Human Factors

When it’s raining in Wellington, people just get wet. They usually don’t bother using an umbrella, the strong winds would probably destroy them within a short time anyway. In other parts of New Zealand and in Germany (well, probably in most countries of the world, but I know for NZ and Germany for sure) people use umbrellas. And when they go into a shop or a supermarket, they try to get rid of some of the raindrops on it by waving it around and getting other people wet. Inside then the umbrellas drip on the floor, building up slippery puddles of rain water which can cause people to fall. Not to speak of wet pants, when people accidentally touch their legs with the umbrella.

The Japanese have a different system for dealing with wet umbrellas. To keep the water outside when the weather is crappy, all shops have a plastic cover dispenser for umbrellas at their entrance. You put your umbrella in from the top and when you take it out towards the front it’s covered in a condom like wrapper. This is how the shop floors stay dry and people don’t slip. And you don’t need to fear that anyone will get you completely wet when they wave their umbrella around in order to get it dry before they enter the shop. Awesome idea!

It would be great to see a more reusable solution, using a plastic cover once and then throwing it into the rubbish bin doesn’t sound right to me. But it’s a start and certainly limits some risks associated with wet floors.

But when you want to go to a museum or a restaurant, you’re usually not keen to carry your umbrella around, regardless if it’s placed in a cover or not. That’s why such places often have a lockable umbrella holder at the entrance of the building. Put the head of the umbrella in, close the lock, remove the metal plate to lock and your umbrella will be waiting securely locked up until you return. That’s how Tokyo stays nice clean and tidy even in nasty weather conditions.

I have just returned from a short holiday in Tokyo. I had already heard about the impressively high level of service people usually experience in Japan, and now that I’ve been there I can only confirm, that being a customer in Japan feels absolutely great.

I can only talk for the Tokyo region, since I didn’t travel anywhere outside of the big city, but I assume it’s the same anywhere in Japan – whatever you do, wherever you go, whoever you encounter: people are always nice and go the extra mile to fulfil the wishes you didn’t even know you had. There was the shower head in our hotel for example, which had a little leak. Not a big problem and I certainly wouldn’t have complained about it, but when we used the shower again the next morning, it had been fixed. Without us saying a word. Not only had the cleaning staff seen the problem, they had even organised the repair. Great service!

There were lots of little things where I though “Wow, that’s great, I didn’t really expect this”, but one of the best things happened to us at Junkudo. Junkudo is a huge book store in Ikebukuro, one of the must-see parts of Tokyo. The store has nine stories, with level nine hosting foreign books. Since neither Kai nor I speak Japanese, we went straight up to the top floor to look for a book we had seen advertised in a newspaper. When we couldn’t find it, I approached the information desk and asked for it. Luckily I had the newspaper clipping with me, so it was easy for the person I asked to look it up in their computer and locate it within the shop. For some reason they had it one level below, and they sent me down to get it from there. Now, in both Germany and New Zealand “Go to level xyz” means that you have to find the item you’re looking for at that location for yourself. At Junkudo it meant, that someone on level eight was informed via phone that we were looking for the book, and while we took the escalator down, which probably took us less than two minutes, this person grabbed the book and placed it at the information desk for us. When we arrived to ask for it again, it was already waiting for us. Great service, again!

I got really excited about the high level of service, and when we met a friend for lunch at our last day in Tokyo I got an explanation as to why the Japanese are so service oriented. It has to do with the custom of “omotenashi”, the atmosphere of hospitality and welcome. It’s the thought of creating a nice, welcoming experience for guests – with an attention to details – that got transferred into the whole service industry. It’s a great custom and it certainly makes Japan a great experience for visitors.

I haven’t been blogging for more than a year. There are many reasons for it, but non of them are really good reasons.

For one, I didn’t like the old, gloomy theme, so it made me feel depressed when I looked at it. Why I chose it in the first place? No idea.

And sometimes, when I had a thought I wanted to get out there, I did a search and saw that someone else had discussed something similar, I chose not to blog about it. Which is stupid, I know. If there was only ever one opinion allowed for each topic, we would live in a very sad world.

I didn’t even blog from MAX last year, which was very stupid, too, since I like going back to look up the sessions/speakers I saw and review how they influenced my opinion over the time. It’s easier to do this in my own blog, than trying to locate my notes somewhere on my computer. But at least I had a good reason not to blog from there: I tweeted live from the conference for the online magazine Create or Die and wrote some more articles related to the conference for them. This was probably the only good reason not to post something to my blog for the whole year of silence.

What brought me back to rethinking my habits was that I noticed some people officially quitting their blogging activities. I know that in times of Twitter blogging seems to be a bit “old-fashioned”, but other bloggers still are a great source of knowledge and inspiration for me. I don’t read all the feeds I get into my Google Reader, but I do scan all titles at least a couple of times per week and I follow up on what catches my interest. I makes me feel sad to see people giving up on it and I was just about to start moaning about it, when I realised that I wasn’t any better. I never officially quit, but reading some of the “latest” posts made me aware that it was going down and then stopped with no explanation. I don’t want it to end like this, and even more I don’t just want to consume other people’s work. I want to contribute again, and I’ll make the best effort to get back into regular blogging! :-)

I haven’t been blogging for quite some time. Reasons for this are many, but non of them is a really good one. As a main reason could count that I’ve spent most of the winter in Europe and used the time overseas to reflect the things I was doing and the life I was living in New Zealand. It turned out, that my life was great but I didn’t enjoy my job any longer, so on my return I started checking out opportunities and learned heaps of new stuff – and here I am now, two weeks into a new job, which I really like and enjoy. Now only summer needs to come and stay, and the world will be perfect :-)

The blog design is still far away from being nice, but the move from BlogCFC to Wordpress was quite painful, so I currently don’t care much about the looks, I’m just glad that all old entries survived the move. Most entries are assigned to the wrong category now, but this is something I can live with and one day, when I can’t think of anything else to do, I’ll change them manually. But for now it will be ok, I guess. Let’s get back to dealing with all things usable (or unusable)…

Finally I’ve managed to move this blog to wordpress. I had a little play around with the online version of wordpress before I downloaded it to my server, so I think for a use focussed person like me it’s a good alternative to BlogCFC, which I used to date. Unfortunately it seems a bit more complicated to import the older posts from BlogCFC into wordpress, so I’ll probably need to wait until Kai is back from Australia on Friday before going ahead with the move. Until then you can still read the older posts here.

Another tiny adjustment I’ll have to make is the integration of widgets and change of header, although the theme was tagged as custom header and widget ready I can’t find in a rush. So there will be some more changes during the next couple of days…

Yesterday I lost my favourite earmuffs. Yes, I still had one of these old fashioned keep-my-ears-warm things with two round cosy fluffy ovals that cover your ears and are connected by a plastic strip. They are not meant to look good, their only reason to exist is keeping freezing ears nice and warm. I lost them at the bus stop, apparently IN the bus, but the girl who found them just asked the woman in front of her if they were hers and when she denied the bitch threw them out of the bus door again instead of handing them over to the bus driver. When I returned to the bus stop later on they were long gone. Today I spent two hours looking for new ones in all kinds of shops, but wasn’t particularly successful. There is no such thing as earmuffs available in New Zealand, at least not in Wellington. So I decided to get some new earmuffs online, and that’s where the odyssey begins:
Apparently you can’t get the original 80s-style earmuffs anymore, and honestly, I really wonder why, because they do an awesome job keeping someone’s ears warm in winter. The only product that I could find (except from heart shaped ones or little teddy bears!) was a medical ear protection for elderly people. No, that wasn’t what I was after. But I found something that I once read about in a German magazine before: Ear Bags. A swedish product, almost the same concept as my old ones, but without that plastic strap – you just pull the ear bags over your ears and they stay there without support and keep the cold wind away. I’m not sure if that will have the same effect as the old ones, but they are not very expensive, so I thought I’ll just give it a try. I checked a couple of online shops but couldn’t find one that delivers to New Zealand. Finally I ended up on the manufacturer’s homepage and was happy to see that they have an online shop, too, and they deliver worldwide. I strolled around a bit and decided to get a pair of ear bags they call “advanture” which have a security string you can clip to your clothing so they can’t get lost (seems to be the right product for me!). The shop itself is ok on the first sight: you always know where you are, the products are pictured, payment methods are visible on each page, information on shipping and delivery as well as all other terms and conditions are easy to find and you can chose from six different languages for your navigation. The only thing that annoyed me was the fact that you can’t get a close look at the different colours that are available for their standard product, but that’s just a small nuisance compared with what was waiting for me. The next step irritated me so much that I almost gave up on buying something. It was just a little oversight on my part and they probably never ever thought about having a careless user like myself, but it almost ended in me not buying anything. If it wasn’t so cold and uncomfortable in Wellington today, I swear I would have given up! What had happened?

I checked my shopping cart and there I had the chance to either log in as a registered customer, or to give them my name and billing address. I didn’t have the choice to “create an account” with them at that stage. So I gave them my contact details and an email address I usually use for online orders and newsletters and stuff like that. They sent me a friendly activation email: “click here to activate your account”. At the bottom of that email they gave me a user name and a password, but I didn’t read the complete email. I wanted to get the order finished quickly, my normal experience is that there are hardly ever any additional information in an activation email so I didn’t read a single word of that email but just clicked the button to activate my account. Back on their website I wanted to go on with my order but they wouldn’t let me unless I’m logged on with a proper user name and password. As I thought I didn’t have one, I tried to create one. But the system realised that I already gave it my contact details and told me that my email address is already in use – if I couldn’t remember my password I should press the “Lost Password” button. But to request a new password you must know your user name and as I was still convinced not to have one, I became slightly annoyed. It would have been a very easy thing to avoid this situation: they could have mentioned that the user name and password had been sent out with the activation email and everything would have been good. But they didn’t and so my only option to finalise my order was to create another account with a different email address. That finally worked and I hope to receive my ear bags soon. But I will always have the strange feeling that the shopping experience wasn’t a good one.

New Zealand is a real coffee country. Not that we actually grow coffee beans, but when it comes to preparation, our barista are the best in the world. After drinking a coffee in one of the cafés in Wellington you’ll find it hard to drink your Cappucino, Latte or Macchiato elsewhere in the world. But apperantly it was not good enough for New Zealand to have first class coffee makers in the country, they wanted to revolutionise the coffee preparation. Which led to the existance of one of the most unnecessary products on earth: the Riccocino. The Riccochino is a FROZEN coffee you’ll get at the gas station and prepare yourself by putting it into a special microwave oven. Depending on how many coffees you’d like to prepare at the same time you choose a button, in case you want two Riccocinos (hopefully because you have vouchers for two free cups) it takes 3.15 minutes. Then you open the lid of the cup and find out that there is still some kind of ice cube in the middle of your cup. You put it back into the microwave, press the “Boost” butten, just to realise after 10 more seconds that your Riccocino ist still not hot. Three more attempts and some fire sparks in the microwave later your coffee is hot, but it doesn’t taste good, in facts it’s pretty disgusting. Very sweet, so that the first sip feels like a chocolate treat, but I felt sick after drinking about one third of the cup. Thanks that it was for free… Conclusion: time-consuming, circuitous, probably unhealthy (due to the microwaving and additional ingrediences that don’t belong to coffee) and not tasty at all. I guess, this one won’t stay on the market for long…