Pluto encounter

Like most of the scientific world, I am eagerly awaiting the Pluto encounter by New Horizons very soon.

I also realised that it has been a while since I have posted any of my music on here, or on SoundCloud.  So, the other weekend, I just sat down and composed a short piece which evoked for me the mystery and loneliness that New Horizons must have felt during it's long 9 year journey.

It is very rough, and I didn't have time to clean up a lot of mistakes and timing errors, but I thought I would just upload it in rough form.  It is hopefully as imperfect as the signals coming back from the end of our solar system.

To celebrate the imminent arrival of the New Horizons probe at Pluto & Charon, a short composition. Also a salute to the ferryman of the river Styx...

EDIT: I stand corrected - the images coming back from New Horizon are FAR from imperfect.  Kudos to the NASA team on an epic achievement.

These long term space explorations remind me of an old proverb - "Good things happen when men plant trees under whose shade they will never sit".

The key to good customer service - consistency

To continue my conversations on customer service on this blog, I'd like to distill the essence of what I consider good customer service down to one key element.  Consistency.

Humans thrive on the comfort of the 'known'.  As a species, we don't generally like surprises.  It moves us out of our comfort zone and clashes with our sense of peace and calm.

Any organisation that provides a service should have consistency as a high priority, and I don't mean the sterile, production line like consistency of, say, a franchise like McDonalds, that does everything according to a procedure manual.

I mean the consistency of providing that extra touch that delights the soul.

I will give you an example.  Given the fact that I work from home, I often crave the chance to get out to appreciate different scenery.  There is a cafe that opened up near me recently that I enjoy going to.  The coffee and food is great, and my 'usual' is a mocha coffee.  It is what I ALWAYS order when I go there, which is over 30 times now.

I recognise most of the staff, and some of them know me now.  A couple of them even are good enough to say 'Mocha coffee sir?' as soon as I walk in.  That makes me feel special, and appreciated.

There is however one staff member, who has been there since I first started going there, and who has taken my order over a dozen times, who ALWAYS asks me what I would like while giving me a blank stare.

That's all right, I will put that down to personality traits and perhaps some training, but there is another factor that has been irking me of late.

The first dozen or so times I ordered a Mocha coffee, it came to me with a single Tiny Teddy biscuit beside the cup.  A lovely touch I thought.  Then I began receiving the odd cup without the TinyTeddy.  That was a little disconcerting.  Consistency was failing.

What compounded it however, was the response of the staff.  I began to jokingly ask where was my missing biscuit when my coffee arrived without one.  On one occassion, the waiter was profusely apologetic and fetched me TWO biscuits as compensation.  On another couple of occassions, the waitresses just laughed it off and said something along the lines of "Oh Really?", without attempting to make amends or offer an apology.

That's the missing consistency.  I had an expectation that I would get a biscuit with my coffee, as well as the expectation that the staff would make it right when I pointed out to them that there was an inconsistency.

I know that most of you are thinking "First world problems", and it certainly is.  But this episode is building up a wedge of ill feeling between myself and this establishment.

On the other end of the scale is Sharon, my massage therapist.  I have been going to see her on a monthly basis for over ten years now.  The main reason is because she gives a great massage that makes me forget about the stresses and trials of my life, but the biggest factor is that in the whole decade that she has been treating me, her service delivery has been unfailingly consistent.

Sure she does introduce minor variations here and there, but the key elements of her treatment that I especially enjoy are always there.  Simple things like at the end of the massage when she bathes my feet with warm water to wash the oil off - I always look forward to that bit, and she never fails to finish my treatment with that thrill.  Ever.

I know that in my own business, I struggle to deliver consistent service to my clients, but I am willing to make the effort to try and discover:

(a) exactly WHAT elements of my service that clients think are special, and

(b) trying to ensure that I always deliver on those elements identified in (a) above.

Together, lets brings back great service to small business.

Lets stop the abstraction!

There is an old saying - "Give a programmer 5 hours to write a particular program, and they will spend 4 hours writing another program that can write the original program in one hour!".

Increasingly these days, it is hitting me just how true that old adage is.  I have been cutting code for over 30 years now, and more than ever I am of the opinion that the world of programming is just drowning in a sea of constantly evolving tools.

It is no longer enough to just pick a language and become proficient in that, and just plain write code using that language.  Nowadays, it is a constant dance of selecting frameworks, database layers, deployment layers, and even additional languages that simplify the writing of the base language of your choice!

We all know that at the core, all computers just function on a series of 1's and 0's - the turning on and off of electrical impulses.  The closest we can get to that is to write in assembler code - manipulating the registers and directly accessing blocks of memory in the hardware.  But that, as we know, is fraught with danger.

So we rely on higher level languages, which are then compiled or interpreted down to machine language so we can run our apps using code that is easier for us to understand as humans.  For years, we simply picked a high level language, then let the compiler or interpreter get on with converting that language into machine language.

But lets look at an ubiquitous language of today - Javascript.  Now Javascript in itself is a fairly simple language, bearing close resemblance to C and other languages, so that programmers can usually pick up the nuances and write decent code in short order.  It is also an interpreted language, usually being converted into machine instructions at run time within a browser.  Not the most efficient language, but still serviceable and functional.

But somewhere along the line, someone decided that Javascript was still a little too hard, so they invented a simplified version called CoffeeScript.  Lets paint the picture here - we now have a specialised language which is then converted into another language which is then interpreted within an environment written in another language which then converts everything into machine language.

But it didn't just stop there.  CoffeeScript itself became bastardised over time, and now exists in about a dozen different flavours.  As of writing this post, there are around 40 different languages that 'compile' down to Javascript.  This is not counting the hundreds or so other extensions that generate javascript code based on a whole other language.

It is no longer enough to say that you know CoffeeScript.  You have to now define the flavour of CoffeeScript that you are familiar with.  You have to remember a whole new syntax to compensate for the fact that you could not remember another syntax in the first place.

I just can't wait to see the next iteration of languages that compile down to CoffeeScript, which then compiles down to Javascript, which then compiles down to.....  You get the picture.

I am theorising here that there is a glut of excess programmers out there who are not actively engaged in solving real world problems, so they take out their energy and time by writing yet another interpreter/compiler for a perfectly valid working language.

To put it in a more primal context, the village is thirsty, but rather than locating water or digging a well, the villagers are busy improving each other's shovels.  We will all be dehydrated soon, but man will we have some great shovels...

The lost art of Customer Service...

"Don't worry - you're not the first woman to have a baby".  That was a line I clearly remember coming from a nurse when we were in hospital having our first baby son.  Nothing was really wrong - things were going well (if a little long), and we were just two people who were anxious about embarking on this remarkable new journey in our lives.  The nurses were great.  They were jaded veterans who had done this many times before.

I mean, I realised that there were probably thousands of women giving birth across the planet during this same time, but for us, it was a time of change and redefining of who we were.

Not all things are as massively life changing as having a baby.  But in the small things still lie important forks in our life path.

Earlier this month, I found out that I needed to wear glasses for close up work.  Back in my younger days at flying school, I had better than average 20/10 vision, and I prided myself in not having to wear glasses like a lot of my peers.  In a way, that fact help to define me as a person, and the knowledge that I now had to resort to glasses was a dent in that perfectly moulded idea of who I was.

When I went in to pick up my glasses, I was strangely nervous.  The young lady who fetched my prescription and asked me to try them on was perfectly nice and friendly, but she was also busy and I could see that she just wanted me to like them and be off.  It was all part of a routine process for her.

I tried to explain that this was my first pair of glasses ever, and I kept trying to stretch out the interaction a little more than I normally would have.  I guess I was just waiting for her to reassure me that it was all OK, and that the glasses looked good and life would go on as normal.

In the end, I walked out and trust in myself that this new fork in my road would lead to good things.  But I couldn't help shaking the feeling once again that I was just a cog in a big machine.  Just an Input that had to be processed and Output again.

I lead me to think that a lot of skilled professions have basically come down to that - a big processing machine.  I know I am guilty of that.  Pressure to turn clients/jobs/projects over and keep revenue flowing will lead to the commoditisation of the humanness of the interaction.

I know I am guilty of it.  It is easy to become complacent, bored, jaded with doing the same thing day after day.  The magic goes out of it for us, and that is reflected in the way we deal with those that we are committed to helping.

Perhaps it is time for us to start giving back a piece of ourselves in every interaction?  To treat every transaction like it is the first time - for BOTH myself and the recipient.