I feel a rant coming on

So, it’s late (around midnight) and as I’m on holiday I’ve had a few beers and have been surfing around. Cruising Facebook, as you do, I came across a group called “I secretly want to punch slow walking people…“; fits me to a T, because I’m tall and EVERYONE walks too slowly for my liking. This group, as is the Facebook wont, has a Discussion Board and one of the topics is “For everyone who works in a shop but hates customers“. It’s a rant wall basically.

And it has inspired my rant. But my rant is not about customers that I hate - it’s about shop assistants that I hate. The thing that they - and call centre staff and anyone else that has to deal with customers on a daily basis - forget is that CUSTOMERS PAY YOUR WAGES. If your business didn’t have customers, you’d be out of a job.

But this seems to be an uncommon view of the world; I’m reading comments like:

I had to ask people if they wanted help with packing, so of course one guy said yes and stood there while I packed his £70 shop, fucker…I said help with it, not do you want me to pack every piece of crap you bought.

Sorry to burst your bubble but that’s what you’re there for. If he’s spending £70, pack his damn shopping. Or would you rather that he - and all the other people that you’re pissed off at - went and spent their £70 somewhere else?

I know that you don’t care about your job. It’s just your stepping stone to that career that you’ve always wanted. But think about it from a customer point of view; I’m sure you’ve been one at some point in your life. The assistant who couldn’t wait to get you out of the shop so they could go back to texting their friends? That was you!

There’s a lot of talk in media circles about “McJobs”, which has grown in meaning to encompass any job that pays minimum wage and involves dealing with customers, but I think it is a little unfair. A McJob can be a rewarding occupation, providing you don’t belong to a new group of workers that I’m calling McEmployees - people that think they’re too good for the job they have but don’t actually know how to do it properly.

I work for a company that deals directly with the end-consumer of the product. I speak to customers every day and I work to the old adage that “the customer is always right”. I do this because I believe in another old adage ” do unto others as you would have others do unto you”. I provide courteous and efficient service because when I go into a shop, I want courteous, efficient service.

Sadly, most of the time I am disappointed.

Open Office and NeoOffice

A while ago, I wrote a post about my attempt to use Open Office to replace Microsoft Office, in advance of moving from a PC laptop to an iMac. I was looking for an open source alternative to Microsoft, as I couldn’t afford to re-buy all my old software.

On the whole, Open Office was good and on a personal basis was a viable alternative to Microsoft. The problems I had with it were that I couldn’t use it effectively for doing some of my work stuff; it didn’t like some of my Excel documents and was no good with the Access databases that I needed to work with. That really scuppered any chances of being able to use Open Office at work.

When I moved to the Mac, one of the first things I did was to download Open Office. To run on the Mac, Open Office requires something called X11, which is an extra part of the OS X system. OK, so I loaded that. Everything worked fine, but it seemed an inelegant solution. Open Office are working on Open Office Aqua for the Mac, which doesn’t require X11, but as it was described as currently being “very beta” I decided against it.

A Google search for “Open Office for Mac” directed me to NeoOffice. Using Open Office as a base, NeoOffice is a development for Mac that does not require X11 but is a stable release. Excellent; downloaded it, installed it, got rid of Open Office.

And there it stayed for the last few weeks. While I had it available, I didn’t actually need to use it. One thing I did notice with both Open Office and NeoOffice was that - when printing to my HP Photosmart 7762 - the top margin got ignored. Very annoying.

Then, a couple of days ago, I saw this post on Slashdot, saying that the latest release of NeoOffice was available. And guess what? All my problems are solved - it prints the top margin, it will open those big Excel sheets from work in five minutes instead of 20, it will keep the graphs when I re-save in Excel format and it’s more closely integrated with native OS X functionality like Dictionary. All-in-all, it’s brilliant.

If you use a Mac and you want something to replace Microsoft Office (and iWork doesn’t really cut it for you) then check out NeoOffice. You won’t be disappointed.

Brief notes

1. You’ve got to feel sorry for Paul Robinson after last night’s England vs. Germany match. He got caught out by a cross that turned into a shot that turned into a goal and this morning he’s got David James leaping to his defence. That’s David James, possibly the worst goalkeeper the English national side have ever had.

2. Did you know an iMac can resurrect your CD’s? I’ve got an original (1995) copy of the Pulse double CD set by Pink Floyd (you know, the one that had the little flashing light in it) and some while ago the last three tracks of disc two became unplayable. No obvious damage to the disc - just wouldn’t play, in whatever machine I used. Just tried importing it into iTunes and it did it with no problems. What’s more, I’ve been able to use iTunes to make a new CD to replace the one that doesn’t work anymore. Just another reason to buy a Mac!

3. If you’re a woman of 40 or over and live or work in the New York Metropolitan area, head on over to Marianna’s blog; she’s looking for people to help her with a survey as part of her Masters degree. It’s all online and will only take about 10 minutes to complete. Tell your friends.

4. For all you environmentalists out there, check out Skimmer’s blog for 20 top tips for going greener. Some of them you’ll probably already know, but others will not be so obvious. And some of the facts and figures he presents will scare you. Seriously!

5. Eastbourne Borough FC remain unbeaten so far this season, throughout all the pre-season friendlies and the league matches they’ve played. Go Borough!

At the risk of getting sued

I’m a bit of a feed-reader and one of the ones I subscribe to is Slashdot. I don’t read all the articles, but will normally check out anything that has a good headline. So “Science blogger sued for unfavourable review” was always going to get read.

Now, I don’t profess to being anything of a scientist and I’m certainly no biologist but I know that spiders have eight legs, not ten. Yet the book being reviewed apparently includes reference to ten-legged spiders. A lot of the review itself passes me by (what’s a torus? I don’t know) but the content seems plain enough - the guy that wrote the book doesn’t know what he’s talking about and has no data to back up his claims.

Well it seems that the books author (a chap called Stuart Pivar) has taken exception to the review by PZ Myers and has filed a $15 million suit claiming damages for the emotional distress that the review has caused him.

Now, this seems to me to raise two issues. The first is that if you invite someone to review your book (as Pivar apparently did) can you really expect them to cover you in glory if you’ve written something that they consider to be nonsense? If you don’t want to be called a “classic crackpot”, perhaps you should present your ideas coherently and with evidence to back them up? If people are going to get lawyered up every time they get a bad review, then nothing is ever going to get written again.

The second issue references the whole Creationsim vs. Evolution debate. It seems to me (coming late to the party as I am) that Myers (an evolutionist) has given Pivar (a creationist) a bad review based on lack of science, which Pivar has taken exception to because you don’t need science to back up a creationist point of view.

I’m always a little lost when it comes to this argument; at heart I have no real objection to the idea that there is a God. I know that many people draw comfort from the thought that there is some Being up there watching over us, guiding our lives. However, I don’t myself believe this to be true.

I’m a pragmatist; I want to see some evidence that God exists and that creationists are right. (”Ah, but proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”). The evolutionists have plenty of science to back up their opinions, after all.

I also take issue with the position that creationists seem to take - our way is the only way; all you evolutionists are the spawn of Satan and your ideas are meaningless. Surely, if they are right then the evolutionist position is all part of God’s plan for us; to help us develop thoughts of our own? There seems to be no compromise in a creationist position, hence the lawsuit.

Of course, this is nothing new; many of the bloodiest wars in our history have been fought over a difference of religious opinion. Perhaps we should be thankful that this time it’s only a lawsuit.

[Further reading: The Panda's Thumb, Pharyngula]

Smoking - The Book

Well, I finally finished reading “Slow Burn” by Don Oakley. Normally, I wouldn’t write a whole post about a book, I’d just update my “What I’m reading” page, but I think this one deserves as bit more.

First off is a warning; this book is a chore. It’s about 600 pages of quite factual stuff that needs quite close attention. If you’re the sort of reader that skims, you probably want to avoid this one.

Second is another warning. The guys style is not the easiest in the world to get along with; he cares deeply about his subject, but the phrasing he uses to put his points across can be irritating. There were several occasions when I nearly threw the damn thing across the room because I was annoyed not by what he said but how he said it.

Taking those two points into account, what do you get? Well, what you get is an examination of the whole arena of smoking and the effect that it has had not only on people’s health but also on the way society functions. Oakley takes issue with practically every piece of anti-smoking reportage that has been produced in the last 40 or so years, starting with the Surgeon General’s 1964 report and continuing up to 1999 when the book was published.

He explains at great length the ways in which statistical probabilities have been manipulated to present the public with scare-mongering facts to encourage them to give up smoking (children have a greater risk of health problems from a glass of milk a day than they do from living in a house where one or both parents smokes). He discusses how many conclusions about smoking and health have been based on only one (narrow) study. He takes issue with the way that many studies into the effects of passive smoking (or environmental tobacco smoke) are based purely on after-the-fact anecdotal evidence provided by friends or relatives of the person supposedly effected.

There is a big hole in his arguments, though, in that at the same time as condemning statistical manipulation and extrapolating from only one study, a lot of his counter-evidence does just that. He accuses various bodies of having bias towards anti-smoking, but displays bias of his own. Having said that, though, there is enough evidence presented here to make you re-consider your anti-smoking stance; if only half of what he says is only half true, it still presents a completely different picture than the anti-smoking brigade, public health policy groups and politicians would have us believe.

The truly thought-provoking part of this book comes, though, when he moves on from discussing the implications for health to discussing the implications for society. We’ve all seen the way that smokers, over the last 20 to 30 years, have slowly been ostracised from society, but the picture presented by Oakley is much worse than I would ever have thought it could be.

Consider this; you’re a woman, or non-white, or Jewish - or perhaps all three - and you apply for a job. The company turns you down because you’re a non-white, Jewish woman. What’s the first thing you do - call your lawyer! Now, replace those groupings with just one - smoker. Don’t bother calling your lawyer, he won’t be in.

Smokers are being regularly discriminated against because they smoke. Not because they smoke in a room where co-workers may be effected, mind. Just that they smoke - or have done in the last 12 months, or whatever arbitrary time limit the prospective employer might like to put on it. Coupled with the fact that (in the States at least) they have to pay more for health care, and many other things, smokers are as victimised as any minority group since the slaves were brought over from Africa - but no-one seems to give a damn.

And that’s why I would encourage you to read this book (if you can find a copy); to make you re-think the social ramifications of anti-smoking policies.

- - -

I feel that I should point out that I am not a smoker. I never have been. I grew up surrounded by smokers and never really saw the attraction, but I don’t have any deep-seated feelings against smoking. I have never been convinced by the arguments against smoking, or passive smoking, and the recent introduction of a blanket ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces here in the UK quite frankly pisses me off. I realise that my opinion is not one that is shared by many people but there you go!