“Something tells me I wasn’t supposed to get the South African cricket teams plan/strategy for the New Zealand team batsmen and bowlers under my hotel room door… I wonder if this means Dale thinks he’s sleeping in my room tonight?..”
Well, that’s blown their plans wide open…
After: http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/aug/19/south-africa-dossier-new-zealand-cricket
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Hmm. Cranes and bridges. I know who’ll like this one…
But it’s not a happy crane and bridge video. It’s a bit of a disaster…
Look, because of the title of this post and the title of the video, you know that things aren’t going to end well. But it’s the way things happen almost in slow motion and the lack of any sort of discernible panic that makes this so entertaining.
And we can be entertained, because happily (and perhaps incredibly), as this news article with its sub-headings like:
Veel schade (lots of damage),
Puinhopen (heaps of rubble)*, and
Enorme schade (enormous damage)
…also tells us:
Burgemeester: geen slachtoffers ongeval Alphen
Although running it through Google translate, it does appear that he was only talking about humans:
It is believed one man wounded by two cranes and a bridge part topple Monday afternoon and attacked a number of houses and shops in the Main Street. The man was removed from the rubble and had problems with his hip. Also, a dog did not survive the blow.
Oh dear. Damn those attacking cranes.
* Puinhopen is totally going to be the name of my next metal band.
…and why it might or might not work in SA.
Recent visits to the UK have left me irritated that my homeland has chosen to move on and develop – especially in the technology arena – since I’ve been away. How very dare they?
Trains, buses, pubs and restaurants all have free wifi. You can use NFC to find your way around shopping centres, or log in to your local bus stop to get a live map of where your bus is and when it’s going to arrive.
Google Now works! (well, sometimes)
And then there’s the shopping stuff.
First up, the online ordering stuff. It just makes sense. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t work here either, and I don’t quite understand why more stores don’t offer it. If Takealot can manage, why can’t other places? Maybe it’s a critical mass thing, because the shops in the UK have had to adapt or die, so they’ve all pushed their online option hard. When you order online from your supermarket, you get what you asked for, and you get it when you asked for it. If you’ve ever used our local system, you’re probably not using it any more, because those two things don’t happen and it’s a disaster.
But if you’re missing the opportunity to impulse buy, then there’s always ‘click and collect’ – the hybrid of traditional and online shopping – whereby you order on the net and then go and pick up your shopping at the local store. This saves you the delivery fee and means you don’t have to be at home to receive your goods. You can also decide if you need another 4 pack of Murphy’s when you go to collect your groceries (spoiler: you do).
All of this means that fewer people are actually in the supermarkets, and it’s so actually a much less stressful experience when you do go along.
It’s not just food and drink, either. All the major clothing stores offer the same services, so you can shop online and either get it delivered or pick it up at your local store. And if stuff doesn’t fit, you stick a big returns label (supplied) on the bag and drop it off at your local post office. Simples. It’s no fuss, because if it was fuss, people wouldn’t do it, just like you’re not doing it with PicknPay right now.
If you actually want to go to the supermarket and walk around the aisles, in some stores, you can wander round with a barcode scanner and Scan As You Shop. This means that you can pretend to have a raygun and shoot aliens (although you may be charged for items you didn’t actually get if you hit them inadvertently while pretending to be Flash Gordon).
And then there’s the option to scan your own stuff at the end of the shop. Apparently, the phrase “Unexpected item in the bagging area” has been voted one of the most irritating things in the UK, and is being phased out. And it’s not always straightforward either:
Shoppers are stealing more than £1.6 billion worth of items from supermarkets every year as frustration with self service tills leads to theft, a survey found. One in five people admit pilfering items at the checkout, but the results suggest people steal regularly once they realise they can get away with it – the majority admitting they first took goods because they couldn’t work the machines.
But for foreign visitors (especially those with kids), scanning your own shopping is actually quite fun. And if you don’t have kids, it can actually be quite quick as well.
Sadly, it would never work in SA though, as passing zebras would constantly trigger the barcode readers.
And finally, contactless payment. Like us here in SA, the UK has long had chip and PIN payment, but there, you do everything yourself. (To explain to anyone not in SA, generally, we hand our cards to the cashier and they put it in the machine for us.) (We also have attendants who fill up our cars with petrol, and fairly regularly, someone at the entrance barrier to car parks to press the button and hand us the ticket.) (Yes, I know.) But contactless payment is the one where you just wave your card over the machine and it takes the money off your account.
Now, my SA card (it’s the exciting accountant coloured one on the right) has this facility too, but I’ve yet to find anywhere to use it here. Whereas in the UK, it’s everywhere and it’s all too easy to wave and spend without even thinking about it. And yes, I suppose that there are some security worries with this system, but wow, it’s so damn quick and you suddenly realise just how much impact having to enter your PIN has on making you understand that you are spending money.
This certainly isn’t a OMG – Look How Much Better The UK Is Than SA post, but the integration of technology into the retail process has definitely made it better for the consumers over there and they are way ahead of us in this area. The good news is that hopefully, the best bits of these advances will trickle down to South Africa – there’s actually no reason why these ideas wouldn’t work here – and we can all live happily in the future together.
Of course every dad is a superhero in his kids’ eyes. I’m “just fortunate” to have a beagle that looks up to me as well, presumably as some sort of God of Food.
However, if I had to choose a superhero guise other than my own, it would probably be something along the lines of Technically Correct Man:
Or Captain Pedantic.
Or Professor Meticulous.
Hmm. I’ll have to give this further thought – it’s obviously important to get it just right.
I’m always careful not to dive in to political debates that I don’t know enough about – especially those overseas. However, sometimes, some propaganda comes along which is so good you just know that it represents the truth and suddenly you know which side you have to take.
I’m don’t know if they’ll take down the wall now, or even if doing that would reinstate the origin, country or history of the canine in question, but one thing is for sure – you don’t mess with a black dog with green laser feet.
FREE TIBET!