Idioms, Idiosyncrasies and more Service Failures

ome days you have nothing to say other days you have plenty to say… today is fortunately the latter.

Came across this site this morning whilst trying to determine where we got the phrase “How d’you like them apples” … didn’t give me the answer (we can assume American origin though) but it’s still an entertaining trawl through some of our bizarre idioms.

Secondly, why is it that I continue to measure temperature in two different ways during the year? When I watch the forecast during the winter I want to know how close to ‘0’ it is, but in the summer I want to know how close to ‘100’ it is, despite these being on different scales. The spring and autumn are clearly a difficult time for me, temperature wise. I don’t know whether to think in terms of Celsius or Fahrenheit and invariably can’t rationalise it in my head. In the past year I’ve tried to be disciplined and stick to Celsius but then the forecasters in the summer always say, “that’s .. in Fahrenheit” which makes me think that everyone does it. It is surely borne out of our tendency to make things simple and linear. For instance 0(ºC) represents cold much better than 32(ºF) and 100(ºF) represents hot much better than 37.78(ºC).

Have been thinking of getting a Digital Camera to play with and three stand out to me: Fuji S5500, Canon A520 and Nikon 5900. I’ve been really impressed with DPReview (despite being an American site) for their reviews and WarehouseExpress for their range and prices – though their website is a shambles …. They need to radically simplify their menu structure and devote more room to products and less to site ‘furniture’, margins and white-space.

Talking of which, try looking for Adult Education classes in language in Ipswich via the council website – absolutely shocking. I gave up. Now, I consider myself to be a power-user of the web, having experienced all manner of sites, navigation systems, information architecture and the like but it amazes me that a governmental site that should be so easy to navigate – especially when looking for educational resources (imagine the educationally-poor resident looking through the site at a local library).

Finally, another adventure with ‘one’ railway this morning. Vandals damaged signal equipment between Diss and Norwich so we were chucked off the train at Stowmarket to wait for buses … that were busy on the school run … 45 minutes later we all filed back on to the platform to catch a train to Norwich … delayed by a good one and a half hours. Can’t blame ‘one’ for the vandalism but can blame them for inept and almost silent handling of the issue. If buses aren’t going to run, get people in taxis and pay for it. That’s what exceptional customer service and ‘going the extra mile’ is about and that’s what the rail industry needs to start doing. Talking of which, still had no response to my email to their customer service department about the fire on the train earlier in the week.