Personal Blogs

The link to all the my posts https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

[ 8 minute read ]

You make me want to be a better person

Because we cannot hear what our voices sound like to others we are surprised to hear it when we first hear a recording of our own voice. Similarly, I once heard that if we met ourselves in the street we would always thereafter cross the road whenever we saw ourselves to avoid another meeting; such is the distaste we would have at our own selves. In other words, we would not want to be friends with ourselves.

The man in his fifties

      'What, you don't need me anymore?', said the man in his fifties to me as he came down the library stairs. This man did not seem to be offended nor surprised, merely bemused. I suspected he was not significant in improving my day, and he seemed to be wondering what he would do before he finally disassembled after gradually fading, if I continued to ignore him. At least, that is what I was wondering.

I ignored this familiar, though not recognised man. I had no idea who he was, simply because I had never seen myself before without prejudice, and never heard my own voice coming from outside my own head, without the resonances in my mouth and nasal passages acting as feedback.

At the time I didn’t realise that I had imagined and created him to guard me and warn me of impending danger, which he had so far done exceedingly well, though not in a language that I understood, more as an uncomfortable feeling, of concern in a particular direction. I knew that it had been useful, really useful, to be somehow connected to someone unbiased and disconnected from the world by a slight phase shift; a delay of a few milliseconds. I had also used him as a counselor, or just someone to act as devil’s advocate; a sounding board, if you will; this was, after all, someone I had never met in the real world, would never be punitively accountable to, or ever expect him to tell my secrets. But at this time of first meeting a visible, seemingly solid, manifestation I was still clueless.

Later, when I was talking to an elderly lady, the man in his fifties came back, talking nonsense, well, almost nonsense; certainly interjecting himself in a boorish manner. He seemed to be someone else's idea of confident and open, and desperately, though dismally, trying to demonstrate some kind of learnedness that encompassed the current situation and everything in it.

Disgusted, I walked away and left him to it - not wanting to become engaged in any kind of difficult dialogue with him. I felt sorry for the elderly woman, leaving her talking to, what was really just obfuscation of her slight problem with a shopping trolley; a bit like inclement weather. I didn't know it was myself she was talking to, me just a few days, weeks, years ago, but now projected as a probable future outcome. It was that same person, me in the past and recent present, compressed into a single moment. I had, in fact, two decades ago as a teenager, created a manifestation to fill the gap in my own emotional mis-education. No wonder no-one liked me now if I was going to be like that.

During the next few days a few people, strangers I met, looked at me a bit too long as though they recognised me, or  puzzled as though I had sworn out loud for no reason, or saw a change in me. How could they? They had never met me. No, but it soon became apparent they had met the man in his fifties. To be fair, they hadn't actually met the man in his fifties. Instead, their own being, imagined, created or organically existing, inside of these strangers, who in their cases happened to be the same age as themselves, had met the man in his fifties; this being my future self if I did not change my ways. They knew each other, and on days off had sometimes met and wildly pontificated their theories on everything; they were, after all, not bound by a fear of failure and consequently were supremely confident.

Later that day, I met the elderly woman again. The wheel on her stolen shopping trolley was still about to fall off, much like it had been ‘borrowed’ in the 1990s and had never been properly maintained up to today. That in itself was strange, but that she looked like how my wife might look in forty years was overwhelmingly disturbing.

       ‘Who was that awful man?’ she asked. I had a strange feeling then that I was not going to remain married. This fleeting feeling of deja vu and prescience broke the veil of incomprehension. I understood in a small way who the man in his fifties might be.

Hakim, my outrageously handsome childhood friend met me at the bar in the pub that evening. He was much more sanguine about how my day had played out. When I say handsome, I mean that I try not be seen with him in public because, although my features are plain, in comparison with his, I would be arrested for being in possession of an offensive face. My only advantage was that being slightly taller than average height I towered over his diminutive one metre fifty stature.

We stayed sitting at the bar, our usual place. ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s nothing’, he said, ‘I have had whole conversations with animals about re-incarnation.’ He climbed down from his stool and flambuoyantly limped over to the docile dog in the corner.

      ‘Jean-Paul', he said, ‘When will you give me that ten Francs you borrowed from me twenty years ago in Paris?’ Hakim has a sense of humour that makes it difficult for me to know when he is joking or just crazy.

While Hakim was in the toilet, the man in his fifties came in, stood briefly at the bar, then took a stool there, two stools away, waiting to be served. My heart sank. It plummeted into depths of despair when Hakim walked jauntily back in without his limp and climbed his stool again. Please don’t talk to him, Hakim, I prayed.

‘Long time no see, Martin! Have a beer?’ My name is Martin but Hakim was not looking at me. I was beginning to realise that Hakim might actually have whole conversations with dogs, and why he is supremely confident; he could see my older self, just as I could. For the first time, I regretted reading that book. ‘Mind Games’, when I was fourteen, and particularly the chapter titled. ‘How to manifest a being’. A kaleidoscope of jigsaw pieces fell into place as developing thoughts in my mind. Most of these I knew to be only suppositions, such as virgins have a greater ability to manifest in the spirit world, like Oracles in ancient civilisations. I had manifested ‘Martin’, my avatar, before I had scratched the itch of carnal desire with someone else. ‘Martin’ was consequently, not a temporary being.

Alarmingly, it seemed that my manifestation now had agency over itself. I suspected that Hakim already knew this. I knew that I would not shake ‘Martin’ off, as me in thirty years time, without help. I looked hopefully at Hakim, who ignored me.

       ‘Get Martin whatever he is drinking, please.’ he said to the barman, gesturing to the man in his fifties.

Oh no! I thought, This is the being that guided me, without tripping, through a completely dark wood, after I fell in a ditch. I didn’t like this manifestation but I should.

- end -

Are these the persons who precede us? 

Realistically, I think first impressions in the real world do count, yet not necessarily in the ways that many people postulate. We can tell if someone is fit by the way they walk. We can tell if someone is polite or merely aware of social protocols. I am fairly certain that it is how we perceive ourselves that causes us to shape ourselves to a reasonable conformity of our expectations. I slouch, not so much because I am tall, but because I am jaded. I make mock gestures of tipping my hat to strangers to let them know I have a sense of humour and a recognition of manners past, because I feel isolated. There are a myriad of tiny things I do which I do not recognise because I have not met myself and can’t see them. If I met myself coming down the street, I would see a man tipping an invisible hat and jauntily and happily moaning about his perception of the world. I would cross the road to avoid myself. The little story is about how awkward I would feel if I had to introduce my embarrassing invisible friend (me) to my other friends, as someone I love and respect. Strangely, this invisible friend is someone my friends and family have already met.

‘Old Martin, You make me want to be a better person.’

[14 minute read]

Agency or agency? Part One

 Mental Health issues

Roget’s Thesaurus and dictionary, or the Internet?

From the 1962 edition, Roget’s Thesaurus has five entries for possible noun meanings;

agency; instrumentality; action; management; commission.

Eight diversions including ‘action’ which splits off into nine branches and management which splits off into 8 branches and commission which has ten relevant near synonyms, ostensibly under authority, as in ‘to have authority’. And it is perhaps this that I am most interested in alongside, under ‘instrumentality’, ‘effectiveness’. When combined, I am considering someone who has agency in their lives, for the purposes of maintaining their life to a level of that which meets their satisfaction, to have ’authority to be effective’ in their life. However, when someone downloads an app on their phone, have they given over agency to a third party technology firm?

The Oxford English Dictionary website largely reflects my understanding of how we miss out on peripheral information which could be useful to us later or immediately. The page mentions that ‘there are eight meanings listed in OED’s entry for the noun agency’. Impressively, it also gives nearby entries, which would be the words you would see on one of their pages in a book-type dictionary.

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/agency_n?tl=true

And yes, you can log in with your local UK library card, under Institutional Access.

In fact, the OED does not reflect, concur with, or mirror my understanding or sentiment. For me to believe otherwise would be madness. I am not the first to have an understanding that some avenues of seeking information are fraught with danger (There be dragons in uncharted waters) or, following the water theme, there is only a puddle of facts, or there may be a cascade or a fountain, of information. Determining where we get information should not be just about getting information; it should be from sources that allow us to make links to other seas of knowledge. When I say ‘links’ I do not mean canals or even rivers (though these are more organic). ‘links’, is not a modern word and it has been used as a verb for a long time, and today means, clicking an onscreen icon or text to open a new page on a device with a screen. I don’t even mean that. No! I mean how a tide ebbs on a beach and leaves rockpools that invite exploration and scrutiny. I mean a pastime of discovery, of hope and disappointment; a hunt for answers (or crabs).

Read a map or use SatNav?

So many of us use SatNav to guide us in our journeys from one place to another. I was once a professional driver. I can tell you that a SatNav should only be used for the final mile of travel. The whole of the rest of the journey should be by way of following a map and an A-Z of the city you are to visit. We should take back our decisions to go where we choose to avoid traffic and delays. The best use of a SatNav is to get you out of trouble. Follow the A-Z until there is a police incident right before you and then because the SatNav is on, do a U-turn and follow the SatNav to a safe place to stop and look at the map and A-Z again. Knowing where you are is both reassuring and interesting. I will give you an example of lazy driving; my own. I have always wanted to visit Chartes Cathedral, in France. I had to drive to Madrid, in Spain having set off from the south of England. Foolishly, I did not look at a map of France to see the alternatives routes I could take. Suddenly, I entered Chartes and there was the Cathedral. Two things then happened. My experience as a multi-drop driver told me to never stop unless it is for fuel or a breakdown, and my fatigue and reliance on the SatNav had sent me into a passive role. In effect, the ex-multi-drop driver was in control and driving, and the owner of an International Relocation business, me, was asleep at the wheel. I saw it there, only a couple of hundred metres away, but drove right past Chartes Cathedral. I was switched off; stupefied; semi-conscious; a passenger in my own life; dulled; blunted; unalert and boring. Effectively, the plan to get to Madrid overrode the formation of any new ad hoc plan to enjoy the journey.

Back to the reality of taking away the mundane task of being awake in England.

‘York Way is a major road in the London Borough of Islington, running north for one mile from the junction of Pentonville Road and Euston Road, adjacent to King's Cross railway station towards Kentish Town and Holloway.’ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/York_Way

You don't need to understand the route I am describing or even know London, England at all. You only need to look at a map.

York Way runs parallel to the A1 (Upper Street, Pentonville), which is to the east. The cars on the single-carriageway A1 during evening rush-hour are practically stationary. A SatNav will direct drivers to take this part of the A1 to go North from the major East-West road, the A501, City Road. Need I go on? Okay; at 5pm during the week, York Way is so empty that I have driven at 40mph for over a mile, taken a right turn on Fortess Road, at Tufnell Park, and driven at 30mph until I joined the A1 in Upper Holloway where the A1 is a dual carriageway. Any London A-Z will show this as a good route, just as is Caledonian Road, which is between York Way and Upper Street (A1). Never mind, just go to sleep and be a passenger behind the steering wheel. You never wanted to have agency over your lives anyway; you just didn’t want your parents to have it.

From the book of Joel (in the Bible) Joel 1:v5:

‘Awake, ye drunkards, and weep; and howl, all ye drinkers of wine, because of the new wine; for it is cut off from your mouth.’

Joel goes on to mention a nation that has come upon his land, strong and without number. This invasion has destroyed the vines from which new wine is made. Make what you will of that. Just picture an idyllic life in a rural setting in the sun and then take away the light from the sun and use only LED lights during the day. Take away the warmth of the sun and the fresh air and enclose the garden so the air-conditioner, dehumidifier, and heater are not wasted. Take away the smells of the flowers and rinse the air free from scent. Then you have my concept of blindly using a SatNav.

Bus timetable or phone app?

I worked in The Netherlands for a while and would catch the bus to Leiden, a major university town, in Holland. It is pronounced Ly-Den. I would wait for the bus without knowing when it would come, content in watching the Dutch world pass by. When the bus came, I would say, ‘Leiden alstublieft’ (alstublieft means please). The bus driver would say ‘Leide?’ (Ly-Der), and I would say, ‘Yes’. If I asked to go to Leide, the driver would say, ‘Leiden?’ (Ly-Den), and I would say ‘Yes’. This is an amusing quirk of catching a bus that could occur in any country, including our own. Catching a bus is not a dull, uneventful, journey of no value. Yet, so many of us use phone apps to see where the bus is and when it will arrive. I suspect this is because there is no recognition of an opportunity to engage with a moment in time that is significantly different to other times and has so much potential for activities that other times do not hold.

I had a new girlfriend of just a few months. I had booked tickets for a play in Plymouth; she lived in Devon. I had agency over the evolution of the day effectively. Of course, she would also share decision-making and she was a strong woman, and could end her participation in events at any time; of course. 

While we were still in her home, she instructed me to phone for details on train arrivals.

     'Are you going to phone, or do I have to?', she said, stridently annoyed at my relaxed attitude towards chaos.

I already had a printed timetable in my pocket; of course I did. I duly phoned and told her train times. To her, it seemed the world, with me in it, had obediently returned to a state of control. Within the same breath I ended our relationship. By this time, I had recognised that she didn’t want to live her life; she wanted to have lived it. She didn’t want to be going somewhere; she wanted to have already arrived. I reasoned the end of the relationship thus: When would we be able to explore the train station with our eyes while sitting on a worn bench eating an expensive stale sausage roll and pulling faces at  the rancid coffee bought on the platform? When would we have a moment to idle and meld into the ebb and flow of the station? When would we be able to smile at the other waiting passengers? Never. We would forever waste time in our homes, twiddling our thumbs while we wait for the taxi that will drop us off with just a minute or two before we would be whisked off on a silent train. You might think that all the fun things we could have done on the platform could be done now, on the train. There is one problem though, we cannot get off the train; we cannot change our destiny; we have given agency of our lives over to the taxi-driver and then to the inevitability of the train movement and arrival. Caught in a tide over which we have no control we won’t find the moment to just softly say, with any real and overwhelming conviction or sentiment, ‘I love you’, or ‘You make me smile’, or something. Our lives together would always be on the clock; segmented into episodes of how to best give our freedom away. It would be fettered by preparing for the moment when we must act; when we must march over to another ‘fairground ride’ over which we have no control and have paid handsomely for.

My, now ex-girlfriend, wouldn’t get on the London Underground; she preferred the buses. I love the Underground and Metro systems across the world. There is a growing sense of anticipation on the London Underground of the arrival of the train that announces its imminent appearance with a whoosh of warm and humid air just before it leaves the tunnel and meets the platform. I love that nobody looks at each other in the eye. I love that teenage girls who are friends sit on opposite sides of the carriage and signal to each other which of the young men standing between them have the best bum or bulge, with little head nods directed towards the winner of their secret competition. I love that they think it is fine to objectify men and judge them on their physical attributes because it is only a looking game for them, which they will grow out of. I love that they are not looking at their Smartphones. I hate that they are not looking at their Smartphones because they are safely tucked away so no-one will steal them. I love that they are forced to play little games that connect them to each other and their environment. I know that they can't get a signal for their Smartphones.

If I catch a bus to work each day, I know when the bus arrives; I don’t need an app on my phone because the discovery has already been made. If I am to only catch a bus once, let’s say to get somewhere in a city I don’t know, I don’t need an app on my phone; I will simply look at a bus timetable or swear because there is none, or ask someone who might know something. You never know, perhaps that elderly person at the bus stop will not get to speak to another person for the rest of the day. In any case, I will experience catching a bus and riding the bus or a train. If I love it, am bored by it, cramped because I have long legs, or just hate it; at least I will be alive and not be someone who just wanted to have lived, but never understood how to.

Cook now or cook later? Smart Meters

Some time ago I shared a house with someone who did not believe that chips could be made at home. I also shared a house with someone else who did not believe me when I told him that mashed potatoes is made with potatoes. He thought mashed potato comes out of a packet, and to actually boil and mash potatoes was the wrong thing to do in a kitchen. I had to show both of them what to do with potatoes.

I like making chips (strips of potatoes deep-fried in oil); sometimes I make crisps (very thinly sliced potatoes deep-fried in oil). I also live in an area which has no gas supply. Good restaurants have gas cookers or naked flames because control of heat is essential for cooking well. Cooking on an electric cooker is much, much harder than on a gas cooker. This may be a contributory factor in determining whether people eat healthily at home. Learning to cook with electric WILL give poor results.

A case in point: Most of the UK homes, I think have SmartMeters for the electric supply. They told us that we would save money because we could see how much electric we use. It is very rare that the power used by an electric device is not displayed somewhere on the exterior of an electric appliance. For example, a typical kettle, in the UK, uses between 1700 Watts and 2200 Watts (2200W). Do you need a counter-top device to tell you that you are using, say, 2200W per hour to boil water for your cup of tea? Of course not. Do you need a counter-top device to tell you that if you watch a television that uses 230W per hour, for four hours and twenty minutes you will have used 1kW, or one unit of electricity that has a known price attached to it? Of course not. SmartMeters have not been installed for your benefit; they were installed to notify the electric supplier of your usage and the overall usage of the area in which you live. 

Power supply is fraught with immense difficulty. Electric is difficult to store in large quantity. This means that the actual power generating stations must be agile and adapt extremely quickly to demand and just as importantly, reduce the supply when it is not required. Take for example a major sports event shown on the telly. If there are advertisements many people will get up and boil their kettle; not for the fun of it or to release tension, but for making tea and coffee. This puts an enormous strain on the power grid. SmartMeters have the capability of baffling the amount of power they supply at any given time and are controllable by the power suppliers; you know, the ones who send you a bill for your electric. 

SmartMeters can both limit the quantity of power that passes through them and the rate at which power passes through them. So, it may be that no more than 11kW per hour can ever pass through a SmartMeter, or during the times I want to make chips and need a good supply of unfettered excellent quality electric to make them crispy (usually tea-time) the rate of electric for my whole area is slightly reduced by the power suppliers because everyone else’s SmartMeters told the suppliers that there is usually a very high demand of electric at that time. 

The problem for the power generators (power stations) and controllers of the national grid is that they cannot just press a switch to reduce supply when everyone suddenly finishes cooking for themselves and their families. Oh Boy! Do the power suppliers want us to use microwave ovens that use 750W to 1200W for short periods of times; power usage that would be staggered over time within a regional area? Oh Yes. This is very much a lecture on whoever has knowledge has control over others.

So, do I make my chips now, or when no-one in my village is hungry? I have no agency on when I can make good chips at tea-times. Except that I do; I have a camping stove that uses gas canisters. Not only can I accurately control the heat, I can do it independently of everyone else’s predilection to all eat at the same time. WooHoo! I can control my life a little bit with cooking gas on a camping stove.

To make UK crisps at home you need to salt very thinly sliced potato slices (one of the grater type things that slices works well) and leave for a hour or so for the water to run out of the potato slices, and then deep-fry them in small batches at less than the highest temperature, to make sure the rest of the moisture evaporates off. They do need to be carefully watched because they go from soggy to golden very quickly. Also, they need to be taken from the oil still a bit soggy, to cool, which will allow them to brown a little more as they go crispy.

[14 minute read]

I had a question to answer that had no punctuation in it whatsoever. Clarification of the question would have taken at least a week, so I just went ahead and answered it. Obviously, this is not a question set by the Open University and certainly the answer I gave would fail at the first hurdle. But some courses do provide good mental exercise, so bash on.

At the time of purchasing explain “Different Approaches for Different Products and Terms and Conditions”

NOTE TO SELF -

Here we have:

At the time of purchasing, explain different approaches for different products, and at the time of purchasing, explain different approaches for terms and conditions

OR

At the time of purchasing, explain different approaches for different products, and at the time of purchasing, explain terms and conditions

OR

At the time of purchasing, explain different approaches for different products, and at the time of purchasing, explain different terms and conditions

Yet; since there are quote marks containing “Different Approaches for Different Products and Terms and Conditions” we must consider that there are different approaches for both different products and different approaches for terms and different approaches for conditions; because the sentence includes ‘products and terms and conditions’ without punctuation.

This, altogether, is known as ‘amphiboly’.

So, let us begin;

What is a product and how is it differentiated from another product?

What approaches can be made towards products?

What is a term and how can it be differentiated from another term?

What approaches can be made towards terms?

What is a condition and how can it be differentiated from another condition?

Finally, what approaches can be made towards conditions?

- END OF NOTE TO SELF

Products

Happily, we know what a product is. Raw instinct and empirical knowledge tells us that it is a tangible item that has been formulated either through natural means or through a deliberate process to change one thing into another. In both cases, this could be by way of chemical or biological changes, including applying pressure and/or the addition or subtraction of other elements. In any case, for our purposes, a product is the result of fabrication.

Each business will use a slightly different process to manufacture a product, even an almost identical product to another business. These processes, however, can be grouped into seven different categories. Usually, these categories, themselves, are simply referred to as processes. It is not difficult to understand that the process of making a cup of tea, (with prepared ingredients, such as picked and appropriately fermented leaves and flowers) in a kitchen or at a campfire can involve a series of different steps, some of which are interposable. It is only the ingredients and chemical changes that are relevant. It does not matter how the liquid is heated as a process, or whether it is heated at the beginning of the process of making a tea, or somewhere in the middle, as long as the whole process results in a tea.

The seven different processes of manufacture: Casting; Moulding; Metal forming; Labelling and painting; Joining; Machining including laser and water cutting; Additive manufacturing including 3D printing.

A purchaser of a product may approach different products in different ways to ascertain that the product is qualified as being adequate to the needs and requirements of the purchasing business. If we consider a product that has been cast, the purchasing business may be particularly concerned about the product’s porosity. So, a vase that has been cast, for example, will require a check that a vase that has been moulded (Am. molded) may not. Moulded products, we understand, have been subject to pressure and tiny air bubbles are forced out, which reduces porosity. Of course, a steel fabricated vase requires a check for seal integrity, and of course, the quality of protective coatings that have been applied. So, knowledge of the manufacturing process is crucial in determining which approach to use in purchasing a product. However, these lie well within the remit of procurement, since all these details are thrashed out and smoothed before any purchase is made.

If we continue with the vase example. A requirement for mass produced vases of low value will initiate a different purchasing approach than would a pair of matching boutique vases. Any ‘big-ticket’ product; that which has a high price, will require significantly more investigation into its integrity and its probable longevity. ¹ There are exceptions, of course; a very expensive bottle of champagne has only an emphemeral existence if it is bought with the intention to be drunk immediately. This bottle of champagne, however, if it is spontaneously bought by an individual, may not be considered to be a relatively (and prohibitively) high priced item if the purchaser has a very high financial income.

In economics, it is opportunity cost that determines how much effort is put into achieving a goal, or more importantly here, how much effort is put into achieving savings at the opportunity cost of generating revenue. Even, a celebratory bottle of champagne bought by a business may not induce much investigation into its pedigree or provenance, since it could easily be bought by a PA or someone outside of a procurement department. There is simply no reason to disrupt a procurement team from their normal focused activity for the sake of ordering a single bottle of expensive celebratory bubbly. A valid point here though is that much of the procurement checks have already been done by the retailer and their supplier of the champagne. So, up the supply chain, a wine merchant will inevitably make sure that the champagne, of a vintage, will have adequate provenance. They may have, indeed, ordered a significant quantity of the same vintage and have been in extended negotiations not only for availability but also for price. Such an occasion may arise for the sake of an end-consumer’s wedding when there is an ostentatious desire to serve excellent champagne. Again, here the end-consumer shunts off the lengthy procurement details to the wine merchant and instead concerns themselves with choosing a respectable wine merchant.

The end-consumer buying washing powder or liquid on a regular basis will use an heuristic from empirical evidence to determine whether to purchase the same brand and compound. Did it wash my clothes well and was it within my idea of a budget for cleanliness? However, buying a new car requires fitting the complete immediate family into it to see how well they fit, agreeing a colour, looking in the boot (trunk) and asking searching questions on economy and sustainability for answers from the dealer. The car is a high-end product that is a durable good and needs to last a long time against the money spent.

We should, however, not lose sight that when we say purchasing, we actually most often mean procuring. Purchasing is simply paying for something that is procured. Different approaches for paying can be: using credit, cash, lien (that later results in financial satisfaction), or bartering. This paying can be done before a product is received (or even produced); as a continuous series of payments; or at the finalisation of a job or delivery.

Terms and Conditions

Many people fail to understand that in the English language the word ‘if’ is a conditional which can be used in:

first conditional sentences - We use the first conditional to talk about the result of an imagined future situation, when we believe the imagined situation is quite likely. “If it rains I will take an umbrella.”

second conditional sentences – an imagined future wherein we say what the conditions must be for the present or future situation to be different. “This holiday would be great if it would just stop raining.”

and third conditional sentences – when we imagine a different past (now an impossibility). “If we had played a different strategy we would probably have won.”

For anyone who coded with BBC Basic decades ago the conditional IF statement would have an argument following it that checked or compared values. Simplified, this might be IF A>B. The IF statement would then be followed by a THEN statement which told the computer what to do next in the program. This might simply be THEN LET A=0 AND B=0. In effect, resetting the value of the A and B variables. There was also an ELSE statement that told the computer what to do if these conditions were not met.

‘Generally speaking, “terms” refers to the specific provisions or clauses of an agreement, while “conditions” refers to the broader requirements or obligations that must be met in order for the agreement to be valid.

- https://thecontentauthority.com/blog/terms-vs-conditions’

....the difference between terms and conditions is that the terms of a sale is the broad agreement between the two parties outlining a contractual relationship. The conditions are specific clauses that must be met for the deal to go through successfully.

- https://www.enzuzo.com/blog/difference-between-terms-and-conditions

Somehow, neither of these explanations make it clear that a condition is absolutely distant from a term, and the two explanations above contradict one another. A specific clause that must be met for the deal to go through successfully (enzuzo.com - above) is a term (The price is x). There is no wiggle room with a term. Breaking a condition carries a penalty – this is not so with a term. The terms of an agreement when making transactions may be – ‘We will supply you with x amount of units and you will pay us y amount of money within 30 days by bank transfer to an offshore account’. There is no imagined scenario other than the transference of ownership of the units before the transaction has been initiated. Where there is an imagined possibility, a condition to the terms is added, as in, IF you fail to pay within 30 days there will be a 15% surcharge on the whole order for late payment, which usually ends up being called ‘administration costs’. Another condition is IF you buy z amount the unit price is lower, but this does NOT affect the original terms as an offer and acceptance of a contract. There is an element of choice with a condition, such as compelling the customer to purchase before a specific date to achieve a discount; this is not true with a term. A condition we often find in the UK is that an offer is not available in Northern Ireland. This is ‘IF you live in Northern Ireland there is a penalty to pay on this offer in the form of no discount, no delivery, no service, etc. This is written as ‘Not available in NI’. This is not a term because eligibility is conditional on living in the UK except for Northern Ireland (sometimes The Isle of Man is also included). The terms for the rest of mainland UK are unaffected by this conditional.

However, if we take conditions to be ancillary to terms we end up with: ‘This transaction will take place (financing; operational – acquisition of products or services, labour, raw materials; sales – products and services) so long as you do this, or have this, or have a specific property that enables this. This latter could be a degree to move on to taking a Masters degree; possession of a yard big enough to take a delivery; or for some countries be of the right nationality to own a business in their country.

So, how can we take a different approach to terms or conditions at the time of purchase?

Well, terms are pretty much fixed by the time the negotiation stage of procurement has passed. The only thing to do to complete a contract is to make intention to complete a transaction clear. This intention could be for the contract to come into force at a later time and indeed, could be a rolling contract. In the latter case, there may not be an end date that has been set. So, we have an entry into why an approach to terms at the time of purchase may be required. While it is possible to secure a service, such as a mobile telephone contract for two years, it is rarely possible to commit a telephone company to freezing the monthly payment over the same period. What tends to happen is that the price of the service rises annually. Once the contractual period is over there is an open rolling agreement to continue as though a contract is still in place, except that either party can cancel the agreement at any time without penalty. Here then, we have terms that apply for the service which can be assessed at each purchase point after the contractual period is over. So, a new approach to the terms can be made. 

It is important here to understand that prior to there being a contract for the phone service the terms were spelled out and then the purchase was made. Once the contractual period is over, purchases have already been made, and importantly, experience of the service has been accomplished. This places the customer in a position of making a choice to continue with the agreement or make comparisons for service elsewhere every time they pay. For a business, a management control system would invariably be in place.

Since price is one of the terms of a mobile phone contract and the service provided is important (these days it is data download limits and connectivity), the user can approach the service provider as being merely a stop-gap between changing providers solely for convenience or to wait to see how the market changes to suit their requirements. An example here is Vodaphone, a very popular service provider.

 Vodaphone is one of the big four providers in the UK, that owns its own networks. Other smaller telephone service providers, which are called Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNO) rent network accessibility from the big four. Vodaphone is so popular that at certain times of the day, there is a significant diminishment of data download speed due to simultaneous network activity by many people. Essentially, the portion of their network that they have not rented out, and have instead retained for themselves, has been temporarily saturated. Yet, a smaller, and less popular service provider who has rented some of Vodaphone’s network may still have a huge capacity to provide an excellent data download service. An approach to a term at the point of purchase is by knowing that Vodaphone has an excellent network across the UK and knowing that a smaller service provider rents network space from Vodaphone (this is made clear from price comparison sites) a purchaser can make an excellent decision to use this competitor to Vodaphone because data download speeds are unlikely to diminish so much that immediate service is lost. With this example, the customer also makes an approach to a condition that the smaller service provider uses a specific network (Vodaphone instead of O₂ or EE or Three). However, which.co.uk has a comparison site that rates the service providers, including MVNOs, and gives an amalgamated score for each provider. This score includes ‘ease of contact’. 

One approach to a term or condition is ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. If they don’t mess up why contact them? Of course, the fickle public want to be able to tweak their services seemingly on a random basis – add this service, upgrade this service, turn on and off roaming, etc. 

Another approach at the time of purchase is to separate services across a number of service providers. Telephone calls with one service provider and data download with another provider. This, strangely, because it is NOT a ‘bundle’ can actually be cheaper. All one needs is a Smartphone that allows two sim cards or two separate devices. One approach at the time of purchase, following this separation of services onto different devices pertains to cyber security, as in cross-contamination of information, and a risk-averse approach to loss of connectivity with the wider world, at pinched points of time.

Blog address for all the posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

[ 11 minute read ]

Some of this might be historically true

Mental Health issues

People once had money........

Long ago, when humans were sane and had control over their own lives, they were happy. They had agency over their lives. They were a people who made decisions for themselves. ‘Ah ha!’, you cry, ‘Children had decisions made by their parents for them!’. You’re right; until they grew up, moved out, and experimented with the world under their own terms and then discovered that they were actually really rubbish at being responsible. That is when they made friends with their parents, instead of resenting them for interfering in (and ruining) their lives. Once these clueless teens realised that they needed help, they looked around for it and found it in their parents. They then respected their parents. They didn’t realise it, but they respected them. Advice was given to them, along with options that were available to them, and then they navigated the problems and nasty bits of life and got on with their lives. Mum and Dad didn’t fix it for them and so they gained respect for themselves. Because they respected themselves, they looked after themselves and then died; usually naturally, in old age, with money.

Then the world was given home computers, but not before Atari gave some of the adventurous people, ‘Pong’, an on-screen tennis game. ‘Pong’ was fine, it wasn’t addictive; it was only played when they were bored. Boredom meant they had not done enough to entertain themselves. Boredom was a punishment for not leaving their homes and socialising through exercise.

Granted, for some in the halcyon days of long ago, exercise was only given to the right arm that went from waist to chin height, waist to chin height, waist to chin height; with single repetitions of, perhaps, twelve to fifteen per hour, for four hours; and during, and between, this arm-exercise plenty of fluids were taken on-board, while a great deal of socialising took place. Scattered among these mostly male fitness-freaks were a few women. For most, that exercise was restricted to Friday and Saturday nights only; unless a religious holiday, or the last day of the year fell during the week. The reason the weekday restriction was in place was for two reasons only; it was expensive exercise; and this kind of exercise, conversely, impaired work capability. People were greatly respected for this self-imposed responsibility. Arriving at work on a Monday was much celebrated among work-colleagues.

However, for many people, lifting an ever-decreasing weight, twelve to twenty-four times per hour for four to five hours per night was so enjoyable that they did not restrict it to only two days each week, and were so keen to feel the burn the next day that they took no nights off. These people had lots of money! Their work was well paid, and there were whole packs of them with well-fed spouses and children in their warm homes. The only drawback for these people was that too much of this kind of exercise impaired their judgement and they made decisions that they regretted the next day. However, this recognition of making a mistake meant that they were continuing to learn and they were pleasing themselves in making resolutions to improve; in effect, much like their recently ‘left-home’ offspring. Everyone was happy.

Sensible people in the same industries, however, stayed at home during the weeknights. They had other harmless ideas that would never lead to harm. Many of us, today, fondly remember the grandparents of the presently afflicted. Bless them, they could never have known what they had harboured in their safe homes, while their raucous peers eshewed the three channels on the TV, in the UK.

The digital two-player Atari ‘Pong’ game, played through a television set with a home-owned console, was as harmless as tilting a little glass-covered square to manouver a ball-bearing through a maze. Yet, the analogue ball-bearing in maze game was better; Oh, far better! There was a building sense of anticipation that had rising waves and falling troughs of achievement, that if the maze was completed, resulted in such satisfaction and attendant cascading dopamine, that it took many seconds to recover from it; and a sibilant ‘Yes' was commonly heard, at this time. The point is, that people mostly had agency over their lives. They could put the gadgets down.

Then, after a fascinating period of new gadgets; which came about through the invention of the magic transistor; a digital switch (current on – current off) and other arcane digital discoveries and manifestations; a small fraction of the world’s population were told that they could have their own little spooky box that would not only replace their home typewriter, but allow them to make endless copies of their carefully scripted letters to their Councils and Bank-Managers, AND they had real-time editing of those letters. Many homes were cleared from rubbish, both on the floor and in the air; scrunched up balls of paper frustratingly hurled at a bin that didn’t respect their aim, and ‘Dammit!’ vanished. Not only was the typewrite gone but with one of these new digital typing machines that strangely also allowed home accounts to be digitally kept, the bin became nervous from lack of use, and miserably and quietly kept to heel. The kids liked this replacement box and keyboard too, because for a vast amount of treasure (that realistically materialised only two times a year - one being a religious holiday) the games that were played in the amusements arcades, the ones that had bred from the fecundity of new supplicants to the digital games, and moved from the periphery of small nations surrounded by sand and salty water, into the medium sized conurbations, were now available a the flick of a switch. Nobody, however, could afford ALL the games in the palaces of flickering lights and digitally created ‘clangs and dings’, for their home use. The electronic section of a sea-side transported to a town stayed for a while longer next to cinema, without the sea gulls and fish and chips.

Initially though, it was only the serious adults who wanted to appear ‘mentally contained’ to their bosses, and bank managers who bought this home office. They wondered what else to do with it, and separated themselves from their, by now, dreary spouses, to instead push around some digital letters. The strongest mental exercisers found that they could produce digital images and psuedo-presentations. It was, at least, better than the telly, and since they almost never exercised only one arm and never the other arm, found that they could get some separation from their mindlessly raving peers, and a smidgeon of relaxation, not least through silence, unless you discount the music, (with rubbish sound reproduction) they keep on them. Their kids were a bit disappointed as well, because the anticipation of winning a reward of tiny financial wealth by inserting a two pence piece into a glass covered electric machine with a reciprocating wall that may serendipitously push their money into a pool of hundreds of other coins to make them move towards a edge of a precipice that had an access hole to the outside for players to collect their reward, still remained quite firmly at the edges of small countries and in large conurbations, next to the cinema. So, anticipation of a positive reward, lasting for only a few fleeting seconds, was still absent in their homes. Things, however, were about to change.

A bit before 1996, there was a tribe of Japanese technocrats who realised that kids wanted to keep digital pets in their pockets. Finally, anticipation of a dead pet hooked a generation. They gave us ‘The Tamagochi’. The End was Nigh. The Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Atari’s Pong just could not cut the mustard; they were ‘Marmite’, while Tamagochi was crack cocaine.

Today, everyone is an avatar extra in ‘Stepford Wives’ with a perfect life, despite living on a run-down UK Council Estate; or a blur of a person, more excitingly present in both the past and the present, simultaneously in multiple places, but not, consciously, at the breakfast table.

Just so you know, in early 1990s Britain, no-one was surprised to have to wait ninety days for a parcel to arrive; To even think of Just-in-Time supply chains was quite simply madness. Inventory costs, or keeping things in warehouses makes up about 25 per cent of the cost of supplying an item, so if someone ordered something, before Just-in-Time logistics, it had to be ordered from China, or Taiwan, or some other far-off manufacturing country. Unless, it was manufactured in one’s own country or the one next door.

‘We had joy, we had fun. We had seasons in the sun. But, the joy couldn’t last because the season’s went too fast.’ Lyrics in ‘Season’s in The Sun’ sung by Terry Jacks.

..........and then technology arrived.

Blog address for all the posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

[15 minute read]

Happy Birthday, Fool

Long ago, before people in the technologically advanced countries on Earth had mobile phones, adult siblings would often not wish each other a happy birthday on their actual birthdays. Of course, many of them sent birthday cards, mostly when distances were so great that travelling for the annual events to the area in which the celebrant lived; was too time-consuming; or expensive. It is this valuation that intrigues me, particularly in light of being the recipient of birthday wishes by text messages from my sister, when we, in the modern world, both had mobile phones; now, more accurately, they are personal phones. It is this idea of mobile phones being personal phones in that they are considered to be an actual facet of a person, and not just a handy conduit to a person, that, for me, is strange indeed. What I mean by this, is that we are all only a decision away from having a digital implant in our brains that operates just as a mobile phone does.

How much someone values someone else used to be measured on whether someone visits someone else at Christmas and random times, or at least meets up with family; it used to be writing letters to family members; bringing back souvenirs, or sending postcards when you went abroad, or at least when someone went somewhere relatively far away.

How rude of my sister when she sent me a text message wishing me ‘Happy Birthday’ on my birthday, instead of calling me from the same device she had in her hand. Perhaps, she might have excused herself by saying she had no credit to make a call because she had free texts; but free texts or calls were only to numbers on the same network, in those days. Now, of course we have unlimited everything. Perhaps, I was only worth 10p to her, or the time it takes to write fourteen characters and my number followed by ‘Send’.

Furthermore, how did we come to think that an email was preferable to a birthday card? Did we really decide that a text with no nuances, or an email with no personalisation, such as handwriting, was suitable? When did we think that fulfilling a chore could be accomplished at arms-length and minimum effort or forethought, and that same desiccation of emotion would be welcome as an alternative to a kiss.

I brought you some grapes. Mmmm, these are lovely?

If we visit someone we know, in hospital, who are we doing it for? Do we feel a sense of duty, that for us, manifests within us as a personal need that we must fulfill; like having an itch that simply must be scratched; or do we visit them because the need we have is to make the hospital-bound person a little happier, by showing compassion towards them? Are we not merely satisfying our own need in both cases. So, when my sister sent me a text message on my birthday was she just being selfish?

But, is being selfish taken to a new low level when we now think that when a tourist venue offers financial concessions for certain groups of persons that means those people may enter for free upon showing a letter of recognised disability or financial hardship that demonstrates eligibility for the full concession, we might ask if a screenshot from a website that shows eligibility is acceptable instead? To be clear about this: A cathedral in Kent, England gives full concessions to visitors who are on government granted financial benefits that are paid to jobseekers or workers whose earnings are below a certain threshold. The cathedral website states a ‘letter’ of eligibility needs to be produced for free entry.

In Negotiation, there is an acronym, BATNA, which is: Best Alternative to A Negotiated Agreement. In Law, a contract is in place when an offer is accepted; there must also be something moving from one entity to another. That ‘something, can be either tangible, such as product; or intangible, such as a right or a freedom. A contract can often be expressed very simply using only a single condition; the presence of the conditional ‘if’ in a statement makes things clear for the average person – ‘If you give me that, I will give you this.’ Let us write this simple contract thus:

If you prove, with a letter from a government body, that you are in receipt of a government-issued financial benefit (Universal Credit) we will completely waive any entry fee for you, and you can enter for free.

What person would try to negotiate for the best alternative to this agreement? I will tell you: anybody in the modern world whose moral compass is so skewed by their acceptance that fulfilling one’s own need is the same as fulfilling a duty, or the same as making someone feel loved for a while. The recognition of duty to each other to comfort and offer assistance seems to have been completely washed away of late.

Yet, the UK government has decided that it will not issue letters of entitlement to people in receipt of Universal Credit so they can accept an offer for free entry as a visitor to a Cathedral, and instead gives advice to renegotiate a new contract for free entry with a screenshot of the benefit-recipient’s entitlement. What this means for the average person in receipt of Universal Credit and hoping to visit a cathedral with a full entry fee concession, is that they need to check that free admission is applicable with new conditions being met; typically a phone call that very near to the beginning of the conversation will use the conditional ‘if’ in a question – ‘If I show you a screen-grab / screenshot of my entitlement to government benefits will you let me in for free?’ What was simple; click the checkbox for your visitor slot and show the letter eat the entry point, is now complicated by an erosion of common-sense right at the top of the Government and at the fabric of our society.

When a government promotes that kind of behaviour we know we can expect a desertification of confidence in one another and a crumbling of the edifices of courtesy and manners through lack of maintenance because there are no more engineers left to check for decay.

I understand that this laxity in manners has come about because by having personal phones we simply cannot be bothered to comply with instructions or conditions when there are clear rules and guidelines, and so many of us simply phone up and renegotiate the conditions we can't be bothered to comply with. We do this because we get a buzz out of conversation, and we get a buzz out of settling something while avoiding greater effort to achieve the criteria a business has set out for eligibility; in other words – terms and conditions.

An email to my grandma on her birthday saves me walking to the post office for a stamp and an envelope; I don't need to find a pen. 'I know I had one, when I was at school!'; and the emoji or emoticon for a smiley face is cute.

Let me tell you why I am thinking that there is an overall erosion of sensibility in modern society. I was offered a job which I formally accepted. The start date was agreed and everything was in place and understood. I even received an email saying ‘Welcome…..see you on [date]’. And here is the kicker – it went on, ‘If you have any questions email me’. About a week later the recruitment agency, through which the job was arranged, questioned me on why I did not reply to that email. ‘I have no questions.’ I said. ‘But, you should thank them for giving you the job and tell them you are looking forward to starting.’ I sent an email to the business to tell them I cannot take the job because we must eliminate this third party element (job recruitment agency) immediately. I was told by the business that the third party element cannot be bypassed. I rejected the job. Apparently there is now, in the modern world, a requirement to unnecessarily and inanely chatter once a contract is in place. The agreement to work for the business was to do a particular job for x amount of money and for x amount of hours. – end of! Nothing else, terms and conditions fulfilled. No need for reassurance. Would you work for an insecure business owner? Not I! I owned and ran a very successful international relocation business. It worked like this. Tell us what you have to move; from where to where; and when to move it, and we will give you a guaranteed price and a guaranteed start-time AND FINISH TIME on your chosen day, with a GUARANTEED PRICE. (We also made it clear on the website that if you lie to us we will impose unlimited penalty charges, that equated to our penalty charges for being late to the next job, if we are delayed by your deceit).

Once the quote was accepted we sent an email with the details in it to the booker. There was then no more communication. Now, ten years later, we would need to send an email every week just to say we have not forgotten our agreement, and everything is on target, and there are no changes to the price or the time or the dates. In effect, everything is the same. 

We stopped trading at the peak of our success because suddenly, in 2020, everyone got scared and they have never got well again. Nothing had changed with us; we still honoured contracts and those contracts did not include petting and patting nervous entities. Successful businesses, offering excellent service at the best prices, do not have the resources to stroke and tickle nervous customers without different sensible people paying for it. Of course, ‘added services’ for product sales was already billowing, with an ill-wind, throughout honest trade to show, like a waggy-tailed puppy, shallow and delighted attention (that is likely to be revised and diverted at a moments notice when there is a distraction). 

Would you trust someone who says they will be at a meeting place once, or someone who constantly states that they will be there? Think for a moment; why would the second person feel the need to update you? Because one of you is unreliable. However, once you get used to obsequious service you kind of miss it and start to feel nervous when you don’t get it anymore. Ultimately though, the customer ends up paying more money for something that would otherwise have been very simple.

According to Statista , in 2005, the USA sent a total of 81 billion text messages; in 2011, 2.3 trillion; and in 2021, 2 trillion (down from the years 2020 and 2019). With approximately 370 million people in the USA, including infants, that 2021 figure comes to 5405 messages received by each person in that year. (an average of 14 - 15 messages every day)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/185879/number-of-text-messages-in-the-united-states-since-2005/

In the UK, according to sellsell.com, in 2012, almost 151 billion SMS and MMS messages were sent; and every year since 2012 the number has decreased so in 2022, 36,440,000,000 (36.44 billion) were sent. With approximately 70 million UK people, that means approximately 2,157 messages were received by each person in 2012; in 2022, approximately 520 messages were received by each person that year. That is an average of 10 messages per week. Clearly another form of social media is used in the UK.

https://www.sellcell.com/blog/how-many-text-messages-are-sent-a-day-2023-statistics/

Realistically, we have to consider that these figures may only reflect the number of messages that were received by individuals because messages are also sent by businesses. The point is not lost in recognising that the recipient responds to a message by looking at their phone and reading the message; and even looks at their phone when their phone has not notified that a message has been received and when there is not a message to read.

MTV, the music-TV channel, launched in 1981, was one of the first to put streaming 'ticker-tape' type text at the bottom of the music video. Some people had difficulty in watching the band playing and reading the scrolling text. However, we soon developed the ability to comprehend both. We now desire multiple streams of entertainment simultaneously; hence the anticipation of texting and social media interaction that many of us experience throughout the whole of our waking lives.

While I do not condone recreational drug use, some studies have shown that a marijuana smoker is as attentive to their work environment as a person who consistently checks their SmartPhone and responds to messages throughout the day. Given the choice, as an employer, of whether to hire an illegal drug user or a regular user of a SmartPhone, the pot-head wins. The pot-head only loses out if they are dealing too. I mean let's face it; try getting a SmartPhone addict to do a repetitive job. Each of these people-type examples, it seems clear, is trying to ameliorate, what they perceive to be a boring existence, with a panacea, different for each but still a panacea. It is sad that we need drugs to put up with our banal lives and make it through the day. 'Whew! Made it! Oh, wait. One last check of my phone, or one last toke, to take away distraction and help me sleep. 

So, what does all this come down to? The thrill of anticipation of a return text or expected telephone has become an addiction to dopamine, which in turn, has twisted into a malevolent paranoia that things are not well, when the pleasure centre (Am. center) of our brains in not triggered often enough, simply because all is not well because we are not getting our ‘fix’ of dopamine often enough. If nobody calls us or texts us, we feel unwanted and left out, if we have not yet become a junkie. And like all addicts, our judgement is impaired when we both, get our fix, AND when we don’t. As an employer, given the choice between a dopamine junkie and a clean person with the same experience and qualifications, the dopamine junkie would not even get an interview for a job I might offer. The questions that needs to be answered are: Are you selfish? Are you insecure? and, will work be a sufficient distraction from your need for connection?

What distracts you?

I once got asked when, conducting research, I applied for a job, ‘What distracts you?’ I thought, ‘Nothing’. The question was actually code for, ‘How many times a day do you look at your phone?’ I left their premises very much saddened.

All of us are a single decision away from having digital devices implanted in our heads.

Bibliography

‘About duty-based ethics’, Duty-based ethics, BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/introduction/duty_1.shtml

Blog address for all the posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

‘Why, because you always speak in imperatives: like all beauties when they are in their prime, you are tyrannical...’ – Meno – The Socratic dialogue by Plato

Giving commands is an attribute of someone with power and authority; obeying commands and orders is a sign of subservience and subjection. In effect, there is an hierarchy. Yet, somewhere along the line there is respect, at least one hopes so.

In an ordered environment, such as one in which experience and good conduct results in promotion to a higher position in the local community; work environment, there may well be jealousy diffused among the unworthy of command. There may also be one or two people with a hankering to attempt to sway favour, from the elevated positioned person(s). towards themselves . In the UK, we call this person a ‘brown-nose’.

So far, we have two types of character attributes; jealous and deviously selfish.

Bovine character, flat character, or NPC

Many people are simply bovine in their thinking; this is a job and it pays wages. Or, as cattle think, ‘This is grass and it feeds me’. Great! We can’t all be the chief. I am one of these ox-like people, and I, like every one of those cows on the commuting train, have other bigger fish to fry. Hmmm! Bad usage of mixed metaphors! Cows eating fish? I overheard a conversation on a bus yesterday: ‘…...They serve vegan chicken there’. I thought, ‘Yeah, chickens ARE VEGAN’. I forgot they eat worms and insects.

Being outwardly dull by dint of not wishing to waste energy on useless and temporary conversational unity is only broken when one person selects another for only two things; conveyance of information, and another desire to assuage a compelling need. Ultimately, this need is for companionship, I suggest; in the short-term and with a hope of a longer term shared policy of frequent connection.

Back to the hierarchy of power and control.

Now we have highlighted the drone workers, the jealous, and the obsequious persons in our group, we may be left with some that have respect for their leader and a desire to attain the same level of pay their leader has. These persons may be compelled by a single idea; money. Let’s separate these characters from our milling crowd, who are already beginning to form into their respective groups. Over there, if we look closely, we can see the flatterers fawning over each other and smiling too much.

Let us hope now, that, that one mild person without the spotlight on them, in the corner, quietly waiting for an introduction on our gameshow, is someone who cares for others, and wants to lead by example, and has the capability to create bridges and ladders for others to follow their footsteps. Let’s call her Mary (she is mentioned later). Perhaps, if we are gentle, she may put her book down when we bring her forward for inspection. Unfortunately, there is another person in the room, distant from our direction of gaze, but never far from our attention. This is the person that Meno in the Socratic dialogue by Plato, is speaking of.

Person of Interest

This is the person, who is physically attractive. I suggest that, amost everyone is initially distracted by a physically attractive person. Worse, still, for those of us who are the meek person in the corner striving with concerted effort to achieve something in life as a builder that needs recognition, if this beauty is eloquent in speech, we shall remain a ‘flat’ character in a story. The focus will be on the cheery, peppy, humourous (humorous Am.) entity that brings a joy to turning up for work each otherwise dreary morning; ‘Meet Dave, he swims like a fish!’ A welcome relief from the cud-chewing cows on the train and on the bus. Or, ‘Meet Mandy, she sings like a bird’. A welcome relief from the non-vegan hens clucking over their lunch-time worms in the canteen.

Farmer for a day

Sadly, it is only the hungry who get to eat at the top table, so our story ends with a magnificent cockerel (Rooster Am.) or a trilling song-bird with enchanting songs, taking a managerial role and systematically and ruthlessly abusing the talents and experience of the egg-laying hens, and the herd of cows thoroughly and diligently munching through their work and re-checking their efforts, in order for that cuckoo to maintain a semblance of efficacy in their role.

A sour outlook, I grant, yet we should be wary of the person with bigger fish to fry.

In case you got lost in this zoo of wondering; a parallel principle behind this, is that vegans are people who will not contaminate their bodies with produce that has been formed by harmful activities on other sentient entities. The difficulty for vegans, I feel, is whether they should choose organically farmed crop that might use bone meal, animal manure, and fish blood as a fertiliser, or foodstuff that is grown using chemical fertilisers. This is absolutely not an attack on any person with any culinary preference.

The Showdown

Finally,

‘Come on down, Mary!’

      ‘Hello’

      ‘What do you do for a living, Mary?’

Mary sheepishly smiles, with a mischievous glint in her eyes.

      ‘I work in a chip shop.’

[Cut to game-show host]:

      ‘Lovely! Are we in for a treat tonight, folks. We have as competitors, a fish-fryer, a professional angler, and a custodian of a disused Victorian coal mine who breeds canaries. On our experts team, we have Mark, who swims like a fish; Mandy, who sings like a bird; and Giles....'

[Zoom to close-up of host]

[Host winks and gives beaming conspiratorial smile]

     '.....who is our actual secret farmer.'

     'Which one of our contestants will win the grand prize of being farmer for a day? Will it be Mary?

[Cut to close-up of Mary]

     'Solomon?'

[Cut to close-up of Solomon]

     'or Eve?'

[Cut to close-up of Eve]

[Cut to beaming smiling host]

     'Let's find out!'

Long ago, in a country that speaks Latin, there were two siblings, ‘a priori’, a girl, (nicknamed ‘pri’) and ‘a posteriori’, her brother (nicknamed ‘post’). Pri would only ever speak of things that she had no experience of, and Post only ever spoke of things he had experienced. They argued all the time, Pri used deductive logic and knew that things were so, because she reasoned it out, while Post used inductive logic, and only knew things like, you get burnt if you put your hand into the flames of a fire, because he had tried it. He had many burns and scars from trying things out. Of course, Pri had no scars or past injuries, because she had used logic such as; fire is hot; fire cooks meat; cooked meat is softer than raw meat and more easily chewed; therefore meat is changed by heat. She also knew that if she got really hungry she could cook and eat her brother. Post, however, did not know this and was therefore not afraid of Pri, his sister. Because Pri knew that her brother could never know that his sister was potentially food, without having eaten her first, she was also not afraid.

In reality, someone who never uses empirical knowledge would never learn that heat cooks meat and makes its more chewable and so more digestible, and they certainly would never learn to eat or communicate.

a priori and a posteriori

a priori knowledge is independent from any experience

a posteriori knowledge depends on empirical knowledge

Converse to the roles played by the characters above: In the Bible, in the Garden of Eden, Eve eats fruit from the tree of knowledge. This is not a normal tree of knowledge. Its fruit embues (sic) ‘knowledge attained through experience’ to the eater. Suddenly, Eve had experiential knowledge, whereas Adam, had only knowledge based on definitions and first principles. In almost any bipartisan relationship, I suggest, where one partner has experience and the other does not, there exists an unfillable gap; a chasm that continues to grow between the pair. The obvious solution is for Adam to also eat from the tree of knowledge. Yet, it was Adam’s remit to follow doctrine and not make up reasons for doing things simply because he knew how good it felt to do those things. But, Eve, the minx, got Adam addicted to pleasure, the naughty girl. Yes, you guessed it, it is because of Eve that y’all have SmartPhones, and are addicted to dopamine. The canny people out there also realise that without Eve none of us would get invited to parties. Go Eve!

In a court of law, like any place where decisions are made that determine how someone’s life will continue to unfold or exist, ‘a priori’ arguments appear to be cold and immutable. Mathematics uses ‘a priori’ analysis, as do scientists. Engineers, on the other hand, use ‘a posteriori’ analysis; inductive logic, which comes from observational evidence. That is not to say that they do not also use ‘a priori’ arguments or logic; it simply means they solve problems in the real world with workable solutions. I once overheard a welder complaining that a computer told him to bend a sheet of steel in three dimensions.

Let us imagine an early settlement of 500 people that is separated by a fast-flowing river from another settlement with an enticing and attractive market. It is essential to the person who uses only ‘a priori’ analysis that a toll-bridge must be built at the narrowest point of the river, which is half a mile north of the settlement. To this person, the cost of the bridge, being the wages for lumberjacks and engineer-type carpenters, must be recovered from the users of the bridge. To a person who has experience of the bears in the woods half a mile north, the sensible place to cross the river is closest to the settlements. This person, who has used 'a posteriori' knowledge, becomes a ferryman and charges the same as the toll for the bridge, and because there were no set-up costs to recover, makes so much money he builds a monument, in the village square, mocking ‘clever’ people. (Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to come up with a way for the 'clever' people to get their revenge on the ferryman).

People use both these types of reasoning, and in any scenario there will be characters who dwell, even for shorts periods of time, in one or the other camps of decision-making. These types of thinking are used before and after education or experience.

prior – before, in front, ‘previous’

posterior – later, after, inferior ‘behind’

A priori and a posteriori

From Wikipedia: 'A priori and a posteriori are Latin phrases used in philosophy to distinguish types of knowledge, justification, or argument by their reliance on experience. A priori knowledge is independent from any experience. Examples include mathematics, tautologies and deduction from pure reason. A posteriori knowledge depends on empirical evidence.'

Prior analytics (a priori) is about deductive logic, which comes from definitions and first principles.

Posterior analytics (a posteriori) is about inductive logic, which comes from educational and empirical evidence.

Deductive reasoning

This involves starting from a set of general premises and then drawing a specific conclusion that contains no more information then the premises themselves. (dictionary.com 2021)

Inductive reasoning

Inductive is a way to describe something that leads to something else, so when applied to reasoning it just means you collect information and draw conclusions from what you observe. (vocabulary.com)

Roget’s Thesaurus helpfully offers ‘subtract’ as a near synonym for ‘deduct’. If we deduct four coins from these six coins, how many do we have?

Roget’s Thesaurus also helpfully offers ‘cause’ and ‘influence’ as near synonyms for ‘induce’. We can induce someone to believe something. In physics, electro-magnetic induction is causing electricity to flow by changing or altering magnetic fields.

 mental health

Making sense of the world by imagining other worlds

For those people who like to write their own stories and develop characters to understand their own world around them: when someone makes an abrupt change from one way of thinking to another, it can be discombobulating to the persons they are with, or who are observing that person. We all use both deductive and inductive reasoning, yet the extent to which we dwell in each camp determines who we get on with. This is not much different to people who have been trained in convergent thinking making decisions about people who evince no training in convergent thinking. Essentially, if you have ever felt as though you have been ‘pigeon-holed’ or heard someone say that they have been ‘pigeon-holed’ ^[1], you have just met the victim of someone using convergent thinking to assess the needs or circumstance of others (perhaps yourself). 

People with low mental health; that is all of us at some point in our lives, tend to use divergent thinking during our episodes of illness. Divergent thinking is used for creativity. So, if you have just been dumped by your boyfriend or girlfriend, you will likely make up stuff in your head, like, that person was the love of your life, if you didn’t think that before. Convergent thinking is used for writing essays and reports, and Divergent thinking is used for creativity. Convergent thinking is much like the cowboys of old America rounding up cattle and keeping them in a bunch to get them to an exact location somewhere miles away. Divergent thinking is the humour (Am. humor) and banter the cowboys along the way. By the way the cowboys use a lot of convergent thinking when it comes to being paid for their job; i.e. I did this and this, for this many days and I expect this amount of money ('Let's get to the point, Boss!')

Ultimately though, there has to be a merging of these thinking styles if you are planning on learning from your experiences and sharing them. That is to say: there has to be structure and sadly, robust pruning of the fun and creative playground we once dwelt in as children to become, as adults, a figurative fenced-off imagination. I propose that it is the liminal space (at the invisible fence) that story-tellers spend their richest time: the threshold between order and chaos. Great film-makers use our ability to access our experiences by showing us where the fence between order and creativity exists. The film has a plot (order) but is believable because the characters are creatively formed. A murder mystery must have someone with a motive, for example.

1 Pigeon-holing means to classify entities into categories, often with negative connotations – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Pigeonholing

References

dictionary.com (2021), Available at: https://www.dictionary.com › e › inductive-vs-deductive

Marketing and beavers

Producers are people, businesses and organisations that make things. In a supply chain these things are called goods. However, it is possible to produce a result without there being anything tangible such as by providing a service, which could even avoid a reciprocal service, monetary remuneration, or other recompense. Hence it is possible to produce an idea, concept, hypothesis or theory. It is possible to produce a flood that damages an area or property. These ideas and calamities are causes of an effect that are the kernels of demand in ‘the wild’.

Ideas and concepts can be innovations or disruptions. Beavers and pranking children can devastate lowlands by diverting or damming streams. Alternatively, beavers create good habitats for wildlife and are exceptionally good at maintaining a status quo once they have flooded an area. Maybe this tangent is a little obscure in its efficacy to be considered to be part of a supply chain but only if we consider the effect beavers solely have on human lives. The beaver collects wood after working as lumberjacks for a while. As a consequence of building a dam it supplies water to an area that previously had only rainfall. Flora and fauna that like wetlands come to the area, some birds arrive as tourists who regard the area as a second home until it gets too cold for them. These plants and animals leave detritus and excrement which adds to the desirability for other plants to settle there and consequently the animal and plant diversity rises. Each one of these plants and animals are stakeholders in the supply chain as producers in a wide and versatile environment.

Humans are much more direct in their nature and harvest materials to produce goods not only for their hungry digestive systems but also for their material enjoyment, comfort and ease. Worse still, they do this for profit. Nonetheless, we must allow this because if businesses and organisations make no profit then taxes collected by governments would have to be on revenue, which would likely put charities out of business.

Producers make tangible goods and conduct intangible services such as washing clean cars. (We can see them do it and sometimes see an improvement).

Social Learning

Proposed by Albert Bandura in 1977, he said humans can delay gratification and dispense their own punishments and rewards. We can reflect on our own actions and change future behaviour. This led to the idea that humans learn not from how they respond to situations, but also from how other humans respond to situations. Bandura called this ‘modelling’. In social learning we learn by observing other’s behaviour.

For adolescents, role models include parents, athletes, and entertainers, but parents are the most influential (Martin and Bush, 2004). Parents socialise their children into purchasing and consuming the same brands that they buy, actively teaching them consumer skills – materialistic values and consumption attitudes in their teenage years. Interaction with peers also makes adolescents more aware of different offerings (Moschis and Churchill, 1978). Research indicates that those who read reviews are twice as likely to select a product compared with those who do not (Senecal and Nantal, 2004).

In understanding people, it may be useful to understand how they are coerced into doing things they did not anticipate doing. 'Marketing' has some aspects that highlight how someone can be manipulated by a skilled operator. A desperate and ruthless person, with a dilemma quite outside of purchasing and sales, may determine that a course of action; one that may be considered to be heinous to any other, is, for them, the most appropriate action to take. This action can come about by internal conversation, perhaps in the form of soliloquy, wherein this troubled person plays both the part of a salesperson offering a solution sales approach, and their own role as an entity requiring an exit strategy to escape their predicament, imagined or otherwise; or safeguard their position.

What is personal selling? How is it different to sales promotion?

A good salesperson will answer questions before they are made; in effect, will wash away the sand on which an 'edifice of reluctance to act' has been erected. Indecision for a specific reason can be the sole determinant in not making a purchase. However, if the shifting sands of nescience can be, at least partially, washed away and replaced with a shoring-up of information, correct or not, the stumbling block of reticence is shrouded by information and diminishes in importance as the rough edges of clumsy and unruly thinking are shaped and eroded by skilled persuasion. What once seemed to be important, loses its prominence as other lesser aspects are drawn into the light and similarly follow the same path of eroding declination through enervating misconceived, and incorrect, beliefs; that is, if the salesperson is honest.

If we imagine a troubled person with the proverbial little devil on one shoulder and a little angel on the other shoulder both whispering into the person's ears. We can liken a salesperson offering personal sales; which is sales that are tailored for individual purposes, to the little devil whispering what actions the person should take to remove a problem that worries them; this might, in a murder mystery story be another person. It might go like something like this: 'If you continue letting the situation continue without taking control of the elements that will lessen your degree of freedom, you will inevitably be caught and prosecuted in a court in which you will have no chance of gaining any control. You must eliminate the threat now, before it is too late.' The little devil might go on with this, 'If you sneak out tonight when everyone is asleep, you will be able to get away with it.' The little angel, as the person's conscience, might counter with, 'You know it is wrong. In any case you will be caught.' The little devil then sneaks in, 'There will be fireworks all night for the celebrations; no-one will notice you or hear you.'

Personal selling usually involves offering a bespoke set of product capabilities and services to a potential customer. However, the potential customer may be, and frequently is, an existing customer of other product(s) and services delivered by the same manufacturer or supplier. The approach from the sales-person is to move the customer from one product onto another product that matches or exceeds the capabilities of products supplied by competitors' suppliers, in as far as the needs of the customer are fulfilled. Again, the emphasis is on bespoke fulfillment of the customers needs or requirements.

Door-step selling is personal selling and some digital technology services will prospect for customers by enticing potential customers to agree to a contract that seems to benefit the customer. A case in point is, offering super-fast broadband at a particular price in an area that does not already have fibre-optic connectivity. Prospecting in this scenario is to assess whether it is financially feasible to dig up the roads for a given distance to the nearest fibre-optic junction. However, the way this is accomplished is by having the customer agree to the service without specifically mentioning the overall cost to the customer as a fixed cost. In the UK, contract law applying to customers in shops means that it is the customer that makes an offer to buy items at the checkout and the shop then accepts the offer by passing the items past the barcode reader. A prospecting sales-person as outlined earlier has the customer think that they are agreeing to an offer that has not actually been made. Instead, it is the customer that offers to subscribe to the new service regardless of its efficacy and longevity, yet the customer is content to believe that their expectations will be met. Acceptance of the offer is made by the business by installing a fibre-optic service that resembles an idea of what the general consensus of the subscribers have formed from the salespersons pitch and careful avoidance of promises, such as 'This is what the new service CAN provide, not will'. Salespersons would, of course, not mention the last part of that sentence. Sales promotions typically do not prospect for customers by asking questions.

In all instances of buying there is a perceived threat to the customer that they will incur a loss that exceeds the gain of possessing a product or the experience of a service. This is cognitive dissonance and is most often experienced after the sale has been made and the service or product encountered. People, including those who work in procurement or business, all have differing degrees of loss aversion. It is this aversion that personal selling is primarily aimed at; to break down the person's defences, and to drive a promise, what may turn out to be a Trojan Horse, into the customers mind. As a promise, it is merely a seed of understanding that will almost certainly lack full conceptual knowledge of how efficacious the product or service will be.

It is quite simple to realise just how effective sales promotion can be when an understanding of loss aversion is brought into the light.

Loss aversion, to the plotting character in a story, would be an aversion to losing their liberty, losing the respect of their family, or be financially liable for something that they were not previously liable for.

Sales promotion often involves the customer paying a lower price than the product previously sold for (the price, not necessarily the actual cost to the customer as opportunity cost is often overlooked). If a potential customer balked at one price yet almost bought the product or service, then a lower price may just tip them over the edge into a freefall of buying, once the loss aversion position in the customer is reduced or overwhelmed. This may be as simple as the customer having decided that x amount of currency units is too much but x minus 10% is a good price. Once this rigid and remote barbican (remote as in not re-visited) has been breached the customer will be strongly inclined to buy. Sales promotion can easily counter, in this way, such a weak and dilatory defence based on loss aversion alone. However, a salesperson can easily adjust a price if it is clear that the customer is wavering on price alone. An example of this is haggling. Certainly, this is prevalent in many markets and bazaars across the world - the goal of the seller is to get the highest price possible. The buyer on the other hand needs to feel that they have achieved a good bargain, and this can be an extremely powerful motive, particularly so when the buyer is a tourist and has friends and family with them - it's an ego thing. Sales promotion facilitates offering additional goods or services to the customer to make them feel that a good bargain has been struck. At the retail level BOGOF (buy one get one free) works well. At the industrial or B2B level, services are now increasingly more often included with products, such as machinery, than they ever were before.

Unfortunately, whereas there exists a difference between personal selling and promotional selling there is also a confluence of the two that muddies the distinction between them. Personal selling always includes promotional selling, though not the whole scope of promotional selling. A door-to door salesperson promotes a service or product. A salesperson engaged in B2B sales promotes a product or service; this could be a mutable price. However, businesses actually need a product or service to continue operations and price is not always something that can be determined to be a driver away from making a purchase as price is used as a component in more complex equations, any of which components may be adjusted to allow purchase decisions to be fruitfully made.

Where personal selling does not venture, and indeed cannot, is publicity through the use of static advertisement of products or services. Promotional selling can, however, quietly erode loss aversion over time or induce impulse buying through the use of advertising.

Static advertisement for a character in a story is the environment they live in. In a religious community, it is the constant promulgation of religion and its impact that is a billboard of advertisement. When a person is isolated in a social environment to which they are unaccustomed they will have to rapidly learn new behaviour and adjust to the, what may even be abhorrent to them, new environment, corrupt as it may be. A pious person may even need to have to lie, quite simply because telling the truth might get them lynched or mobbed. This is then a person affected by the static advertising in an environment.

Promotional selling at the B2B (Business to Business) level may be at the vanguard of a package of processes that results in a purchase order of a very large consignment of a good at a low price and loss aversion may not even be triggered if the purchasing business already sells the same product and has good information that demonstrates positive results that pertain to past sales and the continuance of sales of the same product.

Despite trade fairs and similar events being in the ambit of promotional selling and considered by some people to be exclusively for promotions, where there is a person attending to the stall, or the promotion of a product or service, there will inevitably be an element of personal selling. However, it is unusual for price adjustments to be made 'on-the-fly' and customising purchase and sales agreements will be conducted in a much more personal and focused level at a later date. The intent is really to make sure interested parties have the relevant information to initiate future negotiations.

For our troubled character in a story, even if they are considering a romantic affair, the internet and specific websites are the tradestands and trade fairs that are there to provide information to potential buyers. Bespoke solutions can be found for searchers of romantic liaisons but there will be some kind of cost that cannot be known beforehand. Travel costs, opportunity costs, and emotional costs, are just three that come to mind.

There is an inherent desire in most of us to make a distinction between personal selling and promotional sales based on 'friendliness' or 'warmth' or 'connectivity' and so describe promotional selling as cold, rigid, unyielding, disconnected, and static. The family of promotional sales are ruthlessly used for different purposes, and as mentioned before, one of them, called price (the most mutable member), always accompanies the salesperson. It is more useful to consider promotions to be a set of tools to facilitate sales; as hammers, wedges, and destructive devices wielded by a Trojan Horse that potential customers have come to be insentient to, through varying degrees of anoesis ¹ and over-exposure; and in the distributors' and retailers' minds, as being a very much alive animal that has to be carefully considered before allowing it into a zoo of equations that hopefully will ultimately reveal financial solvency. One should be aware that promotional sales are not entirely deleterious because, often, the general public who buy as a consequence of being exposed to promotions are unaware of what has just happened to them and go home happy with the feeling that they have somehow just 'won' something and with an alleviation of something that they did not know existed in them. 'Suadade' (sow-dah-dgee - from Portuguese folk culture - a deep emotional state of melancholic longing for a person or thing that is absent who may not actually exist) can be implanted in customers by powerful marketing. Realistically, many people are merely making oblations to the gods and goddesses of ignorant imagination, materialism, self-promotion, and conformity.

Personal selling; remember this is bespoke selling, also creates 'saudade' if the product or service is not immediately purchased and is later ruminated on. Personal selling is also a spell-inducing process that can cause businesses to purchase simply because the business has been seduced into believing that, in chess terms, a 'zugzwang' ² has been encountered, because insolvency of the business has been mooted and a state of uncertainty manifests in the business, wherein it becomes victim to its own incomprehension of a situational episode. At the very least, if a sale is to be made, it is incumbent on the salesperson to create a bifurcation in the thinking process of potential customers by introducing solutions to them for problems that the customer did not know exist, or perhaps did know exist yet has no solution.

A character in a story owns their decision to act in a particular way. The emotions attached to this can be likened to saudade and a feeling of being in a 'zugzwang' position. Wanting the solution of their actions to be already in place might be saudade, and being in a position in which any action is detrimental to the character's position or safety is compromised, both have an almost tangible effect on the character which is evident by their specific body movements, trembling, nervous glancing, manic moods changes, and so on.

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In Japanese culture, there is a strong current of needing to read between the lines, because the Japanese are traditionally less direct in their conversation.

From the web site, ‘thejapanesepage.com’: ‘The Japanese expression "をめない" literally means "can't read the air." It is used to describe someone who is socially awkward or unaware, lacking the ability to pick up on social cues, context, or the mood of a situation.’ (The Japanese Pages)

Apparently, the Japanese love to abbreviate and so they use slang, ‘KY’, When spoken, ケイワイ to mean, ‘can’t read the air’. So, if you see ‘KY’ written online you now know what it means. KY are two of the letters from ‘Kuuki o Yomenai’

I like to talk; I really like to talk. But I am not very good at listening. You would think I would be good at listening because I lost a considerable percentage of my visual acuity when I was still six years old. Decades later, my vision has been fixed and I can see as well as most people in the West; I don’t need corrective aids to see very well. I do however, need reading glasses. Before my vision was restored I could not see the minute facial changes on people I met; I could not distinguish a ‘Duchenne Smile’ from a ‘Pan-Am smile’, because I could not see if the smile reached the eyes. I relied very heavily on nuances and inflections in the speaker’s voice. Unfortunately, it seems that almost no-one I met paid much attention to their voice and how they used it. Indeed, why would they? So far, in their lives everyone they came across, just understood them. It made things quite difficult for me at the most basic level. Doctors, and even people who profess to being autistic, or having Asperger Syndrome, or being ‘on the spectrum’, either tested me for autism or in the latter, told me I am autistic. Because I lost a lot of my vision as a child, I tended to watch anything I could see on anyone’s face that was moving; in effect lip-reading without actually lip-reading. A ‘Pan-Am smile’ would fool me into thinking that the wearer was happy and not instead strained by my continued presence. I suppose, taking a hint was not in my tool-box of social interaction.

Back then, when I was standing quite close to a woman, yet still outside of her personal space as we all understand the size to be in our culture, I would stop watching her mouth when she stopped talking, and look at her eyes. Some women would pull their cardigan over their chest to more firmly cover their body. I wasn’t looking at their chests, I was watching their mouths, but they saw my eyes flick up and they were watching my face for clues on how I was perceiving their conversation. I never bothered to tell them that I was watching their mouths and not looking at their bodies.

Here, we should become aware that I am building a hook to another part of an explanation. It is usual for me to leave a few hooks hanging, and then I can show how the shape of something can be made out when it is brought out into the open and hung from different hooks but with different light sources. We might consider this differently: By partially explaining something, I cast a shadow on a wall. Another partial explanation, from a different aspect, casts another shadow on the same wall, and so on. Soon enough, there are the right shadows on a wall, and I then move the light sources so all the shadows blend together and all the shadows can be seen as one shape. Where the shadows cross, darker areas are formed and depth is perceived; at least, I hope so.

Back to my eyes flicking upwards to a woman’s eyes. If I tell an offended woman I was only looking at her mouth, three things can happen, I suggest. She doesn’t believe me - people caught in the act, I propose, mostly lie about their actions; she does believe me and maybe feels a bit foolish; and thirdly, she is offended because by explaining my actions I have used a suppressed premise, ‘I was not looking at your breasts!’. I believe it is rude, in the UK, to bring up, even obliquely, the shape of a woman in a conversation that is not expressly about her body. So, as a result of any of these three moments, an awkward phase passed between the offended woman and I, and the conversation faltered and petered out. I might paint a picture of the feelings of two people in this scenario as there being a resentful and offended woman who is lowering her respect for a man with poor eyesight, who, himself, is feeling foolish and vicariously guilty by a association with having the thought of stealing a glance, that has been forced upon him. The slightest change in posture or hesitation by this man will positively identify him to the woman as the rightful recipient of her contempt. Of course, this is only a picture that might be painted with broad brush-strokes. If this was occurring, however, the man would be in a ‘zugzwang’ situation. No matter what he does, he will lose a piece in a proverbial chess game with a forced position that requires a move, simply because it is his turn. And all this cast in a greenish spotlight of penetrating focus, before a suddenly hushed audience, with only an internal commentator annoyingly drawing out the micro-pause, to be analysed over and over again in the editing rooms of the man’s and woman’s minds. She may remember only the rude man and, he, only his vicarious shame. It is just a picture though, a wild representation of how things might be seen. That is not to say that there is actually a game to be won or one that is even playable.

Business speaker and author of ‘The Culture Map’, Erin Meyer, spoke, in a talk, on how she gave a talk to a room full of Japanese and asked them, at the end, if they had any questions; no-one raised their hands so Erin moved off the stage and sat down. She was surprised when her Japanese colleague asked her if he might try for questions. He asked if they had questions and no-one raised their hands. However, he selected people in the audience who really did have questions, and who were grateful to be chosen. Erin asked him how he knew who to select. He answered that these people had bright eyes. Because, Erin said, Japanese people will not look at you if they have questions, the ones who look at you show, to those who can read the air in the room, that they have questions or something to say.

My mother visited me one day and, after some time, pointed to a little picture of a hologram with concentric circles in a frame on my mantelpiece. She asked me if that was the right time. I knew she was embarrassed about having poor eyesight and just told her, ‘No, it is not, I will go and find out the right time’; I did, and told her the time. This, in Japanese culture, is reading the room, or the air, or understanding a person. I come across this ability so rarely in the West. We are quick to judge and seem to take everything at face-value. Many of us would inadvertently have hurt their mother by not thinking beforehand and telling her it is not a clock. Why do we do that? Unfortunately, when we read the room and do not act in a particular way there is a hiatus in communication. We, in the West are sometimes compelled to ignore the ‘air in the room’ simply because it is bad manners to disallow someone to be direct with us; go figure, as they say in the United States.

In a TEDx Talk in Trondheim, Norway, Julien S. Bourrelle shares an experience that in his home country, French-speaking Canada, he would have been fine with, in Norway, after living there for some time, he found to be intrusive and uncomfortable. He was sitting on a park bench and someone sat down on the same bench and started talking to him, Julien answered and then turned away. He thought to himself, ‘Why is this man talking to me?’ so he asked the man, and added that he [Julien] comes from a country where that sort of behaviour does not happen; people don’t speak to each other. Yet, he went on in his TEDx talk to negate this, by saying that it is entirely normal for strangers to just start conversations. In Norway, however, socialisation takes place in a much more framed and organised manner. In fact, he had rewired his brain, and his mental programming had changed over the five years he had spent in Norway.

Confront, Complain, or Conform

‘When you confront, it is because you believe that your behaviour is the right behaviour. When you complain, you isolate yourself into social bubbles of segregation. When you conform, you adapt your behaviour to the society you are in, and can truly benefit from diversity’. Julien went on, ‘But that implies that you are observing, learning, understanding the behaviours of others and adapting your own so that it fits with the behaviour of the society you are in’.

I will start a conversation at supermarket checkouts, park benches, bus stops, on the bus or train, but never in a pub or bar, unless I have been there a few times to read the room (or air). This is a selfish attitude. The pub or bar I choose to be my regular or at least one of a favoured few, is a place I go to to feel comfortable. I don’t want to upset the proverbial apple-cart with crass opinion or statements in a place I want to be able to return to. Ironically, I do not present my true self, until I am confident that I am known and as such, some leeway may be afforded me if I make a mistake once or twice. This means I am two different people. Or perhaps, we might see it as ruthlessly using a circumstance with a stranger that I will likely never meet again as a temporary release of verbal energy; thereby, secretly and silently, ticking one of the many boxes on my invisible ‘List of Things to do Today’; Speak to a stranger; No, I mean, socially interact. I no longer air-write: ‘Make a list’ on my daily list. We have all, I suspect, recognised that the volume of conversation is attenuated by the entry of a stranger in a remote village bar where tourists tend not to go.

Valerie Hoeks, in a TEDx talk in Haarlem, The Netherlands, some years ago, spoke of her time spent conducting business in China. She highlighted that Confucianism plays a large part in how Chinese see themselves and others. Valerie remarked that there seemed to her to be three things that really stood out to be imperatives to get things done in China. Of course, she also wanted to be kind and friendly.

Reciprocal favour; Harmony; and Saving Face

In China if one asks for a favour it is unquestionably expected that the favour will be returned; the more favours asked, the more the debt is increased. It, she says, is unforgivable to not return favours. She went on to explain by mentioning that she had friends who decades after graduating still went, every week; every week for decades, to visit their primary school teachers, for whom they felt they had never repaid the debt of their attention and teaching.

Harmony, was impressed upon Valerie by finding herself in a situation for which she had some anxiety but her friend seemed to brush it aside and a fine solution was effected. In fact, the solution far exceeded an alternative that Valerie was actually seeking. There is a time for everything.

A Time for Everything

1 There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens

2 a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot,
3 a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build,
4 a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance,
5 a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
6 a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away,
7 a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak,
8 a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.

- Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 The Bible, New International Version

You may have seen a portion of this in the very first pages of a book. For me, I might have a story-line that resembles the hands on a clock. The hour hand moves slowly from twelve to one, while the minute hand moves twelve times faster before it gets to the twelve again. The clock strikes and a task or event is reached. This happens eleven times more while the hour hand advances and each hourly chime lasts longer and longer, and the task, event, or circumstance being celebrated or tolled is ever more portentous. If this persistence of chiming is made known to the reader, there is a building anticipation of the clock finally striking twelve (midnight for Cinderella).

My mum had a German Cuckoo clock which chimed every quarter hour and cuckoo-ed every hour. As children, we would advance the hands to make it chime and pull on the weights to speed up the tune. The cuckoo clock broke after just a couple of years, but my mum still kept it on the wall; she loved it, even when it didn’t work. We forced events to occur and the world of the two figures and the cuckoo in the clock got broken, and our mum silently cried. We didn’t realise at the time that we had made her unhappy.

I used to hate windy days, because I cycled to work, until I bought a sailing boat, and then would think, ‘Great sailing weather!’ To be mindful of harmony and to remind me to try to let things segue together, I had to change my speech; I now draw out the ‘double u’ (w) on the word ‘wait’. I like how it sounds, and I think some people can hear the word a little better, when patience might be a good idea.

The third thing that Valerie, in her TEDx talk mentioned as being inherent in Chinese culture was ‘Face’, or more accurately, how one is perceived by others. This includes the actual facial physique, social interaction, honour, and respectability. It is horrific, she concludes, for Chinese people with a connection to Confucianism to lose face.

If I had told my mum that the clock she thought she saw on my mantelpiece is not a clock, the implication would have been that I am observing her as stupid or in some way impaired. Extending this implication it would also mean she is either useless to society or even a hazard to safety. Someone, somewhere, filled with hate, would have maliciously told her, ‘Yes, it is the right time.’ and watched her squirm. They might even have deliberately stayed in the room to prevent her from moving closer to the clock to check the time. When my mum asked me if it was the right time, no matter the time she was going to leave; she was merely interposing a pause and introducing an exit strategy to go home. If the mean person makes you feel uncomfortable, then you and I are the same; it makes me very, very uncomfortable.

References

The Japanese Page, https://www.thejapanesepage.com/not-reading-the-air-in-japanese-%E7%A9%BA%E6%B0%97%E3%82%92%E8%AA%AD%E3%82%81%E3%81%AA%E3%81%84/

Accessed: 09 February 2025

Julien Bourrelle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-Yy6poJ2zs&list=TLPQMDkwMjIwMjVo5MAa2lUG8A&index=17

Cultural difference in business | Valerie Hoeks | TADxHaarlem, 2014

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMwjscSCcf0&list=TLPQMDkwMjIwMjVo5MAa2lUG8A&index=13

Accessed: 09 February 2025

Erin Meyer, The Lavin Agency

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQvqDv4vbEg&list=TLPQMDkwMjIwMjVo5MAa2lUG8A&index=14

Accessed: 09 February 2025

Bibliography

BBC https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200129-what-is-reading-the-air-in-japan

Accessed: 09 February 2025

Positive and Negative Transfer Effects

In Psychology, there is something known as the ‘negative transfer effect’. Rudimentally, this means that given a problem to solve, there is a set of rules that someone has learnt, or internally adheres to in their general life, that may inhibit a successful solution being found, because those rules are so fixed in the individual that lateral thinking, or thinking outside the box, does not occur to them. To even think, ‘Ah ha! I need to think laterally here!’ would actually negate this ‘negative transfer effect’; but only if knowing that thinking outside the box might give an appropriate solution is a norm for an individual. Get it? Anyone who normally thinks outside the box is not already hindered. However, if wild and lateral thinking is the norm for an individual, following a linear series of steps to solve a problem can be difficult. Some people with a good understanding of mathematics struggle to pass a ‘Functional Maths’ Level Two exam. In case you don’t know what that is; it is approximately the level of a nine year old primary school child in the UK.

Someone I know has a nickname, slightly contemptuous, I suppose, for a work colleague, ‘word count’. I am told that ‘word count’ will use five words when one will do. I think that there may be an inherent mental health issue at play here. I think this chap is probably talking around a subject and landing on each facet of the topic, which to him, needs mentioning; quite simply because they are fascinating to him, or maybe they are just awkward stumbling blocks which need to be dismantled by spoken dissemination.

Someone with Macular Degeneration, a vision problem that affects how the central part of an image is perceived, sees only the periphery around a blind or blurred central spot. There may be blurred or no vision in the centre of their visual field. To have some understanding of what this may be like we might, ourselves, try to see in very low light conditions. We have cells in our eyes; rods and cones. The cones ‘see’ colour and are important to us during strong light conditions. The rods in the human eye are most sensitive to light but generally, are located in a ring around the cones; so a doughnut (Am. ‘donut’) shape. This means that often the best impression of something we want to see in low light conditions is gained by looking slightly to one side or above or below the object. In other words, you can’t look ‘at’ it. Human night-vision is also in black and white and devoid of colour.

The Secretarybird, found mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, is a predator, resembling an eagle on very long, stork-like legs; reaching up to 1.3 metres tall. It likes to eat snakes and small animals and hunts on the ground. It uses its sharp vision to find its prey by walking about a location and jerking its head about in different directions, seeking movement. It turns its head and focuses; turns its head and focuses, and then moves to a new spot; even returning to a rock or bush it had only just been to.

Now. Let us intermesh our limited understanding of how the person suffering with macular degeneration sees; what we see in the dark; and how the Secretarybird stares, focuses, and analyses each rock or bush; then moves on to the next. Let us also consider how my friend’s colleague ‘word-count’ communicates. Are they not the same? Each one of the entities used as examples for how vision is used have no choice in the application of their specific visual acuity, and word-count, much like a Secretarybird has great focus, but is compelled to examine each ‘rock’ before the whole landscape is understood or described. Perhaps, for ‘Word-count, the central image or focus is not available to him, and the shape of the concept is explained instead. It is also possible that that he is secretly in love with my acquantance and babbles, or he is teaching himself as he speaks, by assembling a construct of ideas.

Word-count’s passion and confusion aside, we might say that these entities have hard-wired systems. These hard-wired systems are far-removed from thought processes that result from experience because experience is mutable; it grows with each new experience; at least it should. The only resemblance is; experience could, disastrously, result in an heuristic, or rule of thumb, that is taken by the individual to be a hard-wired process of problem-solving. It is the past experience of an individual that generally determines how that individual approaches problem-solving. ‘Good at problem-solving’ on your CV doesn’t really mean anything, does it? It just means that you solved problems once upon a time, yet you may well have a fixed mind-set.

We can see how the negative transfer effect is demonstrated if, at a high street jewellers, the door from the high street opens differently to how high street shop doors normally open. There are videos on YouTube that show thieves giving up trying to escape a jewellers because they are trying to force the doors outwards, when they should have just gently pulled the unlocked doors inwards. Certainly, in England, we normally push the door to enter the shop and pull the door to leave the shop. When doors operate like this, a thief needs to spend more time to leave the shop with swag, because a full pelt run comes to a full stop in order to be able to pull on the door’s handle. That, however, is not the reason why our doors open like this; it is so pedestrians, passing the shop, don’t get hit in the face with an opening door.

Now we understand how a movement from one position, circumstance, or situation may smoothly transgress into, what may seem to the character in a story to be serendipitous, and a reader may just follow that rule of one state of being smoothly passing into another – the door opens inwards so the passage from outside to inside is barely slowed, or the transition from stranger to acqauintance is merely a few shared words of commonality. Withdrawing from an environment (or shop) or a situation, however, usually requires a pause if a threshold is actually crossed and the ‘door’ closed, before escape is fully achieved. An individual may create a pause in the movement of another character merely by saying, ‘One moment’, or ‘ Wait!’, or ‘I…’, or any other utterance, and then may say, ‘Never mind’, or shake their head once, left and right, as they, mirroring the movement, gently swat the air with a flat hand. This is akin to the pause before the door opens to leave the shop, environment, or circumstance. This would create a level of tension between people or characters in a story, especially if no other words, notably, went between them beforehand.

So far, we have looked at the positive transfer effect; in that all the action and interaction follows a standard format and one circumstance naturally flows into another. A child, without having fully formed a honed set of heuristics to use as a template to test the world, will not be at all surprised if one of the characters in a book, or an individual in their scope of perception, suddenly acts weirdly. One of the characters or individuals would only need to glance over their shoulder as they leave the presence of another, and an adult reader or viewer may infer that something is afoot; a child, however, may only understand that a character looked at another character or person. Fundamentally, there is no pause if two characters are in a open space and it is only distance that shall, or does, determine separation between these characters. So, a wide-open space with no hindrances that cause a delay in movement has only potential for a fading relationship between people. By fading, I mean there is an absence of finality. Typically, in films the viewer sees this as one person in a nascent romantic relationship running after the other as they tearfully leave town, never to return again. ‘Well, go get him!’ Of course, their relationship may instead continue to cook on the proverbial back-burner. One of these participants may even thwart a mutually attractive and symbiotic future relationship by fantasing a future and inadvertently using this fantasy as a false memory that is then egregiously considered, by them, to be a real experience. Just consider jealousy, for example. A pause, as the threshold of possible social interaction and improbable social interaction is actually crossed, creates a world of possibilities in a relationship between people, but there must be a clearly defined threshold.

A simplified scene of two people without embellishment or style:

‘Goodbye’.

‘Goodbye’.

Martin turned and began to walk away.

‘I…I..No’.

The distance between them grew.

Now the same scene without the pause.

‘Goodbye’.

‘Goodbye’.

Martin turned and began to walk away. The distance between them grew.

Positive and negative transfer is within the field of associative learning. For most of us, one set of problems were solved in a particular way, and that ‘way’ becomes for us our ‘way’ of doing things. My wife would call this her ‘inimicable style’. In an exclusively visual world, she would have been wearing an ‘L’ plate (from the ‘L’ that learner drivers place on their vehicles to designate their status as being inexperienced). But, in explaining experience, I am not seeking to portray a character’s style or personality in a story; I want to understand people’s fallibility; their inability to easily open the proverbial door; the fumble; the hesitation; not the covert look, but instead the unguarded and accidental look. Real people do not flow from one environment to another without a slip. There is an incongruity about them. From the two scenes above; we know that the Martin in the first scene is human because we have learnt that only humans talk and there is the expectation that it is Martin who turns and speaks; because that is our experience of how books are written; unless it is otherwise clearly stated, the last person mentioned is the owner of the next piece of speech. In the same scene above but without speech, the ‘distance’ could be attributed to the enlarging geographical space between Martin and the other character, or it could be an opening intangible chasm that serves to separate their future relationship. Yet, there may be a third character AND Martin might instead be a dog or other walking entity. Of course, it is implied that there are only two humans and no other entities; but that is only implication which works on our shared understanding of normal practice.

Here then, in the example above, is an example of the positive transfer effect being upset by a new perspective, which jolts our perception into an unconscious recognition of our fallibility to correctly understand a scenario. In effect, the possibility of not understanding the scope of the scene is an example of negative transfer – believing things happen this way and only this way, and we are later shown to be wrong or are given conflicting information.

Unfortunately, most of us don’t realise that our experience binds and circumscribes our understanding of a situation. Our perception is working fine, but it is compromised by our experience, and, in many cases, not by our complete lack of experience. Strangely, zero experience often trumps some experience; and a great deal of experience from different perspectives indubitably trumps only some experience. We might know this as: ‘ A little bit of knowledge is worse than none at all’. A little bit of knowledge, or experience, prevents us from approaching an operation with fresh eyes, and so a toolbox of unfettered, and uncluttered, set of possibilities is not available to us. Let us not forget, though, that all of us need to be shown how to do things; we cannot expect wolves to raise our children in the forest, and then expect the children to be able to use cutlery to feed themselves in a restaurant.

Positive and Negative Framing

This cognitive bias can be expressed in terms of stating information with a positive or negative slant; the result, nonetheless, being the same for either choosing one solution to a problem over another. Simply, and loosely: ‘This medicine saves 80% of the sufferers of a disease’, is positive framing. ‘This medicine cannot save 20% of the sufferers of a disease’, is negative framing. This, though, is a very simplistic approach is showing how describing something differently creates different expectations in the minds of recipients of information.

Let us delve into this a little more. In buying a second-hand motorcycle, a group of friends went separately to try to buy the motorcycle as cheaply as they could. The person in the group who was to be the owner of the motorbike went first to try it out. The advertised price was £200. The seller, was the father of the owner of the motorcycle. The father was not a fan of motorbikes. An offer of £170 was made with a determination that a good price to pay would be £180. The offer was refused. Next, a series of friends went and made lower offers; £120; £140; and £130; each of which were refused. Finally, the last friend went to view the motorbike and offered £170 again, with the authority to pay £180. The offer of £170 was accepted. Each of the lower offers served to positively frame the original offer. The same amount was accepted from the last friend because the seller’s expectaction was that only low offers would follow. This is positively framing.

It is possible; indeed, I heard this is true, that Vladamir Putin, at election times, similarly set up opposing political parties that faded into obscurity or had obvious failings, to positively frame his own political position.

In business, an unscrupulous entrepreneur may set up, perhaps, five businesses in the same industry; all of them viable. However, only one of these businesses is the true focus of the entrepreneur’s attention. If these five businesses take up five of the first page of Google listing and four of the websites offer a poor service; five competitors cannot occupy those slots on the first page and one of the websites out of the five will be more favourable than the other four ‘practically psuedo’ businesses. This could, by extension, be an example, if conducted well, of both negatively framing competitors’ businesses, while at the same time positively framing one of the five businesses operated by the unscrupulous entrepreneur. One might not be surprised to discover that Unilever owns around about two-thirds of the businesses that make the butter-like spreads in a UK supermarket fridge. The unscrupulous businessman with five businesses with five separate web pages on the first page of a Google listing is not at all dissimilar. The difference is, though, that the dastardly cad is attempting to use some of the webpages to negatively frame its competitors. You may well find, without too much scrutiny, evidence of such behaviour in modern marketing; it is, however, only a very recent slide into devilishly unfair tactics.

In marketing, there is something known as, ‘Collusive Bidding’. It is banned in the UK. Essentially, there would be a cartel of businesses who take it in turns to bid for a contract, much in the way of a ‘Dutch Auction’. One of the businesses in the cartel puts in a lower bid, still high but lower. Mostly, they get the contract. When a business in a cartel has a slack period of activity, that is the one which ‘gets’ the contract. Because, there are extremely heavy penalties for this type of activity, there is a strong compulsion for a competitor to report this nefarious activity.

A wily person can negatively frame other job interviewees by speaking in the negative, such as; ‘I don’t go home until the task is done’. This suggests that other people will leave work unfinished for their own selfish ends. This tactic used to work – except now, job interviewers want to establish that the potential employee will have a good work/life balance (It is good for the hiring business, due to it avoiding employee mental ill-health caused by too much work). Now, I suppose, one needs to exhibit robustness in job interviews. Ultimately, the interviewee, by default, frames their own application positively.

Bibliography

National Geographic, Secretarybirds,

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/birds/facts/secretary-bird

Accessed 03 February 2025

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology)

I am reading more often that people are puzzled by how easily they are scammed. Why are they confused? If you accept emails from businesses with your name on them, the probability, I suggest, is that you will eventually get scammed.

Surely, without thinking too hard, we can understand that the reason we want online banking and conduct many business activities online, including by email, texts and phone calls is because it is convenient. It means that we do not have to physically go to the post office (or shop) to buy a stamp and go to the post box to post a letter. 'Oh no! You cry. I want immediate gratification'. The truth is, most of us are addicted to dopamine. Anticipation releases chemicals in the brain that make us feel good. Send for a parcel and the anticipation is there. We don’t want it to wane so we pay for next day delivery (more than the price for a stamp and an envelope to order it by post). We wake up knowing that the order will be delivered. There it is! Now the anticipation peaks as we unwrap it and test the item in some way. How many emails did you get from the delivery company telling you the order is wherever it is, at different times of the day? Did you give your details to the delivery company? Of course not; the business you ordered the product from did. GDPR makes it clear that the information you supply for delivery purposes can only be used for delivery purposes. Guess what? Warehouses print your name and address on labels that they stick to packages. Your email address is NOT on the label. Did you agree to a third party knowing your email address ? No, you didn’t. Tacitly, you did, because you ordered from a business who routinely passes your details to third parties, and you did not make it clear to them not to. Your fault for letting them breach the GDPR by not complaining. Oh wait! We enjoy the text messages and emails; it heightens the anticipation. Only the most foolish of us actually believes that our email accounts have never been hacked. And, only the most foolish of us believes that our phones and laptops have not been scanned for information. So, surely, we can understand that if we have even one file with our name attached to it or, madly, within the text of the file, on our laptops, phones, in emails or texts, that someone, some business, some hacker, some terrorist, some country, has a profile on us. Just consider how Google and Amazon make money.

If you change telephone service providers, for example, it is imperative that you tell your previous provider to delete your details from their records under GDPR. If you have no longer have an account with them, it is much harder for you to track what they do with your information, and have conversations with them. If you have an account, you may, as is your right, complain to the ombudsman for arbitration; you cannot do this if you do not have an account with a business. Make them remove your details so they can not sell them without your knowledge.

Incidentally, I have never received a single cold call or advertising that matches my preferences.

Frankly, I cannot understand why people do online banking, and banks actually send emails to customers with the customers name within the email!

If you want to be lazy, prepare to pay hackers and scammers, with the money you want to use for the extra entertainment you now have time for, because you didn’t walk to the post office.

When you click on ‘Accept cookies’ on web pages, ask yourself, What will I actually get by allowing my viewing habits to be known?. Who will benefit from this? Is your web experience really improved? If you did not ask yourself what information you wanted from the internet, you should probably just go back to bed and have a little think about yourself.I have a browser that automatically sets all the little sliders to 'NO!' for marketing purposes and tracking. Did you vote for Trump? Did you vote for Brexit? Did you vote for the Conservatives or Labour? Did you badmouth someone? (You should understand that the last one here has a saying attached to it; 'The dog that fetches, carries.' Do you know what that means? It means that the person who provided you with information or gossip will also transport the information you provide them to everyone else. Did you know what you would get when you voted? Do you know what you will get if you do not accept cookies? Never mind! It is quicker to press 'Accept all Cookies' and aimlessly wander and pontificate because it takes no effort, and because every day is a 'duvet-day'.

Awake, ye drunkards, and weep. Joel 1:5

This is the final installment of my humorous submission for gaining a level 3 certificate in Mental Health and Mental Health Advocacy in the Workplace.

Because so much time is lost to mental ill-health, there is a consequent negative effect on the productivity of an organisation. When problems arise in the workplace mentally healthy people are better able to deal with these situations. Having a mentally healthy work environment reduces absenteeism from mental ill-health by reducing the probability of its occurrence as a consequence of the work environment. The reputation of the organisation is enhanced when it is known that the organisation cares for and adequately assists its employees in dealing with mental ill-health, and particularly so when the organisation is proactive in preventing mental un-wellness. By having good mental health physical health is improved and vice-versa.

There are legal responsibilities that organisations must meet; having a mentally healthy workplace is one of them and so there is a compliance to regulations.

Sometimes, in order to define something a list is required to define how groupings are arrived at. However, I am not going to do that because it requires bullet points.

Every employee should have a ‘wellness action plan’ whether they need one or not. It is a confidential document that is shared between the employer and individual employees to whom it specifically pertains to. In it there should be identifying statements that describe, define or even list, what will protect the employee’s mental health and well-being at work. Presumably, this wellness action plan should be beneficially shaped around existing mental health issues for individuals, and is formed around a solid structure of action an employee should take, that is standard for the treatment of all the employees.

Conversations need to start somewhere and so this wellness action plan is an excellent opportunity for employers to probe into potential employees’ lives to ascertain how much work can be wrung out of them before they break. Looking at it in a more benign way, a setting for a conversation about the mental limitations an employee has, had, or is beginning to experience, is a decidedly good position to be in for the employee, as this setting is much formalised and therefore has the scope to be private and confidential. In this way it is a proactive approach to managing mental health in the workplace by anticipating what may go wrong and the effects it may have on certain individuals. It allows safeguards to be put in place and they help to prevent stress and mental ill-health. They also evidence the employer’s efforts and focus on the prevention and management of mental ill-health in the workplace.

Identify key components of a wellness action plan.

Identify – Give sufficient detail so that someone else can recognise your description. This is sometimes used instead of ‘list’ or ‘state’ so think what the question is asking for.

N.B. It is the conjunction of the words ‘identify’, ‘key’, and ‘components’ in the question that drives me to believe that a list with bullet points is appropriate, and allowable here. However, I am under instructions to not use bullet points unless there is a definite call for a list in the question. The advice is that the answer will be ignored where there are bullet points and the question does not ask for a list. Hmmm. I want to use bullet points because it is my aim to learn and not necessarily pass examinations. Certainly, I shall need to completely rewrite this whole assignment to include bullet points where they are most certainly necessary for easy understanding and for compartmentalising information. Altogether, this means that my learning will commence only after the submission of this final assignment and the complete rewriting of it, for my own understanding of the subject.

The key components of a wellness action plan should contain a list of approaches that an individual can use and adapt to support their own mental well-being. Bear in mind that it is recommended that everyone should have a wellness action plan whether they have mental illness or not. So, the frequency of reading or accessing the wellness action plan remains, so far, a less than fully constructed concept. This may mean that a correlation between degree of mental ill-health and frequency of accessing the wellness action plan is fomented. However, the signs and symptoms of stress or mental ill-health should alert the employer and the employee that there are are circumstances that can trigger a spiral of mental diminishment in the employee. This then requires that the wellness action plan is somewhat memorised, otherwise it should be attached to the individual in some way or reviewed in an office daily. There may be other triggers, such as a lack of communication, or feelings of loss of control, that impart a feeling of mental un-wellness in an employee; these should appear in the wellness action plan. The impacts of stresses should be recorded in the wellness action plan. These, of course, would be based on past observations, or levels of probability. An understanding of how the employer can ameliorate potential and real problems in the workplace that does, or will, impact negatively on the employee’s mental wellness, should be in the wellness action plan. Of course, regular reviews, as mentioned earlier, should be conducted to update and amend, where appropriate, the wellness action plan. The employer and employee are free to have any other additions to the wellness action plan wherein they see fit that further additions should be made.