The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

By the time you read this, I’ll be in China and because my blog [well, all WordPress blogs] is banned there, I’ve pre-written my posts for the rest of the week because I know how you’ll all cry if you don’t get to see something new each and every day.  Ahem!

Anyway last weekend I popped into a local Singaporean coffee shop, Spinelli’s and ordered a large latte for me and a medium latte for Jill.

Now you wouldn’t think that is worthy of a blog post [is anything I write?] however that was until I received the coffee …

Now both these mugs are the same in circumference which means the difference between medium and large is about .5cm.

If only everything in life was like that eh!

Seriously, this is madness and the scary thing [for Spinelli’s] is that It demonstrates how BAD value a large coffee at that establishment is.

From now on I’ll only ever order a medium because the price difference is way over-the-odds for the increased amount of coffee volume that you receive.

Maybe someone should explain to them the Macca’s sizing policy … where trading up represents [at least in perception terms] BETTER value for the customer, not worse.

Mind you, there’s a great book called ‘WHY I HATE FLYING‘ that encourages people to never buy a Business and/or 1st class seat because like Spinelli’s, he says it represents terrible value for money … but then maybe the author, Henry Mintzberg, has never tried flying from London to Singapore on Qantas!!

A little while back, Hari wrote said he was only going to blog about ‘positive’ things.

Now whilst that is all very nice … the fact of the matter is he hasn’t posted a single thing since October 29th … which begs the question, is he even more cynical than me?

If you want Hari to pull his finger out, tell him here

… but this is a disgustingly brilliant post by dear Angus!

A client sent me some wonderful pictures [which I’ve knocked up into a bit of a preso] that demonstrates some of the fundamental differences between Western and Asian culture.

Unfortunately I don’t know where the images originate from so can’t acknowledge copyright – however all the icons were created by the talented Liu Young – a Chinese born, German educated designer!

Admittedly there’s alot of generalisation, but it’s still bloody great and I’d be interested to hear from anyone in the West about what things surprised or shocked them in this cultural comparison.

So as you know, Fred left us yesterday and as he said his final goodbyes, I realised that after TWO YEARS of working with me, he’d only amassed enough ‘stuff’ to fit into one single box …

Jesus, I know tramps who have more!

You will also note that pride of place goes to his leaving card featuring – amongst many things – the Swedish Chef from The Muppets. See Seb, we’re equal opportunity ‘prejudice people’ – it’s not just the Krauts we love to tease! Ha.

Anyway, as I am sure most of you agree … leaving a job wouldn’t be leaving a job unless you stole something from the company – so in a manner fitting a Swedish, Toto-loving, father of 3 … instead of “liberating” office computers, chairs or even stationary, Fred nicked a box …

Bless him.

We miss you already my son!