one individual have?

A respected journalist friend attended a weekend New Age seminar and left before lunch the first day e-mailing the observation, "it was astonishing, I had never before seen so many emotionally wounded and damaged people together in one room."

Ka-ching! goes their cash register and by the second or third seminar, you're hooked for the duration. The number of people without resources (i.e. cash) is no hindrance because the charismatic person convinces you it is time to give yourself this gift and no matter whether or not you can afford it, you cannot afford not to come and you will somehow manifest the abundance you need to join this £1,000 course and the next £500 weekend and the next. Can't pay, come on the pleasure cruise, work in our office and hang out in this energy to pay off your debt.

When done, you have an empty wallet, great experiences in the seminar high and some even have nowhere to live or work. The embarrassment and shame is such that many prefer to just disappear than face family, business associates and friends, the common morning-after lament being, "if I'm so smart, how could I have been so stupid? or how could I not have seen this?" Well if Barnum did not say it he should have, "when a person with money meets a person with experience, the person with experience ends up with the money and the person with the money ends up with an experience."

The message is crafted and controlled with the image and appearance of substance more important than actual substance. Those not drinking the Kool-Aid, smiling goofily and having Kundalini experiences are ridiculed, outcast, whispered about to other disciples (or much, much worse) and nothing but their complete destruction and elimination from consciousness can afford to be tolerated.

The leader usually has expert henchmen and women who are closest to but distant enough to be in the inner circle and live a monk-like life of service to the guru. They also give the guru Watergate-style plausible deniability by doing the dirty work so the leader's hands stay clean. Their lives are put on hold as every phone call and whim of the guru, regardless of time of day, is more important than life itself. I once sat at the head table as a new age guru was thanking dozens of volunteers in a speech before dinner. At table level there was a frantic shuffling of entrée plates as her PA shovelled broccoli from the guru's plate and replaced it with the other tasty portion of her own entrée. When I raised an eyebrow to silently ask, "what's that all about?" The non-verbal reply mouthed back was, "she doesn't like broccoli." For the first time in their lives they are needed and that is their narcotic.

Modern spirituality, from indigo kids to seeing auras and everything in between, has become the ultimate pleasure cruise where one can jump from buffet table to buffet table looking for pleasure without ever confronting the real issue in their lives. Selling books and seminars is the ballgame, get 'em in and keep 'em hooked until they move on exhausted, but not until they have bought everything.

I know this because for 25 years I rode that E-ticket ride, bought a library of books, attended countless seminars, chanted, meditated, fire-walked, freed my inner child, found my inner lover, raged at the past and jumped full-on into whatever the latest and greatest trend was.

And I was never satisfied with just hearing the message from the stage. I dove into the deep end of the pool, met with and ultimately got to know many of these teachers with their hair down. It was there I saw the darker side of their addiction; from the spiritual poetess refusing to show up because the organizer booked her into a 4-star vs. 5 hotel and sent a taxi instead of a limo… to the famous mind body spirit medical Dr. pitching a hissy fit on the cell phone to his PA because his rented treadmill had not preceded his arrival to the hotel suite. 20+-years ago a well-known New York Times best-selling author of millions of books (who has re-invented himself to stay on top of that list in now his fourth decade in the biz) spent three hours lecturing my bank's business team on: pureness of body and mind, you are what you eat, etc… The first thing he asked me coming off stage were, "hey, do you think you can you find me a beer?" and then proceeded to hit on one of the more attractive female managers. I should have known then something might be amiss. Instead the charismatic power made me want to run away and join the circus to be just like him.

My first indication should have been the ability to see how much of my own power I and so many others gave these people through the admiration of who they were, their powerful and witty teachings and thinking they were their message.

And that's what they believe at some level until called on it. For many of these speakers, the brighter their stage light glowed, the darker the shadow was they needed to run away from. Simply, they seemed to busily teach what they themselves most needed to learn.

Their tragic flaw was they convinced themselves and others from the stage they were their message without ever feeling compelled to live it. They possess great power over many who attend their workshops and seminars yet outside of the glare of the public eye, it was stunning to see how few practised what they preached or walked their talk in their daily lives and running of their "business(es)."

As a businessman I was sure there was more to life than the continual pursuit of money, power and toys so I spent countless dollars and hours reading books seeking a path to greater understanding and, who knows, maybe even enlightenment. Three years ago, my wife and I joined the day-to-day operations of a new-age spiritual company that seemed to have a message that felt in alignment with how we wanted to live our business and personal life.

Watching the inner financial and 'business' workings of this "business," it became clear this was a cult of personality. We saw a "spiritual" business filled with duality. On the one hand the process work contained some of the best healing tools any therapist could imagine using. The healing and awakening of many delegates was quite deep and my own clearing was sharper than ever thought possible. Through this work I was reunited with my adult children and an entire family was brought together for the first time earlier this year for my mother's 75th birthday.

And yet on the other hand, I grew increasingly restless watching the company's leaders' over-the-top 1st Class lifestyles and a seeming inability to either see a problem or live their talk. To control people was the main goal and you did that by standard childish control dramas, pointing to behaviours, withholding love and attention, making an example of, in short, classic abuser behaviour to keep everyone in line.

Along the way our eyes opened and we discovered much of the giddy happy talk about things like "finding source," "living in this truth and freedom" and "being true to truth," outside of the actual process work, was little more than a salve to make one feel better. It was a form of spiritual pabulum to temporarily fill an empty stomach/soul. Its real purpose was to help continue to avoid waking up because that would mean independence and the strength to find one's own his way.

The company's motto was "be true to truth." It became clear that meant SPIN the story of truth we want the outside world to see, call it marketing and keep that image intact regardless.

It was clear that to walk my own talk, I would have to fire the guru and walk. Many people eventually tire of seminar formulae and the dependent nature of these guru wannabees. All they want are answers. Just help make the pain go away so I can find some time for myself and peace in my life. There is a burning yearning inside us all to find happiness and we look outside of ourselves through this new age spirituality for answers. We eventually discovered that everything we looked for outside of ourselves was already there inside of us.

There are times when deep process work to clear deep emotional wounds helps and there are times it can become an addiction itself to avoid the real issues. There are times when it's fun to hang out with folks and meditate and have a good time hugging and chanting and there probably is a middle path of taking the tools and finding your own way. Only you will know if it resonates. Somewhere there is just a need to get on with life and walk YOUR path.

In the 2nd season of The West Wing, the President's key advisor Josh is diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome after being shot during an assassination attempt. The psychiatrist tells him that for some reason, music is a trigger and in his head he equates it with sirens from the time of the shooting. As Josh realizes this he says, "so… whenever I hear music, this is going to happen?" The doctor replies, "no." When Josh asks "why not," the doctor says simply, "because we get better."

You already have the answers inside of you. Fire the guru. Real answers are rarely found idolising someone else. They come when you take the tools and do what you need to do to free yourself.

Enquiring minds may want to know. Discerning minds sharpen themselves and cut through spiritual arrogance and spiritual outrageousness.

(As appeared in energygridmedia.com)

What Are We Wroughting?

3 July 2005

He stands a lean and lanky 3’4” tall. Almost five year old Jason (no real names used here) is a fixture in the school playground each morning as his mother drops his sister Jessica off to school in the tiny South Wales hamlet of St. Brides Major. Here mothers gather in chatty gaggles fending off the wind, cold and showers (normal Welsh winter weather) while the children enjoy two-minutes of frantic running about awaiting the bell to toll. They then queue up like docile little lambs (by class rank) before being led into the school by their teacher.

Jason is bored with most of the adult goings on around him (so, truth be told, am I), is too small to play with the older kids and clutches his plastic toy dinosaur (clearly from this untrained eye a member of the Tyrannosaurus Rex family, complete with two quite realistic fire-frothing heads) and peers around Mommy’s leg growling at me.

We engage in a game called “I hide behind Mommy’s leg where I pretend not to see you then jump out with my T-Rex, roar and send you running away screaming in fear a game you have to continue playing until I get bored, something shiny catches my attention or I suddenly walk away… no matter what.” We both play it a b it too well, much to the tsk, tsk disdain of the gaggle to whom this concept of play seems as if perhaps an alien ship has deposited this bizarre American writer on their fair shores.

Dan is a London-based media consultant and his wife works for one of the largest financial corporations on the planet (hint, it never sleeps). To say their lives are busy would be similar to calling the Pope a devout Catholic. They were seconded to London two years ago and their young progeny Walter is living in his third new home of his young life cared for by other hands.

Walter is, at almost five, a notoriously light sleeper and prone to many 3-4 day flu-like illnesses. Dad and I were solving the world’s problems one evening over a pint when the topic of kids and their sleeping habits came up. “It’s weird” he said, “but my kid can only fall asleep watching television. He would wake up in the middle of the night as an infant screaming and the only thing that would help him to sleep was watching television with music. He’s been watching MTV since he was about 4-months old to fall asleep.”

(Sound of deafening incredulous silence.)

Little Jason and I were talking one morning when he said the words “Jurassic Park.” I jokingly asked him if he even knew what that was and he said yes, he had seen the movie. I turned to see Mom standing there smiling as she said, “yes, he has seen all three movies several times and loves them.”

(Sound of deafening incredulous silence.)

So we are clear, we have here two almost 5-year old boys; one a fan of a movie with special effects so realistic and terrifying, if I remember correctly a character was discovered, the roof of his outhouse chewed off (thus saving his pants but not mine from being spoiled) and eaten in two bites by a T-Rex like yesterday’s Chicken McNugget® while sitting on the potty and a young boy every evening lulled to sleep by Eminem and da udda boys from da hood hip-hopping his little self to sleep?

(Sound of deafening incredulous silence.)

I’m 47 years old. Jurassic Park 1 and 2 scared me enough to not even think about renting movie number 3. What is a four year old doing watching that?

MTV, the source of swear words I don’t understand, misogyny, brutality, guns and makes it a point to be cool by demeaning all that is different has been piped into this child’s other than conscious mind for four years and all I get is a laugh and a shrug?

My own 3, 4 and 5 year old don’t get past CBEEBIES® (the BBC’s PBS), Playhouse Disney® or Nick Jr.® (and that last one is skating on thin ice because of dodgy security alarm adverts we now screen).

“These programs enter their consciousness, sit and percolate and twist it around to the point where reality is so blurred they have no concept real vs. fantasy” said a psychiatrist friend on condition of anonymity, (not surprisingly, he is trying to protect his growing practice.) “I see 4-5 kids like this a day and their parents just don’t get it. They fall into the trap of well, it’s not that bad (I suppose if compared to what, Alien vs. Predator? - Ed.) so how harmful could it be? It is this pseudo-intellectual shading that alarms me most.”

Now this is a spiritual magazine where we focus on clearing our issues, never get angry, raise our voices, have judgment, allow negative thoughts to enter our being and have complete understanding for the other person but I gotta ask the question, WHAT THE HECK ARE THESE PARENTS THINKING!!!!

They can certainly rally around the flag when something they have never even seen, like say, a musical doing very well in London’s West End called “Jerry Springer, The Opera” plans a US tour where people will of their own free will pay $100 for a ticket for an evening out of adult entertainment yet will sit and do nothing as their kids watch people beat the crap out of each other because their lover is gay and having an affair with their cross-dressing best friend on the set of his live show?

When the BBC broadcast the opera, the international furore included BBC executives harassed on private home telephones (numbers conveniently provided by a religious right website) and although they have never seen it, the outraged parents of the religious right have banded together in a feeding frenzy to ensure that the US tour is cancelled (it was last week and a UK tour is in jeopardy).

Their venomous concern for something so far outside of them far dwarfs any they might have their children’s babysitter, the tube in the middle of the living room (and in many homes the kitchen, bedroom(s), playroom, garage and bath with 200 channels, TiVo® or Sky+® to let them record and watch Live TV later and nothing’s ever on because the same US regulatory FCC which was titillated by Janet Jackson’s mammary gland cares not a whit about the violence and adverts kids are exposed to on the telly.

(Sound of deafening incredulous silence.)

While this piece has pointed, there seems to be a pattern emerging of finger pointing to excuse our busy, over-packed lives. It’s everybody else’s fault but ours and as my buddy in Georgia says (southern USA not former Russian republic) “that dawg just don’t hunt.” As a master once said to me, when we point the finger of blame at everyone else around us for not doing their job right: teachers, schools, TV, society, church, etc. we seem to forget that there are three fingers on that very same hand point squarely back at us.

(Sound of deafening incredulous silence.)

I made a mistake in the headline What Are We Rotting? now seems appropriate.

(As appeared in Children of the New Earth Magazine)

I Hear You Better When You Whisper

26 November 2004

The author has his world rocked by listenging to the whispers of his instructors equine friends.

Forget Dr. Doolittle.

Cancel the rental of the Robert Redford movie.

These guys don’t come close to spending a day with a 5’ 3” spark-plug in Southern Wales who spends her days teaching us how to listen to the language of our own soul by helping us to listen to and learn from her four horses.

Meet Helen Alysia Wingstedt, founder of Wholly Horses and her merry band of co-conspirator trainers: Q, a retired thoroughbred gelding who does not suffer fools lightly; the undisputed leader of the pack Holly (an Alpha-male despite the dubious name); Jack a lovely, quiet paint with lots to teach and Petal, the gentle, timid mare the other three protect and defend. Together, they will take any confirmed city boy (or girl) on the ride of your life without ever saddling up.

I work with a mind-body-spirit organization so the first thing Helen had to do was break me of all those wonderful concepts I was carrying about with me as well as everything I thought I was about to experience on this blustery and beautiful day spent over 100 lush acres of Welsh countryside. My day with Helen and the team was a birthday gift from my wife and co-workers who thought, rather than let me waste a day relaxing at a spa or traipsing the manicured links of a golf resort, gave the gift that keeps on giving and brings my emotional ‘stuff’ up into my face. An entire day, 1-on-1 with Helen and her equine team where we would learn to communicate on a level I never contemplated possible. The term used by many is ‘horse whispering’ and it seems a misnomer, because words were neither needed nor spoken.

At 10 am sharp we pulled up as instructed in front of barn number 5 and since this city boy could not decide what shoes would work best as the brochure instructs one to bring wet weather gear as it can get a bit muddy (said in the same way a dentist says, “you may feel some discomfort,” or the airline pilot says, “we may experience some light turbulence...”). Well it was all Wellies, all day long as mud and water at times covered my feet well up to the ankle, but I’m ahead of myself.

Helen and I began with a harmless little chat over coffee and tea. She asked questions while circling the table and tuning in somewhere for answers that made my internal alarm bells klaxon a full warp factor 5 emergency as I sat blithely wondering how she was so simply pulling information out from so deep within me. In about 10-minutes time she had me completely sussed and hung out to dry. As in the movie Jerry Maguire when Dorothy says to Jerry, “you had me at hello”?, she knew everything about that quickly. There was no hope of escape. After 45-minutes every one of my issues with women was exposed naked (a purposeful Freudian slip). I was grateful when she suggested lunch thinking, aah, at last the teaching’s over for a few minutes, (ha-ha you silly little man).

There is a deep and profound simplicity without new-age jargon to Helen and even while sitting and munching on sandwiches, I was wide openly confused and thus declared ready to meet my trainers for the day. We began a 20-minute trek down a narrow lane, over mud flows, through several gates and into a huge open 100-acre series of meadows. At the top of the hill stood the imposing Holly staring at me and thinking, “OK gang, listen up, we got ourselves a genuine city boy here who thinks he knows what’s about to happen (my, been there, done that skepticism was clearly tattooed over my entire being), so shall we let the lessons begin?”

They gathered near the fence like American football players in a huddle discussing the next play and enlisted the 6 horses from the neighboring meadow and farm as co-conspirators. Helen then explained how the water represented my emotions and when one horse started slapping the surface with his hoof to rhythmically “stir up the emotions” she encouraged me to climb up the little hill to get a better look.

I gave Helen a look that communicated “well, yes and he could just be playing with the water now, couldn’t he” and noticed the horses had silently moved into position behind me leaving completely cut-off from Helen and then began nudging me (now 600 lbs. of horses “nudging,” you remember). Their message was very movie Godfather-like, “listen up real good, cuz we’re only gonna say dis once, pay attention to da nice lady.” It worked and stopped any further sarcastic thoughts or responses bubbling up to anything the rest of this day.

“Horses,” said Helen, “are so telepathic and empathetic you need never actually say a word. They hear what you are going to say as you think it and react to it before you actually say it.” She (and they) now had my full attention. The rest of the day it became clear they were indeed hearing what I was thinking and it made me very careful of every thought. They also could sense when my defenses came up and even in a later exercise where Helen asked me to summon Holly and have him come to me, I had to lower my guard and really invite him before he would come to where I was standing. After two tries he came willingly and when all defenses were lowered, we stood there and I saw what a big tender baby he really is as I cupped his head gently in my hands and we stood like a pair of ballet dancers embraced in a silent pas de deux. It brought up bucket loads of emotion to see how badly I had misjudged this gentle giant (and through him so many others throughout my life).

It was a brilliant end to an amazing day. I left with an open heart and a spring to my step. The horses quietly munched on the fresh grass, as no sentimentality was asked for or needed. They were done, lesson learned, it’s time to eat. And as I watched them standing there while darkness crept over the meadow, I knew they were simply waiting for the next day’s person to learn their lesson.

You too will be assimilated, if you dare.

(As appeared on An American Abroad.com)

A Swinging Saturday Night in a Dutch Country Town

18 May 2005

Lochem was the town John Denver meant to write about in his lyric.

Instead, having never been there, (unlike modern dance creator Isadora Duncan and R&B legend Arthur “Sweet Soul Music” Conley who both lived near this town) he picked on a slice of middle-America when writing “Saturday Night in Toledo, Ohio is like being nowhere at all…” When he reaches the line, “you can walk by the bakery and watch the buns rise”, it is clear he speaks of this and hundreds of rural Dutch villages like it.

Founded in the 1200s, Lochem was a river/canal community that saw profit from the Far East Spice Trade. When the canal connected the Ijssel River and inland sea to Germany, this town boomed with its own “river” traffic. “Boom”, in rural Holland, is a relative term. Most Dutch rural teenagers feel their lives need more boom!

While Holland has 16 million residents, 75% of them live in the Randstad area (bordered by the cities of Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam and Utrecht) leaving 4 million people spread over very large land masses, 1+ hour away from these cities.

Life as a country teenager is one of hormones wrenched under control by kilometers long bicycle rides to and from well... everywhere. Most high school age kids pedal 8-12 kilometers (5-7 miles) one-way to school in weather most American kids heard about in our grandparent’s legends. They always began with the line, “why, when I was your age we used to...” followed by some exaggerated tale of walking 10 miles to school in blizzards or meteor showers.

I remember the furore when my old US hometown wanted to lengthen the distance by which public school buses would transport kids from 1 to 1½ miles to reduce expenses. Problem was the town was so small; it eliminated too many kids to even make having a bus work financially. Municipalities here neither own nor use school buses. You walk or ride a bike and never ask for a ride, that’s un-cool for any Dutch teen.

And ride they do. Bicycles are everywhere and used by people of all ages. My own pedaling experiences take on an extra sense of urgency when being closed in on from behind by a leisurely riding 70-something grandma. There are few things more embarrassing than being forced into a furious Tour de France like sprint to the finish line (complete with standing leg-pumps) to prevent being overtaken and then jumping off the bike, limping and clutching at an imaginary calf muscle cramp before being overtaken, whew....

Holland lets her kids drink at age 16 but wisely keeps automobiles out of reach until well into their 18th year. While I remember having my driver’s license within days of turning 16, you cannot legally sit behind the wheel of a car before 18. Then you must complete a 30-week driving school before sitting for an exam 90% fail the first two times. By the time most kids have legal access to a car, they are nearly 19 and, in theory, ready for the responsibility.

Most Americans are shocked by the freedoms Dutch parents give their kids. It is a reflection of an otherwise generally self-responsible society. I still catch myself about to tell the manager of the grocery store about a wet spot thinking, someone could slip, fall and sue the store. That is until I remember that the judge will behave like everyone else here and say, “you should have watched where you were stepping! Next case.” That’s why there are no lawyers standing beside the highways near Amsterdam filming, “if you’ve been injured in an accident, call us” commercials.

Lets’ face it, as Americans, we are one of the most uptight and Victorian/puritanical nations in the world. We have no problem advocating stupid programs that promote abstinence or staying drug – free by just saying no when addictions and hormones say, yes, Yes, YES!!

I do blush at the frankness of talk between kids and parents about sex, pregnancy prevention and AIDS protection here. Sex education is not bound by the arcane “PC” rules US teachers face. Here, as in most subjects, direct questions get direct, honest answers. Even teenage television programs discuss very intimate details. Early and constant dialogue between children and parents leads to one of the lowest teen pregnancy rate in the world, marriages happening, on average in the couple’s late 20s and first children born to real adults between 28 and 35 or older. The cynics say, yes and the average age of sexual activity is also younger. The Dutch response is, if they’re going to do it anyways, why not make sure they are safe and informed? Tough to argue with and yeah, I know you will, so get a life.

So on Friday and Saturday nights, Dutch teenagers cut loose and have fun. They just have seemingly odd hours. Years ago it somehow became un-cool to go out before 11:00 p.m. So 10 minutes before that hour, the deafening sound of mopeds riding into the center of most cities and towns can be heard for miles around.

Once here they have few choices – ride the municipal bus to this weekend’s floating discotheque, sit in the park and talk with friends before grabbing some French fries (or is now the official name “Freedom” for these Belgian potato creations), pizza at a snack bar or visit a grand café and bounce around to house music. Whatever, the goal is to fill six hours with activities – many of which we don’t want to know about, then again neither did our parents…

Having talked with several kids late one evening outside my office, what is refreshing is a hundred or so teenagers can assemble without police in riot gear being called in. Yes, they are loud. Yes, they do behave like the teenagers they are. Yes, they should be home sleeping. And yes, they all say, “this is our time” and enjoy it fully before collapsing in bed before just before sunrise.

At least these teenage zombies earn their stripes.

(As originally published in expats.com)

Knocked To My Knees

19 August 2004

South Africa, well into her 10th year of independence and healing from brutal apartheid regimes, sees many fresh wounds from the scourges of generational poverty, illiteracy, unemployment and HIV/AIDS. And yet amid such seemingly dire circumstances she offers a shining beacon of hope and healing for both her next generations and quite possibly the rest of the world.

Johannesburg, South Africa, August, 2004
Alexandra Township, about 1-mile away from and clearly in the shadow of the gleaming office towers of Sandton, Johannesburg’s “Beverly Hills,” is a place where 2-million people dwell in one-room dirt floor shacks. The shacks are made of whatever material (particle board, street signs, corrugated tin, wood planks...) one can carry to build their “home.” The 60 mph winds of a recent winter thunderstorm reduced many to rubble. There are up to 20 such shacks on a typical small English house plot with one toilet (a term used very loosely) for up to 30 people, no running water and the only electricity being what one steals by dangerously slinging a wire over the live wires above.

Education in Alex rarely rises above 6th grade level and unemployment is more than 60% amongst the generation left behind in the 70s and 80s by apartheid’s exclusionary education system. Many spend angry days drowning their sorrows on cheap homemade beer in the shebeens (illegal pubs in houses) of Alex’s mean streets. Police presence is high and even then crime is a way of life. After dark, most do not venture from their homes.

HIV/AIDS is a plague throughout this community. Hundreds of children are orphaned when their parents die of the disease and many are HIV positive and have nowhere to go. Said one caregiver about HIV testing - “there is no testing here, chances are very high the parents passed the disease along and if they live to age six or seven without onset of the disease, no retroviral drugs and such poor nutrition that stunts both their physical and emotional growth, chances are they will survive” So they scrounge for whatever food they can find in a place where most are lucky to eat every third day.

These two young girls lost their mother a few weeks ago to AIDS. The oldest cares for her baby sister and is a “mother” at age 7 yet has the physical size and frame of my 3-year old daughter. Are they warm? Is their grandmother caring for them or do they sit alone shivering on this dark African winter night caring for each other while she drowns her unspeakable sorrow in the local shebeen? Did they eat or drink today?...

And yet within all of this pain burns a miraculously infectious spirit of hope that knocks even the strongest and most cynical journalist to their knees.

They and 250 other HIV/AIDS orphans rely on Mama Portia, the angel of Alex. Portia recently left an abusive marriage, something that makes a woman an outcast in her family and society. She took her own children into the Alex night and while trying to find food for them, agreed to care for a friend who was dying of AIDS. When her friend passed away her family grew with the addition of her friend’s children.

As she wandered the streets of Alex looking to feed six hungry mouths, she found hundreds of similar AIDS orphans and began to do everything she could to provide some level of daycare support and meals for them. Sometimes the best she could do was provide a meal every 2nd or 3rd day, other times even her own children went without food as she devoted her life to helping all of these children. She wanders daily through Alex’s streets like a modern day Pied Piper with children of all ages joyfully following her.

Each afternoon 250 children orphaned by HIV/AIDS gather with Mama and the other caregivers in an old church hall, complete with broken windows and no electricity. She shows me the waiting list for children seeking permanent adoptive homes. It is tens of neatly hand-written pages of names, all carefully documented by the one woman who has dedicated her own life to helping them find homes and a daily respite from Alex’s mean streets.

“At times it’s like trying to hold beach balls underwater,” explained Jane, a volunteer and lifelong resident of Johannesburg. Jane and Portia met at a seminar. Jane arrived late and the only available seat was next to Portia who was a guest along with other caregivers, schoolteachers and student volunteers helping keep kids off of the streets of Soweto and other townships from around South Africa.

It proved a fortuitous “accident” as Jane stayed in close contact with Mama Portia and worked through her Rolodex when she got back to raise a continuous ₤2,000 each month from local businesses to ensure that Portia’s children get a meal every day. Since then a local doctor has also joined the effort and provides regular check-ups for the children.

Mama Portia and Jane are busily working to raise enough funds to build a permanent orphanage for these children. In addition The Journey is supporting a group of teens in Soweto Township working to keep kids off the streets and former Freedom Fighters all working to heal the wounds of the past. South Africa may have lost a generation to apartheid, but Mama Portia and her friends are determined to make sure this generation has a fighting chance.

(As published in An American Abroad.com)

An American in Paris

30 July 2002

The American national anthem played on loudspeakers along the Avenue de Champs-Élysées in Paris. Was it a movie location? Liberation Day festivities? Hip-hoppers playing a practical joke from their car stereos?

No, it was a normal scene for the last Sunday in July as the world celebrated the 4th consecutive victory of cancer survivor and Texan cyclist extraordinaire Lance Armstrong winning the Tour de France. For three weeks, he used nothing but foot power and gravity to race 2,000+ miles – the equivalent of riding from Denver to Los Angeles – on a bicycle seat 6-8 hours a day, 150 miles each day, at speeds averaging 30+ mph, against the 190 best riders in the world over a course so long and mountains so high they literally take your breath away.

As an American ex-pat living in Holland, cycling is a national passion for the Dutch. Public television here provides wire-to-wire coverage every year for this nation of frustrated tour riders.

When my buddy Ed invited me to drive down and see the final stage with him, the first thing I did was check the US State Department terror threat website. There I was petrified by page after page of warnings about avoiding obvious terror targets – places where lots of Americans abroad gather and here I was driving to the one place in Europe where everyone knew several thousand American spectators gathered out in the open? I said, naaaahhhh, not here, threw caution to the wind and got in the car.

I’m glad I did. It was a giant international street carnival. The man next to us waved Basque and Spanish flags and cheered on his friends in Spanish, a couple from Hong Kong had their faces painted with Chinese, French and American flags and the food, sites and smells were wonderful.
Up at 4:00 a.m. (because I was like a kid on Christmas morning - too excited to sleep anymore), I was on the road at 4:45 with a cooler full of snacks and water. By 6:00 am I was in very heavy traffic. A battalion of Dutch tourists were invading France. The three-week construction trade workers holiday began so every camper and trailer in Holland was loaded and on the road early to beat the traffic.

Paris has many park and ride garages and that seemed to make the most sense on a day that many streets would be closed to traffic. I boarded the Metro and met my friend from LA who had an extra ticket for the final day. Ed spent the previous week on a tour of the Tour de France. He is a big-time cyclist and last Sunday while everyone else slept, his group climbed Mount Ventoux the same day the Tour did.

I caught him on his cell phone after completing a Category 1 climb, which had a 15% graded descent. He said he was a little nervous when at 45 mph the wheels of his bike began to vibrate. Tour riders hit 55-60 mph. Drive your own car at that speed and see how ridiculously fast that is for a bicycle.

We walked around the Champs-Élysées for two hours and took in the sights – the media tents, finish line and private spectator areas. The temperature was in the mid-90s when we stood in our assigned area 200 meters from the finish line. There was a big screen television to our right and some commentator screaming at us in French all day in our ears over the loudspeakers.

When the racers entered Paris and passed the finish line for the first time it was 153 riders led to the line by 8 US Postal team members leading Lance to the finish line. The roar was deafening. They raced to the Arc de Triomph and back down the other side of de Champs Élysées. Suddenly there was “DA Man” less than 20 feet away whizzing by in a blur of colors. The caravan of cars, police, motorcycles, medical team, ambulances, trucks, etc that accompany the tour extends for almost a mile in length. By the time the last vehicle passed, the lead police motorcycles were on the other side approaching the finish line for the second of ten laps around this course. Two helicopters hovered overhead providing amazing camera angles before the bell lap.

There were several attacks, at one point a lead of more than a minute was held briefly over the Peleton until the last lap where they were all together setting up a sprint to the finish that would determine the owner of the green jersey. Robbie McEwen from Australia had been here before. He and Eric Zabel were tied and would fight this last mile for the sprint king jersey Zabel wore the last five years. With 500 meters to go (remembering how they stopped him last year) Robbie swung wide and began the final sprint. By the time they came around the last curve, he was ahead by a bike length and the scramble to the line began in earnest in front of our vantage point.

When the stage was over, Lance stood alone in the yellow winner’s jersey on the podium. Even though we knew it was coming, it was strange to hear the Star Spangled Banner played on that most famous of Paris streets. There were many of us choking back our emotions and bursting with pride.

When the awards ceremony ended, the teams parade slowly by to thank the fans for carrying them over those mountains and through the sprints. There you speak briefly with, cheer them on and take close-up photos. On this day, we cheered for all 153 riders. For merely to finished this journey you needed the heart of a lion and all were champions of the Tour.

(As appeared in Het Financieel Dagblad Emglish Edition)

The “Lord” of a Very British-Irish Dutch Castle

29 January 2003

When you think European castles, England’s manor homes, France’s Chateaus or Germany’s baronial hilltop estates come first to mind. Rarely does one think of Holland, nor would it make the first cut on most castle shopping lists. Yet in Gelderland Province’s Zutphen County sits a tightly woven system of castles, open lands, forests and farms bent on preserving the rustic nature of this part of The Netherlands.

Thousands of Dutch city dwellers flee the cramped cities of the Randstad and trek eastward to the Achterhoek or back corner of Holland for their holidays. Here the local dialect is spoken proudly (thanks to the almost cult-like supporters of local rock bands Normaal and Jovink) and shows both strength of family and character here in the “platte grond”.

Amongst bike paths, holiday homes, and country inns the land appears long forgotten by time. Those appearances can be deceiving.

Cycling Vorden’s 8 Castle Bicycle Route, most castles, the former summer residences of Western Holland’s rich and famous, are viewed at a private distance through iron gates and long entrance roads.

In contrast, the very British/Dutch E.V. (Peter) Gatacre openly shares his de Wiersse castle’s heritage. Several days each year he and his family open the 47 hectares of formal and wild gardens to an eager public. Featured in many magazines, the gardens are the crown jewel of this castle and something Peter, his wife Laura and their nine children have worked since 1978 to bring back after decades of neglect during and following the War.

Peter talks about his family, although not titled, his is an interesting blend of Dutch-English history. Having spent most of his life in or near this castle, he certainly wears the preservationist role as the Achterhoek’s “Monarch of the Glen.” Like the fictional television character, he and estate manager Jan Keurentjes work to maintain a way of life real estate revenue savvy city planners would like to slice and dice. The battle between expansion and maintaining the status quo has waged in this region for decades.

Quips Peter, “the bombing during the war was bad, what the town planners did afterwards was worse.” When one visits the towns and villages of this area, it is easy to see his concerns. The construction crane is this area’s Dutch national bird as row upon row of American style tract houses take over hectares of once fertile farmland. Some cities in this region have grown by as much as 50% in the last ten years and this trend shows no sign of easing as densely packed Western Holland creeps slowly eastward.

As we sit in a parlor off the main kitchen, Peter, now 74, reminisces about childhood summers spent sailing the creek behind the castle using only a sheet on a stick. As a boy, he wanted to sail the world and did so from the castle grounds. Everything needed was produced in this self-sustaining community of 14 working farms. The grounds had their own cheese and milk factory, woodworking shop, and one of the farmhouse contains a carefully constructed orchard of flowering nut and fruit trees which every fall still provide an entire year’s supply of apples, pears and walnuts.

de Wiersse has been in Peter’s family, on his mother’s side, since 1678 and he would like that to extend for several more generations. With 9 children half of whom have completed studies in formal gardens, land management and museum curator ships standing at the ready, it is in good hands for at least one more generation.

Peter’s family tree has several interesting branches. He is the son of William Gatacre, a British-Irish prisoner of war swapped with France during WWI. William married Alice de Steurs, the daughter of Dutch preservationist Victor de Steurs who was the unorthodox and pugnacious head of the Naional Department of Monuments, Museums and Archives and a member of the Dutch parliament. It is de Steurs who shamed the government into creating the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the first catalogue raisonné of the Mauritshuis after several artifacts were sold to the highest bidder.

Victor’s personal collection and papers are housed in the castle’s carriage house and maintained for Dutch historians to study and one of Peter’s daughters has taken on the task of preserving this collection.

It is the gardens though, that occupy most of Peter and Laura’s heart and time. His mother Alice began building them after the WWI. They fell into disrepair during the second war when the family was forced to evacuate to England. Then with the after war shortages it was difficult to maintain such a large area. The gardens, as Alice said in an article she wrote for Floralia in September of 1924, “avoid the trap of making a ‘museum of plants’, not too many varieties, too many colors, but go for strong groups, simple combinations, repetition in a loose but regular pattern.” It is this blend of wild and sculptured that brings thousands of visitors each year.
While Peter read history at Oxford, his heart always belonged to de Wiersse. Peter returned after university and ran a museum near Zwolle for many years. He would come home to the castle every weekend to work with and help his mother. The castle was largely a weekend and summer residence because it was difficult to reach Vorden until the main road to Zutphen was paved in 1960. Most were also without heat until residents lived there full-time. After his mother passed away it was necessary to take a more active day-to-day role in castle management.

What started as a weekend job managing the castle’s affairs 22 years ago, now requires him and estate manager Jan Keurentjes to maintain. Together they run a business spread over 300+ hectares of forests and fields. As Jan said, “when I started here 17 years ago on a one-year trial, I spent 75% of my time outdoors working with people on the land and 25% doing paper work, now that figure is reversed.”

This week sees him clearing the hundreds of hectares of forests of all non-indigenous trees to Holland. Disease threatens to wipe out many strains and the government has ordered all forests so thinned to preserve the local heritage. This means the sound of buzz saws replace the call of local wild birds.

Having spent most of his life in or on the castle grounds, Peter is a passionate voice among an informal association of 40 property owners working to maintain this Achterhoek region’s unique and picturesque heritage. Peter will never rest in his quest to bring common sense and a preservation back to this region. Says Peter, “once you destroy a century-old farmhouse and sell the land for tract houses you lose a connection to the past and in this throwaway society we have created we toss our history away every day to innovation. The problem is everyone is busy innovating the same thing.”

As I walk down the castle driveway, I can’t help thinking that that sure sound like something Victor would have said to the Dutch parliament.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it ?

Wooden shoes, harder heads

5 April 2002


Just try taking them away from their owner. I’ll fight you for my pair. Nothing is easier to slip on to take out trash, bring in mail or wander around the garden. They provide a surprisingly comfortable fit yet bulky reminder to remove them when entering the house.

I’m talking about wooden shoes. Klompen (the locals call them) or clogs – when you think of Holland you think windmills and these funky shoes. A stone’s throw from our home sits the world’s largest wooden shoe factory here in the Achterhoek or back corner of Holland. They sell 70% of the world’s wooden shoes and claim to be market leaders. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and leave the investigative journalism to my colleagues (next week a 12 part series – klompengate !) While the tradition-bound villagers of Volendam or other tourist towns want you to believe they are all still handmade, don’t let them fool you, klompen are a big, hi-tech business.

While God made heaven and earth, the Dutch made Holland. After reclaiming the land from the sea, they needed to walk through the muddy earth, so they invented wooden shoes. Archeologists near Rotterdam found clogs dating from 1271. They are perfect for working on a farm and farmers hand-carved shoes for themselves and their families. Today, 1 million Dutch farmers, artisans, children, people working in their garden (and one columnist) wear them every day.

In 1911, 3,900 factories in Holland produced 9 million pair of wooden shoes a year. Today 20 highly computerized factories produce 3 million pair of wooden shoes, souvenirs and gifts.

Paul Nijhuis is a bit of a fanatic. The son of the founder, he is very passionate about wooden shoes. In 1997 when the Dutch government privatized their version of the OSHA, they ruled that wooden shoes were unsafe and banned them from commercial and industrial use. Paul demonstrated the safety of Nijhuis shoes by dropping a 110 lb parking curbstone on the shoes. He walked away from the experiment unharmed (and, I am sure breathing a sigh of relief) proving that wooden shoes have been safe for 700 years.

He also has a unique way of demonstrating how wood’s natural ventilation prevents perspiration of your feet. He spits on one end of a shoe and blows bubbles in his spit from the other end (not an exercise for the full-stomached witness). Air travels through wood and keeps the temperature constant so they are cool in summer and warm in winter. Still, I am not sure we’ll see many of them during prom season.

Nijhuis uses 12,000 Poplar trees annually to produce one million pairs of clogs for actual use and two million souvenirs, gifts and toys. Poplar is light and easy to work with. It is fast-growing and each tree yields about 60 pairs of adult-size shoes. He does this with a staff of 150 employees.A tour of the facility shows the entire automated process – from the saw that cuts each tree into lengths according to shoe size, a band saw which cuts the logs into cake wedges (each wedge containing a single wooden shoe), to a duplicating machine which rotates two pieces of wood in opposite directions to simultaneously create a left and a right shoe.

Paul is proudest though of the interior drill. He invented the machine which creates the perfect orthopedic form for the foot. Since fresh wood contains up to 60% water, the shoes are then left to dry for one week before another machine sands the exterior. All finishing touches – sanding the interior, painting and polishing – are done by hand.

Soccer club fans and corporate clients have their own unique and specially designed clogs. My personal favorite is the smuggler’s pair used to confuse border guards. The heel and toe are reversed so it looks like you are going when you are really coming.

Even in a 700 year old industry, there are OSHA-like disclaimers – “In accordance with the prescribed use of safety shoes we warn you to take care when wearing wooden shoes on wet surfaces. Be aware of the risk of slipping. Replace the wooden shoe if the wood is cracked and when the notch in the bottom of the wooden shoe measures less than ¼ inch. Otherwise when treading on a nail it could go through the wood.”

I guess any guy who drops curbstones on his own foot to prove a point needs a good lawyer.

(As appeared in het Financieel Dagblad English Edition, The Netherlands)

The Windmill Keeper

29 March 2002

He was the butcher in the Dutch country town of Laren. As days became years and years decades, he served customers and dreamed of finding something else to do with his life. When he and his wife sold their shop, he faced a dilemma. I’m too young to retire, what should I do with the rest of my life?

He was fascinated with windmills, built first to pump out water from the reclaimed sea and then to regulate its level in a continual battle against the ocean and alpine fed rivers.

After raising three children, he receives a comfortable pension and, with the blessing of his wife, followed his lifelong dream. At age 59, he enrolled in the only school devoted solely to rebuilding and restoring these uniquely Dutch symbols of craftsmanship and ingenuity.

He is Jos Jansen a wiry, gentle 6’ 7” windmill keeper. Jos greets everyone clad in his blue coveralls with the same smile and quiet enthusiasm for his new work. He clearly loves his land ship, this giant grain windmill and is eager to show you how everything works. There are rules. He makes sure you remain outside the small chain fence. Even there, the site of her giant arms silently swooshing down towards your head is enough to make you duck.

Jos pulls heavily on one of the two long ropes connected to the back of the mill. That tug trips a lever, which loosens a large stone and causes the windmill to quickly shudder to a stop. It is a very delicate counter-balanced system.

He saw a slight shift in the wind so he wants to turn the mill, the entire building, into the wind. Every three feet or so around the circumference of the building sits a giant ship pylon. Around two of them are enormous steel rings connected to the windmill by heavy metal chains. He lifts the rings off the pylon, walks to the side of the building and slowly turns a giant ship’s wheel and the top of the building swivels. When he is satisfied the windmill is facing correctly into the wind, he secures her chains once again on the pylons.

The wind is a bit lighter now so he rotates the mill’s blades ¼ turn so he can roll out a bit more cloth fabric to catch the wind in her “sails”. When they are secured he tugs on the rope again and we stand hypnotized, watching the wind do its work.

In her prime, Holland had more than 13,000 windmills. Most were used to pump water and ease pressure off the dykes. Today the work is done by an invisible computerized network of pumps, locks and canals. Less than 1,000 remain, many in disrepair and only a few hundred are in working condition. Like dilapidated drive-in movie screens in Texas, many stand as silent reminders of another era.

“The problem” he says, “is finding good woodworkers and craftsmen. You cannot simply run over to the local hardware store for parts to fix the problems you find here so you have to be either very creative or very stubborn.” I think a bit of both works wonders.

There are a few sacks of flour on the floor. It is clear the action takes place above us. There a giant stone crushes the grain into fine flour while a series of interlocking wooden wheels and bars move as the wind turns the blades. We climb one narrow ladder after another up into the top of the mill to see giant wood posts turning and creating the chain reaction below. “At harvest time”, he says, “the miller worked around the clock so farmers could get their grain milled before rain ruined it. A rainy summer was disastrous to the entire region.

Since only a handful of windmill keeper jobs are paid, this is a labor of love. He spends every Saturday keeping this mill near Lochem running. Jos weekly turns his giant ship into the wind welcoming visitors to a long forgotten time.

He once charged admission of $3.00, but gave up because his thrifty countrymen (OK, they are cheap – do you think the term Dutch Aunt comes from her generosity?) objected to paying that amount. Now he accepts whatever donation people will make and hopes it is enough to keep this one mill going.

$3 seems a small price to pay to preserve a bit of history. Jos just shrugs and keeps on checking the wind.

(Originally published in Het Financieel Dagblaad English Edition, The Netherlands)

Who Hears Their Cries ?

Published 14 May 2001

A farmer in France sees a blister in one of his sheep’s mouth. A blood sample is drawn. The initial test (as is often the case) shows a positive diagnosis of hoof and mouth disease. The second, more reliable test is ordered. As the result is processed in lab, the death team descends on his farm. They fight back the farmer, establish a perimeter, seal off his land from neighbors trying to help and begin euthanizing every living non-human creature.

The farmer cries, “wait, my God, please wait for the results of the second test”. No one listens as one by one his pregnant ewes fall. The others, sensing impending doom rush to escape but are pinned in a corner of the field where, one by one, they die. As the team walks toward the second sheep meadow, they are slowed by ankle deep mud and decide they have done enough for this day. A crane lifts and dumps the carcasses into a waiting truck. The terrified cries slowly slip into silence until all one hears is the cry of the farmer, holding the sheet of paper saying the second test was negative.

Who hears their cries?

The agro-world debates over the political (which always means economic/market) correctness of a vaccine that could save all the animals, yet does nothing. We sit, watch and shake our heads listening to the cries of more than 1.000.000 healthy animals being slaughtered for a disease that does not kill them (or anyone else for that matter). It merely makes the meat more difficult to export. If it were a disease killing humans, millions would appear to find a cure and yet one already exists.

We sit, watch and shake our heads as farmers fight to protect their animals. Neighbor fights neighbor on evening news programs. There is no shortage of blame sources in this disaster. The problem is no one looks at themselves for creating this (or any) issue. No one willingly accepts responsibility for allowing the ‘business’ of food to grow into the disaster it has daily become.

A news documentary shows a farmer selling free range eggs to a major supplier while his hens are discovered by the film crew living in one enormous, filthy barn and never allowed in the more peaceful outdoor environment. People bribe, negotiate settlement or look the other way at abuses documented by over-worked and underpaid inspectors on the safe handling of what people ingest into their bodies. The animals suffer in silence until a holocaust shines its light on brutality whether in Nazi-era Germany, Kosovo, or a pig barn in Zwolle.

Who hears their cries?

One side is “just following orders and doing their job” (that eerily familiar defense from the Nuremburg war-crime trials) marching to a neighbor’s home to kill every non-human living creature (even house cats and dogs).

The other side raises their fists, screams in anger, erects barricades, burns vehicles and watches riot police with tractors and water cannons remove barricades and push them back so the killing can continue without harassment. And now we learn that more than 30% of the herds in England were disease free and culled unnecessary.

The justification is, they are just “dumb animals” and don’t know what is happening. That works until you see that some breeds of pigs are smarter than dogs, can be trained and bond (if allowed to) with humans in much the same way. Do you think of that or the foul smell when you pass a truck on the highway and see them packed in like cords of wood, noses joyfully pointed out and skyward to enjoy the ride. How many are truly aware this is their last and only ride? The air around the local pig slaughterhouse is heavy with the stench and awareness of doom for blocks from these ‘dumb’ animals.

Yet when millions of men and women were treated like animals and marched naked into the gas chambers of Auschwitz there was world-wide outrage. An entire world mobilized against the tyrant responsible. Today we sit, watch and shake our heads.

Who hears the cries?

Who can watch and not be moved by the home video of the farmer saying a tearful goodbye to his milking cows before the death team arrives? Or the tears of the worker who needed four gunshots to end the life of one from a herd of 40 beautiful horned cows on the Hoge Veluuw. The irony is those cows lived and were government protected to help keep nature’s balance. Now, because they might unknowingly spread the disease and money is at stake, these peaceful creatures must die. Even after erecting enormous fences and bridges to keep them safe they must die because they are too free?

Why is it that whenever politics and economics meet one tries to prove they are doing something while the other demands that something be done and… no matter what is done everybody loses? Why does the presence of a vaccination have a disastrous economic effect when so many animals could live? Maybe there is something deeper here than we can clearly see.

Who hears their cries?

What if, at a very deep level, the animal world is taking revenge for the horrible conditions in today’s commercial farms and slaughterhouses?

What if BSE and MKZ were wake-up calls from nature to bring this planet’s food supply into greater harmony, alliance and balance with all of her people?

What if a higher authority was really saying, instead of growing hectare after hectare of feed corn, use the land to grow corn and grain to feed people in the places where crops cannot grow. Much of the rest of the world is vegetarian and eats simple grains and vegetables why not everyone?

What if this was really a cry for us to bring gratitude and respect back into the food chain and into our daily lives? It is easy to be grateful for a feast. Can one also be grateful in the desert? Can humans ultimately do the right vs. the expedient thing?

There are areas of this world where because of extreme weather conditions (Arctic and Himalayan climates are examples), where even devoutly vegetarian Buddhists resorts to eating meat or fish to survive. The difference is an entire Eskimo village, gathers to give thanks and bless the spirit of the one whale who will feed everyone there all winter long.

When was the last time a McDonalds customer gave thanks to or thought about the cow who gave her life to produce his cheeseburger? 100 years ago the family farm was there for the family. People raised and sold to neighbors only what they needed instead of doing whatever they wanted.

Are you beginning to hear the cries?

What if these diseases are here because of the way animals are treated in the commercial food and animal transport businesses? Videos of cows emptied from transport trucks and into slaughterhouse pens show drivers and workers beating them with sticks into submission and line for slaughter. These ‘dumb’ animals are scared because they smell fear and death in the air.

What if the only plus in this tragedy is the growing number of meat eaters who’ve finally had enough messages about food safety and give up eating meat? Fear of BSE, MKZ, salmonella and other diseases is an enormous motivator.

What if, the analogy of these animals quietly making this sacrifice, is really resonating with the same dignity and silence of the human souls from 55-60 years ago in the concentration camps? Maybe that helps people hear the cries in a different way.

What if the world also did what it needed to do? Maybe then the crying would finally stop.

(Translated into Dutch and appeared in the June edition of Paravisie Magazine, The Netherlands.)