Merry go round

Ok, after writing two posts at  blogger – and uploading lots of photos without any difficulty - I am sold. I switched. From now on please come vist at  http://retirement-merry-go-round.blogspot.com

Frustrated with WordPress  due to difficulties in posting images in the right size and the  right place I  tried to do the same in Bloggger..

And wow, what took me over two weeks in wordpress without even a minimally acceptable result  came out great in blogspot in barely a couple of minutes (you can see the first partial post there at retirement-merry-go-round.blogspot.com) Oh, well, great in comparison…

 I think I am switching…. but need to check how customer friendly other blogger’s features are before making a final decision. No more acceptance for customer unfriendly techno-gobledygook.

Very busy with the move now, though, so it may take a few days. See ya – here or there :-)

Today I was looking for a different kind of help than yesterday. For simple, manual labor:  a move-out apartment cleaning, carpet cleaning, window washing, loading and unloading those belongings I decided to store and those that will go to a charity, but are too bulky/heavy for me to handle on my own.

Until now, whenever  and wherever I moved withing the USA,  I had no trouble  finding that kind of services as I needed them and at acceptable prices. No such luck today.

Well, yes, I found 10 firms offering cleaning services in town and 12 more around town. So far so good.  But here the “good” part of the story ends. Most of those firms did not answer their phones or did not return my call. Out of the remaining firms I got three bids. One cleaning service wanted $100/hr for two cleaning ladies with a two hour minimum, the second wanted $225 firm price and the third did not really know how much they were going to charge, but they assured me that the price would “certainly be reasonable”!!!  I kid you not!

And no, this is NOT a typo: the service firm wanted $ 100 an hour for sending two cleaning ladies. The cleaning ladies would, most  probably  be Latino immigrants, who would be lucky to get paid $7.50 an hour each – if that much.

Thus the service firm’s direct labor cost  for these ladies would be $15 = 15% of the quoted fee! 

Ok, let’s be fair and add to that some indirect labor costs (though I doubt they carry much, if any, of them) supplies, equipment, transportation (if they pay for it, which I also doubt),  liability insurance, overhead, administration,  advertising, taxes. Let’s be generous (well, they might be less than efficient,lol)  and  assume that the total cost of the service they provide is 25%-30% of the fee they demand. That comes out to a 70%-75% of pure profit! Talk about US still being a land of opportunities!

This pattern repeated itself concerning moving help: similar prices, similar assumed profits.

Where, on earth is any serious, willing to get business competition?  Is there no unemployment, no beginning of a recession? Is this situation now typical for  the USA  at large or just for  this particular corner of the Bible belt? And why?  Questions, questions.

Ah, well, since I can’t get any service from the service firms at a price I am willing to accept, I guess the only thing  I can do is to go tomorrow early morning to a place in town where day laborers gather, talk to them – luckily I speak enough Spanish – and hire myself  cleaning and moving helpers for about $15 an hour.

 I’ll have to do my own  recruiting, hiring and  supervising – but at least the profit will be all mine.

USA has  a well developed service sector – I’m sure you heard that time and time again. It was once true, but does no longer seem to be, even as uneployment is rising.   Sad and unbelievable!

… I’d like to think, although, I admit, I sometimes behave like one… (Don’t we all ?)

I am just not interested in technological details, which, I think, I should not need to know in order to use technology to do what I want  it to do.

What??? you ask. Ok, I shall explain:  do you think that it is necessary to know how the car’s engine works in order to be able to drive a car? 

No, I did not think you did, because most people, most drivers in fact, would just laugh at such a demand. (And I bet that most drivers – me included – do not  even want to know how and when to change gears – particularly Americans, since they had it so good for so long. Everything that can be automated, should.) Yet, when I was a young girl in the then communist Poland I was expected to pass the written exam proving I knew how  a car’s  engine worked and how  it was built, before I could actually start to learn driving the car with an instructor and get a license to drive it on my own. 

The  – ridiculous – explanation  for that requirement was that Poland at that time had almost no car service stations, so car drivers were supposed to be selfsufficient if anything happened to their vehicles.  The incredible naivety of  the car techies, who imagined that anybody, without a technical background, would be able (even if he or she was willing and had appropriate tools) to fix his/her broken engine at the side of the road, just after a few teoretical lessons on the inner secrets of car engines, still makes me laugh.

Today I feel in the same situation trying to upload my pictures to my blog. 

Not that i am a total novice at uploading pictures. No, I uploaded tons of images to various power point  presentations, email letters, etc. But not to a blog…

During the weekend I wanted  to write a post about Scania’s gardens and to do that I needed to upload some photos, but no matter how hard I tried, I could either post thumbnails or – when I tried full size images, they came out so huge, as to show only tiny, totally inconsequential fragment of the image on screen… even though one photo somehow accidentally “uploaded itself” (?) to a category (???) … and … lo and behold… there it showed in its desired size. Aah, the miracles of technology!

Ok, I DID try not to be totally  tech-arrogant, so I read  – rather carefully – wordpress’s faq  posts about uploading images, and the forum discussions and did not find what I needed to find, because

1) the information I needed was not there

2) whatever information was there was written by  geeks to geeks in Geeklish (= geek English), not for non geeks in English, so, not being conversant in Geeklish, I did not understand most of it.

Thus  today  I contacted  technical support at wordpress to get some help and Mark responded  very promptly (I have to admit, giving the credit where the credit is due),  that wordpress has no autoresizing … and referred me to a faq question: how big can my images be….. which I previously  read and had no idea how to follow. Sigh….

This reminds me of another technology dilemma, which was faced by one of my former clients, a  small, but international manufacturer of a highly specialized, technologically cutting edge product, who hired me several years ago to solve some serious problems they were having with their  instruction manual and product training.

The instruction manual was written in an extreme Geeklish (  actually in geek-German  and  translated to Geeklish and geek-Japanese), by the company’s tech afficionados, so proud with the cutting edge technology they developed and used in their product, that….. the manual they have written enabled their most advanced competitors to copy their technology and bridge the gap from their to my client’s technological advancement level in almost no time at all, which, of course, was not exactly what the company’s management and shareholders had in mind businesswise.

But the same manual – and the tech-repair loaded training – was a constant subject of complaints of their clients, because, although their maintenace staff could fix the product if it malfunctioned with the help of the manual,  their operators  – the very people to which the manual was ostensibly being adressed – lacked enough technical background to be able to use the product  on the basis of those waaay too geeky instructions.

It took me  no time at all to covince company management to stop the manual asap and withdraw as many already distributed copies of it  from circulation as possible, as not to give away all of their secrets to their competitors….  but it took me a lot longer to convince those tech-geniuses to help me as SMEs (= subject matter experts) to completely redesign  it  and publish in several interactive versions (on line, on dvds, in different languages, not only those of the company owners, but those of the majority of clients) able to accomodate every kind of user with every level of technical background  from  – if need be – a practically illiterate (they did happen, particularly in Malaysia and Brazil) operator of a machine, in which this technological marvel of a product, critical to the quality of production,  was installed, to a  Ph.D in fysics at any  manufacturer of a machine using this product as one of its components – without either  boring to death the PhDs in fysics and similar or going over the heads of  any of the end users

Immediately after we were able to get these recommendations implemented, and the new interactive instruction tools were distributed, clients started calling with praise how pleased they were with the improvements and soon after  the company got a  public endorsement  – at the largest relevant technology fair in the world - from several largest manufacturers of those machines that used my client’s product as a component, not only for the technological advancement of their product, but for “extraordinary customer friendliness” of  their product training and interactive instruction tools. The sales’ levels and company’s profits shot up and stayed up for almost three years…. until their techies – left again to their own devices - managed to ruin the “extraordinary customer friendliness” of  the company’s new and improved products’ instruction tools, once again reducing them to - incompregensible for most end users –  techno-gobbledygook. And the sales responded accordingly: they fell.

Geeesh,  will they ever learn????

I admit, I have some problems with bland tasting fruit, like cantaloupe or papaya and, unless they are served mixed with more assertive tasting fruit in a sallad, I  am inclined to…. add salt to them.

Thus my favorite summer desert is  a fresh cantaloupe, cubed and lightly marinated in lemon juice (with or without  a bit of rum or  tequila) and fresh orange mint leaves ( I love orange mint, it is so fragrant, good also with Cuba Libre ) and sprinkled more or less genereously (more if with tequila, less if with rum) with coarse Mediterranean sea salt.  Help yourselves, please.

A culinary crime of the century, you say?  Naah, just my everyday culinary transgression, perhaps.

Please close your eyes for a moment and imagine a paradise…..

Done? 

Doesn’t your image  closely resemble  a  lush  tropical island  with palms and sandy beaches? 

 Didn’t you imagine being somewhere  in the Polinesia, Hawaii, Thailand or the Caribbean?

Hmmm……..

Now close your eyes and imagine a cold, cold country with lots and lots of forests,  thinly interspersed with small villages and a handful of  medium size cities. The people there are – statistically at least – well taken care of by their government, have access to education, health care, good quality housing, long vacations and even  decent paying jobs. Is that  what you’d call a paradise?

The length of the day  there is -during summer – more than impressive – it’s unbelievable. Yet, in winter, even in the southern part of the country, the daylight begins around 9 am and ends before 4 pm. You notice that people, no matter how well taken care of, do not exhibit anything even remotely reminding of  a joye de vivre - they are serious, if not gloomy, listen to melancholy songs all day and night long and are prone to alcoholism of a rather joyless variety :  in its crudest form straight vodka (good one, though), on a street corner or in a portal of  a building, from a bottle hidden in a brown paper bag.

I have been there – it is a beautiful country, full of the wild, stark beauty, thousands of lakes among the deep, dark woods…  and  filled with honest, friendly, hospitable people.  But is it a paradise?

And yet, according to a country ranking based on a combination of  UN Human Development Index and the Environmental Sustainability Index created by  Yale and Columbia Universities and the World Economic Forum,  if you are searching for the best quality of life ( wouldn’t it be the definition of paradise – a place with the best quality of life?) you need to move to Finland, or – in a descending order – Iceland, Norway, Sweden or Austria.

All winter paradises, perhaps. But if you are fond of islands, palms, tropics, what do you do?

I think someone in Puerto Rico had an ingenious idea of  remaking Puerto Rico based on Finland as a model (see former post: Stagflation??? Tsunami???). 

How could it look like? Let’s see…

First, all the high quality of life paradises have abundant natural values – so does Puerto Rico, so here we don’t have to do much.

Next – they all have very low population density. Puerto Rico has one of the world’s highest. So, what do we do? I have an idea: lets make a Paradise Union between Finland and Puerto Rico and ship the majority of Puerto Rico’s population to Finland. Finland still would have a very low population density, but now so would Puerto Rico.

Third: open a rum distillery in Finland and  let  relocated Puerto Ricans teach Finns how to have fun on the lighter side, without  necessarily always combining it with transcedental meditation of one kind or another. Lets combine sappy sentimentality with the lightness of carefree living!

Fourth: since the named ranking lists Stockholm and not Helsinki as the most livable city in the world, we’d probably need to make a separate Stockholm-San Juan Union … or  make first Helsinki a bit more like stockholm and then make a Helsinki-San Juan Union as a part of the larger  Finland-Puerto Rico Union.

Hmm, I gotta return to packing, but I hope that you got ideas – even better than mine – on how can we improve Puerto Rico based on Finland and/or how to improve San Juan based on Stockholm.

So please, be my guest and post your ideas  here as comments. And remember – dream big!

I think that from now on I’ll need to avoid drinking tea or coffee when I check the news or my blog in the morning.

Yesterday it was the news about the “fishy”? research (see post: Being bilingual makes you faster and younger!),  that almost made me choke …and today I discovered I have been listed on Technorati!?

Don’t laugh ( or go ahead, laugh if you wish)- and pardon my – inexcusable? – ignorance, but I had no idea what Technorati was, what did it do and for what purpose. Now – an hour  or so later –  I know a little bit – not much yet, but  a little

Yippi, if  this pace of my blogging education continues, in a few weeks I might be able to upload photos, which neither take either  a lot more space that a screen allows or show as a thumbnails (? is that the term)… and – dreaming big,  aren’t you, Minerva?  - I  then might even be able to learn how to create links… to posts in blogs I find important and try to comment seriously – and hopefully knowlegeably, like Jamie’s and Maciej’s separate discussions on being Polish - and foreigner’s view’s on how Poles view themselves – in blogroll see respectively An Englishman in Krakow and  A Pole in Ireland) even something with a mysterious and exciting name of a permalink.   Aah, possibilities!

I had some help with filing.  

When a couple of years ago I moved in to Padre Island ( and Shark, a tired and undernourished cat mama, threatened by a hurricane approaching Texas coast, moved in with me bringing her four newborn kittens in her teeth),  I  was busy unpacking and when I opened my cd drawer to file my  cds and dvds, Shark promptly  gathered her kittens…..

and expertly filed them in my cd drawer

…

That’s the conclusion researchers (though I’d call them “researchers”, which I’ll explain later) from the York University in Canada apparently (I haven’t read the original study report, only press reports) arrived at in their study of  104 people in ages from 30 to 88.

Among the people of the study, those who were bilingual were apparently mentally sharper, had faster reaction time and lost less of their mental acuity with age than people who spoke only one language.

It  might have been a reason  to congratulate bilingual people and hit those language books for the monolingual, if not the remarkable composition of  the population that was studied.

Half of the study group were namely English speaking Canadians and the other half…. no, not the French and English speaking Canadians ( or English and any other language speaking Canadians, otherwise similar to the monolingual group) as you might – logically – try to conclude (bilingual and mentally sharp as you are!), the other half….. were people from India, speaking  both English and Tamil!

Reading of such a composition of the “research” population, made me almost choke on my morning coffee. This is against the most elementary rules of studies: compare comparables, not incomparables, or  – as the saying goes – you put garbage in, you get garbage out! 

I am so disappointed…. and can’t  squash the suspicion that a – sufficiently influential ?- member of the research team ?- or sponsor of the “research” in question?, wanted a free trip to India? or to show off people from India as smarter than Canadians? The plot thickens…

… to be a  member in good standing  of the UKLC = Undeground Knitwear Liberation Community!

(see comments to To pack… or not to pack)

Visitors to and residents of the tropics: support the ambitions of  sweaters!

Become a member of  Underground Knitwear Liberation Community!

Don’t let your knitwear pine needlessly in your closets!

Take them to the tropics and wear them proudly – without regard for the weather!