Oops - sorry forgot to post this on May 1st!
Honestly BT (formerly British Telecom)are like a bunch
of school kids who we have to organise to get anything done. We have been
paying the rent on our beautiful new office since April 1st. The earliest
date for BT to come and install our line was April 9th. So the ‘engineer’
turned up but said there was a problem and would need to get the ‘surveyor’ in
who would come the following day or the day after. We then received a
text message to say there was a problem with our order. So I rang up BT
on their free 0800 number that cost me 14p per minute (this is because I called
from a mobile - because I couldn’t use the landline they had just failed to
install). I had to speak to a machine which eventually understood me
(‘just say Yes or No’) and after several minutes of inputting phone numbers and
trying not to shout at it, I got through to a lady with a thick accent who was
clearly based on a different planet, perhaps a different solar system - the
line quality is the worst I have experienced in some time. My Skype calls
and Hangouts are usually better quality. I explained the situation and
she said someone from BT should have been with us that morning. I said we
had not seen anyone. She put me on hold (Mozart’s Eine Kliene Nachtmusic terrible
quality - poor Mozart must be turning in his grave – all for 14p per minute)
and then she came back, apologised profusely for keeping me waiting and said he
had called this morning (the surveyor not Mozart) but had gone to the basement
and had not needed to call into our office (we don’t have a basement as far as
I know) and that the line was now active and could we confirm it now worked.
I asked how I was supposed to do that and she said try making a call.
I asked where she suggested I plug in the phone given we had no socket.
Please hold again, 5 minutes of Mozart @ 14p. She said that the ‘engineer’
should have installed a line and socket and would she like me to arrange for
him to come back and do it? Yes, Hold. Mozart…. Monday between 8am
and 1pm. I asked if he could switch on the Broadband that we had booked
later in the week at the same time. Hold 5 mins Mozart 14p, Profuse
Apology. Good job I called really as clearly they haven’t got a clue
about how to install a line and switch on the internet. I wonder what
they are good at? In case you wonder why we went with BT it is because when we
spoke to the other providers they said they would have to use BT to get the
line installed. It’s called competition or something like that. Worst
part is that I won’t ever be able to listen to Eine Kliene Nachtmusik again. BT
have destroyed Mozart for me. Anyway, better news is that when I rang back the
following day to check the ‘engineer’ was still coming out on Monday as
promised, despite the fact that their online system showed there was a delay
and no engineer booked, I couldn't get through but they rang me back within 10
minutes and it sounded like I was actually talking to somebody on the same
planet as me with a reasonably good quality connection. And no Mozart!
If I were a Muslim I would surely have been tempted to go to the prayer
room and thank the prophet Mohammed for this piece of good fortune. (the
absence of abominated Mozart I mean). Anyway the lady at BT confirmed the
‘engineer’ was still due and apologised for the mis-information on their online
system. To cut a long story short, he did eventually turn up - right at
the end of his ‘between 8am and 1pm’ slot (how can you run a business and not
know where your staff are going to be for half the day?) fitted the line and
two days later the broadband service was switched on. So we got our
telephony services installed and activated in just under 3 weeks which I am
told is not too bad. It just feels like far more effort was required on
our side than theirs. Who’s paying for this? Oh Yes we are. And now we can move in! And now we have moved in, and to cap it all BT are charging us from March 26th for these services!
The French Pearl Harbour: I was shocked to see a documentary on this event which I didn’t know had taken place during the Second World War. This was the first time that the British and the French had been involved in fighting each other since Waterloo in 1815 and we have been at peace since this event. It was a tragic interruption in the 200 year period of peace and partnership between our two countries. By 1940 the war was going very badly for the allies, with the Nazis taking control of France and moving into the Northern ports just 20 miles from the English coast. Britain ruled the waves at that time with the largest fleet in the world. But the French had the second largest fleet and had just surrendered to the Nazis. The combined German and French navies would easily outnumber the British. So you see the problem that Churchill had to deal with. Having failed to get the French not to surrender, Churchill now failed to persuade Admiral Darlan, the commander of the French fleet and soon to be the 122nd Prime Minsiter of France - under Vichy, to sink his fleet so it would not fall into Nazi hands. He would not agree to sink it but gave Churchill his word that he would instruct his men to scupper their ships in the event that the Nazis tried to take them. At the same time, his requests for help from America were also all refused.
So
in July 1940, Churchill was faced with one of the most difficult decisions in his
life. Could he trust Darlan? Would
his marines do as obeyed? Would they have the opportunity to scupper their
ships in time? In a speech to parliament, Churchill repeated that the
French armistice with Germany was a betrayal of the Allied agreement that
forbade each country from surrendering to the Germans without notifying its allies.
This French betrayal, added to by the German Nazi government's history of not
respecting previous agreements led Churchill to declare to the House “What is
the value of that? Ask half a dozen countries, what is such a solemn assurance?
Furthermore, the armistice could be voided at any time on the pretext of 'non
observance' " The first part of the French Navy that the British
commandeered following the surrender of France and the creation of the Vichy
regime, was a submarine in a British port. The British entered by force
and surprised the French who refused to hand over the vessel. Some fighting
followed and one Frenchman and three British were killed before the submarine
was taken. Not a good start; and it then got worse. The British
sent a fleet of destroyers down to Mers-el-Kebir in French Algeria where the
most potent ships in the French Navy were moored. British Admiral James Somerville, based in Gibraltar,
was ordered to deliver an ultimatum to the French, stating: “It is impossible
for us, your comrades up to now, to allow your fine ships to fall into the
power of the German enemy. We are determined to fight on until the end, and if
we win, as we think we shall, we shall never forget that France was our Ally,
that our interests are the same as hers, and that our common enemy is Germany.
Should we conquer we solemnly declare that we shall restore the greatness and
territory of France. For this purpose we must make sure that the best ships of
the French Navy are not used against us by the common foe. In these
circumstances, His Majesty's Government have instructed me to demand that the
French Fleet now at Mers-el-Kebir and Oran shall
act in accordance with one of the following alternatives; (a) Sail with us and
continue the fight until victory against the Germans. (b) Sail with reduced
crews under our control to a British port. The reduced crews would be
repatriated at the earliest moment. If either of these courses is adopted by
you we will restore your ships to France at the conclusion of the war or pay
full compensation if they are damaged meanwhile. (c) Alternatively if you feel
bound to stipulate that your ships should not be used against the Germans
unless they break the Armistice, then sail them with us
with reduced crews to some French port in the West Indies — Martinique for
instance – where they can be demilitarised to our satisfaction, or perhaps be
entrusted to the United States and remain safe until the end of the war, the
crews being repatriated. If you refuse these fair offers, I must with profound
regret, require you to sink your ships within 6 hours. Finally, failing the
above, I have the orders from His Majesty's Government to use whatever force
may be necessary to prevent your ships from falling into German hands.” Somerville did not present the ultimatum
personally. Instead, this duty fell to the French-speaking Captain Cedric Holland,
commanding officer of the carrier HMS Ark Royal. The French Admiral Gensoul,
affronted that negotiations were not being conducted by a senior officer, sent
his lieutenant, Bernard Dufay, which led to much delay and confusion. As negotiations dragged on, it became clear
that neither side was likely to give way. Darlan never
received the full text of the British ultimatum from Admiral Gensoul, most
significantly with regard to the option of removing the fleet to American
waters, an option that formed part of the orders Darlan gave to Gensoul, to be
followed should a foreign power attempt to seize the ships under his
command. Negotiations broke down and
Churchill reluctantly ordered his forces to attack. Another example in history of failed communication
with catastrophic consequences. At
Mers-el-Kébir, 1,297 French sailors were killed and about 350 were wounded. Two
British aircrew were also killed. Relations between Britain and France were
severely strained for some time and the Germans enjoyed a propaganda coup. Churchill's deadly decision reveals the
darkest side of Britain's finest hour. Some call his decision a turning point
in the war, others call it a terrible betrayal and a war crime. 1,300 French
sailors died as a result in what the French still call ‘our Pearl Harbour'. In
the words of French survivors, some of whom still regard Churchill as a war
criminal, and one of the British sailors who opened fire on his former allies,
this is the forgotten story of Churchill's deadliest decision - to sink the
French Fleet. In November 1942, just 6
weeks before Darlan was assassinated, the Nazis gathered outside Toulon where
most of the remainder of the French navy was based. To prevent the fleet falling into Nazi hands,
the ships were all scuttled, exactly as Darlan had promised Churchill some two
years earlier.
 |
| Winston Churchill |
Parochialism is the state of mind, whereby one
focuses on small sections of an issue rather than considering its wider
context. More generally, it consists of being narrow in scope. In that respect,
it is a synonym of "provincial". It may, particularly when used pejoratively, be contrasted to universalism.
The term originates from the idea of a parish (Latin: parochia), one of the smaller
divisions within many Christian churches such as the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches. It occurs to me that
many, if not most, of the world’s disputes are the result of our parochial
upbringings and mis-communications. I recently saw a French comedy film called
“Qu'est-ce qu'on a fait au Bon Dieu?” roughly translated as “What did we do to
God to deserve this?” in which a conservative traditional French couple (very
‘gaullist’) see their four daughters getting married. The first three are already married to an
Arab, a Jew and a Chinese man and the film is about their fourth daughter’s
wedding. She announces during another
difficult family gathering that she is going to marry a Catholic man called
Charles. Her parents are delighted that
at last, a ‘proper Frenchman’ is going to join the family. They advise their local priest that they are
going to have a traditional catholic wedding and start planning lavish
arrangements. The only thing their daughter
had neglected to tell them was that Charles is a black man originating from
Abijan, the largest city in Ivory Coast, a former French colony and the third
largest French-speaking city in the world (after Paris and Kinshasa). The film plays on the stereotypes that we are
all brought up to believe in, and contrasts them humorously with the fact that
we are all actually very similar in many ways. For example, Charles’ father and
the girl’s father both immediately hate each other and make ridiculous demands,
hoping that the wedding will be cancelled.
But of course when they are thrown together and have a few too many
drinks, they discover that they both have the same fears and concerns about the
same issues. One of my favourite scenes
is one of the simplest. The girl’s
mother, in an attempt to bring the family together, invites them all to their beautiful
country house and decides to prepare a meal based on each tradition. She buys a halal chicken, a kosher chicken
and then goes to the local Chinese restaurant to order a lacquered chicken. She steps in and asks to speak to the
cook. The proprietor looks at her in
horror and asks ‘Health and Safety Inspection?’. There are several stereotypes built into
these few words: a white middle-class woman in this establishment can’t be a
regular customer, if she wants to see the cook it must be an inspection, the
horror with which he speaks implies the kitchens must be filthy..... The whole film is like this and it not
unsuccessfully challenges the stereotypes our society drill into us as we grow
up. The Halal butcher says, as the woman
leaves with her chicken ‘I can’t believe even white middle-class women are
turning to Islam. This is too much –
they are going to ruin it for us; maybe it’s time to leave’ ridiculing the
normal reverse position. The great thing
about this film is everyone gets to laugh together and it brings us all a bit
closer. Whether this will actually make
a blind bit of difference as the millions who watch this film step out of the
cinema is quite another matter.
Customer Service at Oxford Station: Having written some
negative things about First Great Western (trains) in an earlier blog, I
thought it only fair to describe the following event that took place a while
ago: Last year my youngest son spent a year studying in Paris. On
one of his visits home he took the metro to Gare du Nord, then Eurostar to St
Pancras, tube to Paddington and train to Oxford. Unsurprisingly he was a
little tired by the time he got to Oxford and managed to successfully exit the
train, greet his mother who was waiting for him at the station and when she
asked him ‘Where is your Suitcase’ reply ‘Oh I must have left it on the train’.
What do you do in this situation? Well of course you ring me.
My reply (the cleaned-up version) was ‘What on earth do you expect me to
do - speak to the station staff!’. I then googled the problem (as you do)
and learned that the procedure was as follows: when the train gets to the end
of the line, left luggage is collected and sent to lost property in Bristol.
This takes about a week. It can then be collected in person at
Bristol office on payment of a fine. Well there were quite a few problems
wrapped up in this short statement including the fact that he would be back in
Paris by then. And I was really not (really not) relishing the thought of
a potentially wasted trip to Bristol at some point in the future having already
had to purchase replacements of all the urgent stuff! You are probably
expecting this story to be another horror story criticising the railways, the
process, the staff, etc. I am delighted to inform you that it is in fact
exactly the opposite. Imagine this: the station staff told my son to go
home and they would see what they could do. They took his mobile number
and rang him less than an hour later to tell us to come back to the station.
They had radioed ahead and got the train staff to find his suitcase and
take it off the train further up the line at Banbury. The station staff
at Banbury then took the suitcase and carried it back over onto the opposite
platform and put it on the next train back to Oxford. The train staff
then took it off the train and gave it to the Oxford station staff who had
organised all of this. So an hour or so later we had the suitcase and no
trips to Bristol! No delays and no fines to pay! I gave the station
manager a bottle of champagne to thank him which he was at first reluctant to
take. I chose not to thank them through the official channels as they
probably broke every rule in the book. This is about people respecting
other people, helping strangers and going the extra mile. The station
staff are to be congratulated on acting like humans with emotions rather than
machines following a process which leads to Bristol. Thanks guys! Keep
up the great work which I hope makes your days a bit more interesting too!
Based on Putin’s actions in Crimea, it
looks like he subscribes to Josef Stalin’s quote from 1923:
“It doesn’t matter how the votes are
cast, but how they’re counted.”
By the way ‘putin’ is a pejorative word in French meaning ‘whore’
No comments:
Post a Comment