Bonkers or What?

In the UK the boss of a recruitment firm said she was told she could not place an advert for ''reliable workers'' because it discriminated against unreliable people. Yes – you read it right.

Nicole Mamo, 48, wanted to post an advert for a £5.80-an-hour domestic cleaner on her local Jobcentre Plus website.The text of the advert ended by stating that any applicants for the post ''must be very reliable and hard-working''.

A Jobcentre Plus worker claimed that the word ''reliable'' meant they could be sued for discriminating against unreliable workers. Bonkers or what?

You cannot now take pictures in London, particularly near Government buildings without being stopped by the police checking that you’re not a terrorist. Similarly, you cannot take pictures on a beach or near a school or a public playground without risking being called a paedophile. Bonkers or what?

Spotted Dick is now deemed too rude to be included on menus.

Warwickshire police chiefs have advised officers against saying ‘Evening All’, over worries of cultural confusion. ‘Evening’ has been deemed by bosses as a ‘subjective term’, which does not necessarily mean the same across cultures and nationalities.

Children are no longer encouraged to sing ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ for fear of upsetting those in schools who are not quite white.

Even in America, it is reported that the Obama family changed the name of their festive tree from ‘Christmas Tree’ to ‘Holiday Tree’.

Jim Fitzpatrick, a transport minister, has said that drivers who display the Union Flag, the cross of St George, the Welsh dragon or the Scottish saltire on their number plates are liable to a £60 fine and a failed MoT for having an illegal plate. Only the blue flag with gold stars of the EU is permitted.

And do you know that it is technically illegal to fly any national flags (e..g. the Union Jack) from sloping poles or from windows in the UK without permission but as the EU flag is deemed to be an advertisement, it does require clearance from the local planning authority. Bonkers or what?

And talking about local authorities, have you heard that a teacher who put up "missing" posters in a bid to find her beloved cat Fluffy was astonished to be hit with a £75 for graffiti by her local council?

I could go on and on but I’d go bonkers.

PS - lovely weather we're having at the moment - see picture - 8 inches of snow yesterday!

What’s Happening at Le Brin ?

It’s been a busy week. We had Irish Dave staying with us and then had another four guests turn up unexpectedly. The house looked like Sauchiehall Street on a Saturday night but they’ve all gone now so I can get back on my X-box and blast a few aliens. The cats are also quite relieved as they no longer find their tails tied together by the marauding 3 year old who never gave them a moment’s peace!

The weather has been quite nice for the last few days so I’ve been doing ‘outside’ work and neglecting all the boring admin stuff such as renewing insurance, fixing my TV subscription etc, but I’m sure there’s a rainy day just around the corner when I’ll be ‘desk bound’.

J, on the other hand has been basking in the glory of an 86% pass mark for her recent assignment for her Degree in Kitchen and Fridge Management. The exercise involved the highly complex task of making sure your pantry drawers were properly arranged with cans the right way up so that you didn’t end up with Senurp instead of Prunes, Snaeb instead of Beans or Eplup Seotamot (Pulpe Tomatoes). Unfortunately, she missed the Denroc Feeb (Corned Beef – see picture) and lost a few marks. I’m sure she’ll recover the lost ground though when she writes her essay on ‘the hygienic considerations of a kitchen waste disposal’. And in case you’re wondering why she’s going through all this stress for a bit of parchment with a coffee stain on it (that’s the degree stationary design), she tells me that it will mean that when she gets her job at McDonalds, she’ll get three gold stars immediately instead of having to work three years for them like everybody else. A good idea I think you’ll agree?

Guy, for his part, has been wandering around in a love-struck stupor, bumping into things as he walks about the house with his eyes closed, murmuring, “Je t’aime, Je t’aime”. At least his latest girlfriend seems to have stopped him smoking which I said might have looked ‘cool’ but decidedly wasn’t. I also reminded him that love-bites on the end of your nose weren’t cool . Of course I did put my foot in it when he told me her name (Tiffany Mauve – no kidding) and I said she sounded like a Hooters Waitress. He’s been to Hooters so he knows that it was actually a compliment but he didn’t take it that way. Oh well!

And as far as Kitty is concerned, she has been an absolute delight recently - well in comparison to the Rottweiler with toothache who used to make our lives a living hell. Renditions of ‘Go Compare, Go Compare’ ,and ‘We’ll Buy Any Car.com. We’ll Buy Any car.com. Any, Any,Any,Any ’, permeate round the house creating an atmosphere of happiness and contentment. Well that’s the case until she finds out I used her best nail varnish to touch up the paint on my scooter!

Turkey

We’re all desperate to get Turkey into the European Union – aren’t we? The Americans are particularly keen as they have quite a few military bases in the east of the country and it would make things a whole lot easier if they were part of the ‘European group’. On the other hand, the French are not at all keen. Well anything the Americans want to do whilst Sarkozy is still in a huff at being frequently ‘snubbed’ by Obama is anathema to them, and there’s also the fact that the French don’t particularly want any more Muslims in Europe, thank you. With 5 million of their own, they think that’s quite enough! They’ve even gone as far as to change the French constitution so that they’ll have to have a referendum if Turkey gets close to membership.

Then there’s Austria who are recalling some old skirmishes when the Ottomans laid siege to Vienna, to block their route to full membership (Turkey is an associate member of the EU). And there’s the Cyprus issue of course.

And finally, it’s the wider EU membership who are worried about Turkey’s admittance into the world’s biggest ‘club’. With 71 million of a population, accession into the EU would give Turkey the largest number of delegates and therefore the biggest voice in the Parliament. Not quite fair if you’ve been in the ‘club’ for the last 20 years or so and suddenly this upstart comes along and starts hijacking the political and financial agenda.

However, despite all these little difficulties, formal negotiations with Turkey are continuing with the earliest date of membership being set at 2013. There are 33 areas, ranging from Transport to Freedom of Movement, Transport to Taxation being discussed, but one negotiation area stands out for me – Justice, Freedom and Security.

And they’ve some way to go in this area if the following extract from an article is anything to go by……

Turkish police have recovered the body of a 16-year-old girl they say was buried alive by relatives in an "honour" killing carried out as punishment for talking to boys.

The girl, who has been identified only by the initials MM, was found in a sitting position with her hands tied, in a two-metre hole dug under a chicken pen outside her home in Kahta, in the south-eastern province of Adiyaman.

An informant told the police she had been killed following a family "council" meeting.

A post mortem examination revealed large amounts of soil in her lungs and stomach, indicating that she had been alive and conscious while being buried. Her body showed no signs of bruising.

I know that there are all sorts of strange ‘customs’ across the world but thankfully, these places don’t want to join the EU. Turkey still has some way to go.

The picture at the start is of Istanbul at night.

The Internet – I Was There At The Birth

There’s a lot of talk about ‘the internet’ at the moment - the amazing advance it’s brought to information dissemination and learning. There’s even talk about ‘awarding’ the Internet the Nobel Peace Prize although I’m not sure who they would give the award to – Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the ‘inventor’ of the Internet, possibly?

First of all, let’s just put the Internet into historical perspective from my point of view.

Back in 1979, not long after I joined IBM, I took some senior executives of a large Glasgow company down to IBM’s Head Office on the south coast of England. They had heard about this new thing called e-mail. I duly flew them down to Havant and we witnessed a guy sending a PROFs message to Paris and waited excitedly for the reply which came through a few minutes later. Apparently this was a huge advance over the then ‘telex’ method of sending and receiving messages – anyone remember typing out their messages and taking them to the ‘telex’ room?

Well, e-mail took off as we all know and I feel privileged to have been there right at the start.

A few years later in BT, I was sent to CERN in Geneva (the place where they are trying to smash atomic particles into each other – see original blog below) and was told they wanted to move enormous amounts of data around the world. Knowing BT’s network wasn’t up to the task, I did as best I could and then left. You can imagine my astonishment and disappointment when I realized that Tim Berners-Lee was working at CERN when I did my call and only months previously had made CERN the first web site on the internet. If only BT's network had been just that little bit bigger!

http://tomsfrenchblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/end-might-be-nigh-7-days-to-go-those-of.html

Fast forward a few years and the internet is now well and truly established but I still don’t really understand it so I ask one of my technical guys to explain it to me. As it turns out, it’s all very simple (just computers around the world interlinked with telephone wires) and something which had, in theory, been around for quite a while, albeit in a different form.

For years, whilst boffins in CERN developed the concept of the internet, we’d desperately tried to sell a service called EDI (Electronic data Interchange) where companies would send each other large files of data over communication lines. Amazingly, despite the fact that it saved enormous amounts of clerical effort, companies just did not like the fact that another company’s data would be entering their computer systems and so EDI basically died a death before it was even born.

And so the internet was announced to the world after a way was developed to interconnect and ‘protect’ companies’ computer systems. Today, we take it for granted but was I really there all along the way?

Babe

I read that the use of pig lungs in transplants into humans has moved a step closer with a medical breakthrough. Scientists in Melbourne, Australia, used a ventilator and pump to keep pig lungs alive and "breathing" while human blood flowed in them. Experts estimated that the work could lead to the first animal-human transplants within five years.

I should phone them and tell them about a sales guy I had working for me in BT (he shall remain nameless) who had a heart bypass operation and they used a pig valve to replace one of his faulty ones.

When I took over the sales unit and inherited this guy (let’s call him Fred), almost immediately I recognized that Fred was NOT a salesman. Month after month, there were no sales and even worse, no sales prospects despite the fact that his ‘entertaining’ expenses were the highest in the unit. Eventually, at one of our formal reviews I informed him that I thought we should look at other opportunities within the company because he was never going to make any money in sales. I suggested that we explore a marketing role because whilst Fred was good at capturing the client’s initial interest, he was no good at closing.

Well – talk about a reaction. He started taping every discussion we had, consulted the union and started talking to HR on a regular basis. Unfortunately Fred thought he was God’s gift to the sales profession and my suggestion of a move was abhorrent to him.

Fast forward a couple of months and Fred was unfortunately diagnosed with heart problems and was whisked into hospital. With no previous experience of sick employees I ‘read the HR manual’ and thereafter duly called his wife every couple of days to see how Fred was and after his operation asked whether he’d prefer the company flowers or the company fruit basket. His wife’s reply that she’d consulted Fred and he’d stated that he would prefer a case of wine did not go down too well. He got a fruit basket!

Anyway, it was during one of my pastoral phone calls that his wife said that Fred had received a pig’s valve and at my next sales meeting I updated my guys on Fred’s improving condition but probably unwisely, said that he’d received a pig’s valve.

Well, the next thing I hear from the comedians who worked for me is that Fred has been rechristened ‘Babe’ after the talking pig in the film of that name.

Fred eventually returned to work and in addition to his ongoing issue about being relocated within BT, he was apoplectic when the guys started calling him ‘Babe’. I personally thought it was all a bit of fun ….. until HR contacted me, after a formal complaint from Fred, and demanded that I receive counseling to help me improve my employee relationship skills.

Needless to say, I told HR where to go, got rid of Fred into Marketing and the rest of the unit worked happily ever after. Fred had never been ‘one of the boys’.

Postscript – several months after Fred left for his new job, we bumped into each other and he said, which I think was very gracious of him, that his move to Marketing was, in retrospect, the best move he could have made. He was incredibly satisfied with his new job.

Aaaaah!