A horse-drawn carriage, of which there were more than one
It’s the first Tuesday after the second Thursday in June, and everyone knows what that means.
What’s that? You aren’t familiar with the great significance of this day?
Admittedly, this is probably something that would never have mattered to me at all, had fate not sent me to live in the Ancient and Royal Burgh of Linlithgow. Such places are so old and steeped in history, that they are bound to develop eccentric mannerisms.
The particular oddity in this case is that it is a local holiday, all the shops closed, and people wished one another a “Happy Marches.”
Was this the inspiration for Lewis Carroll‘s mad March Hare? That is my theory at the moment, at any rate.
If you want to read more about the oddness, it is explained in detail over at the official Linlithgow Marches and Associated Madhatters website. If you click about a bit there are videos of previous years’ events to be found.
Alternatively, just have a look through the sample of the photos I took:
One of the marching bands — not marching.
Balloon purchasing
Marching Band standing and playing in one place
View of the Cross
Flaggy things in the sky
High population density of people in tophats and tails
Bands and tractors
Vintage Car. Maroon
Vintage car. White
Limo. Flags above. Reflections. Marching bands.
Bekilted persons bearing flag
Marching
Marching band closes-up
A horse-drawn carriage, of which there were more than one
People on the side of the road, looking towards the Cross
Toy Story Float
Jethro watching the procession. He is no longer impressed
Multiplying enthusiasm by age — this guy got the highest score for the day
This is a very encouraging step on my journey to a career in writing, as rambled on about at the beginning of the year. It may even morph into a career in radio or television — who knows? Looks like it’s going to be a wild ride in any event.
I’ve also taken to writing in a little A5 notebook. I’m finding it much easier to actually create something when I don’t have the time-wasting lure of felis LOLcatus and other assorted Internet fauna. Just me, the pen, and the paper. There is something very organic in writing that way. It is as if the writing is imbued with unique qualities. Each letter is subtly different. The loops and curves of my handwritten glyphs. The change in the tempo of the text as I become more engrossed in what I transcribe from mind to hand to pen to ink to paper. The words drift to illegibility as my pace of writing increases — but I can still read it even though no-one else probably can.
I don’t get that with typing into a computer. When this goes live on the Internet, you can only see the errors I missed. You can’t tell what I scratched out, or what I added with a ^. You can’t see the squashed words that had to contort themselves between the already-written lines.
With this approach I’m producing many more first drafts than I previously did. When I have enough, I’ll start publishing them. When I start publishing them, I’ll let you know about it on Waffle Group.
When I let Bean off her lead as we went passed the palace, Jethro became very concerned that she would take her new-found liberation and run with it. And not stop running.
He charged after her calling out for her return. Of course this just encouraged her to explore at a greater distance. In the end, i managed to persuade Jethro that she would follow us if we just kept walking.
They wouldn’t let us into the Palace. Not to live there, at least. There must be some sort of mistake, so we’re living in a semi-detached two-bedroom place until we get it all sorted out.
Mind you, the place we’ve moved to is rather nice. It has double-glazed windows while the Royal Palace has no windows at all. Sure, there is a lot more space at the palace than the house we’re in, but imagine the palace heating bill in the winter?
We moved because the costs of living in Edinburgh were too taxing. Other than the palace we should rightfully occupy, we chose Linlithgow because of its strategic geographic location. It’s about half-way between Edinburgh and Glasgow, along the railway line, increasing the markets in which we can look for employment. Nursery school teacher and telephone call centre human are not our life-long ambitions, so having a broader range of places to look for other work is an important consideration.
Unlike the place we rented in Edinburgh, our new place in Linlithgow didn’t come furnished. Fortunately, second-hand furniture from charity shops (like British Heart Foundation) is super-affordable — and they deliver! Unfortunately, on the day we moved they delivered only half our bed. And not the soft, springy half. The floor that night was not in any way comfortable.
Bean Dog’s emancipation from quarantine coincided beautifully with our move to Linlithgow. A few days after we moved home, it was up to me to fetch Bean from the Milton Quarantine Kennels, in Strathclyde, west of Glasgow. Angie was off at work, so I had to take Jethro with me on the journey, which complicated matters somewhat.
The SPCA appeared to have a No Fur Cutting Policy, and as a result Bean was a rather massive canine ball of fluff. I told Bean this, and Jethro overheard me. He still hasn’t stopped telling people that Bean is “a ball of fluff.”
Bean was, understandably, excited about leaving solitary confinement and getting her first sniff in six months of the outside world. Bean has neither travelled on a bus nor a train, and both means of transport would be required to get her back home. Jethro, although having travelled on buses and trains, had not travelled on them with Bean. He was rather excited about it all too.
Their excitement was my trepidation. I had terrible visions of dogs and children running off in opposite directions, and falling in front of buses, trains, and other heavy machinery, as I scurried desperately after them. Surprisingly everyone was rather well behaved, with one exception. Bean sat quietly panting while every bus passenger embarked and disembarked. That was until a black person stepped on the bus. Then she let loose with her growly-yap-growl-yappity-yap! Another passenger sitting across from us remarked, “Your dog is racist.” I couldn’t really argue with her, but attempted to deflect the implication of my inherent racism with a story about dogs barking at white people in South Africa, when the dog owners were black. If seemed a flimsy defence and I’m not sure it worked.
With Bean living with us again there is a sense of belonging. A sense of place. Although nothing can ever be truly permanent, we feel relatively certain that we’ll be here for a number of years to come. Our stay in Edinburgh felt transient and incomplete. A rented flat we were not allowed to decorate didn’t feel like home. We are living in a home now, and that’s an important step on getting our life back on track.
Having a home gives us a base to operate from. We’ve found Jethro a playgroup to attend and a child-carer to watch over him while we attempt to rekindle our careers. Although “rekindle” may be a poor turn of phrase, considering we already cast our careers into the bonfire of [clever metaphor I’m too lazy to think of], and scattered the ashes to the four winds.
Moving on to some pics of the new place. Enjoy!
On the threshold of our home — Bean dog on guard
Can you guess which is ours? Hint: look for a ball of fluff
Stairs — also a falling down trap that has caught a victim or two already
A lovely plug socket in our bedroom
A view, from our bedroom window, of what passes for a garden around here. Also our sheets
The walls are rather blue. On our list of things to fix
Perhaps I should have tidied before taking these photos
The view Bean would have if she didn’t look out the window the whole time
A home needs a painting.
Bean’s new favoured place. Still sorting out the furniture arrangement
[Update: 17 February 2011] After some aggressive petitioning Standard Bank’s twitter persons with cross-references to this post and other disgruntled customers, I got a phone call on the 10th to discuss my problem. A possible solution seems to exist. I’ve posted the documentation they asked for (a written request to reverse the stop on my card, which suggests it was lucky that my wallet turned up in the bus service’s lost property office) via registered mail. Whether I get access to internet banking without returning to South Africa remains to be seen.
Dear Standard Bank,
Perhaps the title of my letter is a little unfair. Perhaps you really are moving forward, but you’ve left your customers behind in the bloody water with the chum to fend for themselves. My experience with you has been a case study in client service failure. This case will be to Customer Relations 101 that Deep Horizon will be to Risk Management 101. That’s right Standard Bank—the disaster, that is your level of customer service, is on par with the “largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry” in my opinion.
Unfortunate failings in service provision
For customer service: Insert human sacrifice here
Back in October 2010 I decided to take my son on an excursion to a Petting Farm in Edinburgh. On the way there the bus became very crowded, I become flustered with juggling a 2-year-old and all his associated paraphernalia, and I dropped my wallet.
Relief of getting off the bus soon turned to panic at the realisation that my wallet was no longer in my possession. I headed home and reported the card lost. The friendly call centre person (and to your credit, the overwhelming majority of your staff are friendly—that is not my gripe) duely cancelled it. I imagined that there would be some pain in getting access to my bank account again, but didn’t expect insurmountable problems.
Following a number of telephone conversations it become apparent that I wouldn’t be able to carry out any further transactions on my account, and that the call-centre people weren’t sure how to help me. I put my request for help in writing, certain that the email would get routed through the correct channels of your bureaucratic labyrinth. Eventual it would arrive on the desk of a wise being who knew what to do and had the power to do it.
Whahahahaha! What an idiot I was.
This was the email I sent:
I’m currently living in Scotland and lost my debit card.
I cancelled the card, but as a result can no longer carry out internet banking. For obvious reasons, I cannot just stroll into a local branch and pick up a new card.
My expensive international phone calls first led me to believe that I could send someone else into the branch with my power of attorney, but further enquiries reveal that since the person will be issued with my pin number, that probably won’t be allowed.
Right — so solve my problem. I want to be able to do internet banking from Scotland, without first returning to South Africa to collect a new debit card.
What must I do, written in clear, easy to follow steps? And I really hope that Sacrifice a virgin to Baalisn’t one of the steps.
I haven’t carried out any human sacrifices. Should I have? I suppose you can’t explicitly tell me to do that. The human-sacrifice aspect of your business is something you don’t talk openly about. Makes the investors nervous, hmm? Can’t see how throwing your customers to the sharks will make them any happier though. Or do you only feed the sharks with the customers who refuse to partake in cult behaviour? It’s all very confusing. Perhaps a FAQ on your website dealing with this might help.
Your email response was unsurprisingly bland, repeated everything I’d already told you (but blandly), failed to make any mention of Baal, and welcomed me to contact you again “should [I] require any further assistance.”
Looking back now, I think your reference to Baal was right there staring me in the face. “Should [I] require further assistance” was clearly a suggestion to ask for guidance on carrying out the required sacrificial rites. The rites needed to get Internet Banking reactivated without going to a branch.
What went wrong and what needs to be fixed
In simple terms, this is how you’ve failed me and what you need to do to redeem yourself.
My problem is: I want to do internet banking, but I had to cancel my bank card, and Internet Banking is linked to an active bank card
Your Solution 1: Collect a new card and pin at your nearest branch, link Internet Banking to this new card.
My problem is: I cannot collect card at nearest branch as nearest branch is over 9000km away from my current location.
Your Solution 2: While customer has no card, repeat Solution 1.
That’s it. I’m stuck in this infinite bureaucratic loop and I cannot find anyone with higher enough privileges to break it. It’s not even a complicated algorithm where this problem is deeply nested within the possibilities of customer difficulties, and could not have been foreseen.
What you need to do:
BREAK THE LOOP! Change point 4. to something like
Your Solution 2: Escalate client request until it reaches person with authority to override standard procedure and MAKE AN EXCEPTION
I can accept that through some oversight in planning a simple potential issue like this might be overlooked, and as a result no procedure was drawn up to deal with it. This left the poor disempowered call-centre and email customer support employees unable to fix the problem.
What I can’t accept is that given this situation, where the support decision is locked in an infinite loop, is there is no procedure for breaking the loop by escalating the problem to a higher support level. If such a procedure exists, then every person who has dealt with my enquiries is either completely ignorant of the procedure, or completely incapable of abstract thought. The lack of abstract thought possibility does lend some weight to my Standard Bank is a Murderous Cult theory.
Resolving my problem may not be trivial within the constraints of your internal systems but, assuming you are not in fact a violently murderous cult populated with mindless drones, how can there be no manual overrides for any of your procedures?
Please, before I am forced to carry out some arcane ritual in a fit of desperation, sort this out.
Regards,
Neil Robinson
—
Footnotes:
This is not the full extent of the pain and grief Standard Bank have put me through. More on Standard Bank’s ineptitude.
A careful look at the first step in the infinite loop I’m condemned to shows that the problem should never have arisen in the first place. The “Internet banking is linked to an active bank card” clause is completely unnecessary. Other banks don’t do this. Why does Standard Bank have to?
It's an organic thing. Like cow dung. And miggies up your nostrils.
Miggie is the Afrikaans word for midge. I’m not sure whether the sign is suggesting cow-dung will find its way up your nose along with the midges, but it does seem to imply that this kind of experience is something you might want to be reminded of when looking at the paint on your patio floor.
If you think I’ve found references to cow dung and miggies in Edinburgh, I’m sorry to disappoint you. This is a rather old photo I found on my mobile.
The Waffle Group 