Time to reclaim my bookshelf

As a young boy I was good with mathematics and my twin was good with English. My mother encouraged me to impart some of my number skills to my sister but since practically it is difficult to impart English skills from one to another, I was encouraged to read novels much to my disliking. If I obliged and read as much as my mother had wanted me too I would have no time for magalimoto amwaya (wire cars) and the almost daily treks up Nyambadwe hill. So each time I was told to read a novel and tell my mother the story after a few days, I would turn to my twin (who would have read it before), ask her what the story is about and tell my mother. I would then do my sister a few favours and everything would be cool. Well this was until mommy discovered our little evil scheme!

Today I take great joy in reading if and when work does not get in the way. And I am about to engross myself into novels even more with the discovery of Grey Matter, a relatively cheap and well stocked bookshop in town. They have a great collection of novels, professional books and children’s literature. I went in today and got myself a copy of Richard Branson’s Screw It, Lets Do It. And there were many other titles from Stephen King, Jeffery Archer and other well known and upcoming African writers. A good collection of autobiographies of Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, Robert Mugabe, Jack Welch, etc. And all at unbelievable bargains.

My immediate worry is where I will keep this new anticipated collection. I ‘loaned’ a bookshelf to my young boys to put their books, toys and other junk. I even painted it bright red! Time to get some paint stripper, a brush and some white gloss and paint it. I need to reclaim that bookshelf of mine.

The (mini)case for more city roads and better public transport

The other evening I was meeting up with a mate for a business discussion at Chameleon bar across town. I set off from Area 47 at 6:25pm for the 6:30pm meeting. I expected to make it on time or at least a minute late. I ended up arriving 10 minutes late and all because I had underestimated the amount of traffic I would encounter on the way. The roads were clogged as if it were still 5pm rush hour.

Yesterday at lunch I found myself making a trip from City Centre to Old Town. By the time I reached my destination my feet were sore from the fifteen minutes of constant braking and accelerating.

We have too many cars on our roads and it’s affecting the environment and our health. I have the pleasure of working from home so don’t share the pain of those who have to make daily commutes to work. There is need for our city fathers to work on getting cars off the roads or making the road infrastructure better.

Provision of more dual lanes and increased parking lots is one way of dealing with it. Some of the illegal parking that takes place actually causes traffic jams. Property developers should also be forced into providing bigger parking areas than is currently the case. An example is the Blantyre City Assembly’s move to clamp cars that park ‘illegally’ but not providing enough public parking facilities. One tends to wonder where all the money from parking tickets and fines goes to.

Alternatively the newly introduced dual lanes should have a lane dedicated to high occupancy vehicles, buses and cyclists. The rest can use the other lane. This will encourage car pooling and also allow people to use buses other than their cars. It requires lots of civic education but it is very feasible. Cities like Johannesburg and Copenhagen have dedicated lanes for buses and cyclists and they work. It won’t happen overnight but it will work if everyone works together to make it happen.

If we don’t deal with this problem sooner rather than later it we will be heading for a gridlock!

When ‘Email marketing’ goes horribly wrong

It all started one quiet Friday morning when I received what was supposed to be a promotional email from a hotel in Chirimba. The sender, who never signed off, sent an email titled “Dorvic Hotel (Blantyre - Malawi)” and the body was simply written “PLEASE FIND THE ATTACHED DOCUMENTS. Regards”. Attached were three power point files and a word document. I found this approach rather amateurish but thought that someone somewhere will buy it. But what I saw next sent alarm bells ringing. The sender had sent this email to some 500 people or so and placed all the addresses in the TO: section for all to see. It was a recipe for disaster!

While I was still thinking why the sender had decided to send off an email in that way an email acknowledging receipt came in. Within a few minutes another acknowledgment came in. Then two other people responded at almost the same time asking people to send their acknowledgments to the sender and not to everybody. Then all hell broke loose. People started to second the idea that people should not respond to all. One of the first people to acknowledge receipt then sent out his ‘social message’ to the whole list. Then someone else sent out a party invitation. People shouted out loud to be removed from the list. Others continued to urge people not to respond to all. The emails went on and on and on and they came from far and wide. A gentleman south of the Limpopo wondered why he had to be abused for simply providing his email address when he patronized the hotel some time back.

Some semblance of normality seems to have set in but not without our hotel getting a bloody noise. An official apology from the hotel was sent out days later assuring email recipients that the whole episode was an error that had now been fixed and would never happen again. They then went on to extend a 10% discount to all email recipients for services at the hotel till 31st December 2009.

This apology no doubt was an attempt at crisis management but the damage had already been done and it was third parties that did the brand the most damage. The hotel provided the fuel for the flame that two people lit and burnt a pretty young and potential brand. The confidence that so many people had put in this institution by providing their email addresses on the assurance that their privacy would be guaranteed was lost at the press of the Send button.

This is one of many bitter lessons that organisations that choose cheap over professional, shortcut over doing it the right way have to deal with time and again. We can only hope that they will lead to better practices in the future!

My hour in one MTL shop

I told myself I would never go into that shop again. I swore that shop had a curse. But I did and boy oh boy did I regret it. MTL city centre shop is that kind of shop you almost always leave angry for one reason or another.

Well yesterday I happened to be in the area and thought I would buy a LibertyNet internet voucher from there. I noticed they had moved into another building so thought new premises should translate to a new customer experience. I was dead wrong!

I walked into the shop just after 3pm, found three people on the queue and the shop had five employees that I could see. A sixth one walked in about 15 minutes later.

Employee 1. She was handling customer service. She gave me a form you have to fill with your name and address to purchase a voucher (and to date I wonder why). The only other person she assisted was a mzungu gentleman who came in the inquire about broadband internet which she rightly said they don’t offer.
Employee 2. Also handling customer service. Assisted one mzungu lady who had come in to inquire why her application for a phone line in August 2008 had not been attended to. He quickly fished out her application from a folder, referred her to a back office and sat down to browse the net. At one point he sent a document to the printer and quickly dashed over to retrieve his documents. I noticed that the printout had pictures of plenty women. When he returned to his computer he maximized a screen and what did I see? A pink coloured screen with plenty pictures of ladies. Now am not jumping to any conclusions here but my creative mind tells me something not work related was going on. I don’t come across many business related websites with pink backgrounds and pictures of women! He obviously had no idea that I could see part of his screen.
Employee 3. Not sure what work he does, if any, because he was sitting slouched and motionless in his chair the whole time I was in the shop. The only thing I could see moving were his eye lids, consolation he had not died in his chair! He is obviously an extra piece of ‘furniture’ worth disposing of!
Employee 4. A cashier who only assisted one gentleman and referred us all to her colleague.
Employee 5. The cashier who eventually assisted us.
Employee 6. A gentleman who walked into the shop at around 3:15pm. He came in a jovial mood and immediately sat down to make a call. He then received a cheque from a customer so this customer could go off do other things. After that he made another phone call. I then asked him if he there is any other way we could be assisted being that I and a colleague had been on the shop for over 30 minutes and still had not been assisted. He said the ‘system takes a long time to print receipts hence the delay’. (Boy, some people just specialize in giving the most feeble excuses on earth!). Then after this he escorted a friend out of the shop and never came back.

I was finally assisted at 4:03pm!! I spent a whole hour in a shop where it seemed only one person was working a lot harder than the others. This shop and it's staff never cease to amaze me!

Can’t wait for 2010

Last week the majority of South African Union of Mine workers downed their tools and these included some construction workers upgrading or building new stadiums for the 2010 world cup. The western media jumped on the story and predicted gloom and doom for the soccer festival. It is not the first time though that the games have been given such negative publicity. After the xenophobic attacks in Johannesburg, Cape Town and other areas of South Africa, a few friends and colleagues of mine were not amused and neither was I. There was a strong consensus that the games should be moved with others suggesting that Germany should host them again. The media had a field day. FIFA president Sepp Blatter came out in South Africa's defense to say the games are in Africa to stay.

Recently a contributor in a UK newspaper wrote of his apprehension of attending the games in South Africa saying the country has the world’s highest crime rate and that this had forced Group4Securicor to turn down a contract to provide security services at the games. He went on to describe how the FIFA Confederations Cup had exposed security and transportation issues and how these flaws will negatively impact on the main fiesta next year. He talked of South Africa not having enough dual lane highways, lack of street lights and of advice given the foreigners not to use public transport especially at night. He even talked of a brutal death of a European journalist covering the confederations cup although later on the circumstances of the death were corrected to state he was killed in a traffic accident. This accident was however used to justify his argument that South African roads are unsafe. He suggested the games be moved to Egypt because it is safer than South Africa despite having chaotic transport and choking pollution in the capital Cairo.

I have been to South Africa on a number of occasions over the years. I have driven on the streets of Pretoria, walked the streets of Bloemfontein, Sandton (at night) & Blairgowrie and have had a few beers in the bars of Soweto, Randburg and Pretoria. I may have been extremely lucky I didn’t kill my family in a car crash or was not mugged walking down the street at 8pm or was not harassed by a tsotsie in one of the night clubs. Or ‘my friend’ is just being a pessimist, suggesting that once you step out of that plane at OR Tambo Airport, you are at the mercy of the locals.

I intend to visit South Africa again next year to be part of the world cup. I had initially wanted to watch the few games I could on big screen from pubs or parks in Soweto, Mamelodi or Thembisa. The reason was simple – all games in Johannesburg and Pretoria have been sold out and now people have started selling their tickets in the UK for as much as £150! However my close friend I intend to travel with to SA has managed to convince me that I should buy a ticket even if it is for some game involving king makers. And here is why. We might never have a chance ever again to watch a world cup match live. So I will be scouring eBay, and if the worst comes to the worst, the queues outside the stadiums to get myself a ticket at a premium.

Now that union members have agreed terms and construction workers have gone back to work, all I can tell them is get the job done and do it well. Like MTN, the majority of South Africans and millions of soccer fans, I CAN’T WAIT FOR 2010!

Just write, don't type! After all who cares?

My mother loves a good movie and like me has no qualms watching a really scary horror or a flick that’s infested with pythons, crocs and komodo dragons. But unlike me, she has little time for TV or so I thought. So last year I got her the entry level package from DStv so maybe she gets a little more news from Al Jazeera than the dose she got from BBC radio.

Earlier this year she enquired about National Geographic channel and I promised to upgrade her package for her although I kept putting it off. In the past two weeks I saw an article in the press that DStv had introduced the Access package that had a good number of extra channels, including NatGeo Wild, for around $10 a month. I decided it was the time to make that upgrade. So I walked into Multichoice offices in Lilongwe lat week to upgrade her service. I was told I would need to pay for the new package although there were still five months to run on the other package she already has. The customer service office tried to explain why I could not upgrade but it didn’t make sense. Since I wanted to give my mama the NatGeo Wild she wanted I didn’t see the point in arguing. I was then given a list of the channels that come with Access. The list was written by hand on a plain A4 paper and had been photocopied! The handwriting was not necessarily the best (at least it was better than mine) and channel numbers were not indicated (the numbers you can see on the picture were written by me). This was so unprofessional!

The next day I went in to make the payment. I asked the cashier (whom I believe is a First Merchant Bank employee) how much I should write on the cheque. He quickly turned to his colleague and asked “kodi cheque chitheka?” (will paying by cheque work?). They discussed and then me mulled over it for such a long time I could sense Christmas was fast approaching. As I was about to pose my question again he shouted “K1,700!”. I can't recall the last time a dollar fetched K170 but I wrote the cheque anyway and he produced a hand written receipt! Had he not stamped the receipt I would not have accepted it.

At the end of the day I concluded that someone at Multichoice either rushed to the press to announce this new product or someone had not communicated internally in good time to get brochures ready and inform the cashier to setup that product in his system. Or they simply do not care anymore after all there is no competition! A typed list of channels on headed paper would have at least been nice. The confusion about cheque payments was also unnecessary. It all left a really bad taste in my mouth … the kind when you eat a rotten roasted peanut! Multichoice can do better, much better actually!

African Time

The other weekend my wife and I were running mad. We had a formal function to attend at 18:30 but at 18:00 we were on the other side of town in casual gear. We made a mad rush home to find a blackout. We quickly dressed in the dark and made it to the function at 18:50 only to find the function had not started yet. We asked an organizer who said that he hall was half full and that they were waiting for some more people to come so the proceedings could start. I felt bad that I had contributed to this delay but was a bit more pissed off with those who had not arrived yet.

A week earlier I attended the commissioning of a new printer at a local print shop. The function started an hour late because there were only five of us at 5pm, the time the function was meant to start. By 6pm there were in excess of fifty people.

Today my wife was attending a lunch scheduled to start at noon. At 12:15 there only a handful of people and table cloths were still being laid out and cutlery was nowhere to be seen. The function only started after 1pm!

The list of functions that start late because either people or guests of honor arrive late is endless and I have attended many. Sadly the organizers of such events let the culprits off the hook too many times saying ‘after all this Africa, we follow African time’ or some other flimsy excuse like that. African Time is an attitude of the past and should be buried in a very deep grave like all similar attitudes and things of the past (Off Topic: Actually we should consider burying JZU Tembo in the grave too!). It’s time we learnt to kept time. If we can’t for one reason or another, we should accept the consequences other than punish my wife who went to lunch on a very empty tummy or me who had to wait for over an hour before I could wet my throat with a very cold beer at the printer launch!