Day Jar View

For the past ten years, I’ve had a plant. It’s been in a few offices, and now resides in my house., above the fire. I don’t know what it is – I think it might be an Amaryllis, but don’t quote me – but it is still around, and is the only thing we haven’t managed to kill.

Each year I am consistently amazed by the appearance around this time of green stalks, from a bulb that has all the hallmarks of a dessicated cricket ball. How does it survive? How does it know it’s spring? How on earth can it go without a drink for 4 months when I forget to water it?

Who knows. All I know is that around the same time that the Business minister was busy putting her foot in her mouth about the green shoots appearing in the economy’s flower bed, my plant was busy putting up a few of its own. Here’s to another ten years!

The news that BMW is cutting 850 jobs at its Cowley plant doesn’t come as much of a shock to anyone I wouldn’t have thought. Apart, it seems, to union leaders.

Despite the fact that the past quarter showed a fall of around a third in new car sales, it seems the union dinosaurs can’t help themselves when it comes to slagging off the government, the manufacturer, and anyone else who perhaps ever bought, drove or looked at a Mini.

In most businesses, if people stop buying your product, you have to cut costs. BMW will make less cars, cutting the working week from 7 to 5 days, and therefore need less people to make them. As a business with shareholders, they have a responsibility to them first and foremost; paying workers to sit around idle to avoid the wrath of union leaders is not only a catastrophic business decision, but it is also just plain daft.

The workers that are getting the chop are mainly agency workers I understand, and the unions have branded the decision a “disgrace”, as they accuse BMW of picking them as they are easier to sack as they have no rights, despite the fact that some of them have been employed as agency workers for 5 years or more.

I think it works both ways. They had jobs, often at a higher rate of pay than if they had been officially employed by the company, for around 5 years in a very competitive industry. If they had been promised anything by the unions then that is wrong, but I can’t believe that they expected special treatment at a time when the parking lots at Cowley must be a sea of steel.

I hope they get all the support they need, but to expect to walk into another manufacturing job is not realistic, so they must be prepared to re-skill where necessary. And in future, like the rest of us, be prepared for the worst at the start of each day.

Today it has emerged that Michael Phelps was snapped by a “friend” indulging in a little extra-curricular substance abuse.

Given the recent fuss over the likes of Marion Jones and Dwain Chambers using performance-enhancing drugs, I thought it was a bit odd that they considered the use of cannabis in the same way as EPO, or steroids, given that on the occasions I’ve indulged I would have struggled to get changed into my trunks, let alone swim a length or two.

Maybe being an uber-athlete it affected him differently, but I would have paid good money to see him in action.

I’m sat here reading a magazine from Sage, the accounting software bods, and its title is “Solutions”. Fair enough, I suppose, given that presumably it deigns to solve problems that crop up with running your business.

When I saw it, however, I was reminded how many things seem to be a problem – given the amount of times you see the word “solutions” thrown about these days.

There’s Shanks Waste Solutions – waste is a problem when it hangs about, so that’s fair enough. There’s a “washroom solutions” van that I see around from time to time, and I guess soap and water solve the problem of germs, so that’s ok too.

But there’s a hair salon on my route to work – with “Hair Solutions” plastered in the window. Now I have a problem with my hair  in that I don’t have much of it, and the only “solution” is probably a wig, although that will of course create its own problems. But if you are saying that everyone who goes in there has a problem with their hair, it sounds to me like they might be put off a bit.

Just a thought.

I’m no political scholar, particularly on the US, but I met the news that President Obama had retaken the oath of office last night with a wry grin.

I say President Obama but, according to the reports, the White House Counsel team recommended that he retake the oath because both he and the Chief Justice said one word out of order when he took the oath for the first time on Tuesday, and that this might give conspiracy theorists and pundits an excuse to claim that he wasn’t ever officially President.

When I watched the swearing in, I had spotted that the word had been misplaced (and what a word to misplace), and had thought that someone or other might make a fuss, which they duly did.

Good on him though for putting it to bed straight away, rather than giving the fuel to the kind of ridiculous theories that have dogged previous events such as 9/11.

Congratulations Mr President. Again.

On hearing that Bush had left a note for Obama in the desk of the oval office, I couldn’t help wondering what it might say.

It could be something as innocuous as “Good luck – you’ll need it!”, or perhaps, “The red button is under the desk”; but I’d like to think it contains something similar to that note which passed between Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev in the sixties.

The story goes that after Khruschev was deposed, he left a note to his successor:

“To my successor: When you find yourself in a hopeless situation which you cannot escape, open the first letter, and it will save you. Later, when you again find yourself in a hopeless situation from which you cannot escape, open the second letter.”

And sure enough, it wasn’t long before Brezhnev found himself in a tight spot, so he opened the first letter, and it simply said:

“Blame it all on me.”

So he duly did, and it saved him,  prolonging his time in office significantly. 

Soon, he found himself in other difficult situation, but instead of panicking he dug out the 2nd letter. This one said:

“Sit down, and write two letters.”

The ridiculous EU has decided, in all their ill-conceived wisdom, that tungsten filament bulbs are to be phased out. The 100W one was killed off last week, and by 2012 even the lowly 40W will be consigned to the dustbin.

Their replacements are those ghastly, expensive, “eco” bulbs, which apparently last for years and use a quarter of the power of Edison’s equivalent. This is all very well and good, but what they don’t tell you on the box is that when you turn them on, you feel like you are in an operating theatre.

Gone will be the cosy nights by the fire, reading by the horrendously inefficient light of the bulb that has served us perfectly well for the past 100-odd years.

Ok, they may give off only 5% of the energy they use as light, and the rest as heat – but is that so bad? Surely that means you can turn the boiler down a bit.

Stockpiling has already started, apparently, and thinking about it I will probably be joining them as the date draws nearer; particularly as my missus has previously not allowed the eco bulbs in the house.

As Edison spins in his grave, start your hoarding now – and show the EU that when it comes to how we light our homes, they really should keep their well-fed snouts out.

I have to admit I’m a bit jealous of those who are spending the next few days in Washington. I’m not an American, but the sheer spectacle of it all will be something special I’m sure.

I will be glued to the BBC tomorrow, and will no doubt wish on a number of occasions that we could have Obama in number 10, instead of that Scot (can you say that these days?) Brown – if ever anyone needed a visit from Obama ASAP it’s him: maybe some of the personality will rub off.

Got a do in a few weeks’ time down in sunny Bournemouth, and the theme is 70s. Went to some fancy dress shop in Gorseinon the other day, and it was full of packs of nylon “clothing” at outrageous prices. If the credit crunch wasn’t the fault of the bankers and the housing speculators, it could quite easily have been the fault of the behemoth running this shop.

Anyone who can charge £45 for a nylon John Travolta disco “suit” and keep a straight face must surely be guilty of something, and if not: the law needs to be changed.

As it turns out, my brother had a pretty cool outfit a few years back for a do when we were at Uni together – mine has long since gone, and I wouldn’t be able to get the trousers above my knees these days anyway, but his is languishing in my other brother’s wardrobe apparently. Complete with afro!

Back in 1998, when I worked for a company in Harrow that had a US supplier, I once went to a trade show where we were exhibiting some of their products.

I’ll never forget what one of the American guys said to someone regarding digital capture technology, when the discussion came around to how wonderful it was. “When you digitise shit,” he said matter of factly, “you don’t get gold: you get a digital shit.”

His point, buried in that surprisingly un-American-like comment, was of course that unless the source material is good, digitising it won’t help – you’ll only end up with a more-or-less exact copy that won’t get any worse.

I was reminded of this the other day when I carted two boxes of CDs down from the loft. My plan is to digitise them all as audio files and then ebay/car boot/charity/sling them accordingly. Having finally made the big decision to get rid of them all, the thing is, I was then faced with an even tougher choice: what format to choose?

I plumped for Windows Media Pro Audio at 192KBps, which means that I am technically sacrificing half of the audio information somewhere. Lost forever, never to be heard again.

Will it matter? Probably not, but the loss of the music data will probably be easier to take than saying goodbye to some of the discs; one of which was my first ever CD single bought in 1990 in HMV Oxford Street – Adamski’s Killer.

That’s the price of progress I guess.