Posts by giovanni tiso
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Actually I read the Symposium a long time ago and had forgotten about it...Kinda figured that it sounded like they were just seeking to justify it back then, rather than to say, you don't need to justify it....we're cool with that...which is how I see the current view.
Actually, it's still us that are uncomfortable with their attitudes, for the most part. The best comedy scenes in post-war American cinema are still those in Troy with Achilles going nuts when Patroclus died on account of the fatc that they were lov... cousins, cousins! They were cousins! Who doesn't go insane with rage when they kill their cousin?! Allow me to screw my female slave here on screen for a few minutes to underline that point. Cousins, I say!
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Dunno about anyone else, but I'm kinda proud that I lived in an age when same sex relationships were given legal recognition. However many thousand years of humans, dunno how many hundreds of years of government & (ok relative few of) democracy and the changd occurred in our watch
Actually, the Greeks and the Romans were fine with it, and that's just two cultures I happen to know about it. I'm sure they would have been/are plenty others.
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Cheers Noizy - but for the sake of clarity, I'm looking for GOOD customer services stories for once...
Yeah? Well, too bad.
For there is a lot more satisfaction in moaning, and you of all people should know that, luggage boy.
Besides, in my culture, it's a state of mind, a way of living. I met this guy in London once, early nineties - both in the sense that it was the early 1990s, and how old he appaered to - had worked all his life at the National Theatre, had an immense love for Italy, bent my ear for a couple of interminable, booze-less hours on the subject, until I felt compelled to ask him why he never moved there, and he replied, I swear, 'the customer service, it's just terrible.' Which seemed at the time to me a sad-ass reason not to move to the land of your dreams. But maybe it's just that I didn't know any different.
So a few years later I moved to the land, if not of my dreams, at least where my partner is from, and experienced this weird thing, cus-to-mair sir-veece - I think I had to ask them to spell it the first time. And it was strange, it was weird, but it felt right somehow, and it made life easier in those first weeks and months.
A digression: there was thid administrator at uni in Milan, with a sign on her door saying "I don't give information over the phone". Which was great, especially for the students who took the train from out of town to meet lecturers who might not be there, and of course none of them had direct lines. Anyhow, on her door she also had opening hours of 9:00 to 12:30, spelt out with little magnets, until one day she took the 3 and a 0 and shifted them a bit and turned it into 9:30 to 12:00. That's the essence of Italian ingenuity right there.
End of digression. I'm in NZ for sixteen months when I take my first trip back home. And I'm there for a week until one night the light goes out. We quickly surmise that it's just us in the building and that it must be a fuse, so I phone the power company. I explain who I am, and where we live and that we have no light. The guy at the other land of the line gives me an answer that I'll take to my grave (if not his). He says: "Mbè"?
Now, for those of you who don't speak the language, mbè is not a word in Italian either. It's like a vocal shrugging of the shoulders. Condensed in that grunt was a whole philosophy of refusal to acknowledge one's fellow human being, sedimented over centuries of contempt-for-customer. And it threw me a bit, I couldn't even muster a sarcastic reply. Since after all, you know, I had phoned the right number, and we had paid line charges and call-out money for close to forty years on that particular bill, so expecting that they might come to our house once and replace a fuse ONCE wasn't so out of place. But I had forgotten, sixteen months of absence had been enough to foster in me the expectation that a call for assistance ought to be answered by those who are there to assist. So you see this is a story of good customer service, really. And can I have my socks now? -
I feel deeply depressed that some NZ MPs were voting with the Nazis -- as it were -- until 1984.
Wow, you drove a tractor through that one. Allow me to cushion the blow for you, thusly: isn't the Haider story a stunner? That leaves the Pope alone on top of the list of self-hating hypocrites I'd like outed as soon as possible.
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It does raise the question...
If you gave your baby to Rodney Hide, for a baby kissing moment (ew).
Would he drop it on its head?
Would have to be a freakishly strong baby.
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Gotcha, I had misunderstood the crux of the OECD survey.
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It's called labour market flexibility, and people seem to leave the country to avoid it.
How do you mean?
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I hope they also have a residual clause that states that if they're going to get more money now that they need to have the same hairstyle now as they did then!
That's a fantastic suggestion.
And what a great lineup on the site already, well done everyone involved.
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The GPS on the car that took us to Mantua earlier this month was one of the absolute highlights of the trip to my son. But I was deligted - delighted! - to discover that it wasn't infallible. My grandmother's patch is small but devilishly difficult to navigate; we had to get to our cousins' village, and it kept trying to steer us away from it, which culminated in the following exchange:
GPS LADY: Turn right
ME: No, turn left.
(Driver turns left, to his eternal credit)
GPS LADY: If possible, turn the car around and proceed in the opposite direction.
ME: But I can see the bloody house!Score one for the human race.
As for your general argument, you've hit on a bugbear of mine: be careful what you wish for, gadget-wise, and for god's sakes leave yourself something to do. It's the flipside of the information revolution, isn't it? Computers our doing our remembering, our thinking, our orienteering - the fun stuff - but as of yet they're not doing our laundry. We've got this thing ass-backwards.
Also on language: The Languge Instinct by Stephen Pinker, which includes a defence of English spelling. I wasn't privy to the discussion in the Herald you're talking about, but shit, who'd want the English language to be even easier than it is now?! Is there another language in the universe with so few moods and tenses, and so modular? And not a subjunctive pluterperfect in sight. What's not to like?
And finally...
Under the new system it has actually become very easy for me to add copy, upload music, insert photos and clips, and so on at Elsewhere.
I can do it . . . ahh . . . without thinking. Hmmm.That's always been my little problem with Elsewhere. It's great, and vast, but also great... and vast. A subset of the Internet, but only just. I get lost easily, perhaps you ought to implement a GPS function.
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What Danielle said.