You Must Be From Away

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“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”  
General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff, U.S. Army as quoted by Tom Peters in Reimagine

I only flew JAL once and that was on 5 August 1972 London to Rome with That Man Strodel.

We flew First Class (probably only cost about £10 in those days @ 90%), got comprehensively ripped and spent the next three days looking for the Senso Unico.

We thought it must have been something like the Vatican or the Coliseum.

“Pretty important place” we though “what with all those signs”

(They broke it to us very gently)

I visited their corporate HQ sometime in the 1980s on a benchmarking exercise for a cargo IT project.

We thought they’d be red-hot, given that Japan made the best cars/radios/TVs/consumer electronics…..

It was like the Dark Ages.

They had a whole MINEFIELD of incompatible systems that didn’t talk to each other,  MILLIONS of people filling out forms that substituted (sort of..) for efficient data interchange and a blissful lake of awareness that there were perhaps other ways of doing things.

I guess things can’t have changed that much…

>For example, how many kilometers are there in 100 miles?

Number 100 can be expressed as a sum of Fibonacci numbers 89 + 8 + 3.

Now, the Fibonacci number following 89 is 144, the Fibonacci number following 8 is 13 and the Fibonacci number following 3 is 5.

Therefore the answer is 144 + 13 + 5 = 162 kilometers in 100 miles.

This is less than 1% off from the precise answer, which is 160.93 km.

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In a past life, I ran the Cargo Reservations department for Lufthansa at Heathrow.

It was frantic.

British Airways moved to a new terminal. Nothing worked. They closed down.

We worked 20 hour days.

British Airways went on strike. Frequently.

We worked 20 hour days. Sometimes 36 hour days.

There was no time for niceties when you answered the phone.

It was “LufthansacanIhelpyou?” or just “Lufthansa”.

But mostly “Lufthansacanyouholdthanks?”

This didn’t go down well with Dick Haynes, the Cargo Manager, who was so impressed with the service that he got from his garage that he wrote a memo INSISTING that we answer the phone just like his garage did under penalty of death.

“Good morning, this is Victory Motors, Bruce Bayliss speaking, how can I help you”

Some people (stupid bloody Poms and not realising that they didn’t work for Victory Motors and their name wasn’t Bruce Bayliss) actually did answer the phone like that.

We did for about 2 minutes, before it became apparent that we’d be working 48 hour days at that rate and went back to “Lufthansacanyouholdthanks?”

I just called up Mrs jb at work and my mate Christoph the Janitor answered the phone with the classic Victory Motors greeting.

Turns out that the boss is back after his Christmas break and has nothing better to do than make up new rules.

Can’t see Mrs jb buckling under on this one.

Just as much chance, in fact, as he had getting her to sign a paper declaring that she would comply with the various anti-discrimination (i.e. be nice to foreigners)  laws.

“Sod that” she probably thought “If I sign that, I won’t be able to discriminate against my own husband. Can’t have that….”

PS
Christoph asked if he should announce himself formally with all three Christian names.

Didn’t go down well. Not at all well, in fact.

Well” he said “We certainly shouldn’t employ the current Minister of Defence (Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg) then. By the time he’s finished the Victory Motors into, the caller will have rung up a phone bill of €5