The Various Uses for a Grand Piano

You always thought that pianos were for playing on. There is an alternative and conventional view that they are very nice pieces of furniture that should be protected, especially from children. A musical version of a Rolex watch. Both are examples of a failure, as we executives say, “to think laterally” or "to think out of the box". That’s another expression that I have always wanted to use. Just don't ask me what it means.

The Bechstein piano, made by German engineers, was designed to withstand the poundings of energetic but non-German pianists such as Liszt and Chopin. They were designed to be indestructible, although I was informed by my U.S. neighbour downstairs, that in the contest between a Steinway and the U.S. East Coast Floods, the floods win. The Germans had not thought of that one. Room for improvement here.

There are other alternative uses for a Bechstein, other than as a piece of furniture or as a musical instrument.

For those of you interested in the history of our particular piano (and for those of you who are not), it was originally sold by Harrods in1937 and restored by Kevin Rowley and his colleague Richard, in 1998 for yours truly, before being driven back through Germany in 2006, probably directly past the factory where it was built, and onwards to Chez Grumpy in Thalwil.

You may wonder how a Bechstein is taken up to a second floor apartment. Easy. You find four big chaps, take the legs off the piano and they carry it up the stairs. And I thought that they would get a crane and sling it through the window.

Back to the story and a bit of lateral thinking or thinking outside the box.

The top of the Bechstein makes for a very good desk surface, when you want to work standing up. That difficult letter that you wish to compose or the report on which you need to concentrate are both best carried out on the wings of a grand piano - I think that there is a pun in German here, but I am not too sure.

The main use to which I put my Bechstein, other than driving the neighbours crazy for one hour a day with Chopin’s third ballade, is for doing jigsaws. This is not normally considered as a musical pastime, but is nonetheless a very worthy use of such a fine piece of engineering. The height is perfect, the pieces can be spread out, a 70 by 30 mm jigsaw sits neatly on the top and allows more than one person to work on it at a time, providing they can agree on who does which part. (I can never be bothered with edges to start with, despite the conventional wisdom on this topic.)

 

I don’t know if this works as well with other grand pianos. But I am going to see if I can sell the idea of a new advertising slogan to the makers of Bechsteins.  “Do a jigsaw - get a Bechstein”.  

As a final grammatical note, I am reminded that the spelling is Bechstein and not Beckstein, with an “h”, not a “k”. I don't remember who pointed out to me the error of my linguistic ways, but I am sure that he or she is on this mailing list - hands up those of you who knew the right spelling. Hands up those of you who don't care.

Does the Post Office really hate stamp collectors?

I have just spent all day yesterday trying to get eight British stamps off three envelopes. Five British stamps of no particular consequence, but special commemorative issues, none the less. Three Olympic stamps and two Christmas stamps.

In the same postal delivery, there were two other letters from England, with the usual everyday definitive stamps. It always amazes me that the British Post Office manages to produce such drab stamps. The outline of the Queen is recognisable after a fashion, but for sheer lack of imagination these stamps are hard to beat. I guess it saves on design fees.

As if that were not enough, the Post Office has used the money that it has saved on design costs, and invested in purple crayons, like the ones that my grandson Bradley, uses to draw over his mum’s kitchen table. These purple crayons are then used to scrawl over the stamps to indicate that they have been used. “X marks the spot” is the training mantra here. Sometimes franking machines are used, but these are not favoured, as they are too neat. Much better to make the stamp totally unusable by anyone, including stamp collectors.

So it’s back to my failed attempt to soak these stamps off their envelopes. Normally stamps from any other country come off in about 30 minutes. These particular eight items of philatelic delight refused to budge one-tenth of a millimetre. My attempts included the use of cold water, then warm water and then hot water, all to no avail after twelve hours.

The Post Office has obviously used the remains of its savings on design costs (after the costs of purple crayons) to purchase special super glue, normally used to hold aircraft wings on to the body of a plane. Well, judging from my experience yesterday, it wouldn’t surprise me.

My efforts having been defeated, I have come to the conclusion that the Post Office hates stamp collectors. Well wouldn’t you? If you had to trudge around the streets all day, in all weathers, with your only outlet for frustration being to throw elastic bands on the ground (of which I was a major beneficiary during my time in Norwich), wouldn’t you hate stamp collectors, together with dog owners?

So today, I was off to the local Post Office in Thalwil to buy a set of commemorative stamps and what did I find? No – they didn’t have any. Perhaps commemorative stamps aren’t meant to be used. They are just meant to be bought and placed in the stamp collection.

By the way, if you are unaware of the significance of the Post Office and elastic bands, you might be amused by the following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Mail_rubber_band.

The English speak English

I promised in the email accompanying my last blog that I would write something nice about England.

I have spent over 10 years in Switzerland now. When it comes to the tests to see how far you’ve gone native, I score pretty well. On returning to Norwich (which is a part of England, for those of you who did not know) for a few months, I did better than expected in adapting to my “new culture”.

Just before coming back to England for five months, I was asked by a friend what I particularly liked about Switzerland. My answer was pretty poor (railways, mountains, etc – I did not even mention low taxes), so I was motivated to keep some notes, while in Norwich, of what I liked, disliked or just observed about England or Switzerland.

The list was fairly long on all three counts, with some surprising entries (e.g. I like the suggested recipes on the sides of sauces in English supermarkets. You might not think is important, but as an amateur chef, I came to like this).

But I know that you have all read the title, so you know what is coming next.

I was in a car park with Hazel by a store like B & Q – it wasn’t B & Q, but that is not the point. The point was that a man, who had parked next to us, came up and I made a complementary observation about his car. Within 5 minutes of banter back and forth, he had told me how old the car was, how old he was, how many grandchildren he had and so on and he probably heard similar information about me. (As we were both male, we will both have forgotten everything within 90 seconds, except that I remember that his car was red – I think).

Yes – English is my native language and this was England. I consider myself something of an expert of the English language, having used it from a very early age. However, as I was forcibly reminded with some disdain by a German lady in Zurich, “Colin, you have been in Switzerland for 10 years and you still don’t speak German fluently”. You have to admire the motivational words.

And yes – in Tesco Express on the Unthank Road “Hier spricht man Englisch” – Hurrah. Time for some banter about the weather, the Olympics, BBQs in the rain, Princess Katie or whatever else was on everyone’s mind at the time or having a minor rant (in English) about the automatic pay machines.

I have become convinced that banter (and probably humour and swearing) is only done well in one’s mother tongue. Here in Switzerland, because I can say “Grüezi” (normal greeting) with a reasonably good accent, I receive in return some sentiments in the local dialect. This is both flattering and totally reasonable. However, my response has to be (in my best German) “Sorry, but I am English, however, I speak some high (formal) German.”

This leads either to the conversation coming to an end or just as likely to a perfectly formed sentence in English from the other person, who having been to university in England, speaks fluent English. This is not the same as banter.

Best places for banter are: car parks, supermarket check-outs, fish and chip shops, (but not in Indian takeaways), bus stops when it is pouring with rain and buying theatre tickets. You may have other suggestions.

When we first arrived in Norwich (England), we had to force ourselves not ask whether they spoke English. (There was one occasion when I spoke to a cashier in the local Tesco Express in German by accident). Imagine being in a street in England and someone asking you if you speak English. I know that England has become multicultural, but that would be too much.

So it is probably true. The English are just not good at languages. We don’t get enough practice. And why should we – everyone else speaks English. Are we spoiled or just lazy? Perhaps a bit of both.

In the meantime, to answer my friend’s question, one of the things I like about England is that everyone speaks English.

 

The Need to Queue

Regular readers of this blog (thanks, Dad) will know how much I hate queuing. Whether I hate queuing more than having Google constantly redirect me to the German website or translating everything into German is a close run thing.

Of course, your view on queuing might be completely different, and probably is. “How do you use your queuing time?” This could be a useful social study, and should rank alongside such important questions as “Do you love Marmite or do you hate it?” http://www.marmite.co.uk/

For some, queuing might be an opportunity to consider and reflect on the meaning of life, or to think over some particular crossword clue. Others might just reflect or think of nothing in particular. I like to engage others in conversation, especially on the subject of why this queue is not moving fast enough / not at all / why the other queue is moving faster / debating whether the person at the front of the queue is trying to buy the entire train etc. and asking myself whether it would be cost effective to actually just pay the bill of the person three in front of me.

It is conceivable that one should just relax, but that it not a core Grumpy skill.

Whichever it is, Starbucks have found a new way of separating us from our free time and in providing us with an opportunity to practice whatever it is that we practice, while we are queuing.

The idea here is to have one person taking the orders and the money and another making the coffee. The trick, though, in the “Let’s help people to practice queuing” training department is to have the person making the coffee not turn up / be on his coffee break /visiting the bathroom. This way queuing practice time can be maximised until the crucial coffee maker returns or just turns up.

I may have mentioned this in an earlier blog, but the Swiss think that the English like queuing. I explain that we do not like queuing. We are just good at it.

I have visited Poland and have concluded that they are good at queuing, at least in the city that I visited. My observations have led me further to think that a significant percentage enjoy it. The feeble evidence for this rash thought is from the local supermarket which has two exits, one at either end of the building. Each exit has its own checkouts. One exit always has longer queues with shoppers with more shopping. This is for the experienced queuers (is there such a word?), or for those who are practicing. The other is for people like me, who are lost causes in the queuing department.

Perhaps queues are a test, although exactly what sort of test, I have no idea. And who would set the test anyway? More to the point, who would mark the results? The EU should seriously consider having a “Queuing Directive”, to enforce this character enhancing habit.

I will continue with this rather unlikely theme. If we are bad in this world, are we destined to come back as someone whose only activity is to wait in an everlasting queue, which never moves?

 I remember a Russian friend of ours, who volunteered, some years ago, to queue for some tickets for an open-air cinema in Zurich. She arrived there at 5.00 am and collected the tickets at 8.00 am. “Wow”, we said. “That was some queuing”. “That’s not queuing”, she replied. “When you stand for twelve hours, you reach the front and the shop then tells you they are closing and you should come back tomorrow, that’s queuing.”

Well, I guess that puts Grumpy in his correct place.

(By the way, there is a “I hate Marmite” facebook page – I shall be lobbying for an “I hate queuing” page on Facebook – perhaps someone can help me to set one up.)

Pencils, Pills and Toe-Nails

Exactly how far can a pencil travel? This is not a physics question. Neither is it a new Olympic discipline (although it could be). It is the practical question of what happens when you drop the pencil on the floor and why.

You know the feeling. You reach for a pencil to start the Sudoku puzzle from today’s newspaper. For reasons which cannot be explained by modern science, the pencil moves of its own accord, rolls across the desk and falls towards the floor.

All is not lost. From the great experience that you have gained from playing table tennis, you are confident of your ability to catch it, as it plunges earthwards – but no – the pencil slips past you and lands with a click on the floor, probably shattering the leads internally thoughout its length.

Before you can reach down to pick it up, it continues its journey to escape your clutches and proceeds to roll gently underneath the sofa. Yes – I have a sofa, next to my desk, so I can have a sleep, when studying German vocabulary becomes too hard for me.

Now it’s a question of getting down on your knees in your best jeans. You reach right to the back of the sofa and at the same time, collect up a handful of dust which has assembled since you lost the last pencil.

There you have it with pencils. They’re slow, don’t go far, but are cunning.

But what about pills? You drop one of those and you are really in trouble and I should know. These little swine, they not only slip through your fingers, then gripped by gravity, they always fall to the ground pointing sideways. This works on the same cosmic and logic defying principle that causes a cat to land on its feet and bread to land face downwards, leaving a nasty mark on the carpet.

Back to the pills. Landing on their side, they proceed to roll purposefully at about the same speed as you can chase and then disappear……You took your eye off it, didn’t you. The chances of this ever being found by anything other than the vacuum cleaner are receding by the second.

Writing that off to experience, you take more care with the next pill, still looking around the room, in deadly combat with the little pill that has decided to humiliate you. Yes – It’s personal.

To summarise: Pills – small distance, but fast and ruthless, with an invisibility cloak, straight out of Harry Potter.

How do toe-nails figure in this league table? Clipping toe-nails is a personal business, not to be lightly discussed in public. However, there are important questions to be asked.

You do your best to make sure that the clippings remain in a space where they can be tidied and collected up – I hope that this not too personal or embarrassing.

Then suddenly, the toe nail shoots across the bath room at the speed of light, diagonally from the basin to the corner by the shower. The cursed thing disappears from view. Do this a few times and you would expect to have a little pile of shavings, lodged in the corner – but no. They have gone forever.

At least you are not trying to do something useful with them, like complete a Sudoku puzzle or swallow them to increase the iron in your blood. (I think that they must have a great deal of protein and calcium in them, but I will leave that thought where it is).

So there you have it for Toe nails – theory of relativity defying speeds and general pain in the whatsits.

Pencils, Pills and Toenails – they are all out to get you. So who’s paranoid?

 

Jubilee Celebrations

“They said it couldn’t be done”. They said that he would give up. They said that no one could  keep up this level of grumpiness. They said that there just is not enough grumpiness to go around.

I don’t know who “They” are, but I have my suspicions. “They” were wrong. Here is the proof. This is the 100th entry in Grumpy’s blog.

"They"

One person said that 100 blogs is not enough– my message to him is “Pay the blackmail money or I go public”. Oh yes – he knows who he is.

 

How did Grumpy do it, some of you cry? Why did he bother, cry the rest of you. But all will agree that it is time for some Jubilee celebrations. Grumpy’s supporters will expect no less.

Did you know that Grumpy’s blog took its first tentative step into the daylight on 8 December 2009 to mark his decision to retire? From then on, he has moaned and groaned his way through various and sundry ridiculous subjects. Common targets have been technology, the news and newspapers, Thalwil as the art centre of the world and silly immature behaviour of yours truly and others, such as men’s inability to find the milk in the fridge.

The workplace however has been taboo as, firstly it is better covered by Scott Adams (Dilbert) and Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times, and secondly and most importantly, I prefer not to insult people from whom I might need a job one day.

What form should these celebrations take? Can I match the Jubilee celebrations? Should there be a Grumpy salute on the Thames? Will the Royal Air Force arrange a flypast? A concert should be held with all Grumpy’s favourite singers. These should then be duplicated in Thalwil. A double Jubilee. Fantastic. I know that you all can’t wait.

So what is planned for the next hundred blogs? Well, first of all, there will be the 101^st blog, followed by the 102^nd blog and so on…….you get the picture.

What will have happened, by the time that I reach 200 blogs? Firstly, I expect to be able to write another blog about the Euro crisis (click for link). But more importantly, people will be asking whether toilet rolls are hung in a standardised way. Will the English “pounds and ounces” and “miles and yards” have taken over from the obviously inferior and ridiculous metric system?

By the 200^th blog, certain things will not have changed.

Google, Apple, Microsoft and printers bought from Tesco in Norwich will continue to assume that I wish to receive everything in German?

I will still not have received compensation from News of the World for their failure to hack into my mobile phone?

Googlemap will not have updated Trinity Street, Norwich, showing me in my luminescent blue coat?

But what more could there be to mark this 100^th Blog? Modesty forbids me to suggest a “Knighthood for Grumpy”, so I won’t suggest it, but it is open to supporters to propose this.

However, it is also a time for reflection. Don’t worry. I’m not going to give a Christmas style sermon. However, do you, reader, think that it is time for a change. What comments do you have? How can this blog be improved? How indeed?

And if you hadn’t realised that there was a catch in this, then you haven’t realised the huge ego of Grumpy. For guidance on giving suggestions and comments, please read one of one Grumpy’s first blogs (19 December 2009) on “Commenting guidelines” (click for link)  Failure to do so will be met with the most severe consequences, whatever that might mean.

So here’s to the next 100 blogs.

Learning from the Airlines

Anyone who has been with me on an airline will know that I do not travel well by air. I do not mind the experience of flying. In fact, I rather enjoy it, even when there is some turbulence. It is similar to a Disney World ride only longer. But I do not like queuing, queuing again, and queuing yet again, taking off my shoes, removing my belt (and having to hold my trousers up), taking out my laptop, and standing on the bus to the plane and then waiting for the couple who decided to check in five minutes before the flight time etc etc.

Then there is the tinny recording of a woman that has been in use for five years at London City Airport, telling us that any unidentified baggage found may be taken away and destroyed. (How many of us have remembered our baggage or children because of a “safety” announcement? “Oh it was a good thing that we heard that announcement or we might have left the baby in Starbucks.”) The announcement repeats this and other “useful and informative” messages every two minutes to make sure that you do not get too settled in your book, newspaper or Sudoku puzzle.

It is possible to create some light diversions out of all this. There are not many opportunities, but there are some, especially for the infantile and immature of us, of which I definitely count myself as one.

There is the “be last on to the plane” competition. Who can sit on the seat in the boarding area the longest? Upon the announcement to board the plane, most people stand up and join the queue almost immediately. Winning this game involves having nerves of steel, avoiding eye contact with other seated passengers, and pretending not to notice the other person playing the same game.

This game can never be won, as even if you think that you are the last person through the gate, there is always the couple who decided to check in five minutes before the flight time and who turn up after you.

There is a variation on this game, which is to sit in the wrong boarding area for a flight departing before yours and to sit there, pretending to play this game. The other participants will admire your nerves of steel, before conceding defeat and going through the gate.

Juvenile games aside, in terms of “Let’s really annoy and stress our customers” there are few organisations to beat airports. I am convinced that they employ people who think up new ways of making the experience as uncomfortable as possible. This is a new form of “Customer Experience”. These are the people whom Tesco fired when they suggested that, as a cost cutting exercise, it would be a good idea to operate only one checkout at 10.00 am on a Saturday morning.

The latest innovation in the “Let’s annoy the customer” game are automatic boarding card gates. You are required to swipe your boarding card in a number of different directions, at least twenty times, and have two members of passport control come over to make suggestions on the best way of swiping it.

The automatic passport face recognition system is a variation on this, designed to lengthen queues, and reduce unemployment by increasing the need for passport control staff and embarrassing the public as the machine tries to work out who they are.

However, Nat West and RBS, after their recent “Oh dear, we have lost all your data” problems, could do worse than copy the example of some airline staff at boarding. When the flight is called, the passengers swipe their boarding cards and show their passports. Now here is the clever bit. The airline staff now ask for the boarding card again, which you have just put away, and crosses your name off a list with a pencil (remember them – long thin things which you can write with).

You thought that the computer did this. Well, it probably does, but I guess that the staff don’t trust the computer (quite right!) and do their own check as well. If RBS had followed this line of thinking, then they might not have ended up in the pickle that they did. I think that there could be a whole new branch of consultancy here.

Consultants could advise on how to check the computer. The young unemployed could be employed to check transactions on computer printouts. They could file hundred and thousands of sheets of paper to be kept, just in case the computer goes down. A whole parallel processing area could be developed.

All we need now is a name for this new business practice. Any suggestions?