Category: General

We have so many ways to communicate with each other today, but we still often hit a communication brick-wall. You can write to people as often as you like, but you can’t force them to read what you write.

I use two e-mail addresses, SMS, What’s App, Snapchat (now and again) and Messenger. Which doesn’t sound like a lot I must admit. But everybody has their own channel preference and I need to monitor them all, so I don’t miss something. And that’s not always easy as I also have my preferences. The more options there are, the more complex it all becomes. The many groups in Messenger, which are often comprised of different combinations of the same people, make it hard for me to remember where a conversation has taken place. Or was that conversation in an email? The time I’ve wasted looking for specific messages! And every little event becomes a new group and sometimes I get a little dazed and confused by it.   

Before the advent of internet, I wrote letters and was in regular contact with many people, both family and friends. A few times a year, that is. Most wrote back just as regularly, and some didn’t. But who writes letters these days? Not me, though I sometimes find myself writing emails like they were letters, which is probably not such a good idea. By writing too much it feels like I’m stealing time in someone’s life by asking them to read it and I even feel guilty doing that! Which is of course totally nuts. Letters used to anyway get opened and presumably read. Whereas emails can get lost in reams of spam, or read, closed and forgotten, if they’re not answered quickly. If there’s news to impart, is it OK to write long emails? I hope so.

I love the ease with which I can instantly message people whenever I want, but what are our expectations on a reply? People are rarely able to answer right away, so I don’t expect a ding within seconds, or even hours. But I have to say it’s frustrating when a reply never shows up, and that happens. So, what’s the etiquette for messaging to a friend? What are the dos and don’ts? Must you always keep messages short if you want an answer? When is it OK not to answer? More than 20 words? More than 10 words? I’ve no idea.

To check up on messaging etiquette, I looked through a few sites and there are plenty of them. But I found nothing that specifically addressed the questions above. On the other hand, there was quite a lot on how (I presume) algorithms handle ignored messages in Messenger. And comments like this one: “If the person is in your contacts that means you know the person, so ignoring their message might just make things awkward next time you see them. Otherwise who the hell really cares?? I ignore messages all the time!” Brilliant! Now that’s what I call social media!

The point being, all this technology meant to help us communicate with each other is no help at all if we choose not to read messages, or not to reply.

I loved Led Zeppelin when it came out in 1969. But it was still the 60s, and that was very much reflected in the lyrics. Not that I cared about that at the time. I was only interested in the music, the voice, the sound and the way they played. Robert Plant, last addition to the band, didn’t contribute to the writing on this album, apart from on “Babe I’m Gonne Leave You”. But his time was gonna come. Here’s verse 2 of “Communication Breakdown”:

Hey girl I got something I think you ought to know.
Hey babe I want to tell you that I love you so.
I want to hold you in my arms, yeah!
I’m never gonna let you go,
‘Cause I like your charms.

But what the hell. It was great anyway and Plant had me convinced, even with these lyrics.  

Vi har så många sätt att kommunicera med varandra idag, men vi träffar fortfarande ofta en kommunikationsstenmur. Du kan skriva till människor så ofta du vill, men du kan inte tvinga dem att läsa vad du skriver.

Jag använder två e-postadresser, SMS, What’s App, Snapchat (då och då) och Messenger. Vilket låter inte som mycket jag måste erkänna. Men alla har sin egen kanalpreferens och jag måste övervaka dem alla, för att inte missa något. Och det är inte alltid lätt eftersom jag också har mina preferenser. Ju fler alternativ det finns desto mer komplicerat blir det hela. De många grupperna i Messenger, som ofta består av olika kombinationer av samma personer, gör det svårt för mig att komma ihåg var en konversation har ägt rum. Eller var det konversationen i ett email? Den tid jag har slösat med att leta efter specifika meddelanden! Och varje liten händelse blir en ny grupp och ibland blir jag lite dazed and confused av alltihopa.

Innan internet blev till skrev jag brev och var i regelbunden kontakt med många människor, både familj och vänner. Ett par gånger om året, det vill säga. De flesta skrev tillbaka lika regelbundet, och några gjorde det inte. Men vem skriver brev idag? Inte jag, men jag tycker ibland att jag skriver e-postmeddelanden som om de var brev, vilket förmodligen inte är en bra idé. Genom att skriva för mycket känns det som att jag stjäl tid i någons liv genom att be dem att läsa det och jag känner mig till och med skyldig! Vilket är naturligtvis helt galet. Brev brukade i alla fall öppnas och förmodligen läsas. Medan e-postmeddelanden kan förloras i mängder av spam, eller läsas, stängas och glöms, om de inte besvaras på en gång. Om det finns nyheter att delge, är det bra att skriva långa mejl? Jag hoppas det.

Jag älskar lättheten som jag direkt kan meddela människor när jag vill, men vad är våra förväntningar på ett svar? Människor kan sällan svara direkt, så jag förväntar mig inte ett svar inom några sekunder eller ens timmar. Men jag måste säga att det är frustrerande när ett svar aldrig dyker upp, och det händer ibland. Så, vad är etiketten när du meddelar en vän? Vad gör du och vad gör du inte? Måste du alltid hålla meddelanden kort om du vill ha ett svar? När är det OK att inte svara? Mer än 20 ord? Mer än 10 ord? Jag har ingen aning.

För att kolla messaging etikett tittade jag igenom några webbplatser och det finns gott om dem. Men jag hittade inget som specifikt behandlade frågorna ovan. Å andra sidan var det ganska mycket på hur (jag antar) algoritmer hanterar ignorerade meddelanden i Messenger. Och kommentarer som den här: “Om personen är i dina kontakter betyder det att du känner personen, så att ignorera deras meddelande kan bara göra saker besvärliga nästa gång du ser dem. Annars vem i helvete bryr mig verkligen?? Jag ignorerar meddelanden hela tiden!” Briljant! Det är vad jag kallar sociala medier!

Poängen är att all denna teknik som är avsedd för att hjälpa oss att kommunicera med varandra är ingen hjälp alls om vi väljer att inte läsa meddelanden eller att inte svara.

Jag älskade Led Zeppelin när den kom ut 1969. Men det var fortfarande 60-talet, och det reflekterades mycket i texterna. Inte för att jag brydde mig om det då. Jag var bara intresserad av musiken, rösten, ljudet och hur de spelade. Robert Plant, sista som kom med i bandet, bidrog inte till att skriva på detta album, förutom “Babe I’m Gonne Leave You”. Men hans tid skulle komma. Här är vers 2 av “Communication Breakdown”:

Hey girl I got something I think you ought to know.
Hey babe I want to tell you that I love you so.
I want to hold you in my arms, yeah!
I’m never gonna let you go,
‘Cause I like your charms.

Men det var bra ändå och Plant övertygade. Även med dessa texter.

I went to a catholic, all-boys school in North London. We often had fun, but it meant no regular contact with females for me, from the age of 11 until I left at 17. What a disaster! Right through puberty. As if that wasn’t weird enough, I’ve only seen two or three of my old school friends since I left. But I didn’t make any effort to meet up with anybody and neither did they. On the other hand, we had no telephone while I lived at home. My parents installed one only after I had moved out, so no easy way to keep in touch. The kids at school were also spread all over North London as it was the only school of its kind. We mostly didn’t live close to each other and rarely met outside school.

The head teacher was a large priest and several of the regular teachers were also priests. A couple of them were even pretty good. One of them was rumoured to be a pedofile, but he was old and thankfully I had no personal experience of him. I have fond memories of being beaten by the head teacher with a thick leather strap on the backside on a few occasions for minor offences. I may not have been St. Philip but was not a bad kid either. I was also threatened with the police by him one time when I was caught with a golf ball that I had found in the street. I was only 11 or 12 at the time and I was scared to death. Apparently, balls were regularly stolen from the local driving-range. But not by me!

Some of the other teachers were quite extreme in the violence department too. Names like Levy, O’Shea, Wilkins and Linnane spring to mind and they all had their “specialities”. Linnane liked lifting us by the short hair on the side of our heads, Levy used the edge of a ruler to hit boys’ fingers and Wilkins favoured a gym shoe on the backside. All of it painful. O’Shea was big, angry and frightening. It makes me chuckle now to think about it and it was comical in a way. 15 years after I left school I told my father about those punishments and he couldn’t believe it. If I’d told him at the time, he said he would have gone to the school and punched their lights out! He might have been able to sort the short Wilkins’ out, but O’Shea or Linnane? Probably not.

Why did I go to that school? Well, it was a “grammar” school, with focus only on academic subjects. In which I frankly had little interest. My focus was on guitars from the age of 10 and I cared little for physics, chemistry and mathematics. The alternative “comprehensive” school was closer to home, more vocational, and mixed (boys and girls!). I’ve often thought that would have been better for me personally, but the grammar school was what was expected of me. And what’s more important than making your parents happy? Doh! On the other hand, I may have been even more bored going to the comprehensive. 

In my final year at school I would arrive at 9:00 am, register in class, then often leave to do something else. Once I even climbed out of the toilet window by the chemistry lab to escape. I ran up the hill to the street with my school bag hiding my face from the teacher. But the consequence of not doing any work during the school year was that I was not permitted to sit the exams in most subjects. And if you don’t sit the exam, or fail in every subject, you can end up leaving school with nothing. As if you’d had no schooling at all. After repeating my final year, I had passes in English Literature, English Language and Art. That was it. All other subjects, it was as if I’d done nothing for seven years. But I really didn’t care, and I suppose I was a bad boy that final year. Strangely enough, though I left with almost no qualifications, a lot of what I was forced to learn stayed with me. Both math and chemistry have been useful. And French!

“My Old School” is from the Steely Dan album Countdown to Ecstacy. Killer guitar work from Jeff “Skunk” Baxter and this is one I often go back to.

My mate Paul and I headed for the west of England in his blue, short-base, 1200 cc, VW beach buggy. Very lightweight and very speedy! We looked forward to a two week summer holiday in St. Ives. A tiny, charming fishing village on Cornwall’s north coast.  I was still 9 years away from getting a driver’s license, so as always, Paul was in the driver’s seat. We travelled through the night, westward from London and crossed the country on empty, unlit roads. There was no motorway.

The only drama we encountered on the journey was passing fields of corn in a soft-top car with no windows. We captured thousands of tiny flies which landed in drifts in the back of the buggy. These we scooped out in handfuls. And on the radio, one item of interest showed up in the middle of the night: Jan Akkerman’s high-velocity guitar playing on “Hocus Pocus”, by the Dutch band Focus. We’d never before heard anything like that.

At that time St. Ives was known for being a hippy-magnet and we naively wanted to be a part of it. I imagined conversations on peace and love and on music and I fantasized about meeting pretty hippy girls. But in reality there was none of that. In fact I don’t think we spoke to anybody apart from each other during those two weeks. The only people I saw that might have been hippies sat tightly together on the pier in St. Ives doing nothing, mostly looking bored. Cool! And there were never more than 20 of them.

The very first pub we visited in the center of the village was packed with people. Mostly men of course. We queued for 15 minutes to buy a couple of pints, but when we reached the bar we were immediately asked to leave. “We don’t serve longhairs in here!” On the way out we saw a hand-written sign saying the same thing, which we’d missed. We were unlucky choosing that dump as our first stop, but we found places that could live with the horror of long hair. Apart from warming soup outside our tent and getting sunburnt, the most memorable event of those two weeks was a concert with bluesy power trio The Groundhogs.

We’d been listening to The Groundhogs for a while, since their third album Thank Christ For The Bomb came out. That album is now mistakenly called “Thanks Christ…” on Spotify. Very naughty! They had a lot of success, especially with their fourth album, Split, which includes the muscular “Cherry Red”. Tony (TS) McPhee was the main man; guitarist, singer and songwriter. The TS is short for Tough Shit (really), and that’s no exaggeration if you check out “Cherry Red”.

Tony was backed by Pete Cruickshank on bass and Ken Pustelnik on drums at that time, but there were very many personnel changes over the years. As late as 2011 Cruickshank and Pustelnik still played in The Groundhogs Rhythm Section and McPhee was active live until 2014, despite having had a stroke 5 years previously. Still well worth a listen!

This is not about Langley Park. Or Memphis. But I needed a soundtrack. Instead it’s about trips to Atyrau, Kazakhstan and Perth, Australia. And an unlikely connection between the two.

In 2006 a customer summoned me to Kazakhstan to discuss a problem that had arisen with a product. It wasn’t easy to get there and took a couple of days as I first had to visit Oslo to get a visa. After half a day in Oslo, I flew to Amsterdam, then to Almaty in Kazakhstan. Not too far from the Chinese border. Then I flew back across the country via a couple of other small towns before landing in Atyrau. An unbelievable 18 hour trip – from Amsterdam.

I was also warned to stay awake at each airport stop, as sleeping increased the risk of stolen baggage. I arrived exhausted in Atyrau. An American, George, who worked for a very large service company, picked me up at the airport. He took me to the first of several meetings that day. They started and ended with Kevin, the scary Scots Quality Control manager. He may have been a great guy in a social context, but earlier George had told me that Kevin scared everybody, so I was wary. George was loosening me up for that first meeting.

The afternoon and evening passed in a blur of meetings. I finally got to bed around midnight after one beer and a few thin strips of pizza in a pub with George. I was starving and I don’t recall getting anything at all to eat during the day. I asked the hotel receptionist to wake me at 5 am and order a taxi to take me to the airport. But instead he woke me at 2 am and I have no clue why he did that.  Not enough English to distinguish between 5 and 2? Before I realised what time it was, I had put my head under a cold shower to wake me up. The shock of that, combined with lack of sleep and stress gave me an atrial fibrillation (for about the 20th time). Of course I felt like shit. I managed to get a couple more hours sleep and at 5 am went down to the waiting taxi. I asked the driver to take me to the nearest hospital. “Oh, you mean the clinic?” was the driver’s reply. Clinic? I got him to take me to the airport instead.

The Atyrau airport building was an unpainted wooden shack. A few uniformed guards with large-brimmed hats and about 30 other men waited for the plane to Amsterdam. There was nowhere to sit, so I stood and composed a letter of resignation to my boss (which was never delivered). On arrival in Amsterdam, my crawling pace between the terminals felt endless. But I didn’t dare ask for help as I suspected they wouldn’t let me travel if they knew I was unwell. I wanted to get home. A few hours later a taxi picked me up at Arlanda airport in Stockholm and the driver dropped me at the hospital in Gävle. Close enough. I spent a total of 15 mind-boggling hours in Atyrau.

My tour of Australia in 2010 was a little longer: 12 days split between Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. One of the companies I visited in Perth was the same as George’s that I’d visited with in Kazakhstan. Nothing strange about that. They have more than 100 000 employees, spread thinly around the globe. The guy my colleague and I were to see was not keen on seeing us at all as he’d heard about our little problem in Kazakhstan. But what he didn’t know was how we solved it. So I spent an hour dropping names (scary Kevin, his brother Ben, Scott, George and a couple of others). I explained exactly how we turned it around. I had every detail on my laptop and he knew, or had heard of all the people I mentioned. Finally, instead of throwing us out, which was his first thought, he gave us a healthy order for goods he needed. It was quite satisfying, a revenge of sorts and the cherry on top of my one and only Australia visit. And the order paid for both trips.

It’s scary as hell being behind someone who’s driving at 40 km/h onto a motorway (the E16) where everyone else is doing 100 km/h or more. I really don’t get it. They’re probably sweating as they creep out into the faster traffic and at the same time they’re forcing everybody following to drive that slowly too. And if the slow driver manages to slide out into traffic safely there’s no guarantee that the cars behind can do that. At times like this I feel most at risk when driving. Luckily most people know how to drive, but it’s surprising how often I get stuck behind someone who can’t.

Yesterday I was behind a car that slowed down to 60 km/h before driving OFF the same motorway, forcing me to slow down to that speed, as I was taking the same exit and there wasn’t time to pass. That also put my blood-pressure into an upward curve as I had a heavy truck behind me, coming up fast. Truckers don’t want to brake unless they need to stop as it wastes time and fuel getting back up to cruising speed, especially if they’re on a long trip.

When I left the motorway, the truck was only three meters behind me. Of course, if I’d slowed any more, he would have braked, but I still felt that twitch of nervousness. So that got me swearing, but as I was on my own, I didn’t disturb anybody. It’s as if some people are in a world of their own when they’re driving and completely unaware of what’s going on around them. People who don’t feel comfortable using a motorway, or don’t know how to drive on one, should use a side road. Or go to a driving school and learn how to drive a car.