Foreign Perspectives

The staffing levels of post offices often seems to be very much politically led and rather than being subject to whatever local demands would dictate seems merely to reflect that it’s considered as effectively a job creation scheme.

Thus, although the nearest post office to us is on a main road and in quite a large village, it has the same number of staff as the post office in the small very quiet village where our son goes to school. The net effect of us is that what should be a fairly well staffed post office is almost always virtually unuseable. Not only are the queues frequently out the door but they close quite often to catch up with the backlog of work that this generates.

By contrast, the post office in the little village rarely has queues and always leaves us with a good impression. However, a large part of that good impression is no doubt due to that office being effectively well overstaffed for the level of business which it receives.

Whilst I wouldn’t want to deny the small quiet village its own post office, that service should really be part-time with the staff working the rest of the time in the larger one thus improving the service standards considerably for a large number of people.

Funnily enough, just as I figured that it was probably all downhill from here on the English course, I’ve hit a bit of a pothole in the form of a chapter on literature.

Well, not so much literature, but rather the language that Literature (with a capital “L”) uses including various types of poetry and the classics. The amount of stuff that I don’t know about literary techniques could fill a library so this particular chapter is proving to be pretty heavy going for me at the moment.

Fortunately there’s a choice of questions on the exam so I should be able to get by without really knowing a whole lot about the content of this chapter which is just as well.

Although the English course that I’m doing at the moment has the reputation of being the hardest course in the university, I’m finding that as I go through it I’m picking up speed and seem likely to get to the end of the course something like three months ahead of schedule (which is some going on a nine month course!).

Yet, whilst I’m moving along at a seemingly hectic pace (and, no, I’m not skipping sections to do that), others are saying that they’re falling further and further behind. Why? Funnily enough, it seems to be a result of my history of doing language courses which appear to have covered a good deal of the material before, albeit either in French or Spanish. Most of the others are approaching this English language course with a history of English literature courses behind them which, of course, wouldn’t have covered that type of material.

Whatever it is, I’m now around 75% of the way through the course and planning on taking a week out to do some revision and to complete the next assignment.

What this experience has shown me is that there’s little point in reading about the experiences of others of particular courses in isolation from their prior experience. For example, when I look at the forum for the phychology course that I might be doing next, I see that many people on that are saying that they’re getting behind too. Aside from not knowing what prior experience in the field that they’ve brought to the course, there’s also the bias towards forums being places to air problems as opposed to saying “I’m doing great”.

In theory the answer is Scots or perhaps Ulster Scots although there’s a lot of debate as to whether either count as a language. However, that’s not the problem with them: in that one key point about learning another language is that you want to communicate with people who you couldn’t communicate with before these don’t count as they’re spoken by people who are 100% English speakers.

So, in reality, the question should be “what’s the easiest useful language for an English speaker to learn?”.

From first principles that would have to be one of the Germanic family of languages of which the closest is probably Dutch. However, unfortunately that too fails the “useful” criteria as both Dutch and Flemish speakers always reply in English unless your Dutch is perfect which, of course, it won’t be for quite a while.

That leaves the second choice of German which has the problem that it’s quite a precise language and takes quite a while to learn. However, at least the Germans will let you perservere with your early attempts at it. Although not in the Germanic family, Spanish is also fairly easy to pick up and if you’re choosing your first second language it’s probably a toss up between Spanish and German if you just want to learn a language although, usually, other factors come into play.

Most of the time you don’t really notice the rate at which technology moves along but when you dig out a piece of not-that-old technology and try to bring it up to date you can really be surprised.

Take my old SuperVHS tapes for instance. I was recording my holiday trips on those for nearly ten years and thought that it was time I sat down and got them copied onto the computer before the old SuperVHS player packs in and I lose them.

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to do that for a while now but only just got around to making a serious start on the task a few weeks back thanks to a new version of a TV to PC interface I bought recently for another purpose. The first surprise was that although the new device is much smaller than the PVR that it replaces, there’s now no noticeable delay after you press the record button and when it begins recording. Well, it was bound to be faster so I suppose that shouldn’t have surprised me.

What’s more amazing though is that although each 45 minute tape takes up around 1.2GB, that’s no longer a large chunk of disc space. At the time I bought the SuperVHS camcorder, the largest amount of space that I had available was 20MB (in 1993); the machine that I’m typing this on has 200GB ie ten thousand times the storage capacity. I originally thought that I’d have to copy the “tapes” onto an external drive but in fact the internal drive has more than enough space to hold all of them.

Shouldn’t I be copying them off onto DVD? I will be in due course but I think it’s more reliable to keep them on the internal disc and make them part of the normal backup process. There’s much more chance that I’ll be able to view them years from now if I do that: on DVD chances are that 1) they could get scratched and rendered unreadable and 2) DVDs may become obsolete and therefore unreadable in perhaps as little as 10 years.

And I did buy that new external drive but then I buy a new one every year as part of my normal backup plan. 250GB in a nice pocket sized drive is fantastic.