Long Ago and Far Away

A long time ago, albeit not very far away, I was one of literally millions of people  eagerly awaiting what was then the first Star Wars film, the one that has since become the fourth in the Star Wars universe's chronology. Then it was just called Star Wars; it has since been renamed Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. I recall sitting in a cinema in London's West End, better to experience the film with the benefit of Dolby sound, listening to that stirring John Williams theme, seeing the now famed crawl as the back story was revealed and then that small space craft flitting across the screen, to be immediately replaced by the hulking mass of the pursuing craft that filled the entire screen to an accompanying rumble from the cinema's loudspeaker system. And now there is a new Star Wars film, one that has been eagerly anticipated by aficionados and which, from what I have heard, is actually rather good in a way that some of the more recent additions to the franchise, Episode One: The Phantom Menace in particular, were not.

3rd August 1977, and crowds flock to The Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles for the opening of Star Wars.

At around the same time as Star Wars was released, in 1977, I started to become interested in science fiction and the first novel in the genre that I read was Larry Niven's Ringworld. More Niven followed, and James Blish (including his novelisations of the Star Trek TV series), Philip K. Dick and H.G. Wells. Interestingly, while Blish, and Alan Dean Foster (who has written novelisations of both Star Trek and Star Wars) have turned their hand to converting film scripts into books, their original output has never been turned into movies, whereas the work of Wells and Dick account for more films than most other science fiction writers. And like any writer whose work is adapted for the screen, the reader's perception of the novel, the story and especially the characters, determines whether as an individual, you appreciate the film or not. Take Jack Reacher for instance; Lee Childs' ex-military policeman turned drifter and investigator of suspicious and dangerous events is supposed to be six foot five inches tall, yet was portrayed on screen by the more averagely built Tom Cruise. A certain amount of suspension of disbelief was required to accept Cruise as Reacher, but on the whole he just about carried it off.

Cruise also starred in the film version of Philip K. Dick's short story, Minority Report, which like most of PKD's shorter output, is a fairly straightforward tale, as was We Can Remember It for You Wholesale which became Total Recall on screen. PKD's longer works, with their themes of altered realities, altered states and postmodernity, have been translated into films which concentrate more on the action elements, with a nod to the philosophical and metaphysical themes of his stories, some with greater success than others. Blade Runner, which Dick eventually gave his full blessing to, is possibly the most successful adaption of a PKD novel (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?); certainly it is the most well known, although The Adjustment Bureau is to my mind a highly accomplished, and much underrated, adaption. A Scanner Darkly, on the other hand, was in my view a grave disappointment. As much as I enjoyed the book, as much as I wanted to like the film, I didn't warm to the movie, perhaps largely because of the animation technique (rotoscoping). The Man In The High Castle has been made into a TV series by Amazon Prime and there have been plans to make a film of Ubik in the pipeline for years, although the PKD novel I wish someone would film is Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, a story that I return to periodically and which to me is most representative of PKD's work; it is the novel I would recommend as an introduction to anyone unfamiliar with his writing.

While Philip K. Dick has been largely well treated by the film makers, one cannot say the same for Robert Heinlein. Starship Troopers, the first science fiction novel to appear on the reading lists at three of the five United States military branches, is widely regarded as a classic of the genre yet was turned into a film that bore little resemblance to its source and was described by one critic as "a nonstop splatterfest ... devoid of taste and logic."

Meanwhile, H.G. Wells, a master of science fiction in print, has not been especially well treated by the film makers either. While the 1960 film of The Time Machine was a creditable effort, the same cannot be said of the remake released in 2002. Likewise The War of The Worlds was turned into a landmark work of the science fiction cinema in 1953 (although the special effects now look somewhat dated) but suffered miserably when remade by Steven Spielberg in 2005. Despite favourable reviews from the critics, this adaption succeeded in turning a classic novel into boring, plodding film. Considering how many other stories there are that have been rebooted, it is odd, not to say more than somewhat disappointing, that no one has had the wit to make a film faithful to Wells' original story, that is to say set in Victorian England.

The late, great, PKD

Meanwhile there is Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but with all due respect to those who like this particular branch of sci-fi, I don't think I'll be bothering. I wouldn't categorise it as drivel, although goodness knows there has been a lot of that in cinemas masquerading under the banner of science fiction; think The Phantom Menace, think Superman IV, think Battlefield Earth (which I apologise for mentioning since most of you were probably trying to forget it ever existed), but Star Wars is not really my thing anymore.

On the other hand, there are a whole load of stories that are crying out to be made into films. Apart from the aforementioned hoped for but unlikely War of The Worlds reboot, and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and Ringworld, there's Time Out Of Joint[1] (PKD again), A Canticle for Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller), The Player of Games (Iain Banks), Perdido Street Station (China Miéville) and Altered Carbon (Richard Morgan) to name but a few.

But there again, books being so personal to us, often the stories are better off remaining on the page. Sometimes the best films are the ones that we make in our own heads.

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[1] The Truman Show bears comparison with Time Out of Joint. Until someone films Dick's book, the Jim Carrey movie will do just fine.

Christmas Presents Past

Amazingly, three years have passed since I retired (or was made redundant, but old enough to claim my occupational pension, if you prefer). In some ways it seems like only yesterday that I walked out of the office for the last time; in other ways, it seems like an eternity ago. I met up with some of my former colleagues a few weeks ago and from what I heard,  plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose seems to fit the bill at my erstwhile place of employment. That meeting, plus the anniversary of my leaving work, had me reminiscing on past Christmases at work.

When I worked in branch banking, for Midland Bank, the last working day before Christmas could be manic, although in some branches it was definitely more manic than in others. If the last working day was actually Christmas Eve, we closed at 12.30 rather than 3.30 (or 3 o'clock in the City of London), which meant that at 12.29 the banking hall would be a seething mass of humanity. Private customers would be cashing cheques, shopkeepers would be paying in takings and publicans would be staggering away with enough loose change to get them through the evening.  And on one occasion, we had a gentleman who wanted to open an account: who on earth needs to open a bank account on Christmas Eve? Some poor devil (me, quite often) would have to go into the banking hall to lock the front door, and stay there to let customers out after they finished their transactions. Almost immediately  there would be a procession of people pushing on the locked door or ringing the bell. Upon opening the door (on the security chain of course), I, or whoever had drawn the short straw, would be asked, "Are you closed?" Answering in the affirmative would often draw forth a plaintive request to be let in, which of course had to be declined, to much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the customer.

My experience was that suburban branches tended to be much busier than City branches on Christmas Eve. Romford Market Place branch was particularly frantic on 24th December since we had the accounts of most of the pubs, a whole host of market traders and many of the big shops. People who believed that because we closed early we must have got to spend the afternoon in the pub had to be disabused of that idea because despite closing at 12.30 we would be lucky to get out until two o'clock, and since in those days they closed at 2.30, it often wasn't worth trying to shoe horn yourself into a pub already packed to the gunwales with market traders and assorted others for the half an hour or so of opening time that remained. Except the year we popped into The Rez (Reservation Club) in North Street and weren't asked to leave until 5pm; I have vague recollections of beer and mistletoe.

My experiences of working in the City of London at Christmas were somewhat different. At Queen Victoria Street (QVS), the morning of the last day before Christmas one year when Christmas Eve fell on a weekend and we did not close early, was complete bedlam, with queues of customers who all wanted to cash cheques. It soon dawned on us that we would run out of cash before lunchtime, so one of the messengers and I were deputed to walk down to Cannon Street branch (no longer there, I think it is a pub now), with a Branch Payment for £10,000; we sauntered back as nonchalantly as it is possible to with £5,000 each in our jacket pockets. The Inspectors would have had a fit. Naturally management, mindful of how busy the morning had been, asked everyone to limit their lunch break to the bare hour, which we did, quaffing a few ales in The Dandy Roll in Bread Street (demolished years ago). Of course, when we got back from lunch we found that the only places still open in the City were the banks and the pubs and all of our customers were in the latter, or had gone home. As far as I recall I served one customer in two hours. Christmas Eve at QVS was one of the rare days when the branch manager, a traditional, old fashioned type, would leave his office and pass among his staff, with whom he would share a mince pie, a glass of sherry and some appropriate seasonal platitudes.

I'm not sure if it is still the case, but back in the days when branches had traditional managers, their favoured customers would bring in gifts in the lead up to the festivities. By and large these consisted of alcohol; vast quantities of wine and spirits would be delivered and depending on the manager, these would either be quietly taken away by him, or shared with staff.  Jack Groom, one of my managers at Barking,  fell into the latter category and in fact would often supplement gifts given by customers to ensure that every member of his staff went home on Christmas Eve with something. While working as Foreign Clerk at Barking I had frequent daily dealings with a record exporting company and twice received hampers from Fortnum & Mason as Christmas gifts, the only time I was singled out to receive a gift from a customer other than the store owner in Romford who presented me with a half bottle of Scotch after I discovered that my (large) till difference (an over) was down to a mistake on his paying in slip.

When I moved back to the City in 1986, it was to Eastcheap where I was no longer expected to work on the counter, but Christmas Eve was possibly even more manic in the Foreign Department than it would have been if I had been cashiering. One year, while everyone else appeared underemployed, I found myself desperately trying to process what seemed to be a never ending stream of outward bills, and then had to cancel the Large Town Clearing in record time, with a messenger breathing over my shoulder, anxious to take any returns to the clearing house. And at Eastcheap I took home the oddest Christmas gift I ever received. We were all called into the manager's office individually, where we were each presented with a large bag of dried fruit, courtesy of a customer who imported such things.

Having left branch banking, I found Christmas Eve quite different. Unless it was essential, many jobs wound down, although working in payments was an exception, with limited opportunity to slope off early. Sometimes however, Christmas Eve meant doing very little, and resenting what little I had to do, until it was time to go home, and I do mean home, not the pub, because getting into one on Christmas Eve has in later years not been worth the effort, particularly with all The Amateur Drinkers about (see The Amateur Drinker).

In some occupations, Christmas gifts from customers are unheard of. My wife works for a local authority and has never had one to my knowledge, but by an odd coincidence, my elder daughter, who works for a different local council, has brought home a bottle of wine, courtesy of a client, who just happen to have been a customer of Midland Bank, Barking when I worked there. As they say, it's a small world.

The Christmas Present

Some years it seems that hot on the heels of the first cuckoo of spring is the first mention of Christmas. The earliest I can recall seeing Christmas mentioned was when Debenhams installed a Christmas tree to advertise their Christmas Club...in July. This was closely followed by a local Indian restaurant imploring patrons to book early for Christmas, even before August Bank Holiday Monday. Then in 2012 when the Olympics came to London, the hullabaloo and razzmatazz that attended their preparation, delivery and aftermath put thoughts of Christmas out of the advertisers heads for a while. It was like a throwback to my youth when it seemed that there were no festive references until we had got Guy Fawkes Night out of the way. In the years since then Christmas has started to creep in a bit earlier again. By next year no doubt we will again be seeing festive advertisements before we have taken our summer holidays.

This year, and not for the first time either, Christmas has crept up on me a bit. When the first festive commercial appears on television, when the first display of Christmas cards and other goodies appear in the shops, I tend to shudder, considering it way too early, and put all thoughts of present buying and card writing out of my head. There is ages yet till I need to think of such things, I say to myself, months to do all that stuff. Then suddenly it is a week before Christmas Day itself and I still have to buy presents and post those cards (and last post is Monday, yikes!)

Buying Christmas presents is something that I have to brace myself for; it isn't that I begrudge doing it, nor spending the money, so much as I find it incredibly difficult to decide what to buy for people. I like to buy things for my family and see them open them on Christmas morning and know that they appreciate them, and more importantly, want what it is I've bought them. The flip side is the realisation that you have bought someone something that will be consigned to the cupboard or drawer and never see light of day again once Christmas Day has passed; never a nice thought.

Some people are easier to buy for than others. Generally, children are easy to buy for; there will always be toys or film or television related products that they crave. In fact it can often be difficult to know when to stop, but as they get older the decisions get more difficult. But when children are young there is nothing more enjoyable than watching them unwrap their presents on Christmas morning (provided you can delay that activity until a reasonable hour, say 6 a.m.)

 When buying for friends or relatives who have specific hobbies or collect things, then choosing gifts is easier than for those without such interests. The hardest person I ever had to buy for was my father. The old expression, "what do you buy for the man who has everything?" did not apply, more like, "what do you buy for the man who doesn't want anything?" My father wasn't interested in reading, and once he developed macular generation he couldn't read anything smaller than this font

size.

So books were out of the question. He watched little on TV, making videos or DVDs a waste of time and after he gave up brewing his own beer, his only hobby was gardening. Invariably, therefore his Christmas gifts would comprise socks, a bottle of wine, some chocolate coated Brazil nuts and a tie or a wallet. "Just what I wanted," he would exclaim, although in truth this probably applied only to those items that could be imbibed or eaten. One year I bought him some things for the garden, but the fact was, he had most of the things he needed anyway.

My mother was slightly easier to buy for. Books, DVD's, picture frames, houseplants, a jumper or fleece; these things featured large and for a couple of years we made up hampers of nice foods, the sorts of things that you wouldn't normally buy yourself, but which shops like British Home Stores  specialise in at this time of year. I confess to be being little easier to buy for than my dad was; ask me what I would like for Christmas and it is a rare year when there is anything specific that I really, really want. The odd DVD, or CD; a book perhaps or sometimes a particular item of clothing, but some years I honestly have no especial need or want. At one time, when I was single and living with my parents, we agreed a pact and didn't actually buy each other anything. Bah humbug! you might say, but why waste money, and more especially time and effort, trying to buy something for someone that they don't actually want?

As I sit here writing this I am hoping that inspiration will strike, because one present apart (which she chose for herself), I have bought nothing yet for my wife. Fortunately she is more organised and we therefore have bought presents for our daughters and other relatives, although I have no idea if she has bought me anything, since when I was asked what I would like, my mind went completely blank. As in many other ways, I am turning into my father, the man who wanted nothing. While inspiration is my biggest problem, finding the time to actually buy things for others has proven to be a bit of an obstacle as well this year. You would think that being retired I would have more time, but for some reason (and I have explored this before, see Where does the time go to?) I seem to have no time whatever. I suppose that when I worked I would take a day or two off in December and frantically do all of my present buying. Now that I have all the time in the world, I have all the reasons in the world not to go to Lakeside or Romford, the search for a parking space and hordes of other shoppers being just two.

Genuinely, this oven glove was one of my presents last year.

Were I slightly more organised I could have done my shopping online, except that presupposes that I knew what I wanted to buy. The old fashioned method of trolling round a shopping centre at least offers the advantage of inspiration occasionally striking as you walk past a shop display. And troll round a shopping centre is something I must do. Chances are if you are reading this before Christmas Day, I will be  wandering around shops with a haunted expression, in the company of large numbers of increasingly panic stricken men, on a quest for The Christmas Present.

Big Brother In The Bus Lane

A simple white envelope landed on the doormat on Monday.  Plain, ordinary, with no post mark and no return address, just the words 'Royal Mail, Postage Paid' in the top right corner. What's this? I wondered, intrigued. It was addressed to me personally, so not junk mail in all probability, but one thing I have learned over the years is that unexpected mail is rarely good news. Sometimes not news at all, often unimportant news, but frequently annoying or bad news. I slit the envelope open and pulled out...a Penalty Charge Notice (PCN). Apparently I had driven in a bus lane. I peered at the CCTV photos and recognised with a sigh of resignation, that yes indeed, I had driven in a bus lane, for all of fifty feet or so, approaching a set of traffic lights at which I wanted to be in the inside lane. There had been no bus in the bus lane, in front or behind me, I was not causing an obstruction nor inconvenience by doing so, if anything I was speeding the traffic flow by not clogging up the outside lane, but nonetheless I had driven in the bus lane...for fifty feet.

*Sigh* That's me, entering the bus lane.

According to the AA, fines for motorists using bus lanes have outstripped parking tickets as the main cause of complaints from drivers. One such bus lane, in Lambeth, generates over £1 million in income for the local council every year. Many drivers are fooled by worn road markings and poor signage of bus lanes, while the Lambeth junction is said to be difficult to negotiate without driving in the bus lane. There is a common perception that bus lane cameras, speed cameras and other cameras that regularly record drivers committing some sort of motoring violation have more to do with income generation than improving road safety or traffic flow. With these fines going into local authority coffers at a time when central government grants are being cut and councils find themselves under increasing financial pressure, it is easy to see why.

This Daily Mail graphic shows revenue generated by just ten traffic enforcement cameras in 2013

I toyed with the idea of appealing against the PCN, but decided that there was little or no point, after all I had no real grounds other than requesting that common sense be applied, which is no defence at all. Had I appealed on the grounds that it was only fifty feet, there were no buses and that I was actually improving traffic flow, the reply would simply have been that I was in a bus lane, ergo I was committing an offense.  No doubt my PCN was generated from the image taken from the camera mounted on the lamp post by an automated system, and that my fine having been paid online, the record will be updated by an automated system and me apart, no human will ever be aware of the matter (except you, dear reader). That being the case, there was no possibility of a human operator using any discretion and saying that while technically an offense occurred, there was no harm done. I recall, a number of years ago when motorcycles in London were not allowed to use bus lanes, seeing a motorcyclist stopped by a policeman in Aldgate and asked, "So this is a bus, then is it?" with that particularly sarcastic tone that is undoubtedly taught at Hendon Police College from day one. I am fairly confident that the police officer used his discretion and sent the rider on his way with a flea in his ear but no more; CCTV cameras however have no more discretion than a washing machine does.

In twenty three years of motoring (I was a late starter, only passing my test in 1992) I have picked up five fines. The first was for parking on a double yellow line and was a bit of a calculated risk on my part, although I was by no means the only person parked on that particular stretch of road. I imagine that the traffic warden had writer's cramp by the time he finished his shift. I have to hold my hands up to that one. Number two, however was infuriating to say the least. Driving into a space in a car park as it was just being vacated by another motorist, I was annoyed to return to the car later to find a parking ticket. It was one of those car parks with poorly marked bays as it was largely gravel, with white lines barely a foot long indicating the spaces. My infraction was to have parked over two spaces. My defence was that one of the spaces was largely occupied by a large bush making parking entirely in that bay physically impossible; it didn't wash and I had to pay.

I received a ticket for doing 37mph in a 30mph zone and again, have no defence except that it was one of those maddening stretches of road (the A12 in Suffolk) where the speed limit jumps from 30 to 40 to National Speed Limit (NSL), then back down to 30 via 40 then back up to NSL through 40 mph. I genuinely thought that the limit was 40 when I was clocked; obviously I was mistaken. I went on a Speed Awareness Course as an alternative to the points on my licence; I still had to pay the fine, although they call it a course fee. Then there was parking partially on the pavement, which is fairly common round my way; in fact in some roads, even though there are no formally marked bays, it is the norm. That isn't to say it is allowed and the ubiquitous CCTV camera picked it up.

There are twenty different types of traffic enforcement cameras in the UK; there are somewhere in the region of 5.5 million CCTV cameras of all types (not just for traffic enforcement) of which 6,000 are speed cameras.  Look around and you are never far from a CCTV camera of some kind, so I suppose that PCN's are an almost inevitable consequence of driving.  Eventually you will infringe some traffic regulation or another and get one in the post.

A positively Orwellian London Transport poster from 2002

Oh, some people don't get them. You know the sort, they will boast that they have forty years of unblemished driving behind them. What they actually mean is they have forty years of never being caught behind them. With the number of cameras in the UK, that won't last long.

Mind how you go.

A Midland Odyssey - Part Five - Over Land And Sea

In the days when I worked in branch banking, if someone asked me what I did for a living I would say that I worked in a bank. Most people probably thought that I was a cashier, despite the fact that in most branches there were about ten times as many people doing back office jobs as there were cashiers, and I was only on the counter for about three of the ten years I spent working in branches. Later, when I had left branch banking to work in other areas I would say, if asked, that I worked for a bank rather than in one, which meant that I then had to elaborate on what I actually did.

In fact over the years, despite having only one employer, Midland Bank/HSBC, I had any number of different jobs; conservatively I reckon it was about seventeen diverse roles. Having worked through a number of jobs, I ended up at Barking branch as Foreign Clerk in 1981, which was a varied role including selling foreign currency and travellers cheques to customers, handling Bills of Exchange and processing inward payments, creating overseas payments and issuing bankers drafts.

Processing Outward Bills of Exchange was a tedious process involving the completion of a seven part form that required six sheets of carbon paper and a heavy touch on the typewriter[1]. We had one customer, a record exporter who twice won the Queens Award for Exports, whose work required me to complete these by the dozen.

What was frustrating about working in branches was dealing with International Division, particularly trying to track down incoming payments. The image that I, and probably a lot of other people had of International Division, of highly sophisticated systems, straight through processing and little paper,  was completely different from what I experienced later when I worked there, the reality being paper, paper everywhere and an almost entirely manual process. No wonder it was so hard to track down a payment. Years later the boot was on the other foot and I was the one answering calls from branches desperately seeking a payment.

HSBC Barking Branch

I was a Foreign Clerk at Barking and Eastcheap branch, where I spent virtually all my time processing inward and outward Bills of Exchange, it was on to Threadneedle Street International Banking Centre (IBC), where foreign work from many branches in the City of London had been centralised. At the IBC I was in the Payments team, processing payments to banks overseas and to other London banks in foreign currencies. Further centralisation followed, with payments being taken out of the various IBC's around London and absorbed into Multicurrency Payments Department (MPD) in 1990. And in one way or another, it was in the payments environment that I remained until I retired. The payment system we used when I started in the department was called VOPS. Technically the VSAM Operated Payment System[2], it was known (not entirely affectionately) as the Very Old Payment System. When not on payments at Threadneedle Street I sometimes worked on Foreign Exchange, which our manager made it very clear did not make us Dealers, using the wonderfully named Super DORIS system (DORIS being Dealer Operated Rate Indication System), or on Admin, where I had my first introduction to Microsoft Office; I think it must have been Windows 2.0 operating system.

Threadneedle Street branch is now a hotel and restaurant.

I appreciate that to non-Bankers, and even to some people in the industry, payments could be as dull as ditchwater, so I don't intend launching into a detailed description of the subject, but I found the whole area fascinating. And on the basis that if you enjoy something you tend to do it well, and if you do something well you tend to enjoy it, I got a lot of satisfaction in the various roles I had in payments. As with any job, I needed to learn the basics, and in payments one of the first is understanding the difference between Nostro and Vostro accounts[3]. It's an obvious difference and the principals are not that hard to grasp, but until you do there is great potential for error. Once you have made the mistake of threatening  a bank in New York that you are going to debit them when in fact you should be asking them ever so nicely if they would not mind crediting you, you tend to learn your lesson.

From processing payments, it is a logical step to working queries on them. The majority of payments get processed without any problems, only a small percentage go wrong, but when you are processing tens of thousands of payments a day, that small percentage equates to a lot of queries. Sorting them out is an immensely frustrating task, particularly when dealing with banks in the back end of beyond who are often disinclined to answer your enquiries, but satisfying when you solve a knotty problem. There is a popular misconception that once someone presses a button to send a payment to a bank somewhere else in the world, it is there instantaneously. That is not the case everywhere, it wasn't even the case where I worked twenty years ago when the amount of manual processing involved in handling payments was phenomenal. In banks in many parts of Asia and Africa, and even in Europe, the majority of payments went through any number of human operators, with the attendant capacity for loss or error.

The Cheetah telex machine. Telexes were largely superseded by SWIFT as time went by.

Naturally for the customer who phoned to say that the payment that they sent last week had not arrived it was a matter of supreme importance, for us it was only one of dozens of similar queries we had received that day. Sometimes it would take weeks to prove what had happened, and invariably the payment had turned up, albeit somewhat late, but on occasion it would mean pulling out all the stops to locate it. For instance, one Christmas Eve we had a phone call to say that a payment destined for someone stranded in the Canary Islands without any money had gone astray. A series of increasingly fraught telephone calls to banks in Madrid and The Canaries finally established where the funds were and they were paid to the beneficiary barely an hour or so before the banks closed for the holiday. It was nice to sort that out and avoid someone having a very unhappy Christmas.

You would expect that working in a department processing overseas payments requires a rudimentary knowledge of geography. Some of the errors I had to remedy stemmed from some people having only a sketchy familiarity with the subject, for example the payment sent to New Zealand in favour of an account with the Puget Sound Bank: Puget Sound Bank are based in Seattle, Washington State in the USA. Or my all time favourite, the payment from Midland Bank, Paris in favour of a beneficiary at Midland Bank, Montpellier Branch that was sent back to Paris instead of Cheltenham where Midland Bank, Montepellier was located. Even for someone with only the most tenuous grasp of geography, that one made no sense.

In those days all of our files were on paper and one of the biggest challenges was finding a file when you needed it, particularly if you had an impatient customer or branch on the phone (oh, how I learned about being on the other end of such a call, very much like one of the ones I might have made just a few years before), so the decision was made to develop a computer based query system. And so was born The Midas Project.

To be continued

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[1] Seriously, when was the last time you used a piece of carbon paper? Or a manual typewriter?

[2] Virtual Storage Access Method (VSAM) is a file storage access method introduced by IBM in 1970's and is used to organize data in form of files in Mainframes. And VOPS may have been VSAM Outward Payment System.

[3] Nostro, our account with you (for example a UK bank's US Dollar account with a bank in New York) and Vostro, your account with us (say, the same New York bank's Sterling account with us).

The Interview

In last week's blog I mentioned that I am not good at interviews, in fact in the whole of my life I was only successful at one interview, and that was the one that got me my first job in 1976. Subsequent interviews at which I failed resulted in one of three outcomes: Someone else got the job (I can cope with that); The Interviewer got the job (mildly humiliating); No one got the job (very humiliating). On occasion I was on the other side of the desk, interviewing people, but thankfully not alone; had I been I doubt I would have been comfortable.

Interviews are notoriously stressful and some candidates, like me, are not good at talking about themselves, well not in a way that sells themselves anyway: there's a very British trait that we don't like to boast which conflicts with the object of the interview. Some interviews require candidates to perform some sort of test, in fact I was involved in interviews where we were looking for a Workflow Architect (part Business Analyst, part Software Programmer) where we asked applicants to design a workflow diagram (not for anything too complex, it was for making a cup of tea). These tests have always struck me as a lot more useful than questioning alone.

But these days it seems that interviewers have gone beyond the "What are your strengths?" type of question and added some that, at first sight at least, seem surreal, irrelevant and possibly downright unanswerable. Out of idle curiosity, I took a look at the top ten toughest questions asked in the UK [1] to see if they as pointless as they seem at first sight, and the answer is that by and large they make some sense, even if the answer is to some extent irrelevant.

1. "Can you calculate how many tennis balls are used during the course of Wimbledon?”

No, is the short answer, not unless you know the number of matches played in the tournament, but even then you'd need to know how many games within those matches, because the balls are changed every nine games, unless of course the answer required is how many are supplied by Slazenger, which is not necessarily the number used. I'd say that by demonstrating your understanding of the question you would at least show the interviewer that you had the ability to think through the problem. Alternatively you could admit you don't know, but know how to find out, an equally important skill in my book. After all, I couldn't say I knew everything about my job, but what I didn't know I knew how to find out. The actual answer to this question is 52,000 by the way.

2. “Estimate the total number of cars in the UK.”

Unless your previous job was with the DVLA or the Office of National Statistics, this is not a fact you will have at your fingertips, but again you could demonstrate a logical mind by estimating (because that's what you are asked to do), that in a population of 60 million about half the population will be too young, too old or not bothered to drive, leaving 30 million people who are likely to drive, and let's assume one car per person for the sake of argument; it is an estimate after all. And the correct answer? 34.5 million.

3. “How many calories are in a grocery store?”

You can take this question literally, in which case the answer is none because a grocery store will comprise steel, wood, glass, concrete and other building materials that are not known for their calorific content, or you could ask, how big is this grocery store as a starting point, then dissemble a bit by comparing the little corner shop with the cavernous out of town supermarket, and what sort of grocery store are they talking about anyway and the state of the nation's diet. The number of calories in the food being sold within the supermarket will also vary due to the season (at Christmas it seems food of a much higher calorie content is on offer), the time and day of the week, whether a delivery has recently been received and how much stock has been sold.

4. “How would you sell a fridge to an Eskimo?”

As soon as the interviewer said Eskimo, you immediately thought of someone swaddled in seal fur, living in a house built of ice, and how could you sell a fridge to someone like that? Except Eskimos no more live in ice houses (igloo, by the way is Inuit for a building people live in, so they all live in igloos, whether they are ice houses or brick built) than I do. So the answer is, in exactly the same way you sell a fridge to anyone else. Oh, and some people prefer Inuit to Eskimo as they consider the latter term non-PC.

5. “What would you take to a lonely island with you and why?”

Note, lonely, not desert, not deserted. So my lonely island would be Bandos in The Maldives, and I'd take my family, my swimwear and my Kindle, because that's what I take on holiday.

6. “Is Batman a superhero?"

Yes. Superhero is not the same as having super powers in my view, so the fact that Batman can't fly or turn green, or burst into flames does not prevent him being a super hero, because he is undoubtedly heroic and super has any number of synonyms, including great, magnificent, sensational, terrific and cool, and I think he fits the bill there, don't you?

7. "You have 17 red and 17 blue balls, and you remove two at a time. If the two are the same colour, add in one extra blue ball. If they are different colours, add in an extra red ball. What colour is the final ball removed?”

Let us assume that the first two balls you remove are red. You are now required to add a further blue ball, but since you only have 17 blue balls to start with, how can you? Nowhere in the question does it say that you have a reserve of red and blue balls to add to the balls you begin with. Also, since you remove two balls at a time, there cannot be a final, single ball removed. There can of course, be a final ball remaining, but that is not the same thing. The question is inherently flawed.

8. “What cartoon character would you be and why?”

Think of the most obscure cartoon character you can, Dagwood Bumstead perhaps, or Garth, or The Escapist. If the interviewer has not heard of them, so much the better. This sort of question is surely asked solely so that you can demonstrate the ability to speak coherently. Better yet, make up a character.

Dagwood Bumstead

9. “What is the wildest thing that you have done?”

Naturally, the answer here should be tailored to the job you are applying for. Obviously the position of Club18-30 rep requires a much raunchier answer than that of Archbishop of Canterbury. On this occasion, I think you have to second guess the interviewer!

10. “What was your opinion of the film Blair Witch Project?”

How you answer this depends very much on whether you have seen it or not. I haven't, so I have no opinion on its content, but I have heard of it and have a general idea about it, so at least I could waffle on about how it popularised the "found footage"  type of movie, albeit that it was not originator of the genre.

A lot of these questions anticipate that you, the interviewee, will make assumptions based on preconceptions. In a similar way, when one goes on courses and is given a team activity or exercise, you will be given certain limitations. There will invariably be a limitation that is assumed by the team that was not named; finding and then exploiting that invariably makes the task easier.

The ten questions are there to make candidates  do something that Edward de Bono labelled lateral thinking, but what we now generally call thinking outside the box. When we see a question we make assumptions, invoke our prejudices and preconceptions and answer accordingly, often missing what the question actually wants.

But finally, a question that I think you will find impossible to answer. When does the dfs sale end?

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[1] Source: glassdoor.co.uk

What? Me Worry?

My Mother, God bless her, was an inveterate worrier. My Dad and I would often remark that when she had nothing to worry about she would worry that she had missed something she ought to be worrying about. With hindsight, this was probably not helpful. In fact I think that today Mum would have been diagnosed as suffering from anxiety, a condition experienced by nearly 5% of the UK population, but back in the days I'm referring to people worried rather than suffered from anxiety.

And in the 1960's, my Mum had plenty to worry about, largely it has to be said, about money because my Dad rarely had a secure or long term job. A French polisher by trade, my Dad would frequently start a new job on a Monday only to be handed his cards by Friday. During the decade that began with the building of the Berlin Wall and ended with the first moon landings, my Dad had so many jobs that Mum had to keep a notebook of employers, start and finish dates, pay and the like in order to be able to fill out his tax return, and when Dad dropped a cast iron letter box on his foot and broke his toe,  he was off work for weeks with virtually no money coming in. So I guess there were times when, by any definition of the word, we were living in poverty, not that I was aware of it, it wasn't a concept my ten year old self had heard of let alone could grasp. In later years my Mum told me how much she had to scrimp to put food on the table and pay the rent, and how much of a worry that was. That probably influenced her in the last few years of her life, when even though she had enough money to live comfortably if not in luxury, she would worry about spending her savings.

When my Dad gave up polishing in favour of more stable occupations (he was a school caretaker and later, storeman for firm of pneumatic engineers) and my Mum went to work for a firm of solicitors as a shorthand-typist, money was less of an issue, but Mum found other things to worry about, principally me it seemed, especially when I went out. Like any normal teenager I would go out with friends, but whereas they seemed to be able to divert from a previously made arrangement and do something off the cuff, I could not, particularly if this meant staying out longer than planned, because Mum would enter panic mode if I was home even five minutes later than I had originally said I would be. Over the years this caused me to cancel or not even bother with arrangements to go out, especially if they were spontaneous arrangements; the hassle, particularly if events overran, was just not worth the bother.

I suppose that this has driven my almost obsessive approach to timekeeping. I abhor being late but even above that I cannot abide being late when it is me and me alone that has imposed a deadline. I guess that most people have a slight concern about being late when they have a plane to catch, but I tend to fret about being late to do something as trivial as going to the shops once I have decided that I will go at a particular time. Unfortunately I have inherited some of my Mum's traits when it comes to worrying. Rationally I can see them for what they are; most of the time they are baseless and not worth consuming thoughts with, but that does not mean that I will not worry about them.

Most people will have heard the famous Serenity Prayer:

 " God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

The courage to change the things I can,

And the wisdom to know the difference."

Huh! Is all I can say to that. To me there is no difference between something I can change and something I cannot; I will worry about each equally. I even worry about things that may not even happen (and what a total waste of time and energy that is). For instance, let's say you apply for a job. You send off your application and wait to hear if you have got an interview. Meanwhile you get on with your life. I, on the other hand, start to obsess the moment the application has been sent. Here's a short list of the things that I will worry about:

• What happens if I get an interview and it's at an awkward time?
• What time should I leave to get to the interview?
• How should I get there?
• What do I say when I get there, how do I introduce myself?
• If I get the job, I wonder where my desk will be? And where the toilets are? And how will I get my system access on the computer set up? What time train should I get on my first day? What if I'm late? What are the names of the other people and will I remember them? 

I do not worry about whether I will get an interview, you will notice, although inside I am praying that I don't because then I don't have to worry. Whether I get an interview or not is genuinely beyond my control, I cannot worry about that. And I do not worry about the interview itself (should I get one), which is probably not a good thing as it leaves me unprepared and in a sort of self fulfilling prophecy, I confidently expect to fail...and do. All that worry about trivia such as where is the stationery cupboard becomes irrelevant and exhaustingly time wasting.

Oh, and I can worry by proxy quite nicely too, thanks very much. Let's say it is a family member who has applied for a job, not me. All of the worries that I listed above will pass back and forth through my mind even though it isn't me who may have an interview and may eventually have to make that commute and find that stationery cupboard.

Anxiety can be a debilitating condition and I don't mean to make light of it, especially since I don't think I am a sufferer (I am writing that because I am worried that people who genuinely suffer from anxiety may be offended or upset by my potentially making light of it), but I am a worrier, and like my Mum I will occasionally worry that I have nothing to worry about. I suppose I am by no means unique in having had periods of my life when everything seems to be going according to plan but still I worry that there is something around the corner or something that I have not thought of that will give me something to worry about.

The strange thing is that I rarely worry about the really big issues, assuming I cannot influence them. After last Friday's tragic events in Paris, you might expect me to be worried about a repeat in London that might affect me, my family or friends, but I'm not (well, not unduly) because I can do little or nothing about it. There are some things that are genuinely not possible to worry about, such is their enormity and our inability to influence them. 

Maybe there's something in that Serenity Prayer after all.

The Long Walk To Tilbury

A few weeks ago I wrote that I was looking for sponsors to support me in walking from Romford to Tilbury to raise money to buy a defibrillator for Romford Football Club (see Project 10 - Walking To Tilbury). The aim was to set out from Westlands in London Road, Romford (the site of the football club's proposed new home) and walk to Tilbury, where Romford were playing that day, a distance in the region of 16 miles. 

This was the first time I had tried this sort of fund raising and I have to say that the internet is absolutely vital in getting the message over. Without the internet my exposure would have been limited to supporters of the football club through our programme and matchday publicity and family and friends, and since I am now retired I have  no network of work colleagues to tap into. And without the internet it's a largely repetitive process of canvassing people face to face. JustGiving, well known for helping people raise money for charity, also help with Crowd Funding and their website was invaluable in publicising my campaign and collecting pledges. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter were similarly crucial in spreading the word along with Romford FC's website and the Ryman League's site (see http://www.isthmian.co.uk/blogger-turns-walker-to-save-lives-27005). But for all the amount of publicity, I was still had no idea whether my target of £1,000 was achievable.

About to set off, 8am, Saturday 7th November 2015

I started canvassing for pledges in mid-October at Romford's game against Redbridge and within a week I had £200, which I was quite pleased with. By the end of the month this had more than doubled and that point I wondered if I could reasonably expect much more, so as you might imagine, I was delighted that the pledges continued to come and on 6th November, the eve of my walk, my target was reached.

Five miles done, eleven to go. 

But my happiness was tempered by the weather forecast, which was for heavy rain for virtually all of the duration of my walk and could have led to the game being postponed. The prospect of arriving at Chadfields (Tilbury's ground) to be greeted by a waterlogged pitch, no game, no fellow Romford supporters and then having to make my way home again on my own  didn't really bear thinking about.

Nine miles done!

Come Saturday morning, it was raining when I woke up just before five o'clock but mercifully it had stopped by the time I set off from Westlands at just after 8 o'clock. I say "I set off", but in fact I wasn't alone. My wife Val came along initially just to take a photo or two and walk as far as Roneo Corner. As it turned out she then decided to walk to Rainham but eventually walked as far as Lakeside (that's 11.81 miles) where the prospect of a sit down with a cup of coffee and some retail therapy proved too strong and she left me to my own devices for the rest of the trip. By that stage we had marched from Westlands to Roneo Corner, on to Dovers Corner in Rainham and then trudged along the A1306, getting a good drenching when we crossed the A13. After Val went off to sample the delights of Lakeside, I plodded on through Grays, which was where for the first time there was a hilly bit. Leaving Grays Town Centre, Orsett Road climbs up towards Palmers College and I was puffing a bit by this stage, being overtaken at one point by an elderly lady carrying home her shopping. Still, I bet she hadn't walked fourteen and a bit miles to get there! Oh, and I also met a couple of Mormons who attempted to engage me in conversation (bent, presumably on conversion), but I made my apologies and ploughed on.

Checking my phone, I noticed some reference on social media about whether the game was on or not. At about 10 o'clock Tilbury FC had tweeted that "as it stands (the game) is on" which was only vaguely reassuring, and when my phone rang as I approached Palmers College at 12.45 I imagined that this would be a call telling me that it was off. I wrested my phone from my pocket to be greeted by a recorded message, "We understand you may have been involved in a car accident that wasn't your fault..." I hung up and plodded on. The next stretch was mercifully downhill, along the Chadwell By-Pass, and in the distance I could see Tilbury's floodlights. My goal was in sight, but as I reached The Gateway Academy the heavens opened again.

I squelched into St Chads Road and arrived at the ground at quarter past one, 5 hours and 11 minutes and 16.34 miles after leaving Westlands. Romford skipper Matt Frew and some of his team-mates were in the clubhouse when I walked in and were obviously aware that I'd walked there. Not so the locals who at first thought I was some sort of madman, but when I explained what I'd done and why, they  became more and more genuinely interested. And I have to thank them for their impromptu collection that raised a further £54 for the fund. At this point I have to admit to feeling almost hyperactive; I thought I would just sort of collapse, but bizarrely I felt as though I could have kept on walking.

1.15 pm Saturday 7th November 2015

Considering the rain that fell at various points in my walk I was not too wet, although I was grateful when Romford manager Paul Martin lent me a spare, dry coat for the duration of the game, allowing mine to dry off in the changing room. The rain held off for the ninety minutes, but unfortunately we lost 3-1 after being a goal ahead.

By the time I got home (thanks to club chairman Steve Gardener for the lift) and checked my Crowdfunding page, the total pledged had risen to £1,040 and when cheques received and cash donated were added, the total reached £1,325. That exceeded what I realistically expected to raise, so once again, my grateful thanks to everyone who contributed.

I expected to ache a bit the next day, but remarkably I didn't, well nowhere near as much as I thought I would anyway, although every now and then a little stiffness crept into the muscles after sitting down for any length of time.

The next step is to arrange the purchase of the defibrillator and organise training courses for the users. The irony is of course that once we have bought the defibrillator, I really hope that we never actually have to use it.