Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

Most of the time we just take it for granted that American is pretty much the same as English and at least that we know the differences (color not colour, check not cheque, etc.) but some differences in interpretation can cause problems.

The main problem we have is with our pickup and dropoff service. This is a service that we offer for the likes of walkers who frequently arrive at the airport or rail station without cars but who’d like to start their walking in our area (it’s very popular for that).

Most of the time our guests are couples and we’ve only once had a family arrive wanting a pickup. Therefore we don’t need to get a minibus or similar and can easily do the pickups and dropoffs in our car, sometimes with the aid of the trailer for the luggage.

Critically, from the American perspective, it isn’t a “shuttle service” and we never use that phrase in any of our marketing because we’re just not setup to offer such a thing. Yet, consistently, the Americans read “pickup/dropoff service” as “shuttle service” and thereby have an expectation of its capability that we just aren’t equipped to fulfil.

For instance, a few weeks ago, despite several e-mail exchanges a large group arrived wanting to book the shuttle bus for the nine of them. Earlier, we had one couple who wanted to catch the shuttle to and from the city every day and, were none too pleased when we weren’t able to collect them from the town a couple of times during their stay.

One thing that we hadn’t allowed for was that French style barbeques aim to cook the food French style ie very much undercooked from our point of view.

However, we sort-of assumed that they’d fire up the BBQ in the normal manner with food sizzling on the spit and so on. As usual, we assumed wrong and in fact at tonights BBQ they only had the temperature high enough to merely warm the food rather than actually cook it which, of course, means that we couldn’t cook it as thoroughly as we’d be happy with.

Sit down BBQ meals seem a little odd too.

Oh well, another custom that the French have sort-of taken up.

Although I am that little bit happier to be able to hold a photo in my hand rather than have it only as a digital file on disc, obviously it’s a whole lot handier for me to have that image on disc too.

In fact, although I’ve thousands of photographs from my holidays all over the world, you’ll only have seen those that I’ve taken in the digital age which, for me, effectively started just under four years ago properly but there are the camcorder images from back as much as 16 years.

What to do about all those non-digital images though? Well, in the plans is the purchase of a slide scanner which’ll radically increase the number of photos available to me online and make a major difference in the geographic coverage too with photos from Australia, the far east, India and several Pacific islands not forgetting about photos from just about all corners of America and Canada.

Now all I need is for the price of the things to drop down to something sensible.

Since we’ve gotten over the peak of the Summer season and, more importantly, I now have the Spanish exam behind me, our thoughts are turning to holidays for ourselves.

London is an easy choice for us as we’re just 20 mins from the airport and the flight times are pretty convenient too. Not only that but there’s loads of things to see and do in London year-round so we don’t need to aim for any particular date.

One interesting option that we think of now and again are London apartments. You might think that these would be very expensive and, of course, some of them are. Not all though and particularly not if you choose your dates wisely as many serviced apartments are aimed at business people and therefore have lower rates at the weekends.

Failing that, London is naturally full of cheap hotels although you should be careful with these as some are cheap because they’re not that convenient to public transport. If they’re reasonably close to a tube line even hotels that are relatively far out can be extremely practical as you can get a surprising distance on the tube in 20 minutes.

ReviewMe is one of those paid post sites that gets heavily promoted by the make money online blogs.

Now, the make money online blogs appear to do incredibly well from the posts that ReviewMe offer them with the likes of John Chow quoting figures into the thousands of dollars per month from them. Now, to be fair, you’d expect his blog to do quite well from any payment scheme in that it gets very substantial traffic each month and therefore is a valuable property to advertisers.

For me though, all I could see were a few posts at $5 back in May and nothing more until last week.

Ordinarily, I don’t do $5 posts and definitely not when they’re looking for 200 words but I figured that perhaps it was a matter of starting from the bottom and working up with them so I wrote a couple in May and then four last week.

Result? They paid out for one of the four, the advertiser pulled out of another one and they rejected the other two.

Why the rejections? Well, they sent me an e-mail saying that I’d “flagrantly broken the rules” and quoted the three rules:

1. The post must say it’s sponsored;
2. The link as specified by the advertiser must be included; and
3. There must be at least 200 words

I tag all my paid posts as sponsored unless the advertiser specifically requests that I don’t. The post that was accepted was identical in this regard to the other three.

I copy and paste the link specified so it was what the advertiser asked for in all four cases. 

I run a wordcount on my posts so all four cleared 200 words.

Actually, the second point was the problem. Three of the four advertisers had specified a link that simply wouldn’t work. The ReviewMe software obviously checks that the link in your post is the one asked for and therefore it’s not possible to correct this yet they rejected me because the link wasn’t “correct”.

I pointed this out to them but have yet to receive a reply.