…but boy, your Cloud (Ubuntu One) and Music (Ubuntu One Music & Ubuntu One Music App) connectivity smells!
This is a rant, and my first on Ubuntu, so unless you want to blow off some pressure, this won’t be your favorite post 
. Whilst the title is a quote copied from one of my favorite shows – The Big Bang Theory – the intro is going to be my quote!
As you’re reading this, there is for the purposes of this article only 2 possible situations. You work for a company that does outside representation, or you don’t… (work; work for a company; work in a company that provides services or products or both).
But whether or not you do, I am assuming that you will be able to understand the initial thought behind this rant.
If you can say yes to at least 1 of the above simple situations, then answer me this: how did it make you feel about the company that employs such slobs?
It’s been a while again, and before posting a missing rant on representing your organisation, I thought I’d give you an insight into a few ingenious products I came accross and have started using frequently.
The series begins with these rather stylish speakers for my new iPhone 4 (for which, I need not rant ), and their incredible price/quality ratio. But let us not jump ahead!
It’s been a while now that I’ve been looking for a solution to listening to music on the go -mobile you might say – and I’ve had tries with several versions. A Philips and a Sony Alarm/Dock/Charger, several mini-speakers in ball-shape, and of course a wide selection of headphones (in-ear, on-ear, even a large wireless version). None of them however ended up being used frequently, they were mostly cumbersome to move, and most of the time not that effective with my iPhone…
As you, loyal reader, might already know, traffic conditions in and around Luxembourg can be pretty bad. We do have radio stations that on a regular basis list a few issues, but they’re not always “up-to-speed”…
Same goes for those apps that use the public network of highway cameras – what good are they if you don’t take the highway?
And then it hit me. The only way to have this working out for everyone, is if it is all of these at the same time: free of charge, quick to update, easy to use, rewarding and useful (of course). Now imagine you’re on the highway stuck in a traffic jam, you take your iPhone® or other Twitter®-capable device, switch on your preferred Twitter®-app, and tell this to your followers: “hey guys, am stuck in traffic, again…”. Now imagine your followers could also recognize the geo-tag of where you’ve written this, and they would know exactly where not to drive without you needing to explain it to anyone.
For years, I have been advocating self-checkouts in all kinds of places, yet everyone always told me it wasn’t going to catch on. Then back in my London-time, I saw a Tesco in the Bank area that had nearly only self-checkouts and I tried to grasp all the (dis)advantages of the change: less staff – less training – quicker checkouts?… But was it really that? Does it really take less staff and less training, or does it take less staff sitting in tills all day and just a more advanced training to fewer people? Are checkouts really quicker, or does it feel quicker as you are busy checking out?
Then came the era in Luxembourg (finally) where you could buy tickets at cinema online or at small self-checkouts, and along came IKEA and Auchan and more organisations such as Quick. Whilst the first 3 really do seem to make it a quicker experience for me, the 4th was still dependent on the speed of the person serving my order as that process could not be transferred to me.
But the most pressing thought that just popped to my mind is that even if it is not really quicker or more convenient, I’d still have a tendency to just use the machines anyways, as it removes in most cases a variable that is a potentially bigger burden than a potential improvement: customer service!
This week was marked by a development that was somewhat unexpected to me. A place that I’ve been going to for a very long time now, a place that I’ve tremendously enjoyed, has been holding my lesser visits against me. Don’t get me wrong, the relationship has developed to a very casual and joking setting, and indeed, I’ve been going there a lot less than say a year ago, but this has nothing to do with them. I just do it less.
Now when I try to extrapolate, I can understand that in other circumstances (read: other cultures), this may be a common approach: joking about guilting customers in increasing their custom, but to me and quite a few of my local peers, this has been and still is very strenuous as I (we) do care a lot about what people think about me (us). It has now gone as far as to make me consider choosing another place for the time being where I can just go to, not befriend and just transact with at a superficial level where quality/price ratio is the only important variable.
In order to simplify my parents’ lives, I decided to investigate options for locks to the house that required only 1 key, rather than several different ones. That is when I decided to call several shops I thought would be able to help, one of them being a chain of shops named Batiself. A very friendly man on the phone “explained it all” to me, but said it would probably take him two working days to get an exact quote, and that he’d get back to me latest on Wednesday (my call was on Saturday).
So a week later (yay), not really happy anymore with the promise of the friendly man, I called them again, and I was told he’d call back. A few days still later, I decided to go to the competition’s shop, and purchased what I needed there, and though the security levels were lower, it also came at a very low price. However, another week later, the man finally called me back with a quote that was twice as high as what I’d already paid, but still a low price, considering that the security was almost twice as strong; he told me he couldn’t order it without a deposit, so I decided to check it out.
That is when I thought I’d traveled to another, “lonely”, planet. In the whole shop, there must have been about 5 employees, and about 50 customers, each looking for answers to their questions, and none of the employees seeming all to be happy to be working. They were happy to chat to each other, but as soon as they were “interupted” by customers with questions, I thought I’d recognized a couple of looks from old Westerns.
Over the years, it has come to my attention that Luxembourg has a few obvious issues 
– and the one for today is me going hungry on Monday nights unless I cook myself! Unfortunately, this particular case only applies to my experience in Luxembourg, but maybe some of you out there will be able to identify my particular issue with one of their own?
So basically, as mentioned before, I really do enjoy going to good restaurants and have a good time with my friends. There are a few very usual places for me such as Adriano’s or Kyoto, but there are also a few more that I enjoy going to if I want to have a little change: Bacano, Miggi’s in Bonnevoie, Lo Sfizio, Patagonia and so on. But none of them seems to be opened on Monday nights! Now in a very catholic country such as Luxembourg, I would be totally understanding of restaurants being closed on Sundays (which most are anyway), but why are my favorites ALL closed on Mondays? Is it a common but secret knowledge that Monday is dine-at-home night? Or is it more the fact that they all tried Mondays, but as there might really be less customers out on Mondays, they all decided at the same time to be closed on Mondays?
When I was a young boy, my parents taught me to be a good boy, to stand up for what I believe in, and to play by the rules. Those rules applied to anyone that wanted to be just a good boy as I was, and ultimately to those that “wanted to go to heaven”. These rules slowly transposed to everyday situations, and quickly enough I understood instructions in public transport, at cinemas or other public places to be important and to be followed. The example I want to focus on today is restaurants.
You are taught to sit up straight, not to play with your phone, generally: to follow standards that were in some case created hundreds of years ago. You are also asked to order from a menu as this is what the chef decided to be the best – the chef’s rules so to speak.