Tag: Challenge

Another day and, yes, another sad flight.

For those who believe that airlines can actually take off on time, we have a departure time 4:25, and boarding time, 3:40

Yep, and pigs really do fly. Not

We are still on the ground at 4:25, and the excuse is the late inbound flight but that’s as tired as I feel about airlines who just cannot give their customers the truth.

There is more likely a plethora of problems with this aircraft, and there isn’t enough duck tape to fix them.

I chose Qantas because of their safety record, but first impressions of the Airbus A330-200 is that it was the last plane built by the Wright Brothers.

Yes, it is that old.

The screens in the seatbacks are 5 x 5 inches in size and activated by a hand unit I haven’t seen since the early eighties.

And that unbelievable statistic is compounded by the fact mine is broken and it takes an engineer a few minutes to realize that it needs duck tape to temporarily fix it.

The truth of the matter is that this relic of the past should be at the Qantas museum in outback Queensland, than flying passengers.

I thought Qantas had a youngish fleet, but apparently not. It seems the lack of pilots on Boeing types has forced them to drag these Airbus relics out of mothballs.

I guess it’s our turn to roll the dice.

We are pushing back 1 hour and 8 minutes late. 15 minutes later we take off.

It’s rather unsettling but otherwise normal takeoff, so it’s now going to be interesting how much time we can make up. The flight time as originally quoted by the Captain was 3 hours and 39 minutes.

About an hour into the flight the Captain is obviously either trying hard to make up time or more to the point find a level where the headwinds are not as severe, because for the last ten minutes the engines have been given a real work out.

Usually in flight at this time is quiet, but at the moment we can hardly hear ourselves think. Memo to self must get noise-canceling headphones.

In between all the flight level changes, it’s time for dinner service, or more to the point what’s left service.

There is a choice of three items, beef, pork slop with rice, or chicken, a large cold lump of aforementioned meat with salad, very little salad.

The key choice here is the beef in gravy but by the time the trolley reaches row 50 the beef is all gone.

Surprise, surprise.

Ok, so most of the plane agreed with me on what was the best meal, and the 70 odd passengers down the back of the plane are deprived of a first choice and forced basically to eat leftovers.

I get the pork to prove a point, and it is every bit the garbage I expected and definitely not fit for human consumption.

God help the person who created that ‘dish’ but if it was the winning dish on a Masterchef episode, then I guess we got what we deserved.

Another memo to self, remind me to bring my dog next time. It seems Qantas is able to cater to animals better than they can humans.

Having expressed my opinion, I am reminded that to others the pork and rice dish might have been very good and that I should temper my remarks with the proviso the comments are my own opinion and do not represent that of others who may have enjoyed it.

And after dinner, it didn’t matter if we made up time or not. Leaving late, missing the preferred meal, and enduring no onboard entertainment, no, the engineer decided it needed more than duct tape to fix it, there was nothing left short of crashing that make this flight more enjoyable.

On a scale of one to ten, this was a minus six.

It’s the little things…

The difference between what you want to do and what really happens can be as wide as the Rio Grande River

Not that I’ve tried to cross it, but you get my drift.

Shopping, any sort of shopping, can be a nightmare. Certainly, when you decide to go shopping always leave enough time for the vagaries of serving staff and fellow customers.

And then there’s Murphy’s law

Like, for instance, you’re in a hurry to get to a lunch appointment and need money. The ATM is broken or refilling, and inside the bank the queue is long and there’s only one teller serving

Of course, its lunch time!

Or you’ve decided to get a pre theater dinner and drink and get to the restaurant early, order, and then have to wait and wait and, well you know how it is.

Of course, there’s always late staff, missing cooks.

Or you draw a number and sit down to wait only to discover that somehow your number got lost in the system. Or worse, you go to the doctor for an appointment, sit down, and get forgotten.

When you ask, oh, he had to go home for an emergency.

No doubt late for golf.

It’s happened to me, more than once.

But the worst thing that can happen to you. Going clothes shopping with your partner, sit down near the counter knowing she will eventually come back for you.

Only….

You get a phone call three hours later from her asking where you are.

One day…

That rather odd world of customer complaints

I was going to write more about the waiting game, where it is the peak hour for shoppers and there’s only two cash registers open, or the bank tellers at lunchtime …

On and on. Nothing will change except for some of us, an increase in grey hair.

Time to move on, and get off my soapbox.

Perhaps we could delve into the online world of customer complaints.

It’s an interesting place, when I want to buy something, or see something that is too good to be true, I hit the computer, dial-up google, and go into investigative mode.

But, here’s the thing,

The only people who go online, by and large, are there to complain. Yes, there are a few positives, like five out of five stars, then the numbers show up for four stars, three stars, etc.

You get the impression that the owner of the product or service had written several 5-star good reports to counterbalance the negativity, which sometimes all belabor the same point.

For a long time when I saw the bad reports and very few good reports I thought the product was no good, but recently, when talking to someone whose product was for sale, and had a few bad reviews, they said if a customer is satisfied, why did they need to file a report. People had expressed their good opinion but had not added a review.

That might well be the case.

As an example, I looked at several river cruises in Europe and their operators. I then went online to check the customer ratings, because these river cruises are very expensive, so you need to know you’re getting value for money.

Nearly all of the reviews were bad and lacked any credible numbers. Those that were on the site were critical of the food the hygiene of the staff, the inability to get more than 1 ‘free’ drink with lunch or dinner, and substitute boats that were terrible.

Food and wine were the heart of this cruise, as well as cabin comfort, and the last thing you need is to be sick for the duration of the cruise.

I have to say I’m put off.

Perhaps I might revise my policy of looking for information on the internet. If the bad customer feedback continues we may never go anywhere ever again

The first case of PI Walthenson – “A Case of Working With the Jones Brothers”

This case has everything, red herrings, jealous brothers, femme fatales, and at the heart of it all, greed.

See below for an excerpt from the book…

Coming soon!

PIWalthJones1

An excerpt from the book:

When Harry took the time to consider his position, a rather uncomfortable position at that, he concluded that he was somehow involved in another case that meant very little to him.

Not that it wasn’t important in some way he was yet to determine, it was just that his curiosity had got the better of him, and it had led to this: sitting in a chair, securely bound, waiting for someone one of his captors had called Doug.

It was not the name that worried him so much, it was the evil laugh that had come after the name was spoken.

Doug what? Doug the ‘destroyer’, Doug the ‘dangerous’, Doug the ‘deadly’; there was any number of sinister connotations, and perhaps that was the point of the laugh, to make it more frightening than it was.

But there was no doubt about one thing in his mind right then: he’d made a mistake. A very big. and costly, mistake. Just how big the cost, no doubt he would soon find out.

His mother, and his grandmother, the wisest person he had ever known, had once told him never to eavesdrop.

At the time he couldn’t help himself and instead of minding his own business, listening to a one-sided conversation which ended with a time and a place. The very nature of the person receiving the call was, at the very least, sinister, and, because of the cryptic conversation, there appeared to be, or at least to Harry, criminal activity involved.

For several days he had wrestled with the thought of whether he should go. Stay on the fringe, keep out of sight, observe and report to the police if it was a crime. Instead, he had willingly gone down the rabbit hole.

Now, sitting in an uncomfortable chair, several heat lamps hanging over his head, he was perspiring, and if perspiration could be used as a measure of fear, then Harry’s fear was at the highest level.

Another runnel of sweat rolled into his left eye, and, having his hands tied, literally, it made it impossible to clear it. The burning sensation momentarily took his mind off his predicament. He cursed and then shook his head trying to prevent a re-occurrence. It was to no avail.

Let the stinging sensation be a reminder of what was right and what was wrong.

It was obvious that it was the right place and the right time, but in considering his current perilous situation, it definitely was the wrong place to be, at the worst possible time.

It was meant to be his escape, an escape from the generations of lawyers, what were to Harry, dry, dusty men who had been in business since George Washington said to the first Walthenson to step foot on American soil, ‘Why don’t you become a lawyer?” when asked what he could do for the great man.

Or so it was handed down as lore, though Harry didn’t think Washington meant it literally, the Walthenson’s, then as now, were not shy of taking advice.

Except, of course, when it came to Harry.

He was, Harry’s father was prone to saying, the exception to every rule. Harry guessed his father was referring to the fact his son wanted to be a Private Detective rather than a dry, dusty lawyer. Just the clothes were enough to turn Harry off the profession.

So, with a little of the money Harry inherited from one of his aunts, he leased an office in Gramercy Park and had it renovated to look like the Sam Spade detective agency, you know the one, Spade and Archer, and The Maltese Falcon.

There’s a movie and a book by Dashiell Hammett if you’re interested.

So, there it was, painted on the opaque glass inset of the front door, ‘Harold Walthenson, Private Detective’.

There was enough money to hire an assistant, and it took a week before the right person came along, or, more to the point, didn’t just see his business plan as something sinister. Ellen, a tall cool woman in a long black dress, or so the words of a song in his head told him, fitted in perfectly.

She’d seen the movie, but she said with a grin, Harry was no Humphrey Bogart.

Of course not, he said, he didn’t smoke.

Three months on the job, and it had been a few calls, no ‘real’ cases, nothing but missing animals, and other miscellaneous items. What he really wanted was a missing person. Or perhaps a beguiling, sophisticated woman who was as deadly as she was charming, looking for an errant husband, perhaps one that she had already ‘dispatched’.

Or for a tall, dark and handsome foreigner who spoke in riddles and in heavily accented English, a spy, or perhaps an assassin, in town to take out the mayor. The man was such an imbecile Harry had considered doing it himself.

Now, in a back room of a disused warehouse, that wishful thinking might be just about to come to a very abrupt end, with none of the romanticized trappings of the business befalling him. No beguiling women, no sinister criminals, no stupid policemen.

Just a nasty little man whose only concern was how quickly or how slowly Harry’s end was going to be.

© Charles Heath 2019

Writing instead of insomnia – 3

Back to the explosion at what was first thought to be at a takeaway.  Certainly, it had been leveled, but so had several other buildings in the near vicinity, but we haven’t got to that part yet.

The boredom of the flight is still giving me an opportunity to explore the opening sequence a little further, where we left our man on the scene under tight police guard.

 

In five minutes, perhaps less, the whole scene had turned into countless vehicles with red and blue flashing lights, screams from the victims, and yelling from the rescuers.

I was still under police guard, but coming from the other side of the scene, a rather battered and bleeding street policeman came running towards us, stopping short of the man standing back, the one I assumed was in charge.

Tell me you’ve got them, he gasped, then looking from the man in charge to me then back again, looking very concerned.

We have.  He looked very calm and pleased with himself.

What? Him? He nodded in my direction. He was blown up in the blast and from what I saw was chasing the real culprits, two men covered in dust, one of whom was carrying a large duffel bag.

This guy was caught running from the scene.

I decided to add my bit to the discussion. Your car drove straight past them. I can’t see how you missed them.

He was starting to look worried. We were given your exact description from an anonymous tip.

The battered policeman bent over and collapsed to the ground. Two of my captors went towards him, but he motioned them away. Of course, you did, by the two men escaping. Get after them, before it’s too late. And free this guy. He’s got nothing to do with the blast.

After removing the cuffs they jumped back in their car and headed back in the direction they came. Too late now, the two men would be long gone.

I went over to the policeman on the ground just as another ambulance pulled up and as the paramedics got out, I motioned to them to come and attend him.

What happened, I asked him

A bank robbery, the clowns used far too much explosive and almost brought the building down on them. Not so lucky for the neighbors.

He was looking around, then stopped, looking at the place where I’d just been held down. I followed his gaze and then saw what he saw. The cuffs were still on the ground where the man who removed them had obviously dropped them.

His expression changed, and for a moment I thought he was going to explode.

What’s wrong.  Obviously, something was but I couldn’t see it.

The cuffs. We haven’t used those for years now. They weren’t real police.

My mind clicked into gear at the same time as he uttered the words.

They were there to help the others escape whilst holding us both up with a phony arrest. I wonder what they would do if they hadn’t been sent after their fellow robbers.

The battered policeman just sighed and lay down on the pavement and let the paramedics work on him.

Only then did we notice he had a piece of an iron bar sticking out of his side.

 

Then, of course, people just don’t happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Or do they?

 

© Charles Heath 2020

The vissictitudes of life

I’m currently sitting in my car waiting to pick the grandchildren up from school wondering where that dream of the glamorous life of an author went.

Can it be said that any author leads a glamorous life, except for maybe J K Rowling, James Patterson and a handful of others?

That dream is of course only a dream. I did not start this writing caper to become rich and famous or live a glamorous life. I started It, and it continues in the same vein, that I have a lot of stories in my head that I want to get on paper.

If anyone else wants to read them, then that’s a bonus. If I happen to make enough money, rather than live high on the hog, an expression my father often used to describe the rich, I would happily invest in programs that get young people reading more.

It also strikes me that it would be difficult to write a literary novel in the vein of Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters, to name a few because modern day life has no real meaning like it did then.

Instant news, instant communications, and the rest of the country, as well as the world, do close, we can go anywhere, and communicate instantly. In the days of classic literature, they survived on periodic letters, and traveling to another part of the same country was very arduous. Just the receipt of a letter could give a chapter, the trip to and the visit to a relative could give several.

But those tales of life were always about people of means, not the ordinary people. Stories that have the minutiae of daily life do not appeal. No one wants to read about their lives, they want to be transported to another world where there is no such inanity like cooking, cleaning, washing and picking up children.

I’m using this time to write another episode or chapter, or, in this case, a blog post.

As any parent will tell you, it is the calm before the storm.

Writing instead of insomnia – 1

There’s nothing like being on an airplane and suddenly getting annoyed.

If it’s not the confined space, it’s generally because most people before a flight are usually stressed or on edge.  At least until the plane takes off.

Then it can be any number of things that can set you off

One might be the propensity for the liquid to spill.  Those tray tables are hardly stable or level at the best of times, and the plastic they serve meals on and pour drinks into, is very slippery and it doesn’t take much to spill.

I know, it just happened to me.

Of course, if its water, you can suffer the cold for as long as it takes to dry, but when it’s beer or wine, then there’s that ever pervading aroma the lingers long after it’s dried.

Yes, I had to spill beer, and yes, it does smell.

Annoyed am I, yes.

But that isn’t the biggest bugbear, that’s bothering me right now.  Its one the affects a lot of air travelers and it’s that 31 inches between seats and the person in front who decides to fully recline their seat, right into your face. 

I mean, it’s not that bad if everyone decides to recline, or it’s not mealtime, but on top of the spill, I’m not going to be in a good mood anytime soon.

So, while I’m at it, the next problem is airline food.  Ok, I get it, I’m in economy and I’m getting what I pay for, but seriously, I’m not really sure what it was I got, other than the rice, and, since we’re leaving Australia and one of our signature fast foods is the humble meat pie, why not one of those, a pleasant reminder of home, or the place you may have visited.

Air New Zealand has the right idea and serves you venison as a menu choice.

I guess bring a Chinese airline we’d be served Chinese food, but a menu describing what it was would be a help instead of being tossed on a slippery plastic tray and dumped in front of you.

Maybe I’m expecting too much from airlines who seem to consider that transporting you from one place to another in a seat that has a modicum of comfort more important than the trimmings.  Well, I guess that what you get for paying a rock bottom fare.

Maybe I could work this into a plotline if I can’t get to sleep.

Our next airline will be Air Canada.  I wonder if moose is on the menu?

 

Is there something wrong?

I asked myself that question when about 1000 odd words into a current short story, one that I continue to go back to, but found an initial reluctance to write, and now seems to be difficult to continue.

Is the reason because I don’t feel like writing, that I’ve written myself into a corner, the story isn’t flowing, or there’s something else I’d rather be doing…

Like, scouring the internet…

Working on writing some blog posts, like this one…

Checking my email…

Checking my other blogs to see how many people have viewed my recent posts,

Or just puddle with anything other than what I should be doing.

The thing is, I know where most of the stories are going, it’s just a matter of sitting down, picking up the threads, and writing. Certainly, I could be working on one or another right now.

But, something is nagging at me.

I thought it was that I wanted to write another Being Inspired piece, having the photo I wanted to use for inspiration in my head. I sat down this morning and started it, and got seven or eight paragraphs done, and then it was time to go down to breakfast.

Attention diverted.

I could have written more after breakfast, but that seemed to segue into a chat over coffee that ran into lunch. It’s odd how it seems there is so much to talk about.

Then it’s been one excuse after another that has kept me from picking up that story and running with it. I could do it now, but that reluctance remains.

Perhaps tomorrow.

For now, I’m going to work on some crosswords and see if that doesn’t inspire me, and if it doesn’t I could always have an early night.

It’s the same every time we go away, on the run all day doing touristy stuff, making notes for later on, on the run, and then getting back to the room exhausted. After all, there is so much to see and do.

Maybe I’ll just reflect on today and worry about it tomorrow, except…

We have an equally hectic day planned.

Maybe I’ll get that holiday from writing after all.

I should be on holiday but…

You would think that going away for a few days, you would be able to drag yourself away from writing.

You would think, after doing it every day for the last six months, it would be time to take a break. But, the trouble with good intentions and being in a different place, there’s a ton of new and different places and things to write about.

We are here primarily for a wedding, with part of it being a Chinese Tea Ceremony, and at course I’ve been reading up on it, and there is any number of descriptions, making it difficult to get a clear idea of what happens.

I guess I’m going to have to wait until the day, next Friday.

In between, there will be a dinner that will have as the centrepiece, Peking duck, my absolute favourite duck dish.

I had it last in Hong Kong two years back before the riots at the restaurant in the Peninsular hotel, and it was exquisite.

Then it’s my brother’s 70th birthday. As he is working feverishly on the family history, and having jetted off many times overseas tracking down the long lost relatives we knew nothing about, it’ll be time for a progress report.

I must admit that some of those relatives have roused my writer’s curiosity. When I helped clear out my parent’s house after they moved into a retirement home, we found a great deal of ancestral material, the most interesting of which is, would you believe, was about my mother.

We have found a whole lot of letters she received from her first boyfriend and then from my father. It shows a side to her I never knew about, and a side to my father that given what I know of him, is totally out of character.

There will no doubt be more on this subject later.

And finally but not least there was a baby announcement, always a subject of much joy and happiness.

This is only day two. There is definitely more to come.

Is social media useful for advertising?

Of course, if I had I might be saying that it was luck

But…

There’s no such thing as luck, there’s simply good management or being in the right place at the right time.

Or you’ve just put a lot of research and hard work into an idea that pays off.

That’s not luck, that’s something else.

I say this because I have never been on the receiving end of good fortune very often, except, as you would expect, as the result of hard work.  And yes, everything appears to conspire against me some days, but I would not call that bad luck.

Timing, quite often, is everything.

So…

I’ve been researching the internet and the world of social media. So many people make claims about how good it is, how bad it is, how they made a fortune, and how, for others, it’s a dud.

Again, it’s about good management, hard work, or being in the right place, etc.

And viral stuff on YouTube, well, if it goes viral with a million hits in fifteen minutes, it means everybody, in that fifteen minutes, was looking for something interesting at that particular moment, and there it was.

It was not luck.

However…

Using either of Facebook or Twitter as a means to advertise, without parting with your hard earned, or more likely, non-existent cash, is not all it’s cracked up to be.

You have 17,000 followers, that means you have at least 17,000 people who are going to see your post.  Or someone else’s if you are thinking of getting people to market their product on the back of your followers, hang on, targeted followers.  If, say, for instance, you’re followers are book orientated, doesn’t that mean…

You get my point.

Wrong.

You’re lucky if 5% of those followers see anything, and that doesn’t increase by putting a lot of different tags on the post.  Twitter itself is restrictive in the number of people it will distribute the post to.

Five per cent, that’s 850 of your followers who may see any one of your posts at the one time.  other people have done vari0ous tests to check just who gets a post and who doesn’t, so it’s not just me who had noted what’s happening.

Then there’s the take-up rate, which Twitter does tell you, in my case, it’s about 2% at it’s lowest, which means the effective number of real peal people looking at my posts with any interest, is about 17.

It can be more, though I’m not sure how the Twitter algorithm for distributing posts works.  I’ve seen other people get thousands of likes and re-tweets.

And, yes, I get it, their posts might be more interesting than mine, and I accept that, but the numbers I’ve been tracking don’t lie.  If more people saw the tweet, the curiosity factor would be higher, and at the very least, the click-through rate would be higher.

That it isn’t can be verified from checking with the number of clicks on the bitly web site for the day, even over a number of days, in the basic statistics they provide their users.

I’m just saying…

All of those people who say they have thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of followers just waiting for you to advertise with them, cannot deliver any sort of mass advertising you need, and even if they were to pay to advertise with Twitter, they would have to charge very exorbitant prices.

You can do it yourself, but there’s no guarantee your tweet will read by the people you need to buy your book.

It’s what I would call a shot in the dark.

So…

What do we do?

Anyone else done this exercise and come up with different results?  If you have I’d be interested to know what sort of responses you are getting from Twitter, or Facebook, or any other social media platform.

Preferably before I pull all my hair out in frustration!