All at sea - but where

Now I don't do looking back and bemoaning, so bear with me again. The Royal Mail once along prided itself on getting the post through no matter what. There are legends of postmen battling through atrocious weather just to get the mail delivered. Delivery and a dependable service was the summation of the Royal Mail. Yes of course its service area is in steep, probably certain, terminal decline. Yes it was very unionised. Yes it had grown topsy-turvy whilst stuck in past methodologies unable to dig itself out. It had become a bloated shambles of what it was in its heydays.

Nowadays there are at least eight if not more rival couriers all making deliveries along my road. The Royal Mail undertakes to deliver first class but only within three working days, unless of course there are 'adverse conditions' when all bets are off. You are not in a position to query whether there has been a mis-delivery until a fortnight after the posting date. When Thatcher set about breaking up the Unions, breaking up nationalised industries and maximising her opportunities to create personal wealth and income for the Nation, her ruthless destructive tunnel vision of life did not encompass all the consequences. Yes, commercial competition was seen to be a good thing. However when you slice one more or less finite albeit large pie into lots of small slices the cream just get spread thinner. The more organisations there are, the more they have to do with less and chances of licking the cream become diminishing small. Not a scenario for improved service, not a scenario for reduced costs and if, in a saturated market, growth can only come from gobbling competitors then recovering a profit after those purchases is only going to be at the cost of pricing and service. There is no magic bullet waiting to transform by some significant factor the logistics of home deliveries, just small incremental steps with modest returns.

I am sure that her rush to generate wealth and thus her ability to control and benefit from the flow, did not anticipate the greedy, self-indulgent, to hell with the consequences culture that followed in tune and in step with it. Sweeping aside rectitude and tradition she also swept aside commitment, honour or putting other first before ones self. Necessary updating to a new era, maybe. The residual remainder we still have to deal and to come to terms with, is this endemic them and us. Compounded now by a prevailing selfishness, me first.

So looping back, the Royal Mail workers see themselves as in league against the management rather than seeing the need to work together to retrieve an organisation that has some prospect of surviving, by offering a cost efficient delivery and a dependable service. It is not of course just the Royal Mail. So few organisations offering services actually have any regard to the end users. They talk the talk but set aside the flyer's proclamations of how they regard you the customer, the actual interface beggars belief. Indifference, stonewalling, anything other than acceptance and providing the service promised is the de facto delivery. Maybe deep in the organisations psyche, their flyer is their truth. But at the human interface their representatives focus is on an easy life, keeping their particular nose clean, beyond reproach and certainly not to take on a problem and making it their personal objective, for the good of their company, that it is resolved. Instead it is always someone else's problem. Never the current person facing it. Off my desk and on to the next one, who cares. We do. We are all suffering from sloppy indifference, any easy fob off will do, avoid any risk of blame at all costs and lets keep raking in the money. As rewards only follow the money. Not just commercial organisations of course, but civic and governmental organisation are all prey, shrug off any inconvenient enquiry with the easiest first pat trite answer that does nothing. It is like after that excruciating twenty minute hold, you get to speak to IT support. Who seizes the first opportunity to say take the plug out and put it back in. If that does not cure it ring back! Cannot be faulted. So many problems are rooted in such blindingly obvious mistakes. My only problem is that the response totally ignores any tale of prior events and, rather then getting the plug and power switch checked for correct positions, dumps them at the earliest opportunity. This is a classic example of not taking responsibility for resolving the problem.

We cannot be bothered, so exquisitely and concisely put. Too many fingers in to many pies and too little time to check anything out and fault blame pressure to match some financially driven target. A selfishness and a weary acceptance that wrong is okay unless lots and lots of people get it. Jump on the bandwagon when it is truly rolling but until then, lay low, or it might cost you. In anycase nothing to do with me, it that other persons job to do something, not never mine.

It is each and everyone of us, our duty to stand up and say, this is not right. There is a better way. But more importantly, this is what I am doing to change it and can you help me please. Together we can overcome our problems and prepare for the future, working for each other so that the I can benefit. Together we can beat this culture of indifference. We care.

Waiting to Die

We are just too good at keeping people alive. Our baby boomer generation is now approaching those critical final years as the body systems begin to shut down or wear out. Gradually as the body systems weaken then fail so the support needs increase. As we approach the nineties we become increasingly dependant on support carers to make all those necessary daily living tasks possible, of sleeping, washing, dressing, eating, defecating and waiting for the day to end. Each further intervention requires giving up precious independence and loss of privacy whilst having to accept and rely on the goodwill and timing of others. Medication struggles to offset contradictory systems failures, weak hearts, water retention and a general inability to mobilise. Relieve one symptom at the direct jeopardy to the other. By the time we are well into our nineties, if we are lucky, we are housebound, physically and mentally confined to an ever shrinking world, scarcely able to break out of the containing walls, drained by the effort to manage those few physical task not yet delegated to others. If we are lucky. If not, we may be drifting in an out of mental confusion unable to make sense of what little conscious thought we retain or hooked upto to machines with every function monitored and controlled with no escape routes left open to the mind.

The elderly have no natural place left in our society. For many reasons their families cannot accommodate or give daily support for them. Their views and experiences are old worldly and not only are seen as having no relevance but actually derided for being so out of touch. The best the state can offer is to offer low paid carers from the bottom of the employment market. Even then the rising costs of supporting all these elderly mean that budgets are constantly strained with more limitations placed on what can be provide under which ever meaner circumstances. The medical profession is harassed and time constrained without the tools to ease their elderly patients and lacking time to empathise with their patients deteriorating condition. We as a society, having made some provisions, refuse to recognise the enormous indignity we subject our old to nor have sufficient generous hearts, in recognition for all the sacrifices they made, to allocate time, with costs, to help them enjoy their last years.

So our grand elderly, who have led extraordinary lives with so many rich and varied experiences are left trapped within their weak and feeble bodies and minds, trapped in an ever closing in world. Waiting to die.

Needing each other

The thoughts, values and judgements we hold as a person are no value in themselves. There really is no golden bullet of logic, objectivity, deduction or trial and error which ensures our own take on an issue is the right one for all times. It all depends and mostly what it depends on are the tacit approvals or acceptances of mostly our pier group but more importantly the social flag bearers. What makes any one particular line of thought right is that it gathers a consensual approval around it. Now there may well be other brighter and sharper thoughts about the same issue but it matters not if the opinion formers do not agree with it. If that outlier idea does not have the strength to win understanding then it is doomed to being an also ran.

Each individuals creates their own very personal mind-map of how things are, how they work and what can be expected as a reaction to it from other persons. If only we soldiered through life with out any need to interact with any soul then that would be perfect. But we do have to interact. At each interaction we have to check, take soundings, that our own take is in line with or at least not too discordant to the mind maps of those we are interacting with. We have to expose our thoughts to the challenge of others, to keep our thinking within the bounds of acceptability of the society with live within, not too out of kelter. It is a two way process of course, as we offer our thoughts so we are evaluating the thoughts of the other. This exchange is at the heart of building trust in our social connections.

If it is simply offering goods for payment, that is a routine task where you can reasonably anticipate the sequences and responses. If you want to make overture of friendliness then that is another ball game, so many variables and subtle clues to be assessed before progressing to more overt gestures and so many possibilities to misjudge if with someone with different cultural expectations. If you want to get into some heavy meat, like offering a view on social morals or conduct, offer an explanation of how a process works or an insight into how the world is made up then there just are no easy short cuts. There are so many parameters that have to be prior checked. We each bring our own set of presumptions, expectations and prejudices. Each relevant one has to be checked against the others to make sure your language and thought flow substantially mirrors that of the other. Else you talk at cross purposes and there is no engagement. It would be as if you were describing lemon and they were interpreting it and responding as if it were an apple. Hence most difficult areas are often left to specialists who have a commonality of language and sequence flow expectation that can keep their separate mind sets on similar tracks.

Life however is not just for specialists. We all need to be thinking about how we perceive the world and checking amongst ourselves that our view is not too discordant or distant from those we expect mix amongst. This vital cross checking, making sure we as an individual are not too far out of line with our compatriots, is not a quick and easy exchange. I have indicated that it takes time to check the basics, that we are both thinking about lemons for starters. This process of exchanging and comparing ideas well suited a reflective society. Such a society as served by the village pub where, of an evening, the elders gathered and exchanged opinions about events of the day and their world around them while the younger generations listened and learnt the process.

Those reflective days are past we are now in a headline era. We now have an instant consumption society. The tweets, the facebook messaging interaction and our urgency and impatience with anything long winded and drawn out work against reflective, considered, check and counter checked discussions. Where, in this age, can we find these freely and open counter-checks to the vagaries of our conscious minds workings? Tweeks and facebooks give off a tremendous buzz of connectivity with a hugely out there world. Very seductive but so shallow, superficial and so lacking of content. All done for instant impact, move on, next. Yet we do need to expose our thoughts to more than just the pre-digested neat packaged focus group approved targeted media items. A soap storyline or even a earnest documentary are unlikely to tweak out the weaknesses in our own line of thinking. At best just confirm the headline content but it is all in the details, as always, behind the headline, where the real issues are to be found. This is the confrontation area, where conflicts of differing thought processes are to be found. That for our own sanity, we need to face and reconcile our thoughts against where we see our peers thoughts are. This not about highfalutin philosophical maxims, just the ordinary every day garbage, how does a husband relate with a wife, what should limit teenage behaviour, when does cheek become rude, what is exploitative and what is commercial enterprise, just those every day grist's of every day life.

Having posed the question I have no answers to offer. Currently we are overwhelmed with undreamt of access to information. Information in such volumes that we drown in it, unable to devise coping strategies, twitching from one information feed to the next, but unable to digest and absorb the significance of any. (See the New Scientist articles linked in, you will need to register.) My hope and expectation is as we come to terms with this instant access to information and our IT develops we will pass through on to a more contemplative phase, were we spend our time thinking about the significance of information and not just the hunger famine stuffing of everything on offer. This is were our minds excels, leave data trawling to the bots.