Customer Satisfaction

Everybody knows it's tough to make a go of an independent business, big or small, right?

As someone who probably would never in a million years have the nerve to put all his eggs into a small business and run it for his life, I should go nowhere near this topic...but what the heck, being all judgey probably goes completely hand in hand with not doing any research, so here we go:

Part of what has been astonishing to me over the years is the number of very small businesses, handymen mostly in my case, who do things like just don't finish jobs, or don't show up to do jobs they've agreed to do, or don't arrange to get that final payment from you for work they actually did do, or appear super uncomfortable to be dealing with you, or very obviously employ people who have zero interest in doing or ability to do the job at hand.

I often end up wondering how they ever stay in business, a thought which is quickly followed by reflecting on the old trope about how hard it is to make a go of a small business. I mean yeah, it's probably really hard to stay in business if you're a nitwit about it.

Usually, there's a burst of resentment in there somewhere, too, because they're driving way nicer vehicles than I've ever been able to afford because they can write off payments on them. On top of that, I'm betting vehicle licence fees are being avoided on very many small-business Ford F-350 pickups that are not correctly licenced for what they're doing. The truck below isn't a Ford, but may be the Dodge version of the F350...but if I were attending here I think I'd be looking at the driver, not the vehicle:

...and when it happened, there WAS a car in the space below the truck...

That picture was taken by my daughter Hayley at her place on May 15.... it wasn't submitted by the Autonomous Car Cabal. I like to imagine the conversation the woman in the foreground might be having.

For fun, and because I'm not sure where this is all going, here's a picture of a truck doing a government job that (a) I defy any pollster to get positive survey results on and (b) I had no idea existed at all and (c) is probably correctly licenced. It was in the Costco parking lot in Port Coquitlam in the middle of a work day:

I'm thinking bullet proof vests and danger pay, for sure...

I don't know what else to say. Statistics suggest that although the number of small businesses in BC has not really increased since 2007, and peaked in 2010 (not too surprisingly), the number of jobs and people have remained about the same excepting that bulge around the Olympics. I'm none too sure the stats provide a conclusion I can draw about the impact or lack of impact of running small businesses badly.  A simple table of stats on small businesses in BC is here

Maybe what I should be going on about is whether some of our tax dollars would be really well spent educating people on how to run businesses, but I'm going to bet there's plenty of dollars being spent on that already. The BC government provides loans and services already.  I didn't find out how much or how many, but I wonder how many of the guys driving F350s and pulling trailers crowded with lawnmowers and garden tools are spending their evenings on sites like this one for providing info to small business owners?

Soooo...I'm still blown away by the number of people who seem to be running small businesses very badly yet appear to make a living at it.

What if the Earth Stopped Spinning?

No, that's not some metaphor introducing a dreamy post about feelings, possibly including lyrics from a Taylor Swift song.

This post is for those of you who like to actually look into things, and find out real facts instead of arguing with someone about things neither of you know anything about....which is one of my most favourite pastimes.

My friend Rich and I once had a conversation about what would happen if the Earth just suddenly came to a dead stop. I think it started off as a speculative conversation about whether it was possible that the Earth's rotation has anything to do with where wind comes from.

(I think we need to pause right here for a moment to applaud me for even having managed to drag an eminently sensible, logical, orderly thinker like my friend Rich into such an inane conversation. Creative time-wasting is not quite as easy as you'd think.)

The Earth's circumference is roughly 25,000 miles and it goes around once every 24 hours, so that means that in spite of my more recent experience at the PNE, I am somehow able to be on a ride that's spinning at about 1,000 miles an hour without throwing up.

Does Earth's atmosphere also rotate at 1,000 mph?  Seems likely.  Is there anything out there in space that might tend to slow that rotation down, even just the tiniest amount, and so contribute to the development of wind?  Hmmm...not too sure, but it seems doubtful. Maybe solar radiation sets up drag, I don't know.

But if us, and all our goods and chattels, and everything that's on the surface and the interior of the planet, is all spinning at 1,000 mph, what would happen if somebody pulled the Emergency Earth Rotation Stop cable? Would me and my iPad and this house I'm sitting in and the trees outside and the ocean nearby just suddenly begin hurtling eastward at 1,000 mph? Would we burn up with friction even before doing our impersonations of bugs on a windshield, or would there be 1,000 mph winds blowing eastward right along with us, because the atmosphere is way less substantially bound to the rest of the planet than, say, bedrock?

I bet Steven Spielberg has seen any number of screenplays involving these questions, but none of them got made because no one can figure out how to indulge in that orgy of special effects and yet have Our Hero(es) somehow live happily ever after.

So, Faithful Reader, how about it?  Want to look into it and see what science says about this? Come o-o-o-onnnn...be a sport, do my work.

Thanks, eh?

PS there's a really great story about the ancient Egyptian who figured out the Earth's circumference (and a lot of others things), how he did it, how accurate he was, here .  I especially like the picture of him, and his apparently enormous skull:

A Cheap Ploy For More Views, or...?

This is a picture of my mom when she was very young, having just graduated from nursing school.

Yes, that's the Cheap Ploy, a Mother's Day post.  I'm not even sure yet whether that's as low as I'll go. You and everyone you ever knew or cared about and everyone you ever talked to will have to read avidly on to find out. I know I will.

When that picture was taken, my mom was finally about to escape what sounds like a pretty tough go in early life in Ontario. Her father was an illiterate farmer with I think a drinking problem, and I know even less about her mother. When the Olive family could not make a go of life, the children of the family were "taken in" by the good people of their parish, which in more concrete terms means the family was separated and the children became more or less indentured servants at various peoples' farms in the area. They were expected to work hard in support of the families they were living with and they were expected to be grateful for the chance to do so. Their educations or futures weren't really something the host families looked to.

My mom's eldest sister managed to get into nursing school, I don't know how, and eventually got a job and then got my mom in, too. Who knows how she managed it.

When she got out of nursing school, she went "overseas" (a kind of vague and romantic-sounding term we don't hear much anymore) to be part of the war effort. She became engaged to a man in the RAF who was shot down over Libya or somewhere in North Africa and didn't survive. It's hard for me to imagine her dealing with stuff like this having come from where she came from. She renewed her acquaintance with my dad in England, and they eventually became engaged and married.

After all that, they came to western Canada and settled down to the business of having a family and all the rest.

I never heard a word about all the stuff above from my mom. She was told to never complain and to always look on the bright side and be grateful, to only say good things about people or nothing at all, that hard work was its own reward...and so that's exactly what she did. Really. We found most of it out after she died, going through medical records put together as the local doctor tried to figure out whether what happened to her was Alzheimer's or some other kind or dementia or severe depression or what.

If you know me or have read a few of these posts you'll recognize that in spite of setting as good an example as anyone ever had, my mom failed to really instil most of those core beliefs too deeply in me. Probably something to do with not having threatened to let me starve to death on the streets in winter if I didn't toe the line...because what she didn't take from that Dickensian early life was a lot of anger or bitterness or entitlement, at least not that anyone noticed.  How does that happen?

Here's a picture of her while she was still partly herself, about 10 years before her good strong body finally got the message that there was no one at the helm and stopped.

So that was it, my Mother's Day post, to a person who made the best of things (even an obnoxious, obtuse, hockey-playing son). I never got to know her as a person, really, and wonder whether that would have ever happened, anyway. I just know she was a good mom, tried her best every day, and that I think of her often.

Happy Mother's Day!

Dr. Seuss's Wild Ride

For months I had posted, fair acres of text
And some of the faithful were asking "What next?"

I hemmed and I hawed and I said "I don't know,
But the world is our oyster, so where should this go?"

"More photos!" they squawked and "More photos!" they screamed
But..posts done with pictures? It's more than it seems.

So I got out my road bike and put on my gear
Set off to get pictures and post them on here.

I took pictures of beaches

I took pictures of boats

I made titanic efforts and took copious notes.

I paused for reflection (to rest my fat butt)

I pondered my future, the where and the what

And when all was over, my ride was all done
I thought "I'll just post this, and say 'I had fun!'"

But there was one thing to say here, just ere we part:
Yesterday's doggerel is today's high, pure Art.

...thanks Hayley for the tip, and apologies to all for the text...

The "blow it out" theory

Today's theory is one that I've been bouncing back on forth on (from "this is among the stupidest concepts I've ever entertained" (and let me just say, I've entertained some whoppers) to "I'm sure The Lancet is going to love my scholarly contribution on this").

The subject is present for me today because I've had a cold or some kind of similar viral affliction for the past week, and I'm getting near the end of it. Like many people, I'm a very impatient patient, not to mention one who feels that every little thing is an affront, something that should happen to someone else, regardless of a long list of behaviours that my mother told me 50 years ago would expose me to getting sick. "If you let yourself get run down, you'll get sick." The trouble with this very good information was that at the time, as an eight year old, "get run down" was not even a vague concept.

The theory is that if you're just coming down with a cold, or just at the tail end of one, you can either avoid it or speed up its finish by elevating your respiration with exercise. You'll blow it out, cook the virus by raising your body temperature and clear out all your respiratory passages by breathing really hard. 

The counter theory is that you will deprive your body of precious disease-fighting energy and either come down with a more severe cold than you would otherwise have had or prolong the recovery you're trying to get through.

My oldest brother just last night declared his allegiance to the theory. He might be the source of this idea for me, I'm not sure. I'm reserving judgment (and blame...credit seems unlikely no matter what happens) pending outcome of my upcoming experiment. My sister, without having been specifically asked, sounds like she's on the side of the counter theory, and feels that it's foolish to not just rest. There's probably yet another study in here about whether the theory you support predicts anything about your general makeup and approach to problems (and I'm thinking about the dominance of the inner 15 year old here).

The beauty part of the theory is it's probably impossible to prove or disprove, because outcomes depend on each individual set of circumstances: where was each person in a virus-fighting process whose outcome might have been no different regardless of exercise, how exhausted did each person become with exercise, how susceptible to extinction by heat is every different virus, does your body temperature even rise when you exercise, how is the body's energy deployed (ie., would your body always make disease fighting a higher priority than casual exercise? If you got all excited about your exercise, would that suppress the immune activity temporarily?  Is all you're accomplishing with this theory a temporary suppression of symptoms with really no change to viral status?), etc.

So cast your votes.  I'm going out for a run today and if that seems to have been okay, spin tomorrow. Will I relapse and continue to schnorgel and hack for days longer than necessary, or will I emerge a new man, fresh and minty, on Wednesday?  Will exercise have made any difference at all?  And as thy used to say on Sesame Street, What about Naomi?

Stay tuned....