Thoughts from altitude

On my flight back I was trying to avoid DBT, deep brain thrombosis, and thought back to my recent comments on Russian business practices opposed to western nations where you have ‘freedom of choice’ and the ability to ‘vote with your feet’ if you didn’t like a particular service or product. It is often expressed as such a simple and straightforward equation where the consumer is all powerful and competition a virtue in a free market economy. I may have been affected by a lack of oxygen and began to consider whether the free market is so pure and virtuous. Some practices seem to run counter intuitive to the rhetoric of freedom of choice and free markets. A few consumer models came quickly to mind.

Cajole the consumer
Choice is slavery. People it seem are suffering from consumer fatigue and don’t want more choices they often want less and testament to this is the huge popularity of multinational food outlets where menus are stripped back to a few variables. People view these places as safe havens in a world where even buying a toaster can require a three score choice. Look at the huge recent popularity of multinational coffee outlets. Most people know the Italians have been making superb coffee in Australia since the fifties and sixties yet the coffee phenomena of Gloria Jeans and Starbucks to name the two leading multinationals is not about coffee it is about a formulae. People like these places because they don’t require negotiation and the formulae is replicated from Pitt Street, a shopping mall in Albury to Tenth Avenue in New York. It is easy, safe and non confronting. You know the routine, you know where things are and you know how much it is all going to cost when you walk out. Many people it seems are happy to surrender more choice and run for the sanctuary of sameness. Freedom of choice can be intimidating.

Confound the consumer
Another interesting deviation from the free market is what I call the confound the consumer principle and perhaps the best example of this is comes from the communication carriers, particularly mobile phone companies. You see, what all these carriers avoid like the plague is for their costumers to actually know what there services costs are on a unit by unit basis. Presumably this makes it far too easy to judge one product against another. Imagine that, imagine being about to actually know on a unit by unit basis what one carrier costs against another. Unfortunately the actual price is an amalgam of the phone contract, the time of day, the day of the week, the carrier of the other person, what other services are bundled together and so on. It seems these carrier do everything they can to avoid the scrutiny of a true free market.


Capture the consumer
It seems most consumerables require period replacement of parts or servicing. Manufactures long ago realised they could make just as much out of after market sales as they could with new sales and if their product are not breaking down or wearing out fast enough they engage an engineer to ensure periodic failure and breakdown. Don’t laugh it’s true. These engineers probably went to university believing they were studying to design products but were really gaining the tools for deception. Some manufactures are worse than others. A pet hate of mine and a good example of this is the price of printer inks and bait marketing of the actual printers. Here’s an example, the Lexmark Z617 comes at a steal at just $44. Take it home and plug it in and before too long you’ll be heading back to the store for a cartridge refill at just, $53. Got you haven’t they! The manufacturers are so keen to pull you into their lucrative consumerables stream that even at the time of you walking out the store with the new printer tucked under your arm the cartridge installed in the printer is only filled to around 30% capacity.


I thought it was important to balance my criticism of the Russian costumer service principle of take it or leave it earlier expressed. The first is an ‘in your face’ approach and the later can be a stalking, sneak their hands in your pocket approach and not quite as pure as the driven snow. .

Winter Again

I had a Canadian girlfriend who would laugh when I talked of winter in Australia. ‘Winter! You don’t have winter what are you talking about’. Well, Canada certainly has a summer. I remember trying to sleep at Ma and Pa Martins orchid in the Okanogan with temperatures in high thirties thinking this is not the image I had of Canada. So when I stepped out of Sydney airport in August to a warm sunny day I wasn’t too surprised about unseasonal weather. Damn, had I spent all that money to escape winter for nothing? I was reassured quickly that spring had come just this week, ‘like an Indian summer’. Well I was glad to hear it. I know it can get cold here. Living up in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney winter can be a wet , cold and miserable affair with temperatures dropping below zero. Now I know it will never get to minus 30, 40 or 50 here but when water turns to ice I consider that cold. Add a little, or a lot, of drizzle and high altitude wind sheer and winter here is an event I’d rather avoid.

I was soon heading west on the City Rail train to Mt Victoria armed with a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald. Bundled in with all the other quirky snippets in column 8 was the reports of blow fly sightings signalling the beginning of spring. Yes, where else but Australia, the ‘blow fly index’ . It seems the moment the temperature rises a few degrees the blowies get moving off the plains, over the range to annoy you and I. Then there is the cicada index to indicate summer has arrived. You almost forget about the deafening crescendos these little fellows generate until the next summer when you are almost driven crazy by the relentless chorus. Oh, the little things that come back to you quickly when you return home. Similarly, I thought my commentary on toilet practice and costumes would have been left behind on the other side of the globe but I had a chuckle on return. Australians have this strange ritual around washing hands. I remember years ago you would dry your hands on paper towels placed near the hand basin. Some might even remember the endless towel which could be pulled down to supply a new section of dry towel. Either way you would exit the convenience with dry hands. Somewhere back in the 70’s this cultural practice disappeared replaced by the electric blower. I’d like to call it by its common name, electric hand dryer, but unfortunately this is a real misnomer. Has anyone ever stood long enough to actually dry their hands? It is funny to watch people walk up to this machine and wave their hands under it briefly. They know from years of experience that this action will result in absolutely nothing other than slightly warming the hands but feel committed to make some acknowledgement of the machine in the hand cleaning process and then most times wipe their hands on their pants as they walk out the door.

Anyone reading this blog would be aware of my previous discussion on pay for poo. Well thankfully Australia is a free poo nation but there is one practice that I find curious. I am always amused when I see a sign stating something like, ‘this toilet is for costumer use only!’ I have almost been tempted to go into a service station, café or the like and buy whatever, hamburger, chips, drinks or whatever is on sale and then just sitting down and refusing to move at the end of the day. When the perplexed staff tell you they want to close shop and ask you to leave I’d just love to turn and say, ‘sorry but I still have that hamburger and coke inside me and hell I’d hate to offload that is someone else’s toilet now would I, that wouldn’t be fair on them would it, to use their toilet for food bought in your shop?’. I think some people just like to be awkward.

There is a shop near where I lived and the woman who owned the shop had a sign up saying, ‘No change given for phone!’. Occasionally I would buy take away food and would engage in a little small talk while she was flipping patties or whatever and one day the telephone subject came up and she started complaining about people coming in and cleaning her out of change for the phone. I know it is generally better to glaze over the eyes, take your food and leave in these situations but I took the bait and said, ‘Maria how often do you go to the bank?’. ‘Oh, everyday’ she said, ‘I never like to leave money on the premises over night’. ‘Maria’ I replied ‘wouldn’t it make sense to grab a few bags of coins while at the bank, they don’t charge you for change?’. Well, a confounded look came across her face as she considered what I had said. For a moment I thought there was going to be a short circuit or sparks and smoke would emit from the cranial region. It was clear this suggestion ran totally counter to her pet grievance that she had harboured for many years and the thought that she might actually anticipate and accommodate these people who had annoyed her for years was just too much to comprehend. Now, if I was the owner of a corner store I’d be more than happy to have a telephone box right out front of my shop as people use the phone then often walk inside to buy something or would go to your shop over Fred’s shop because they wanted to use the phone while they were there. But then I suppose some people just need something to complain about and Maria in my home town, the service station manager who puts the ugly sign on the toilet door and the bus driver from Riga to Vilnius perplexed about his onboard toilet have an outlook on life that crosses language and cultural barriers. Oh, I am definitely back in Australia now when I start to draw parallels between the corner shop owner and a the bus driver in Latvia.

Heading Home

It wasn’t easy leaving Riga. I had done a brief side trip to Lithuania and briefly decided while there that Vilnius, the capital, was the pick of the Baltic nations yet the moment I stepped off the bus on my return the charm of Riga overwhelmed me. An emotion blended with the sounds of trams running down metal tracks, of boulevards and parks, of renewal and optimism, colour and vitality.

I was expecting to head further east into Estonia but was now on my way back to Oz yet I did have a return ticket the following year and reassured myself that I would reacquaint myself with this region before heading further east.

The bus stop to Riga airport is a short walk from my hostel and as I stepped aboard I briefly looked back towards the city with a quite thought of ‘here we go’ and a realisation that this step into the bus was the beginning of a chain of events; boarding, alighting, transferring, disembarking and generally moving from one vehicle to another until arriving in Australia in less than 48hours time. I did have some concern about passing through London Heathrow airport still in critical alert just two weeks after bomb threats but as I had almost 16 hours to get from London Stan stead airport to Heathrow I imagined I had plenty of buffer there.

It is a fairly short run by bus through fairly unremarkable suburbs to Riga International airport a new and, as with much in Latvia, almost certainly foreign financed. Any new economy needs a welcoming and new gateway right? Riga, like Tallinn, Vilnius, Warsaw, Prague, and in fact almost all destinations in Europe are now serviced by the so called discount airways such a Ryan Air, Easy Jet, Wizz Air and others. Unfortunately these new carriers bring a new breed of tourist to many eastern European locations, the most readily identifiable being the English lager louts. I say they are fairly readily identifiable as they tend to travel in groups of around eight to twelve and follow a fairly standard itinerary; drink lots of beer (lager), be loud and obnoxious, drink more beer, look for sex (or pay for it), drink more beer, sing predominantly football songs, drink more beer, drink more beer, get on the plane and go home (then probably tell everyone what a shit place …. is, but the beer is cheap and I got a root!). I had to share my dorm with such a group on my first two nights in Riga but fortunately they never got home until late in the morning and I was happy to take off soon after they did. I didn’t get too much of an opportunity to talk with these guys but sensed there was an unwritten humour law that required others in the group to laugh out loud when someone attempted to tell a joke. It is an interesting phenomena to observe this form of mutual appreciation. One guy decided that as I was an Australian then humour dictated that I should be called Bruce and I responded at one point by turning and saying, ‘oh Charles your so funny, I think (empathises on think) that was funny about twenty years ago. A response of laughs all round made me think for a moment that I’d gained honour membership to the humour club. Despite this prospect and a number of offers to come out for drinks the prospect of going half a block away to sit in an English style pub called Dickens with a group of boozed up louts seemed a little desperate to me and moved to a different hostel on day three. I did however bump into them as I walked pasted the Dickens and had a brief exchange and found an opportune moment to drop the comment that they were just worried that Australia would soon be playing better football than England and then they would have nowhere to run and hide. Funnily, no one laughed at this joke. I think I’d found a raw nerve. For the English that would signal the real end of empire. They can overlook hardly making it onto the medal count in the Olympics, and being beaten resoundly by the colonies in cricket and rugby but the prospect of being beaten by Australia in football was something they found unnerving. I walked away from the Dickens with a sense of satisfaction of perhaps putting them off their lager if only briefly.

Sitting at Riga airport waiting for my flight to London it was interesting to watch the various aircraft come and go by carriers unknown. Watching an Uzbekistan 767 arrive I felt convinced this was a re badged ex Ansett plane from Australia. I’d seen images of row upon row of aircraft from failed carriers after September 11 sitting neatly on a tarmac in the Nevada desert in the US waiting to be resold. I started to consider any similarities between used car sales and used plane sales and some fast talking sales person walking down the tarmac stating, ‘this lovely little 767 over here only did short haul flights up and down the east coast of Australia or perhaps you’d like something a little smaller, this 737 is a gem with full log book history’. Anyway, most of these second hand planes would have found there way to Eastern Europe, Africa and the discount airlines of Europe so perhaps that piece the piece of chewing gum I stuck under the armrest of seat 46b on the Ansett flight from Brisbane to Sydney in 98 might still be there on my Ryan Air flight to London?

Ryan Air advertise as a discount airline so you don’t expect too much but to find that your discount fare doesn’t include luggage is just a little too much of a stretch of that title I believe. Buy a ticket with Ryan Air and you can bring one piece of hand luggage on board yet you pay per piece of hold luggage!! To be fair to Ryan they do inform you of this when booking but only when you have almost completed the multi page online booking form. Nevertheless, I found it a little dishonest to promote a fare and then charge extra for luggage at around $30 a piece with a load limit that has been reduced to 15 kg. Who goes on holidays without taking luggage? Is this nothing more than an dishonest way to disguise the real price of your ticket in the market place? Oh course not. My first experience with this discount airline was further complemented when the aircraft landed. While other aircraft pulled along side an air bridge the Ryan Air jet parked well back on the tarmac requiring a walk out from the terminal. This didn’t really worry me but I presumed this was to avoid the fee charged for the air bridge and allowed the plane to move off forward under its own power and avoid the towing charge. I was one of the first on the plane so I took the opportunity to use the toilet and found a nappy stuffed into the toilet bowl and it was apparent that the plane had not had a rudimentary clean between flights. This is the world of discount airlines.

The flight to London Stan stead airport is around two and a half hours. While I might not know too much about the UK I gathered while looking out the window and seeing grazing land and farming plots that this airport was not particularly close to London and in fact about two hours out of London. Stan stead airport would have to rate as the worst airport I’ve been to and well below several in Africa, Asia and Central America I have been to. It reminded me of a cattle auction rather than an airport with people being directed this way and that. Most airports are purpose designed to funnel people in various directions and have a logical progression through them. Stan stead is one huge rectangular building in the middle of nowhere with lots of temporary barriers and gates yet little signage. In larger airports like Heathrow you move through the airport with people in front of you and perhaps a hundred or more behind you but you are never more than a group of say two or three hundred as you pass through. At Stan stead I found myself in a tide of somewhere around six to eight thousand in a huge hall. No wonder there where heaps of police walking around with assault rifles. If you were a terrorist this would be an ideal place to create a bit of ‘collateral damage’. (euphemism courtesy of George W )

I soon found myself at Heathrow airport after catching the last train out that evening to avoid the peak hour commuter crush and prepare me for the reported lengthy check in times post terror alert. The authorities had decided that no liquids where to be taken on the aircraft. Funny thing was the day before I passed through security at Riga with a litre of orange juice in my hand luggage and only afterwards I thought you could create a hell of a lot of problems if I’d had petrol in that container rather than orange juice. But then terrorists would only board at Heathrow wouldn’t they? Anyway the security at Heathrow wasn’t anywhere as onerous as I’d imagined although I did get taken aside for a ‘random’ search on my way through security. I wasn’t sure whether this was entirely random. Perhaps anyone over six feet tall is a potential security threat or perhaps the security had picked me up on camera moving from terminal 4 to terminal 3 by the tube on two occasions. I had gone to terminal 3 because there is better food there and to stretch my legs but to a security officer sitting in an observation room my aimless walking and movements may have raised suspicion. Anyway having already flushed 2kg of cocaine, 200 ecstasy tablets, and two blocks of hash down the toilet, ha, before boarding I had nothing to fear and agree willingly.

This was a fairly amusing experience. They have this small cubicle erected just near the standard x-ray machine. You are first asked to submit to this inspection or alternatively you would be taken for a strip search. You are then asked to take everything out of your pockets and take off your shoes and enter one end of the cubicle while an officer enters the other end behind a partition. On the floor there are six marks in the shape of the sole of a shoe. Two had the number one marked on them, two with the number two and two with the number three. I was instructed to raise my arms and first place a foot on each with the number one then move to have each foot on number two then number three. The prints where arranged in a way that your legs would be splayed apart no doubt so those x-rays would have a clean path to the anus area. I was tempted to ask the officer if he know how to play ‘strip twister’ but thought he might not share my humour. Is was handed my shoes an was soon on my way back home.