Probably not true?

Posted on

If you’re on Facebook or other social media service, you may well have seen this, which has been doing the rounds lately. It even made the Independent:

1533914_10157331988995377_4149580904031315219_n

Ah – those pesky Victorians, eh? Always breaking the rules and poking fun at officialdom.

Hmm. Something smells iffy here (probably due to the fish-bender doing his work), so let’s look more deeply into this

First off, I tried to get in touch with Jeff Kacirk. You can see his name bottom left. He writes things about olde Englishe, so that bit kind of fits, but it seems that he hasn’t given us a book since 2005, although what he has given us looks very interesting.  This list has that ‘© 2015’ thing there. And then, in addition, his books aren’t published by Sellers Publishing, Inc.
I’m still awaiting a reply. [No longer – see below]

Next, I tried www.makefun.com (bottom right). It’s a card and gift site. I couldn’t find this particular card/book/page anywhere on there, though. Dead end.

So then, I got inventive. I got in touch with the London Genealogical Society. Except, I didn’t, because the LGS doesn’t exist. Hmm. There is a Society of Genealogists in London though, and one of their researchers got back to me with this reply.

I saw this too and was intrigued and had a look in our magazine and archives and tried to follow up the reference from Jeff Kacirk’s website and book but couldn’t get anywhere. It’s nothing that I am aware we ever published and we are not the London Genealogical Society.

This seems to be falling apart at every level, doesn’t it? But there’s still no evidence that it’s not real. So I had a look at some of the language. Well, there were certainly railways, turnips, midgets and cows around back then. (And let’s get this straight out up-front: a cow-banger was simply another name for a farm hand working with cattle.)

Goldfish? Probably – they were introduced into Europe (via Portugal) in or around 1611. So you could conceivably have caught them in Britain in 1881.
Sampler of Drugs – well, yes, the pharmaceutical industry was booming, but would an 1881 Briton have called them “drugs”?
Probably not – there were other far more popular words for those sort of things back then:

Fullscreen capture 2016-03-24 112148 AM.bmp

I knew about the knocker-up. That was a profession in which an individual would wake others for work in the days before alarm clocks were a widespread thing. This would still have been an important job in 1881, and is only included because of its amusing connotations about pregnancy, I would imagine. *snigger*

Waller is an interesting one. Either someone that makes walls (durr!) or someone extracting salt from seawater, or even:

it may be a nickname for a “good humoured person”, from the Norman word “wall(i)er”, cheerful, merry.

“Random” was also rather unusual word to use back in 1881 though.
Which is, you know, a bit… random.

And then there’s the Electric Bath. There are two options here: the one where the patient is immersed in water and a small electrical charge is passed through the water, thus advancing the spread of alternative medicine and pseudoscience, and then one which was an early form of tanning bed, with many UV lights under a cover, beneath which the patient lay. There were examples of this latter device in the spa on the Titanic, though I don’t think they can be blamed for the events of 15 April 1912. There’s fair evidence that at least one of these would have been around in the early 1880s.

So, much circumstantial evidence that this isn’t real, but nothing concrete. Perhaps the best evidence for this not being genuine is the Victorian people themselves though. Presumably those who were well enough educated to come up with such ‘witty’ answers would also be those who were more tightly bound by Victorian etiquette to answer honestly and correctly.

As I mentioned above, I’m waiting for Mr Kacirk to fill me in on his role in this, but until that evidence is produced, I’m leaning gently into the “fake” camp.

I’ll keep you informed.

UPDATE: And here’s the inform, as promised:

Incoming from the man himself, Jeffrey Kacirk:

Mr 6000,
Truth can be stranger than fiction. Those job titles came from an exhibit at the Museum of London about 15 years ago. I’m glad lots of people are getting to see them. Thanks for letting me know.
All the best,
Jeff

Well, there you go – perhaps not from exactly the same place as we were led to believe, but – and I swear that this came straight from the horse-tickler’s mouth… or something… apparently true.

One learns something new each and every day.

Social Media & Public Customer Service

Posted on

There’s obviously more to running a business’ social media account than there seems to be. Otherwise we’d all be at it. But it seems that some businesses don’t really get it. I think it’s one of those things that your business either does, or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, then (maybe) you’re missing an opportunity and (almost certainly) you will make some people on Twitter very annoyed:

“OMG! Like, [Brand X] isn’t even on Twitter! Talk about backward! Ugh!”

Those individuals are perhaps forgetting that there’s a whole other world out there that doesn’t rely on social media in the same way that it relies on oxygen, and gets on with life just fine.

But if your business does do social media, then the expectation is that it has to be all in. There is no halfway house here. That’s even worse than not doing social media at all. And you’ve got to do it correctly. History is littered with horrendous social media own goals from just about every company ever, as the hoards of Offendatrons seeking outrage at the slightest misinterpretation or misplaced word in those 140 characters are ready to jump – loudly – all over your case.
Yes, social media is the public face of your company to anyone using Facebook or Twitter, and if you mess up there, you mess up in front of (potentially) hundreds of thousands of individuals, some of whom may once have been future customers.

Oops.

Fortunately, there’s always another social media outrage bus to jump onto, and the public’s memory is short, meaning that these ‘scandals’ don’t last long.

But what if you were to use these facts to your advantage? What if you were to brand all your company’s easily-distinguishable, bright red vehicles with your twitter handle, inviting public engagement, and then used the public face of twitter to appear caring and on the ball when negative comments came your way, but then – once people had swiftly moved on – actually did nothing about addressing the problem?

Step forward then, catchily-named Sport 24 hrs Taxis – they’re @Sport24hrsSA on twitter. And I was “rather disappointed” by the quality of the driving and maintenance on one of their vehicles last week. When I contacted them on twitter, they replied within 5 minutes. Evidently, Sport 24 hrs Taxis are one of those “all-in” companies who “do” social media.

1Fullscreen capture 2016-03-23 093954 AM

Impressive response time. And  taking it private sounds like a plan, because actually no-one else really cares about the outcome, which will surely be something along the lines of “Sorry about all that. We’ve told the driver not to use his phone while driving and we’ve fixed the brake light”, right?

There was a hitch though – Twitter rules mean that I couldn’t DM them (send them a direct message), because they didn’t follow me on the popular microblogging service. Silly people.

Still, there are other ways to get in touch with me, as I let them know, (right after I had made the kids some dinner):

Fullscreen capture 2016-03-23 102840 AM.bmp

And so they got in touch with me and they said “Sorry about all that. We’ve told the driver not to use his phone while driving and we’ve fixed the brake light”.

Except: no.
No, they didn’t. 

I’m here to tell you that once their public facade had appeared caring, helpful and concerned, I’ve not heard a single word from them on any forum. No contact whatsoever. I’m using this blog to let you know that as far as I’m aware, they’ve done absolutely nothing about the broken brake light on Taxi 26, nor have they addressed the issue of the driver using his phone and weaving all over the road at 80kph past UCT. Because surely if they had done anything about it, they would have dropped me an email or contacted me on twitter to tell me that they had. No?

So, if you publicly comment on a company’s service on twitter and they tell you that they are going to follow up, please hold them to their word and make sure they do.

And, don’t be fooled by a company responding promptly to and promising to follow up on a negative comment or observation on twitter, because the quick public response followed by fokol aksie in private approach is all too easy to use when you want to make it look like you care, but you actually don’t give a toss.

Promise fulfilled

Posted on

Yesterday, tired and emotional, I promised that I would upload photos from the weekend onto Flickr. Well, now I have. I’m nothing if not reliable.

As I explained earlier, the weather was nothing if not variable, with a gloriously sunny Saturday (above), followed by a moody and grey Sunday (below). I quite liked both.


My walk was just to explore a bit of coastline I hadn’t managed to get to before. Any beach walk with the kids typically has to end at or nearby the cottage at Piet se Punt, which is 2km from our place. Add the 2km back, the fact that it’s beach walking, and the detours to see rock pools, sand dunes and the like, and you’re going to run out of time, youthful energy, or both.

Thus, I chose to go alone when I set off to see a bit further around the corner (ironically the first bay you come to is Hoek se Baai). And when I got back, I had done 16km in 3 hours. I’d love to share tales of towering cliffs, rocky inlets, smugglers’ caves and possibly, aliens. But the truth is that this bit of coast is actually rather non-descript in geological (and extraterrestrial) terms. Dotted with seemingly abandoned buildings all the way to Die Walle (apparently, a really good fishing spot), I got almost as far west as the end of Brandfontein beach (you may remember that from here or here). And there, I found a handful of really modern lodges which looked like self catering places, and which I guess must be part of the Brian Mansergh Private Nature Reserve, but which I can’t find anywhere online, or on Google Earth. Recent build then, but poorly publicised too, and that’s a shame, because they look fantastic.

My aim was to get a photo of a Black Oystercatcher to enter into a competition from a local vineyard (bet you can’t guess which one), and I got several, including finding a chick in the weed on the beach. However, other pictures may also have been taken.

You can see these much promised and discussed images here.

The Promise

Posted on

No, not the new hit from 30 Seconds To Mars, or indeed anyone similar, but merely a vow to get the photos from the weekend up onto Flickr… tomorrow.

Today’s shenanigans on the beach, followed by the trip home and then an impromptu braai and several (or more) beers have left me short on energy and inclination for anything other than my nice cosy bed on this distinctly autumnal evening.

So – the pledge is that the weekend’s photos will be uploaded to Flickr tomorrow.

Really, I promise.