How very inconvenient

Larson, the cartoonist, was a genius and an American – a very rare combination indeed. He was able to encapsulate frustration into a one liner and a sketch. My particular favourite was a picture of a shop interior in which all of the shelves had been placed just below the ceiling. The caption read: ‘Inconvenience Store.’

You might think that this is simply the whimsy of a fertile imagination but his cartoons are borne out of real life. I come across this sort of stuff all the time. For example, on Saturday I encountered an ‘Inconvenient Convenience’ at Farnborough Football Club.

The urinals under the main stand are high enough up the wall to trouble Meadowlark Lemon. For anyone under 7 feet the only feasible way to avoid a puddle and an embarrassing tie die stain around the crutch is to stand a yard away and ‘arc.’ This option requires a steady hand, stomach muscles and a well-timed sprint towards the urinal prior to the shake. Inevitably this set of skills are only in the domain of the under 40s. Anyone beyond that age is acutely aware that nothing dribbles uphill.

Last Friday, whilst travelling to Bristol, I also encountered the most ‘Inconvenient Parking Meter.’ I was planning to meet a colleague at Chievely Services leave my car there and drive down with him. The new thing in parking is buying your ticket by telephone. The sign informed me it was for my convenience, as I would no longer need to rout around for change – a dubious benefit as the cost for parking was a crispy tenner.

To take advantage of this convenience I had to register as a customer. The sign informed me of the benefits – if I ever parked in one of the management’s parking spaces again I wouldn’t have to do much. Obviously, to enjoy such a worthy benefit I’d need to register my car too – that way if I ever parked the same car in one of their parking spaces ever again I’d save loads of time. Clearly, taking my debit card details was a pre-requisite, as it would also save me considerable time should I ever park the same car in the one of their parking spaces ever again.

As the other option to giving them my debit card details, car registration number and registering was parking on the hard shoulder of the M4 I opted for the convenience.

I then set about the registration process – a system based on hitting the right key, in the right order and listening to a voice recorded over the top of a 7 year old practising the violin regurgitating my selection back to me. Not too difficult for numbers but quite a task when you combine numbers and letters. Take a look at your telephone keypad. Under most of the numbers are 3 or 4 letter clusters. So to simply input the letter V of my registration number for example, I had to input the number 8 – the violin voice then asked me to confirm I had selected the number 8. 1 for yes, 2 for no, 3 for repeat the options. I selected 1. It then suggested I might like to pick 1 for T 2 for U 3 for V or 4 to repeat the options. I selected 3 for V. The violin asked me to confirm my selection - 1 for yes, 2 for no, 3 for repeat the options. I selected 1.

Bored yet?

Imagine the fun I had with the debit card details. Then disaster. I pressed the wrong key but confirmed it was the right key. I put this down to repetitive the strain injury that to this day has left me with an index finger set to permanent point mode. I had to ring off and start the whole process over again.

By now I was drawing a crowd. People get so inquisitive when they see someone circling a car like a punch-drunk boxer and repeatedly calling the phone cupped in their hand a bastard.

30 minutes and two text message confirmations later, feeling light-headed and now 30 minutes late for my meeting I set off.

The moral of this story is: never trust anything or anyone that promises you convenience because it invariably mean theirs, not your...

What a load of bankers...

Forgive me blogees for I have sinned. It has been nearly a month since my last blog-fessional.

I can’t point to a particular excuse, only that life keeps getting in the way. Or to be more accurate, my new business venture www.wedothewords.com (please go visit – lovely website). By some strange quirk of fate it has been attracting customers. The business isn’t just me, there is an old chum from a previous career involved and Slash the editor. My old chum brings savoir-faire to the adventure and Slash brings brevity. I bring the biscuits (Rich Tea obviously – the SAS of dunking biscuits).

New business ventures are predictably unpredictable. But there are two things you can always be sure of: expenditure (of time, effort and money) confidently strides out over the horizon whilst income rolls around behind you kicking and screaming like a truculent child.

I’ve been involved in quite a few new ventures over the years some successful, some not so. But, the common denominator in all of them is that I always played with other people’s money. This is something I have in common with the banks.

When I was young and looking for my first bank loan to buy an Opel Manta the first stop after the application was the bank manager. He wanted to size me up and try to understand why a 19 year old would need a ‘sports car’. He offered me the loan, but only on the proviso that I buy a Ford Fiesta or Escort. Those were the conditions of the advance.

These days, of course, things are different. I wouldn’t get to see the bank manager, because there isn’t one. But, the Indian call centre disguised as my personal banker would, until recently, have suggested a Ferrari.

They wouldn’t need to worry about my defaulting because at the end of the day banks can’t go bust – because you and I guarantee all their loans. It’s our money the Government are using to prop them up.

This is an interesting concept. Lets think about it for a minute. Everything I earn I put in a bank. The bank uses my money to lend to people and businesses. It also borrows against my money so it can lend even more money. It then sells the future interest repayments of my money to other banks or takes out a mortgage on my money to lend even more money.

Anyone still with me?

My money is now so far away from where it started that I have lost interest and the bank have lost track. But no matter because should someone in the long chain of lending not pay up the Government will step in and make good the loans. With my money. Genius.

But banks are even cleverer than that. They have taken all of my money and refused to lend it to anyone. In this way they can keep my money to pay bonuses.

Yesterday I read in the paper that the man the Government put in charge of the Quango responsible for looking after my money in the banking system stated, and I’m quoting almost verbatim here, ‘… if we take away bankers bonuses or defer them as shares to be vested over some years we are in danger of losing all the talent in the banking sector as they move elsewhere to achieve their remuneration expectations…’

Two things: Who are these talented bankers? Are they the ones who purchased securitised loans riddled with toxic debt? Is it the bankers who thought lending money to the long term unemployed in the Mississippi Delta represented a good lending risk? Or is it the ones that apologised for their mismanagement of banks to the Treasury Select Committee last year before walking off into the sunset with multi-million pound pension pots?

One thing's for sure - it's not the man who told me to buy a sensible Fiesta...

And anyway, where would all this talent move to – I imagine banks are crying out for bankers who don't understand what they are selling?

Naturally I have a solution. It involves snipers. I can’t go into too much detail here, blogs have ears and all that…

Bugger, I'm ranting again...