Shtusim: for your entertainment

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

When Free Gifts Hurt

It's great when you get little knick-knacks from work - coffee mugs, clocks and all that. The longer you work in a place, the more stuff you acquire - all with the company logo. And not just your company. Calendars, pencil holders and keyrings from companies trying to make a good impression and gain your business.

In my experience, I have found that most of these little trinkets seem to break, bend, scratch or simply cease to function after a short time (like that really neat 2005 wall calendar from a recruitment company which, frankly, is not much use now). You see, they've got to buy in volume. I've done this sort of thing before. The more you buy, the cheaper it is per item. So it makes sense for a bakery to buy 4,000 toilet-roll-holders with their company logo on it and send them to all of their customers and prospective customers. But although it is cheaper for a company to buy 4,000 instead of 400, each one costs money so inevitably they get the basic or non-deluxe version. The result is 4,000 low-quality, mildly defective, company-logoed chamois cloths, or whatever. In other words, junk with a logo on it. But you take it because it's free and it's a shame to waste it.

The only time when I can see this as not being applicable is if you are the CEO of a company. You have a win-win situation. Firstly, whenever some supplier sends you a freebie, you can say to your secretary, "Carol, why don't you take it. I already have a set of gaudy flurescent-green serviette rings". See, the reason you can do that if you are CEO is not because you already have that item, nor is it because you don't have the space in your large country villa for it, but it's because you don't feel the need for more freebies.

Here's what I mean.

Let's say that you are the CEO of Samsung. Samsung is a huge company that makes everything from gadgets to large appliances and beyond. So being the CEO, it would be embarassing for you and the company to be seen with a Motorola mobile-phone. You bring home various business associates for dinner and the company wouldn't look so good if they noticed that your TV, fridge, sound-system and microwave was made by General Electric. So the company gives you all this stuff for free. Now your home practically has "Samsung" written all over it. You no longer feel the need for a cheap "ACME Concrete" iPod cover.

But here's the downside: let's say that you leave Samsung for a better paying job as the CEO of a bank. A few things can happen: 1) Samsung wants all their shiny toys back and you have to re-stock your house with appliances; 2) Samsung lets you keep all of the shiny toys but now your house is full of Samsung branded stuff, which you may or may not have liked to begin with; 3) It's not like the bank is going to supply you with free samples of their product, so all you are ever going to get are cheap, plastic, bank-logoed gimmicks.

Looks like Carol will be missing out on her use-once-keyring-torch. Tough world.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Swimming

An avid reader of this blog...well, let's just call him a "fan"... perhaps a more accurate description would be "casual reader"...okay he's some guy I just met because he asked me for directions - but that's beside the point. "Some Guy" asked me today where I come up with the topics I write about on this blog. Alright, he didn't ask me directly, what he said was "can you please point me towards the central bus station" I thought he said, "tell me all about your really interesting blog". An understandable mistake. But, I digress...

So I told him that it really isn't easy coming up with interesting topics to talk about. What I often do is I sit at the computer and whatever word pops into my head, well, that's what I write about. I gave him the example of "swimming". I think it was at that point in the conversation that I looked up and realised that the "guy" had nicked off, leaving me to talk to myself for the last hour and a half. But then it occurred to me that I have never written a blog about swimming. So here it is...

I love swimming. Yes I do. More specifically, I love swimming under water. There is almost no better feeling than swimming to the bottom of a deep pool, sitting on the tiles and then looking up at the surface of the water. It is somehow calming.

I remember very clearly when, about 11 years ago or so, I was on kibbutz, working in the greenhouses in extraordinary heat. Then, when the day was done at 4pm, I would head straight for the swimming pool. A quick shower and then, in I went. Ahhh, the coolness, the stillness, the tranquility. Incidentally, that's when I learned how to do a backflip into the pool. I can't remember who taught me (one of the French guys, I think) but I learned how to flip myself over into the pool. It really was thrilling. And, to show off, I had someone take a photo of me doing a backflip into the pool. I ended up sending the photo to my parents with the caption, "Here is me doing a backflip. You can clearly see the scar on my knee from when I fell off the roof". Boy, did I have some explaining to do. You see, one of my jobs was to whitewash the roof of all of the greenhouses. The greenhouses were all made of some sort of plastic. It was like one sheet of this thick plastic stuff, bent in the middle to form a curved roof (of course that's not what it was, but you get the picture). So I had to climb up on the curved roof to paint it and I fell off, gashing my knee on the way down. But, yet again, I digress...

I remember watching the movie "Kickboxer" when I was a teenager. Here was Jean Claude Van Damm training to beat the bad Thai kickboxer guy. Naturally (like in the Rocky movie when he was training to fight against the Russian) the training methods were very unorthodox. One of the things Jean Claude had to do was to submerge himself at the bottom of a well and punch the water. I thought that it was so cool that I had to try doing the same thing. Funny thing is, I think I must have stayed under the water for quite a while re-enacting that scene. I suppose if you don't concentrate too much on the breathing, you can stay under for longer than you would have otherwise.

Notice that I have only talked about swimming in a swimming pool and not at the beach. There is a very good reason for this. Fish. I don't mind fish on my plate or in a tank, but I got this thing about swimming with fish. I suppose that if I had to conquer a "fear" this one would be reasonably easy to do. I mean, there is no real rational reason why I should be scared of swimming amongst harmless fish, but the thought of it doesn't thrill me. I can even predict what will happen: I'll jump in the water, schools of fish will swim around me, I'll flail my arms in an effort to avoid a head-on collision with a trout (or whatever) and then I'll get out of the water and go "whew". And that will be all, nothing worse. But I aint gonna. Besides, then you get sand in between your toes and the salt water makes your hair smell funny. And other excuses.

But I really love swimming. I didn't like swimming when we did it as a sports activity for school. I was always uneasy with the idea of plunging into the water with 15 or 20 rowdy guys. And besides, the sports teachers had that gleam in their eyes whenever we stood by the side of the pool. Once, we had to line up and lie down on the diving board, face up, head over the water. The teacher then lifted our legs and flipped us into the water. I'm not exactly sure what educational value this activity held, but somehow I kept finding myself at the back of the line. Oh, the teacher saw me hiding, but to my great relief, he left me alone.

I used to be a reasonable swimmer (now I would just classify myself as "buoyant"). I was never fast (once, when I was in Grade 6 we had swimming trials and I told one of my friends that I'll pretend that there is a shark behind me so I will swim faster. When I came last, he asked me what happened. I said that the shark took one look at me and lost his appetite). What I lacked in speed, I made up for in stamina. I was like that with running, too. In my hey-day I could jog and jog and jog without raising a sweat. I could also swim lap after lap after lap (I think my record was 120 laps of a 25m pool - about 3km - without pausing). I think the attraction of distance swimming was the challenge of setting a tough goal and achieving it, sort of like the way I write my blogs.