Another modest proposal

Oh, dear, oh, dear—evidently the House of Windsor’s house is not at all in order. Queen Elizabeth II has overspent on household maintenance, and she’s down to her last £1MM in reserves. (Question: Couldn’t she just check between the sofa cushions? Gotta be a few million quid there—she must have a lotta sofas, no?)

Horrors!

And even with the profligacy, royal residences are said to be in poor condition, and HM needs more dosh to attend to the deficiencies.

The parliamentary report recommends that the Queen (well, her minions, really) should do more in the way of cost-cutting—by which they actually mean “lay off employees”, keeping the public sector (well, I dunno—is the Royal Household considered “public”? Oh, never mind) in line with private sector strategies of not bothering with improvements or innovations when you can just sack the staff.

It actually used the phrase “do more with less”, which has to eat the Royal Lunch.

There’s also a recommendation to increase revenues, and one suggestion was that Buckingham Palace should be opened to more paying visitors during times when HM is not in residence.

Well, let an American product manager who has no qualms about thinking outside the box propose they go a couple of steps further. I’m talking Bucks House B&B. This is not even an untried idea—the French have done it with one of the sub-palaces at Versailles.

Of course, they’re probably serving better food, but still.

Really—there are all kinds of tourists with more money than brains who’d pay premium prices to spend a night at the palace and shoot out selfies at a rate of knots. And I’m sure there are plenty of spare bedrooms that could be dusted off and hawked on hotels.com or Room 77.

Although—I’m wondering how many of the bedrooms have en-suite bathrooms? How would said tourists feel about paying £700 per night for a single bed and a loo down the corridor shared with yahoos from Utah, Uganda and Uzbekistan?

Then there’s the breakfast of cornflakes and cold toast under the beady stare of HM’s serving staff. (Well, more likely underemployed yoofs brought in on zero-hour contracts and tricked out in livery to look like the real thing. But they’ll be trained to get the snoot effect down.) What the hell—charge extra if they want an actual meal—it’s the palace, for heaven’s sakes; you could get away with £65 for the full English, including VAT.

Yeah, I know—they’d have to worry about folks nicking the towels or the spoons. Although, look—you’ve got their credit card details; just tack on £35 per spoon and £100 per towel. You can really revenue-spin the hell out of this. And you’d keep the linen and cutlery factories going, so a bonus on the employment front.

(Unless, of course said factories are in Bangladesh. Um.)

Okay—we do have to work out some details, including shaping HM’s head about the concept of sharing. It seems she was pretty cheesed off by police on patrol eating the palace peanuts. And we know this because she marked the level in the bowls of nuts around the place (yes, with her own royal hands and an imperial Magic Marker) and then let it be known that she was not amused.

But look—package up said peanuts in two-ounce packets stamped “By Appointment to the Queen” and sell ‘em for £5 a pop. It’s all good.

And, Windsors—you’re welcome.

Coffee connectivity

I know my way around the various coffee shops in the Valley they call Silicon—excepting Starbucks, whenever I can avoid them. (But then they’re pretty much all of a muchness, a dreary, synthetic, bitter-tasting muchness; so maybe I do know my way around them.)

And it’s been my observation ever since coffee shops started offering free Wi-Fi (again, Starbucks tried muscling its patrons to pay for the privilege, but eventually had to cave) that all kinds of people use them as an alternative (or perhaps even as a primary) workspace. I’ve been on con-calls for more than ten years where one or more participants was in some coffee shop, for a number of reasons.

Now, I understand that giving away Internet access is basically inviting people to park their cheap asses at a table in your establishment for hours, for the $3.00 you charge for a cup of coffee—especially if your refills are free. (Starbucks? Ha!) So it’s got to be a dicey trade-off for management: do we offer free Wi-Fi and risk table hogs, or do we not offer it and lose business from all those people who won’t come in without it?

(It’s curious that coffee shops in Europe—London and Wiesbaden being two locations—are charging customers by the minute, not the purchase. Presumably they’re assuming that people are there more for the connectivity than for the coffee. I shall follow this potential trend with interest.)

As you might imagine, here in the Valley they call Silicon, it’s the rare occasion when you see someone sat at a coffee shop table without a laptop or tablet. Even when there are several people sat at the table engaging in acts of pseudo-IRL-sociability. Clearly, free Wi-Fi is kind of a basic cost of doing business here.

So it’s really a puzzle to me that local bakery-café chain Le Boulanger is so lackadaisical about the Internet access in its outlets. (Or maybe it’s that they’re just cheap.) They went from a system where you just connected to their network to requiring that you log in via an online app; but getting that web page to come up is actually quite dodgy. (The app requires that you log in via Facebook, Twitter or an email account. Seriously? I use other people’s email addresses.)

I quit going to the one in Mountain View because of this inconsistent access—and because when their network went down, their staff just said, “Yeah, it’s not working.” No back-up, no work-around; basically, “Not our problem.” (Even when it was operational, I swear it was powered by a couple of elderly and very tired hamsters, barely managing DSL speed.)

And there’s a Panera Bread about a mile away with a bitchin network.

Yesterday I was in the Boulanger store in Cupertino—with Mountain View, probably the vortex of techdom, what with Apple and Google representing the hardware and software meccas—and again ran into that “you must log on to access our network” combined with “but we’re not going to display the log-on page for you” conundrum. And I also ran into that “not our problem” staff attitude.

I asked a fellow typing on his Mac if he was using the restaurant Wi-Fi; he told me it hasn’t been working reliably for months. And he’s told the staff about it, repeatedly, but received nothing but the shrug…

And here’s the thing: within a couple hundred yards of this place, there are a Panera, a Peet’s, a Philz and a Paris Baguette, all with free Internet access. (There’s a Boudin Bakery, too; but they don’t offer Wi-Fi at all.) Even techies can manage to walk that distance.

It’s an interesting strategy—advertise that you have Internet access, but make it nigh-on impossible for your customers to use it. I suppose it saves a few coins here and there, but it will eventually cut into your repeat business.

In fact, I just give up on Le Boulanger; it’s not worth the annoyance of showing up, either alone or to meet up with someone, and not know whether you’re going to be able to do real work while you’re there. And believe me—the quality of the food is not such that it compensates for that.

Turn, turn, turn

Wow. A giant has passed—Pete Seeger died Monday at age 94.

Those of you raised in the age of industrial or grunge rock—or probably everything post-disco—no doubt are scratching your heads wondering who he was (other than quite old, of course). Well—you might have caught him singing for President Obama’s first Inauguration. If so, no doubt you wondered who the hell he was.

Ah, children—beginning his career during the Great Depression and continuing pretty much literally to his death, Seeger was a folksinger, a writer, an activist (labor, civil rights, peace, environment—his passions ran both deep and wide), a humanist. Seeger was old while he was young and young while he was old. He displayed courage and grace the likes of which you don’t see in any music celebrity today.

I mean: do you feature Daft Punk or M.C. Hammer facing down the House Un-American Activities Committee, and being willing to go to prison for it?

No, I didn’t think so. But Seeger did that in 1955, at the height of the McCarthy frenzy, refusing either to name names or to take shelter behind the Fifth Amendment. Actually—here’s what he said:

“I feel that in my whole life I have never done anything of any conspiratorial nature… I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this.”

Possibly one of the most concise and eloquent statements of what an upright American should be in the face of ignorance, fear, intimidation or wrongheadedness, in any form and from anyone, but especially from one’s government.

Seeger pioneered the way for so many of my musical heroes—from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen. I must have first been introduced to him via the Byrds’ cover of “Turn, Turn, Turn”. But I couldn’t have escaped into adulthood without “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “We Shall Overcome” (you should hear Dr. Loco and the Rockin’ Jalapeño Band’s version), “If I Had a Hammer”, “Which Side Are You On?”, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy”… Oh, hell—you catch my drift.

One of the many recordings I have of him is this one, for a PBS show on his friends Woody Guthrie and Huddie William Ledbetter (better known as Leadbelly). “This Land Is Your Land” may have been his signature piece, though Guthrie wrote it, and he commands the performance, even surrounded by such powerhouses as Sweet Honey in the Rock, Springsteen and John Mellencamp:

He was a gregarious and generous performer, which you can see from any videos of his concerts. He was made to be with an audience, not record in a studio. Here he is with Johnny Cash, on the latter’s TV show:

Or this one with Woody’s boy Arlo:

On of the best concerts I ever went to was Arlo and Pete at the Greek Theatre. A magical experience.

But it turns out he was totally down with social media, too—with both Twitter and Facebook accounts. I love his Twitter profile:

And here are a couple of his tweets from last month:

Well, I’ve been listening to his stuff for the past day—just letting YouTube take me where it will. At 94, Pete Seeger’s earned some rest; he had a wonderful, remarkable life. As he used to sing again and again, there is a season for everything. God rest you, Pete.

Off message

You know, I’m not sure whether I’m being petty, hard-assed or just age-related cranky, but I have to say that—as a person for whom clear communication has been at the core of everything I’ve done since I started speaking in complete sentences—people who share Inspirational or Amusing Messages would find me more receptive if their billet-doux weren’t full of misspellings, grammatical errors and sloppy imagery.

For instance:

So much for Web wit.

But on the Metaphysical side, we have this:

And not only does the misuse of “it’s”, along with the pronoun-antecedent disconnect (body and ego plural/it, singular); if the producer had got that right s/he’d have had the chance to misuse “they’re” or “there”) make my jaws clamp, but I’m lost trying to connect the “love and light” thing with what follows. I guess we’re meant to infer that “love and light” equate to the spirit, but I’m just not sure.

Honestly—this sort of thing gives New Agers a bad name.

Gratitude Monday: Good influence

Gratitude Monday, and I’m grateful for a friend (with whom I’ve been out of touch for a few years) who suddenly appeared via social media to thank me for something I really had no idea I’d done.

Seems that Lisa’s work colleagues voted her the “most influential” person in her company. And she thinks that somehow I was, well, influential in her success.

While I’m not so sure about that—Lisa’s always struck me as being highly self-propelled and able to manage very complex operations under less-than-optimal conditions (and make it seem effortless)—it was such a blessing for me to hear that she thinks I’m somehow part of that.

I’m also somewhat chuffed to think that I might somehow, under some circumstances, be an influencer.

And finally, I’m reminded of all the times Lisa and I got together during my years in the UK—to discuss work situations (both of us were in sales support; we comprised 50 percent of team members with the XX chromosome configuration, out of about 30 total), translate cultural differences between the US and the UK, and just, in general, exchange ideas. She was a sounding board and a reality check, both of which I really needed during my sojourn there.

(There was also the episode of “confronting our demons”, which you’ll be interested to know was not proposed by the fourth-generation Californian, but which came from the Welsh girl. It was an exceptionally good idea; and in the process I learned that Lisa likes Champagne as much as I do. Which is great, because I had been rather concerned about the quantities of Lucozade she used to consume.)

Anyhow, it was a sheer blessing that Lisa appeared this past week to bring all this back to me, and I’m deeply grateful for it. And for her.