Work Life – Page 2 – Ian Louis Harris

FoodCycle, GoodSAM, The Samaritans, 1981 Keele/BBYO Redux & Being Boilered, This Is Lockdown 3.0, 20 February 2021

With thanks to Rachelle Gryn Brettler for snapping us in Rossmore Road, preparing to do our FoodCycle run on a wet winter’s day

We don’t get out much in Lockdown 3.0, other than to buy food and do our charity work.

That is giving me a chance to crack on with my retro-blogging; I’m working through 1995 & 1996 to cover the Ged & Daisy (Ian & Janie) “25 years ago” story. I’m needing to give more thought, though, to the formerly less well-documented, “40 years on” story of my early days at Keele University.

Strangely, 1981 and 2021 seem to have collided, forty years on.

I wrote last summer about my joy at being asked to make our FoodCycle collections from St Paul’s in Rossmore Road…

FoodCycle’s Spiritual Home In Rossmore Road & Other Tales, 24 June 2020

…mentioning the superb tapes Graham Greenglass used to make for me, including quirky numbers such as Rossmore Road by Barry Andrews. I still hum it or sing it more often than not when Daisy and I do FoodCycle from there:

Dreamy use of sax and double bass on that track.

Last week, I wrote up the very weekend during which several visitors descended on Keele and Graham presented me with a few cassettes, including that very track. The piece below is a thumping good read, even if you weren’t there, including an excellent undergraduate recipe for spaghetti bollock-knees:

The Best Pot I Had In Five Years At Keele, i.e. The First Weekend I Tried Cooking In The F Block Lindsay Kitchen, 11 to 15 February 1981

On Wednesday, before Daisy and I did our FoodCycle run, I did an NHS Responder gig to collect a prescription. Strangely the prescription was to be collected at the Tesco Hoover Factory in Greenford. Strange, because also on that little collection of quirky recordings given to me in February 1981 was the song Hoover Factory by Elvis Costello:

So, by some strange quirk of fate, forty years after being given recordings of those two rather obscure (but wonderful) recordings about lesser-known places in West London, I found myself doing charity gigs from those two very places.

I have already written up the ear worm I got from Hoover Factory a few months after first hearing the song:

Uncle Manny’s Funeral & The Hoover Factory, 15 May 1981

But the early 1980s connection this week does not stop there.

While I have been cracking on with the NHS Responder/GoodSAM app as well as FoodCycle, Daisy has been training to become a Samaritan and this week moved on from being a course trainee to becoming a mentee (i.e. doing real sessions with real calls under the supervision of a mentor).

Towards the end of her course, Daisy had been waiting with a little trepidation to find out who her mentor might be. Mentors work closely with their mentees for a few weeks. She knew that it might be one of her course trainers or possibly someone she hadn’t encountered before.

A couple of weeks ago Janie announced that her mentoring instructions had come through and her mentor was a new name to her: Alison Shindler.

GED: Oh, yes, I know Alison Shindler.
DAISY: What do you mean?
GED: She was a leading light in BBYO towards the end of my time there.
DAISY: Might not be the same person…
GED: …Ealing BBYO – bet it is!

Of course it is.

What a pleasant surprise.

Less of a surprise though, after their first session together, is that Alison & Daisy seem to be getting along really well. I’m confident that the mentoring partnership should be a very good one.

Meanwhile Alison has furnished me with a photo from so far back in the day, the biggest surprise is that we were in colour back then:

With thanks to Alison Shindler for this photo

That’s a c17-year-old me turning around, next to me Simon Jacobs who was central to my “going to Keele” story and part of the “cooking weekend”. In the red scarf I thought was Jilly Black (who has remained friends with me, Daisy and Alison throughout those decades – in fact it is a little surprising we haven’t overlapped before now )…but it turns out to be Emma Cohen disguised as Jilly. Opposite Simon is Lauren Sterling plus, slightly upstaged by Simon’s head, Caroline Curtis (then Freeman) who visited me and Simon at Keele the February 1981 weekend following the “cooking” one.

A Short Visit From Caroline To See Me And Simon At Keele, 20 to 22 February 1981

It’s all too weird, in a good way.

But now, after all that excitement, Daisy and I are in temporary exile at the flat. The replacement of the Noddyland boiler has over-run by a day, making Daisy right and me wrong, as usual.

Stock boiler image: neither the actual old nor the actual new boiler

I’ve been grasping for a quirky early 1980s musical connection for a boiler replacement. So my earworm for the tail end of this tale is by that early 1980s mainstay, The Human League – Being Boiled:

Dumbo, One Of The Unsung Heroes Of The Pandemic Volunteer Effort, Reflects On 2020, 1 January 2021

Dumbo: seriously cool…and honest

Dumbo The Suzuki Jimny is an occasional writer, here on Ogblog and also at King Cricket. Dumbo’s writings are more widely read than those of most automobiles. Dumbo only ever refers to me as Ged and to Janie as Daisy. Why Dumbo has chosen to write a “review of the year” public message is a mystery, but 2020 was a strange year in so many ways.

2020 started badly for me. I acquired a squeak that would not go away. It was incredibly loud and hugely embarrassing – heads would turn in the street at the sound of me coming and going.
A huge team at my car hospital struggled to get to the bottom of it. Ged and Daisy started dropping hints about my possible retirement. It got as bad as that.
Eventually, just before lockdown, thank goodness Derek, Colin, & Marlon performed a pioneering operation on my viscera, which solved my problem.

Ged & Daisy Go South On A FoodCycle Made For Two, 2 May 2020

Just as well I got better in mid March, because within a few weeks I was being called upon to do voluntary work.
In theory I was on call for NHS Volunteer Responders from early in the pandemic, but no gigs were coming through at first. So Ged and Daisy signed us up to do FoodCycle gigs once or twice a week, which we have continued to do throughout the pandemic.
My copious rear (as Ged describes it) comes in pretty handy, especially for the FoodCycle gigs.

Finally We Really Are NHS Responders, 19 May 2020

It wasn’t long before the NHS Volunteer Responder gigs started to come through as well. That and FoodCycle kept us really busy through spring, summer and into the autumn.
Just occasionally, it got a bit much; like the time the NHS Volunteer Responder app went into overdrive…

…And Then, For No Apparent Reason, The Volunteering Went Into Overdrive, 15 & 17 July 2020

…and the time Daisy inadvertently switched on the voice recognition for the FoodCycle Circuit Teams app and mentioned Madagascar…

White City To East Acton Via North Kensington…& Madagascar!, FoodCycle, 2 August 2020

Ged was busy with work the last few weeks of the year, so we did a bit less volunteering in the run up to Christmas, but during that time the pandemic got a lot worse again and the need out there started to rocket up, so we started NHS Volunteer Responding again on Christmas Day and have done lots of gigs since.

My proudest moment of the year was just a few days ago, when Ged and I went to the Co-op on Hanger Hill to get some shopping for a person who is having to isolate. (There seem to be a lot of those at the moment.)
Three young fellas from the Tesla Show Room & Shop around the corner came out of the Co-op just before Ged came out with the shopping. The young fellas stopped to admire me and one of them said, “I think these cars are pretty cool”. Ged overheard him and said, “seriously cool, not just pretty cool”.
So I don’t think Ged & Daisy will be dropping hints about my retirement again any time soon. I think we’re going to be pretty busy with NHS Volunteer Responding & FoodCycle for the next few months at least.
Which is pretty seriously cool.

Z/Yen’s Virtual Christmas Song Lyric, December 2020

This was written 6/7 December 2020 and performed virtually on 17 December 2020 at Z/Yen’s virtual seasonal event.

Note to self – communal singing doesn’t work by TEAMS or Zoom. It’s a latency thing.

DO THEY KNOW IT’S Z/YEN’S VIRTAL CHRISTMAS?

MICHAEL It’s Christmas time, Z/Yen has gathered virtually;
At Christmas time, enlightenment is on the screen.

MIKE And in our world of webclaves, we can spread a smile of joy;
Webinars around the world, at Christmas time.

LINDA But you recall, when we were in one place;
At Christmas time…

ALEX …we’d all gather face-to face.
There’s a world outside your window, that’s in a Covid wave again;

PETER Where the only liquid flowing, is the Dettol and D10.

JULIET And the Christmas bells that ring out, are the viral chimes of doom,

MORGAN Well tonight thank God it’s Teams, instead of Zoom.

SIMON And there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas time,
At least they can’t blame climate change down there.

IAN Oooh.

ELISABETH To Lothbury no-one goes, Z/Yen’s door is always closed,
Do they know Z/Yen still exists at all?

IAN INSTRUMENTAL RIFF 1

BIKASH Here’s to you;

BEN Raise a glass for everyone.

MATTHEW Here’s to them;

HUGH In that massive atrium.

JANIE Do they know Z/Yen still exists at all?

IAN: INSTRUMENTAL RIFF 2

IAN: INSTRUMENTAL RIFF 3

CHAOS…CHORUS – ALL: Teams Z/Yen’s chorus
Sing Z/Yen’s Christmas song remotely
Zoom Z/Yen’s chorus
Z/Yen’s not choral, not remotely.

[REPEAT CHAOS…CHORUS AD NAUSEUM]

Here is a link to the riffs.

Trying To Rectify Dire Customer Service: It’s A Gas Gas Gas, 2 November 2020

SASOL, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE BRITISH GAS CUSTOMER RELATIONS TEAM

2 NOVEMBER 2020

Thank you for your response to my complaint last month.

For the benefit of new readers, I complained about shortcomings in the establishment of a joint electricity and gas account which required me to spend 10 to 15 minutes unsuccessfully and eventually 45 minutes successfully waiting for my phone call to be answered. I would not have needed to phone British Gas at all, but for shortcomings in the on-line service which allowed me access to the electricity account but required me to phone to initiate the gas one.

I asked you not to blame the Covid pandemic for these shortcomings, but you spent some 35% of the words in the substantive part of your response doing just that. I did not complain about the delay in commencing the gas service, as I am aware that you were one of two suppliers involved. But you spent some 30% of the words in your substantive response implying that Opus might be to blame. (The previous supplier was Octopus).

To be clear, only British Gas is to blame for:

the fact that the on-line system worked for the electricity account on commencement but not for the gas account;
providing no means for me to initiate on-line activity for that gas account – there was simply a clear message on the screen telling me to call a particular phone number;
such dire staffing on that phone line, I waited an hour before speaking with someone.

The reason I didn’t want you to blame Covid is because I KNOW that British Gas can staff telephone lines adequately at the moment. The sales team responded to my calls very rapidly. British Gas has chosen not to staff adequately the customer services phone. I strongly suspect that the dire service level I experienced is regular fare for your poorer and more vulnerable customers, who might lack the literacy or IT skills to use the on-line systems and webchats (if/when available, which in my case, you realise, they were not).

You end the substantive part of your response with a delicious question:

“In terms of complaint resolution, other than apologies, could I ask what are you requesting?“

I find this question hard to answer. Perhaps some of my friends and contacts have ideas, which is one of the reasons I am publishing this letter openly. If I get any great ideas from my personal network, I shall pass them on to you.

But I suspect that your question is a veiled way of asking “how much compensation do you need to go away and not come back?” I shall leave the answer to that question to you. I spent an unnecessary hour just waiting for you to answer the phone and I have spent a further 90 minutes or so actually getting my problem resolved and writing to you.

At minimum wages levels that equates to £21.80. At my commercial charge out rate it equates to £1,000. Somewhere between those two figures feels right to me.

Whatever you decide to provide as compensation to Buffalo Woodfield Limited, I pledge personally to donate that sum to FoodCycle, the charity which my wife and I are supporting through the pandemic by doing food drops to the needy. My friends and contacts will eagerly await the donation figure.

I genuinely want British Gas as a supplier to look after poorer and more vulnerable customers properly. You are a large organisation which can make bigger and bolder choices than small companies like mine and individuals like me. Currently, in the matter of customer service, you are making bad customer care choices. Do better.

With best wishes

Ian Harris, Director, Buffalo Woodfield Limited. Complaint Reference number: 5022907658.

Postscript

Seventy minutes after sending the above complaint (and posting it on Facebook & Ogblog) I received correspondence offering £200 as a goodwill gesture.

For aficionados only, the full chain of correspondence (including my acceptance of the offer with some further entreaties for British Gas to look after its vulnerable customers better) is attached as a pdf here.

…and for lovers of Facebook chat about such matters, here is my Facebook posting of the above repleast with comments from friends and family.

A Voyage Around My Neighbourhood & My Past, 21 July 2020

After my “NHS Volunteer Responder App Going Berserk” experience the previous Friday…

…And Then, For No Apparent Reason, The Volunteering Went Into Overdrive, 15 & 17 July 2020

…it was with some trepidation I switched on the app on my next visit to my Notting Hill “Ivory Tower” the following Tuesday afternoon.

Once bitten twice shy, though. I now knew to regulate my own uptake of the calls by waiting a while between accepting a task and making the call, or between completing a task and confirming that the task was done and that I was available again.

Thus I was able to field another half-dozen or so calls while also completing the work tasks that I had undertaken to do that afternoon.

The last of those calls did want some shopping. The woman sounded old. With a heavy Caribbean accent, she almost apologised for needing help. Her son had been getting shopping for her all the while, but he had developed a chesty-something and the doctor had recommended that he isolate. Sounds sensible.

She didn’t need much and she hoped that I could get everything she needed from the pound shop on Portobello Road, which is just a couple of minutes walk from her place. Otherwise there is a Sainsbury’s (other supermarket chains are available) just opposite the Poundland (other pound shop chains are available)…

…that’s fine, I said, after making sure we had clarity on the payment protocol…

…I told her I’d be about an hour, as I resolved to finish my work, “shut up shop” in the Ivory Tower and get her shopping on my way back to Noddyland…

…no rush, she said, she didn’t want to inconvenience me too much.

…no trouble, I said, delighted to help.

It must have been about 17:45 by the time I parked up in Elgin Crescent (close to her place and the pound shop).

It was a glorious sunny evening. The pavement outside the Duke of Wellington was heaving with trendy young folk eating, drinking and making merry. Trustafarians, mingling with local folk and people who work in the area.

This end of Portobello is the part where bijou Notting Hill meets social housing Notting Hill.

The street scene looked like Portobello as I had always imagined it before I moved to the area, but never really lived it, although I have lived in the neighbourhood now for well north of 30 years.

I hadn’t seen scenes like this since before lockdown…not since last summer…in truth I’d never really seen scenes like this before – it was as if the Notting Hill of my imaginings, back in the 1980s, when I chose to come and live here, had suddenly been brought into existence, filmically, in this time of pandemic. It certainly showed no signs of social distancing or increasing social need.

Social housing/bijou housing/social housing…

But just around the corner from that hedonistic street festival was an old lady who needs a few things from the pound shop so that she can get by for a few days; her son is ill and she was almost too proud to ask for help with her shopping.

Indeed, just up the road and around the corners are lots of people who need help, because my responder app goes off as often as I let it and the need for FoodCycle deliveries seems to be going up and up still.

But in many ways this is still the Notting Hill where I chose to pitch my tent 30+ years ago. It always was a strange mix of gentility and grunge.

Stand in the middle of Portobello Road at a suitable junction, such as the Elgin/Colville/Portobello one shown above, look one way and you can see boutique-style shops & The Electric…

…look the other way for the Sally Army, pound shops and (if you venture even further north), informal hawkers under the flyover on a market day.

Anyway, the pound shop indeed had all of the food items that my elderly client had requested. I had no idea that pound shops sold quality-stamped Danish bacon and posh-looking tubs of tiramisu for a pound each. Now I know.

Feeling like a mighty hunter who had landed his prey, I swaggered around the corner to my client with her swag. Old school Notting Hill, her place; a conversion in one of the many old, somewhat dilapidated, Victorian houses around there; not vastly different in architectural style from my place.

The client really did look old; late 80s or possibly even 90. She’d have hardly been a youngster when I moved in to the neighbourhood; she’d have been…

…57 or 58…

…that’s what I am now. There’s a pause for thought.

She thanked me. I wished her good luck and hoped she would enjoy her food.

Less than a minute later, I was back at the youthful throng of Portobello/Elgin:

Heaving even more, it was.

I couldn’t help wondering whether some of these trustas might deploy some of their energy towards volunteering. They mostly didn’t look as though they were demob happy after a hard day’s work. They mostly looked as though they had not yet been mobilised on much, ever, in their lives, other than looking good and having a jolly time.

As I drove back to Noddyland, I resolved to write up this little episode, but then realised that I hadn’t taken any pictures for the blog.

I then also realised that I had in fact never taken any pictures around Portobello. Back in the late 1980s, you didn’t tend to take pictures around your own environment…

…why would you?

So I resolved to return at lunchtime on the Friday and snap a few. They depict the market on a Friday lunchtime, rather than the hedonistic bar/cafe life of that Tuesday late afternoon, but the sun shone and I think I snapped a few nice pics around abouts my own manor.

…And Then, For No Apparent Reason, The Volunteering Went Into Overdrive, 15 & 17 July 2020

The Government is encouraging people to try and get back to “normal”, whatever that might be, while the pandemic is in its summer recess. This doesn’t seem to have reduced the load on charities, such as FoodCycle, nor yet on the needs emerging for NHS Volunteer Responders.

What it is achieving, though, is a reduced volunteer force…

…Janie was back to work this week, but she’s not letting that stop her from continuing with the volunteering, at least for now…

…yet I get bemused looks from plenty of people when I tell them that our voluntary workload is increasing.

Two examples this week.

FoodCycle Marylebone 15 July 2020

Probably a temporary glitch, for this project, which we have been supporting by doing deliveries for nearly three months now. The delivery load has increased to three teams these past few weeks, but this week, try as they might, they could only find two so we needed to take on an extra half load.

That meant 16 deliveries; 32 bags full (sir).

Our previous record; 24 bags. “32 bags full sir” required some strategic stacking

Mostly on the Lisson Green Estate, plus one or two blocks on the Church Street side and a few up in Maida Vale; mostly people we’d delivered to before, which helps.

As usual, we got a lot of satisfaction from this gig; huge amounts of gratitude from the guests who clearly need the food and really appreciate our help.

But it really was a bit of a marathon this week. Back to three teams for Marylebone next week; Janie and I are grateful.

The Day My NHS Volunteer Responder App Went Berserk, 17 July 2020

Back in May, I wrote up the very first gig Janie and I did for the NHS Volunteer Responder scheme. We had been waiting best part of two months before we got our first gig:

Finally We Really Are NHS Responders, 19 May 2020

I’d clocked up some 800+ hours of “duty” by then:

Since May, we’ve both had a steady stream of calls. Not all that many, frankly, but around a dozen gigs each (more if you count the “no shows”), which, from what I can gather, is significantly above average.

I think the run rate has been increasing slightly, but when the first eight weeks is metaphorical dot balls and the next few weeks is ones, twos and the occasional four, it is hard to be overly analytical about the rate.

Then came Friday 17th July.

I relocated to the flat, for the first time in months, as Janie was taking patients at the house and I thought it was about time I collected the post, flushed the loo, ensured the computer was working/updated properly and got on with preparation for the Z/Yen Board meeting. Frankly, now we do everything in the cloud, I could now do Board preparation work from pretty much anywhere without shlepping loads of files or papers.

I’m not entirely sure what triggered the storm that followed, but basically the NHS Volunteer Responder App decided that, as soon as I closed one call, it wanted to alert me to another one.

I didn’t really notice it earlier in the day. My first call took a while to close. An utterly charming South-East Asian woman – Vietnamese I think from the name – who didn’t answer the first time I called and then wanted to come off the calling scheme as she is no longer isolating and is returning to work. The first such call I have taken, I called the support line to establish the protocol for doing that – basically the woman herself needs to call the support line to be removed from the scheme.

Perhaps my first ever human (telephone) interaction with the scheme itself triggered a new status on my account…

Super-responder. Bit of a mug – probably will help pick up all the slack everywhere. Bombard with calls until this responder expires.

…or perhaps the algorithm detected “a new kid in town” around Notting Hill and there happened to be a lot of business around there on Friday.

Most of the calls were delightful folk who really appreciated the scheme, had used it when they needed stuff but didn’t, as it happens, need any help that day. One other person wanted to come off the scheme and I advised her on how to do that, now I am an expert on that protocol.

As the afternoon went on and my little “ivory tower” office heated up, I decided to return to Noddyland, taking one last call. I think my 12th of the day. A charming gentleman in Earls Court who did, on this occasion, as it happened, need a prescription collected and one or two other things from the pharmacy.

In truth, I was glad to at least have one of my calls today result in an errand, even though it was a little out of my way on a hot day.

I ran the errand and returned to my car, opened the windows and checked my messages.

I picked up one message from a client that absolutely needed dealing with before I could draw stumps on my working week, but my mobile phone battery was already running low (NHS Volunteer Responder does that) so I arranged a call with the client for 30-45 minutes hence, when I’d be home.

Then I cleared the good deed I had just done by clicking the “completed task” button.