Foreign Perspectives

The Open University tutorials are always on Saturdays so you sort-of get into the way of assuming that all their activities are on Saturdays. Well, they usually are but the exams aren’t and it certainly throws me for one.

This year was particularly confusing in that the exam was in Dublin for the first time rather than in Belfast so the local Dublin hotels did rather well out of that. How come we didn’t get paid £70 each because the exam was in Dublin though? After all, they’d have charged us £70 each if it was us that asked for it to be in Dublin (ie abroad).

Hmmm, wonder if they’d pay up if we all asked?

Blogs from accommodation providers are fascinating things to read.

In the blogging world, they quite simply can’t use “in your face” marketing and therefore usually end up producing blogs that people want to read. Obviously they are broadly in the area of “accommodation news” but that remit is stretched very widely!

For instance, there’s the story on the air conditioned bus stop in Dubai.  OK, it’s there because these guys have accommodation listings there but it’s interesting anyway, isn’t it?

Or, what about the top destinations for uni grads? This gives a very nice top 4 list of locations. Interestingly, this reflects the fact that the producers of this particular blog are from Australia in that “uni” is Ozzie for university and, of course, the graduation time elsewhere isn’t the same (school/university years run February to December there rather than September to June elsewhere).

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.

I’m just getting settled in with the new laptop (Toshiba A200) which is something of a major upgrade from the last one weighing in at 200GB disc, 2GB RAM and 1.86GHz dual-core (which isn’t the same as Core Duo in case you were wondering).

Unfortunately, Microsoft in their wisdom saw fit to not bother testing Outlook 2003 running under Vista. It worked quite nicely yesterday but has now totally given up on me so I’m in the process of downloading yet another patch in an attempt to sort it out.

Sadly my trusty Norton speed tester dating from way back in 1996 won’t run under Vista so I’ll have to find something similar to carry on my unbroken record from the computer I had way back then. Suffice to say that it’s a LOT faster than the Toshiba A5 that it’s replacing.

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.