Back to work
It has been a great holiday. I had a tremendous time; hardly any quarrels, and as you can see, even gave you and my blog a rest for a number of days. I have to say that the night before I travel back home I always find it difficult to sleep. I am both nervous and excited at the prospect of going home, especially at the beginning of a New Year. I think anything new gives you optimism, and that is how I am feeling at the moment.
Now on to a more trivial subject. I made my first trip from Manchester to our office in London and I will speak more about that later in the week. As I have written before, I love trains. I love train stations. The buzz and the noise is not quite as exciting as airports, but to me the feeling of lots going on always gets my adrenalin going.
Speaking of noise, I have to ask you a question. “What sort of people do you think sit in the ‘Quiet Coach’?” From my point of view I would rather stand next to the toilet than be subject to the quiet coach. I bet the passengers there are the same sort of people who put signs on their gate saying ‘No hawkers or junk mail’. Maybe they sit there because they have no friends or colleagues who want to call them on their mobile phones.
I do understand that some fellow passengers, droning on the phone in a loud voice, can be highly irritating, but the reality is that the signal on your phone cuts out so many times that it is quite hard for anyone to sustain a long conversation. But Wow !!! I have overheard some brilliant dialogue – husbands who are trying to disguise a row, business deals at a tense stage in negotiations, media people gossiping!!! There will be plenty of time for the quiet zone when we find our quiet zone spot in the hills. But for me, keep on talking.
Talking of not talking, it has been very interesting to see how our internal messaging system has been used. Or would you agree sometimes abused? The great thing about the system is that you can have live ‘typed’ conversations. The cost is low, and it is especially great when a colleague in one of our offices is talking to you whilst you are on a telephone conference call to a customer. The system allows you to communicate messages such as “Shut up and listen”, “Don’t tell them we can’t do that” and so on. However, I think perhaps this and other electronic tools are in danger of replacing real time “spoken” conversation. This is not all good.
We have been monitoring the telephone usage and the amount of time we are on the phone has dropped dramatically, which is surprising considering the exponential growth of our company. However, the usage of email and internal messaging has grown by many hundreds of percent.
Whilst I am very proud of our customer satisfaction levels (over 98% on 26 million words a minute) I am concerned about the trend of getting out of the habit of talking to one another.
Question – “Are we losing the art of conversation, or are we enhancing it with our electronic friends?”
Now on to a more trivial subject. I made my first trip from Manchester to our office in London and I will speak more about that later in the week. As I have written before, I love trains. I love train stations. The buzz and the noise is not quite as exciting as airports, but to me the feeling of lots going on always gets my adrenalin going.
Speaking of noise, I have to ask you a question. “What sort of people do you think sit in the ‘Quiet Coach’?” From my point of view I would rather stand next to the toilet than be subject to the quiet coach. I bet the passengers there are the same sort of people who put signs on their gate saying ‘No hawkers or junk mail’. Maybe they sit there because they have no friends or colleagues who want to call them on their mobile phones.
I do understand that some fellow passengers, droning on the phone in a loud voice, can be highly irritating, but the reality is that the signal on your phone cuts out so many times that it is quite hard for anyone to sustain a long conversation. But Wow !!! I have overheard some brilliant dialogue – husbands who are trying to disguise a row, business deals at a tense stage in negotiations, media people gossiping!!! There will be plenty of time for the quiet zone when we find our quiet zone spot in the hills. But for me, keep on talking.
Talking of not talking, it has been very interesting to see how our internal messaging system has been used. Or would you agree sometimes abused? The great thing about the system is that you can have live ‘typed’ conversations. The cost is low, and it is especially great when a colleague in one of our offices is talking to you whilst you are on a telephone conference call to a customer. The system allows you to communicate messages such as “Shut up and listen”, “Don’t tell them we can’t do that” and so on. However, I think perhaps this and other electronic tools are in danger of replacing real time “spoken” conversation. This is not all good.
We have been monitoring the telephone usage and the amount of time we are on the phone has dropped dramatically, which is surprising considering the exponential growth of our company. However, the usage of email and internal messaging has grown by many hundreds of percent.
Whilst I am very proud of our customer satisfaction levels (over 98% on 26 million words a minute) I am concerned about the trend of getting out of the habit of talking to one another.
Question – “Are we losing the art of conversation, or are we enhancing it with our electronic friends?”
