Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

Isn’t it strange the way that when someone you’ve not seen in several years appears on the scene, it’s as though the years between didn’t exist?

I’ve just had quite an enjoyable night chatting with an old work colleage (DG) who’s staying with us this evening. What’s perhaps even stranger is that some of the old fixtures in the workplace are still very much fixtures although sometimes it seems like if I went back there I’d be the only one left of the “old guard”!

That’s a question that’s even more difficult to answer this year as there’s not only the problem of the exchange rate making everywhere much more expensive but then there’s the oil price which can mean that your holiday increases in price after you’ve booked it.

Throw in the need for a consensus amongst the family as to where you’re going and what you’re doing when you get there and it’s something of a nightmare this year.

And, of course, those holidays are just around the corner and prices are liable to leap since everyone has been putting off booking anything this year…

It’s been ages since I looked at the detailed stats for this blog so it was something of a surprise that one place reckoned that 75% of the readership is in America.

I say one place because one place reckoned that as low as 25% were from there and that 16% were from India.

Of course, that’s the problem with web site statistics: none of them are really accurate. Bear in mind too that all of those that I looked at have a little stats marker on the site so they should all be in agreement!

To be fair, they’re not all measuring over exactly the same timescale but a few days out isn’t going to make a difference from 75% American readership to 25%. Some statistical errors are evident though so for example the American readership that Alexa guesses at 25% is higher than the British readership that they guess at 20% simply because their toolbar is more popular in the US (all the sensible stats places reckon that both countries are about equal).

However, it does seem clear that we’re getting more American readers than we used to and therefore I’m thinking that it’s time that Foreign Perspectives emmigrated to America itself so over the next week or two I’ll be moving the hosting for it.

If you’re like most people I’m sure you’ve hardly gotten beyond thinking that you’ll either get a few hundred from the travel agent or perhaps just use a card when you get there.

In the first case, you’ll end up spending a small fortune un-necessarily and in the second you could be stuck without any money. In both cases, it’s worth putting a little thought into it and to help you make the best choices I’m putting together a little series on it over the next week or so.

In days gone by it would be maybe £100 to get a car serviced but those days have long since gone and I just paid out over twice that.

In fact, it would have been much more but we’d had the speedo set on trip rather than distance travelled so managed to miss out a service completely. Whilst we did that accidently this time I think we may well do it delibrately next time as I’m sure a lot of people are increasingly doing these days with the spiralling cost of the process.

Is it safe though? If you’d done that 20 years ago perhaps the answer would have been “no” but cars have become a whole lot more reliable over that time yet the service interval hasn’t changed. From our point of view, it certainly doesn’t appear to have made much difference in the running of the car, certainly not £200 worth of difference.

OK, we’ve some new oil in the car and presumably it’s cleaner oil than the stuff they threw out, which I imagine is better for the car. However, is it enough cleaner to make it worthwhile paying £200 to have it changed? I’m sure we could have managed to do that ourselves for maybe £20 tops. I’ve looked at the list of stuff they did and there’s nothing on it that seems really worth paying that much for so I figure that we’ll likely skip the next service too.

In fact, the only thing that might have been worthwhile for them to have done turns out to be a warranty thing which they couldn’t do today anyway and we’ve to go back in a couple of weeks when they get the part.