There are always going to be cases where someone was negligent, where if things had been done differently injury could have been prevented, or where there’s been criminal behaviour/action, and in such cases it can be right that the injured party’s compensated, but these days there are so many ambulance chasers eager to persuade anyone who’s suffered an injury or bad experience and persuade them it’s their right to be paid for everything in life that goes wrong that you can’t switch on the TV without being bombarded by the message. The TV’s full of adverts for injury claims lawyers telling you they’ll get you cash and it doesn’t cost anyone anything (except of course everyone’s insurance premiums).

On the forum I used to run, a medical support forum, I used to see it too. People can’t accept that sometimes things just happen – there invariably had to be someone to blame, a doctor should have diagnosed it sooner, a doctor shouldn’t have prescribed whatever medication it was that was suspected to have caused the condition, someone should have warned them, etc. etc. Looking for reasons is always part of the process of accepting a diagnosis of a serious condition, but so many these days take it to extremes.

Last Sunday there was a Panorama programme, “The Trauma Industry” (Fri 31 Jul 2009, 1.05, BBC1) looking at post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the legal process involved in compensation claims. A condition that was first given a name in the aftermath of the Vietnam War (though earlier veterans of the First and Second World Wars had suffered the same symptoms, but it was known as “shell shock” or veterans were diagnosed as having problems with their “nerves”) has now morphed into a condition that results from minor traffic incidents.

TV reporter Allan Little, a war zone correspondent who’s seen war zones first hand and experienced the death of a colleague in a war zone spoke to veretans, doctors, psychologists, lawyers, and some victims of PTSD.

One is a Falklands veteran who was shot in the head during the conflict, and suffers from PTSD. Understandable. I should imagine that recovering from such an injury and trying to return to normal life after something like that is going to have a major impact on anyone.

According to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) though, the NHS is treating an estimated quarter of a million people a year for PTSD, more than twice the number of people in the British army. That’s a hell of a lot of traumatised people! A PTSD specialist on the programme quite openly said he thought it was “a money spinner.”

The programme featured a number of cases, including a woman who’d been involved in a car accident where the car had been shunted 15ft. From this she’d apparently developed PTSD, and of course was suing for damages. The conclusion of the programme was that the legal process that compensation claims go through can actually hinder someone’s recovery from PTSD. After all, if someone’s suffering from PTSD and are involved in a legal process to get recompense from it, it’s not in their interests to actually recover from it.

As the programme points out, online you can find lists of the symptoms of PTSD in various places…often followed by advertisements for these injury lawyers and advice on how to claim.

Headaches, flashbacks, insomnia…they’re not the sort of symptoms you can disprove. I’d imagine they’re symptoms thousands of people have experienced at times, or after bad experiences – they’re symptoms I’ve had myself (hmmm…maybe I’ve got PTSD…?), but what people who do experience these sort of symptoms need more than anything else is treatment. Again though, if they’re in the middle of a legal case about their symptoms, it’s not in their interests to recover from them.

For everything these days there has to be someone to blame, whether it’s the politicians, doctors, scientists, the public, young people, old people, bankers, foreigners, nationalists, the other political party, voters, those who didn’t vote, etc., etc., and last week the latest group to be blamed was weather forecasters. Yep, weather forecasters!

Earlier in the year the Met office predicted that it was “odds on” for what the media are describing a “BBQ summer.” Of course the forecast heatwave hasn’t materialised (no mention of the fact that if it had, after three days everyone would be complaining that it was too damned hot), so now it’s the weather man’s fault. Thousands have apparently decided to forego a foreign holiday this year and chosen to holiday in Britain on the strength of the Met office forecast (nothing at all to do with the recession then). The BBC news showed waterproof covered after waterproof covered pensioners sitting dejectedly on the sea front, teenagers battling their way along the promenade with umbrellas.

What everyone has failed to notice is that whatever we want it to do, the weather will do what it damned well pleases – it’s something that’s not under our control. I’ve never quite understood the fabled British obsession with the weather anyway – it’s something that happens whether you complain about it or not, and it’s just too big for us to have any influence over.  We live in a country on the edge of a continent next to a rather large expanse of water and have a maritime climite. Unsettled and unpredictable weather comes with the territory. The other rather large thing that everyone failed to notice is that what the Met office said was that it was “odds on” for a good summer, not that it was a certainty. As everyone knows, there are only two certainties in life – death and taxes (and at least a trio of crap songs, one of them by Cliff Richard, battling over the Christmas number one, but I’m not sure if that counts). What the Met Office predicted, which of course the media failed to make a big thing of, focussing instead on the soundbite, was a 65% chance of a good summer…that means that there’s a 35% chance that it won’t be a good summer. They’re good odds, but not great.

No matter how good computer modelling is, which is largely what the weather men use these days in predicting weather, along with data from historical records, it’s an inexact science. A prediction is just that; a prediction. It’s not certain, it’s not guaranteed to happen, and I wouldn’t bet my last tenner on it. Is it the weather man’s fault if the predicted weather doesn’t materialise? No, but as a higher celestial being isn’t handy to blame, someone else has to take the rap, and the weather forecasters are an easy target. Having a maritime climate where the weather’s so unpredictable no-one, unless they’ve got a crystal ball, can say with certainty what the weather can do, and even then there can be a complete difference in weather in a very small area. I’ve been at work in town and it’s rained heavily during the day, yet at home, only a couple of miles away, nothing.

If you get wet though because it rains and you haven’t got an umbrella, someone (the weather man) has to take the blame. Not having the forethought to have taken an umbrella with you even though it was overcast and cold doesn’t come into it.

PTSD, the recession, whatever, someone has to take the blame. No-one can accept these days that life’s tough and sometimes shit happens and you just have to accept it and move on. Life sucks. Deal with it.

The post office keep telling us that their services are improving, but I’ve yet to see any evidence of that. If anything it’s going the other way.

A few years ago deliveries used to arrive early in the morning, invariably before work, but those days are long gone. Normally the “normal” post arrives between midday and 1pm these days, so you’d think if you’re in between those times you’d be safe to assume that you would receive even things too big for the letterbox or that need signing for when they arrived. Not so.

Waiting in for a delivery is fraught with dangers. Larger packets and parcels come separately by van rather than with the postman on foot. They can arrive any time between 7:30am (many a time I’ve found myself rushing to the door half dressed, or woken by the doorbell) and 7:30pm, as can the “normal” post. Normally the postman on foot arrives around lunch time, but we’d had deliveries as late as 4pm, and even once around 7:30pm!

They’re an impatient bunch too. On the front door we have a sticker that reads “please allow me time to answer the door” with the wheelchair symbol at the side of it. Though I don’t use a wheelchair, if I’m upstairs, my stairlift isn’t the fastest mode of transport to get downstairs, and even if I’m downstairs, if I’m sitting in my reclining chair with my feet up, I have to wait for the leg rest to lower before I can get out of the chair. One knock though and they’re off, and many a time I’ve arrived at the front door to find them half way up the drive or gone. It gets to the point that if you’re waiting in for a delivery, you worry that you might miss them if you nip to the loo! Similarly, having a bath or a shower or getting changed is problematic, and you find yourself every activity with waiting for the delivery in mind until it’s safely arrived.

Some delivery people also have a bit of a hard time reading delivery instructions. Recently I waited in all day one Friday for a delivery which never arrived. Eventually it arrived on the following Monday. The delivery guy claimed it hadn’t actually been delivered to their depot by the company until Friday evening, while the company claimed it had been sent to them on the Thursday evening. Of course the company weren’t contactable over the weekend, so I had to wait until the Monday anyway to sort it out. Then there’s the courier who can’t tell the difference between morning and afternoon.

When ordering online with Next you can specify whether you want delivery before or after 1pm, which is rather handy because at least then you’re only hanging around half a day waiting. The courier though has a bit of a problem with following these instructions, and invariably the package arrives whenever they feel like delivering it despite which option you’ve chosen.

Having said that, the speed at which some retailers deliver can be amazing. I once ordered something from Next one evening around 11pm, thinking it would be a couple of days before it arrived, but it arrived by 10am the next morning! Mr Amazon can be quite speedy as well, particularly if you use their “Prime” service, though I’ve known things using their standard free service to arrive at the same time as standard free delivery items.

In general though I think far too few companies and delivery companies offer the option of specifying a time-slot for delivery, or at least giving you an idea of when they’re going to be delivering. Having things delivered to an alternative address isn’t always an option. In the past I’ve tried to have things delivered to work if I’ve known a delivery’s going to arrive on a day I’m at work, but that doesn’t always go according to plan either. Working in a fairly large organisation, all the post’s dealt with centrally and then distributed out to the different departments, so you have to wait for it to be distributed to the department before you can get it. Even having things delivered to the main reception isn’t without problems. It used to be the case that if a parcel arrived for an individually named employee, you’d get a phone call from reception when the parcel arrived and you’d go and collect it from the main reception. No more though. Anything that comes via the reception gets sent off to the department, with the result that a couple of years ago it took me two hours to track down a parcel that had got lost between the main reception and the department. Then there’s the problem that my manager for some unfathomable reason insists on having all the team’s mail delivered to her and then she doles it out. When it’s going to arrive depends on when she manages to wander down to our office, and whether she’s in meetings or out somewhere or having a day off. It’s not unknown for things to land on your desk three days after they’ve actually arrived in the building!

There’s also the problem of which delivery address you can use. On eBay now with most sellers they’ll only deliver to the registered PayPal address. Recently when I was away staying with relatives and I needed an Amazon order to get to me urgently, I could only specify a new delivery address if I added a new credit card to my payment methods, which was apparently a “security measure.” As it happened, I did have another credit card I could add on to my account, but had I had only owned one credit card I’d have been stumped. If you get an item Special Delivery or Royal Mail Tracked and you’re not in when they try to deliver, you can’t then have it delivered to alternative address. *sigh*

It’s been a busy month (hence the lack of me or Bliss around here recently) and I’ve been off on my travels to Brokie meet-ups in London and Brussels, amongst other things.

I’ve had major disasters with hard drives, slight panics over backups when my brain ended up nearly as fried as my hard drive, and the usual crop of medical dramas and unexpected hassles to deal with, and what I could do with right now is a very long holiday.

I’m pleased to report though that I’m now back up and running with a shiny new laptop, albeit with a somewhat temperamental internet connection, and the jury’s still out on Vista. All I can say is that Microshite as usual couldn’t run a piss up in a brewery! For a week now I’ve been trying to sign in to post my tale of woe of my internet connectivity issues on the Vista community forums, but will their damned website accept my email address and password? No! Correct email address; correct password. Microshite thinks they’re wrong though. In desperation I tried re-setting my password. They sent me the email link to reset the password to the correct email address, which kind of proves two things 1) the email address I’d been entering was right all along, and 2) I am capable of typing my own email address.

Next comes re-setting the password. Enter your new password…. *Enters new password* Apparently I can’t have that one because it’s the same as the one I had before…this is the same password I’ve been typing to use all week…

‘Problems logging in?’ asks a helpful looking link, so I click that. Now in Opera (which I’m currently using to browse with as Firefox has recently thrown a major wobbler) the window that should open won’t open. So I switch to the dreaded Incompetent Explorer (you’d have though by version 7 they really would have got it right by now, and then we hear there’s an IE8 beta out – joy!), and guess what? This time the window opens, a “windows help” popup, but scrolling down the list of helpful possibilities for not been able to log in (like you’ve typed your email address wrong, or your password (I think we’ve covered that bit), then I come to one that looks like it might be useful and click on it. I can see from the message in the status bar that it’s a javascript pop-up, but does anything pop up? No! So I click the next one, and the next one (wait for it, you’ll like this one) won’t open because it’s been blocked becuase it’s not been signed by a valid security certificate. It helpfully suggests I should check out IE’s help facility (um, is this the one that I’ve already got open, but it won’t display because they’re blocking their own content because they’re not sure they trust it, and there’s no ‘back’ or ‘forward’ buttons on the help popup, so short of closing it and hitting F1 again I can’t do that?). And 90% of the world’s computer owning population trusts these muppets to produce something that makes their computers work?

*sigh*

Anyhow, as I said, August’s been a busy month so expect lots of updates soon…that’s providing my internet connection holds out, and the Microshite software that runs my computer decides to actually play nice…

The day started off bad, briefly improved for a while this morning when I was actually handed something interesting at work to do…but then unfortunately went down-hill again, until finally tonight the shit hit the fan in a big way.

Result? I don’t even want to contemplate it just yet, but my plans for a quiet few days off before the working week starts again next week have gone flying out of the window.

Right now I need sleep. My eyes are closing all on their own as exhasution’s finally kicked in after the frantic workload of the last few weeks. Right now I need sleep, and my head needs some serious painkillers. What I actually need right now’s a break, but the chances of that happening in the near future are somewhat slim to say the least.

My bed calls…

Take my employers’ new system for booking meeting rooms. In the old days we used to have to phone the post room, who rather confusingly also dealt with meeting room bookings, amongst a host of other things. So, you’d phone Quadir, who’d check the date you wanted in a big A4 diary kept especially for the purpose, and which rooms were available. If there was a free room available you could reserve it (though it’s always been the case that if those higher up the food chain simply must have a room for something, then the poor underlings get unceremoniously turfed out, but I guess that’s one of the perks of the job, along with loads more dosh. a bigger pension, and if you’re lucky, a space in the staff car park). Anyhow, I digress. Once your room booking was confirmed you could then also book refreshments for your meeting, if required. For internal meetings only tea and coffee were allowed – if you wanted biscuits you had to bring your own. For meetings involving people from “outside”, biscuits were allowed as well! If your meeting either started or ended at lunch time you could also order sandwiches…obviously if they were internal meetings though you were expected to take a packed lunch. Anyhow, room and any catering required booked, Quadir would ask you for your cost code, and all was sorted.

Then came automisation…except it isn’t really.

Today I had to book a meeting room, as a meeting for tomorrow mysteriously got requested to be canceled at the eleventh hour. These days there’s a fancy interactive calendar on the intranet, and after selecting the day you’re interested in you can check out who else has got meetings, marveling at the strange and mysterious titles of some meetings, and whether there’s a suitable room available when you want it. Clicking on the time for the column for that particular room takes you through to a form where you specify the name of your meeting, confirm the time and duration you want the room for, specify the layout of tables and chairs you want, and if required, book your catering (obviously adhering to the “no biscuits” rule). Simple. That done you click “submit” and off your booking goes…only it’s not really booked, because despite what it says on the confirmation page on the intranet, until the request is checked out by a real human person (presumably in case those bigwigs upstairs simply must have a room or anything) your booking isn’t confirmed, and you still have to wait for Quadir to either email you or phone you to confirm you’ve actually booked it.

Then comes the second part of the mission – to cancel the room booked for tomorrow as it’s no longer required.

Problem! Nowhere on the system on the intranet is there anything you can press or any instructions on how to go about canceling a booking.

This is where it gets complicated. I figured I probably needed to phone the post room like we used to in the good old days, but we no longer have an internal phone book, on the grounds it apparently isn’t needed. If we need a number, we can look on the properties of whoever we need to ring on Outlook – the problem with that is that usually with all the shuffling of offices and jobs, phone numbers on the email system are a couple of years out of date because no-one’s taken responsibility for making sure all the information’s correct, and it lists users on the system as individuals along with their email addresses, not locations.

The second method is to use our fancy new VOIP phone system, which has a built-in phonebook. The phonebook’s great, if you know the full name of the person you want to ring, as you search it by surname. It’s not so great if you don’t know the person’s surname, or you want to talk to someone about “widgets” for example, but you don’t know which office deals with widgets.

I don’t know Quadir’s surname – I used to play pool with the guy in the staffroom back a few years ago when Quadir and his mate Maz used to pop up there at lunchtime and me and James (ex-manager) used to go up there for a quick game or two too, to break the monotony of the day, but I never thought to ask his surname. I’d no need to.

So in the end, I ended up having to ring switchboard to be asked to be put through to the post room…hardly very automated at all. I did eventually get to speak to Quadir, who canceled tomorrow’s booking for me and confirmed the new one. I did forget to ask him what his surname is though. That might come in useful next time I need to use the automated system to book a room…

Postscript: (15th July) And just to prove the point that if you’re higher up the food chain you can do whatever you damned well please, guess who got ousted from the totally automated room they’d gone to such lengths to secure? Yep, the day before the rescheduled meeting I got a phone call taken by one of my colleagues to say that the bigwigs absolutely must have that room, so would we mind awfully vacating it? Not a request however, but an order. So the booking promptly got canceled. No mention of booking another room; we just got canceled.

On my return of course I uttered a few Anglo-Saxon words and promptly got on the phone to Quadir, bypassing the automated system except to check on it if any other room was available. There I found that indeed the bigwigs’ designated room itself was free, so why the hell they couldn’t use that and simply had to have ours, I’ll never know so I booked that instead.

The email I sent to the rest of the team (with some details edited to protect the innocent) read:

Dear All, Unfortunately we have been evicted from the room we had booked for tomorrow’s <edited> meeting. This is due to the fact that if you’re only a lowly <edited> team, those higher up the food chain (i.e. <edited>) can do whatever they damned well wish, including evicting aforementioned <edited> teams from legitimately booked rooms. Luckily for us though the <edited> room is available (why the hell they couldn’t use their own room I’ll never know!), so we shall be reconvening there. If we get evicted from there though if anyone else higher up the food chain comes along, we’re out of luck, as that’s the last room available, so we may end up in the car park.
Please bring your umbrella in case of inclement weather.
Me

One of the middle ranking managers in the team asked if anyone had commented on my email. Normally such an email would have attracted comments about the need to be respectful of those higher up the food chain. No-one though made any comment. Presumably they all agreed that sometimes things suck when you’re low in the pecking order.

Unfortunately I shall be on leave on the day of the next meeting. Some other sucker can deal with the automated booking system.

Me, I’ll just be phoning Quadir.