It's Troo-dos anyone believe it?

Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain. Who’s next? Cyprus.

These are the European Union countries whose banking systems are in such a mess that some belevolent uncle agrees to pay off their overdrafts, provided that they promise to be more financially astute in the future. Of course, the benevolent uncle doesn’t have any money either, so what he’ll do is offer negligible returns to his investors until he gets his money back, or get taxpayers to refund him.

We all trust the banks with our savings, those same banks play fast and loose with our money plus a whole load of additional imaginary money, and then when it all goes wrong, we the savers – the ones who trusted the banks because they told us we could – have to pay for those rather expensive mistakes.

What genius thought up the latest idea for Cyprus? Basically, all bank depositors have between 6.75% and 9.9% of their deposits stolen in a one-off burglary perpetrated by the same organisations who have been trusted to look after everyone’s money. Never mind the alleged money laundering by Russian oligarchs; hundreds of thousands of Cypriots and expatriates stand to have up to a tenth of their life savings stolen, replaced by shares in clearly worthless banks that could collapse given an unexpected gust of wind.

This is so wrong. Investors are supposed to receive interest and borrowers are supposed to pay interest.

Naturally, the good citizens of Cyprus are concerned, and they queued over last weekend to withdraw what cash they could until the ATMs emptied or were shut down. It can hardly be a coincidence that Cyprus banks chose to stage this stick-up over a holiday weekend. And they’re planning to stay closed until Thursday. I think arguments will rage behind closed doors and the outcome will be that depositors will not be robbed.

However, the damage has already been done. No amount of promising not to do it again can restore savers’ faith that their money’s safe in the bank’s safe. The EU and the banking industry, by demonstrating a willingness to consider such measures, may have signed their own death warrant.

If banks cannot be trusted, and recent events illustrate that this is indeed the case, an awful lot of people will withdraw their savings the instant the banks re-open, and there will be a run on every bank in Cyprus, as savers all switch their investments to Sokunda-Matres Bank: no interest, no overdraft, no charges.

And how will the depositors in other bailed-out countries react? I fear panic withdrawals from every bank in southern Europe and the consequent catastrophic collapse of the Euro.

In the short term, I’m just glad that I didn’t open a bank account last time I was in Cyprus.

 ]}:-{>

Grandpa's Advice

Totally by accident I found this song. Turns out it was written by Adie Grey and Dave MacKenzie and performed by Adie Grey. Being a song about motoring, it even found its way on to NPR's Car Talk programme.

I found the music here between 2'50" and 6'22" on a short video involving Royal Enfield motorcycle maintenance.

Verse 1
I remember Sunday drivin’ in my Grandpa’s car.
Old songs on the radio; the smell of his cigar.
Everybody’d honk at him because he’d drive so slow.
He’d just laugh and tell me, “Kid, here’s something you should know...

Chorus 1
They’re all jerks!
When you’re out here on your own,
Just assume that everybody else is half-asleep or stoned.
They’re all jerks,
And not a one knows how to drive,
So you gotta pay attention to make it home alive.
I’ll give you my philosophy, I guarantee it works:
Repeat it after me, kid: They’re all jerks!”

Verse 2
He said, “They’ll let any fool with money buy himself a car
And you can get a license here, however dumb you are.
Oh, they all turn into hotrods when they slide behind the wheel.
When you get old enough to drive, remember here’s the deal:

Repeat Chorus 1

Verse 3
Twenty-five years later, I’ve got children of my own,
And I do all the driving between school and job and home.
Sometimes on the weekends we head out for the beach.
Now with the kids strapped in the backseat, now it’s my turn to teach.

So every time I’m cut off by some wise-guy in a truck,
Or some hero in a sports car whose gotta push his luck,
I don’t get scared or angry, I just sing this little song.
It always cheers me up to hear my children sing along:

Chorus 2
They’re all jerks!
When you’re out here on your own,
Just assume that everybody else is drunk or on the phone.
They’re all jerks!
And not a one knows how to drive,
So you gotta pay attention to make it home alive.
I’ll give you my philosophy, I guarantee it works.
Repeat it after me, kids: They’re all jerks!
I said,
Repeat it after me, kids: They’re all jerks!

]}:-{>

Tap dance

Today, 3rd March, was Arab Water Day or some such commemoration that wasn't publicised in advance. I was listening to the presenters and guests on Dubai Eye talking about how everybody in the UAE wastes 250 litres a day, and that the UAE consumes more water per capita than any other nation on the planet. In a former life I did water audit work. At the time, total domestic daily consumption in the UK was taken as 180 litres per person.

Most potable water comes from desalination, which is a huge consumer of energy, producing millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Even with (the now environmentally friendly because it doesn't produce carbon) nuclear fission producing a quarter of the UAE's electricity by 2020-something, that's still a shitload of drowning polar bears.

The UAE has to reduce its water demand.  According to Dubai Eye, hundreds of dams and more desalination plants are to be constructed, and there are plans afoot to cap domestic consumption.

I have a few ideas relating to reducing consumption.

• Ensure that everybody pays for the water they use. The most sensitive part of the human body is the wallet.
• All new builds should include grey water recycling. This can be a nightmare to retro-fit into existing buildings and is only really practical if a building is being seriously renovated. The local version of serious renovation is usually to tear it down and start from scratch. So install a grey water tank, and then you can flush the loo and water the garden with minimally treated shower waste.
• Don't make it a criminal offence for watchmen to boost their meagre incomes by washing cars with bucket and sponge. And neither make it an offence to have a dirty car. An automatic car wash typically uses between 68 and 265 litres per cycle; whilst enthusiastic use of a hosepipe might use up to 450 litres, a bucket to wash a car plus another to rinse and leather will use probably 20 litres.
• Discourage houseboys and maids from using hosepipes to sweep sand from driveways. A broom is just as effective and costs nuppence.
• Try to get the Afghan ex-truck driver who masquerades as a gardener not to leave hoses running for an hour or more. I tried to reduce water consumption by fitting spray nozzles to my garden hoses. He simply removed them every morning, drowned the entire garden, and then refitted them when he left, in the apparent hope that I'd not notice. That was the guy that Beloved Wife fired when she caught him standing in a thunderstorm watering the cacti. His replacement has a similar attitude to water conservation: "I'm not paying for it so it's OK if I waste it."
• The biggies for domestic consumption are where hosepipes are involved. Modern toilet cisterns are presumably designed with Fitness For Purpose in mind, and many have an economy flush feature for where only liquids are involved, but putting a brick, a hippo, or some other device in the tank to reduce the volume of the flush may be false economy. Apart from the nasty prospect of having to flush again and again, insufficient water flowing in the foul sewers causes very real problems of blocked drains and all that this implies.
• In accordance with one of the guidelines of Abu Dhabi's Estidama manual, plant native species in public areas where possible. Plants from northern Europe may temporarily look pretty, but they drink a massive amount of water and still have to be replaced when they burn up under the Arabian sun. A lot of the public flowerbeds are watered with treated sewage effluent, which is a step in the right direction, and this re-use of grey water needs to be extended. I refer to my earlier comment.
• Growing local fruit and veg consumes enormous quantities of water. I'm not going to sit here and do the arithmetic, but the carbon footprint of watering local tomatoes could well be greater than that of air-freighting them from Spain.

As for my bit, the car gets washed once a month down at the EPPCO, the bike generally gets a weekly once-over with a duster and some furniture polish if it's been out. We shower rather than bath. I even turn the tap off while I'm brushing my teeth. Beloved Wife wanted a dishwasher, and I refused until she showed me a model that used less water than washing the pots in the sink. Our extravagance is the garden, and that would use a lot less water if I could convince the gardener (q.v.) that aloe vera and agave really don't need to be drowned every morning. In the winter we seldom get a DEWA bill beyond the green (lowest consumption and therefore cheapest rate) zone of less than 6000 gallons a month. That's still 450 litres a day per person, and is on the whole shameful. Over the past couple of months our consumption has been half that, but it always goes through the roof in the summer.

]}:-{>

Optical fibre

I don’t actually want a fibre-optic cable into the Crumbling Villa to deliver internets, telephone, and cable TV. When Beloved Wife and I first moved in over five years ago, the only telephone service available was through the execrable Itisalot. Getting a telephone landline presented little difficulty, but internet was more of a challenge owing, apparently, to a lack of capacity at the telephone exchange.

In fact, the Head of Customer Service at Itisalot’s Deira branch had promised internet within two weeks of the application. He subsequently hung up or was otherwise not available whenever I phoned him. This is Head of Customer service; just as well he wasn’t some disincentivised minion.

We got a wireless internet eventually, and it works fine except when the cheapo wire from the squaerial on the roof to a box in the study perishes in the sunshine and has to be replaced with more of the same. Tropical grade co-ax is apparently Not Coming In Dubai.

But leaving well alone isn’t in Itisalot’s business model, it seems. I’d been putting off random “You should migrate to our all-singing and all-dancing eLife service” phone calls for over a year until in October 2012 when, under threat of having the existing connection cut off, I finally said, “OK, you want to install a fibre-optic cable for eLife? Make it so.”

Sadly, Itisalot’s technicians have had extreme difficulty in making it so.

Sometime in October 2012, a team arrived and put new optical fibre cable from the junction box in the street up to a hole in the skirting board under the stairs of the Crumbling Villa. A second team arrived and advised that there was no signal from the telephone exchange. This would be fixed, and then someone would come and fix the modem, and we’d have our eLife.

• Itisalot phoned to make an appointment for 3^rd November 2012, but nobody turned up.
• Itisalot phoned and made an appointment for 12^th November, and nobody turned up.
•  I phoned Itisalot on 29^th November to find out what had happened, and got a vague apology.
•  Itisalot rang on 28^th January 2013 to make an appointment to fix the eLife cable. Never mind that the cable was already fixed, and the problem was at the exchange.
• Nobody turned up on 29^th January. So much for the appointment.
•  Itisalot rang on 4^th February, demanding to know why no-one was at home. We were in Cyprus; I got the technician to make an appointment for 7^th February.
• Nobody came on 7^th February.
•  On 9^th February, a technician rolled up and declared that the problem was at the exchange, not in the Crumbling Villa. Thanks, but we knew this in October.
•  Finally, on 20^th February, an Itislalot technician got a signal from the exchange. He fitted a box to the wall at a jaunty angle, and then disappeared, promising that the modem would be fitted by another team ‘tomorrow.’
• Tomorrow never comes. On 24^th February a different team phoned, promising that they’d come today at 2pm. At 2:30pm they rolled up and declared that a different team would come “Later today without fail” to fix the modem. Exactly the same story spun the previous week.

Here is where I lost my rag. I tried to complain, but was first told that I’d have to give the technician’s phone number to the Itisalot call centre. When I called back, I was transferred to Complaints. Here, they declared that they had no record of my eLife application. This is weird, as the previous call person I’d been talking to had found the details on the same computer database. I’m forced to conclude that lying to customers is endemic and not limited to technicians.

Aside from the repeated lying and theft of my life days at a time, why should I worry? I neither want nor need cable television, and the current internet and telephone systems work adequately. OK, eLife would marginally reduce the monthly payment, and I can buy a Scotch egg with the monthly saving.

So the telecom company can continue on their inefficient way as far as I’m concerned. Phone and make appointments if you must, but I’m past staying at home to await your non-arrival. If you can’t arrange and then keep your own appointments, there’s little reason why I should hold up my side of the bargain. It is surely not in Itisalot’s financial interest to pay contractors to make repeated visits to customers’ houses to undertake the same task. And it certainly flies in the face of customer satisfaction to employ people who lie to customers.

Edited 2nd March to add that: Itisalot rocked up at 1150 today, having phoned me at 9am. Just over two hours later they've gone, leaving me with a working internet (q.v.) and a landline and cable TV decoder that will come on line 'in 24 hours.' Now I have to visit Itisalot to get my old connection cancelled or I'll be paying for both. Oh, and while the guys were here I received an SMS to say that they'd be arriving on 9th March. I wonder if anyone will turn up?

]}:-{>

Like a Rocket

Judge Grumpy on his Lawmaster

I took my bike in to the workshop to have some work done last Saturday. It's four years old, so the brake pipes ought to be replaced, and I mail-ordered steel-braided hoses. Replacing the hydraulics is a job I've done before on other motorbikes, so this time I wisely paid someone else to do the work.

It turned out to be an excellent decision: the mechanics had trouble bleeding the system and even resorted to dismantling the master cylinder to its component molecules in a fruitless search for a mechanical fault. Beloved Wife had dropped me off at the workshop, briefly looked around the showroom, declared how much she liked the looks of the cruisers, and then driven home.

The ongoing problem bleeding air bubbles out of the hydraulic system meant that my bike wasn't ready by 6.30pm after all. I suggested that if the shop would let me borrow a bike for an overnight test ride, it would take the pressure off the mechanics and they could finish the job on Sunday.

And so I found myself astride a 2011 model Triumph Rocket III Touring. By a staggering coincidence, this was the same machine that Beloved Wife had so admired earlier.

The Rocket III has the largest engine ever bolted into in a production motorcycle. It's a monstrous 2294cc in-line three cylinder water-cooled powerplant that produces massive torque at pretty much any revs. The Touring version that I rode is a bike that comes with a windscreen and panniers, and the engine has been tuned for cruising. There's an unfaired Roadster version of the same bike that produces 40 more horespowers and even more torques. I've a friend in Qatar with one of those, and acceleration coupled with no wind protection make a strenuous effort to pull his arms out of their sockets whenever he rides con brio.

The Touring version (105BHP and 150lb.ft, which is 78kW and 203Nm in Centigrade) encourages cruising. There's a very comfy riding position behind hugely wide handlebars in a capsule of still air. The simple clear polycarbonate windscreen is extremely effective at keeping the breeze off the rider. There's no tachometer, but this is hardly an issue because the bike accelerates strongly in any gear from pretty much any speed. As with a lot of shaft-drive bikes, the tail lifts when accelerating, and the front forks extend as the bike attempts to wheelie, and the overall effect is one of lifting her skirts and going for it.

At first, I got the impression that the handling wasn't up to much. Compared to my own Kawasaki 1400GTR the Rocket III seemed twitchy. But I think a lot of this is to do with the enormous handlebars that are over a metre tip to tip. Actually, the Triumph is very light to steer, considering its 395kg kerbside weight, but flickable it certainly isn't. There was a hint of a weave up at the national speed limit, but I think this was mostly me trying to see if it would. Cruising on straight and gently curving roads, the Triumph behaved impeccably. I didn't test the ABS, but it's a comfort to know that it's there.

I'm new to footboards and the cruiser style of motorcycle, and the rear brake pedal position took a little getting used to. The gearshift has both heel and toe, so it's possible to change up without scuffing your shiny shoes. I thought the five-speed gearbox was clunky. There are probably pieces of girder bridges inside to withstand the huge torques and pass them from engine to rear wheel without going ping.

As for equipment, the panniers are hugely long but very narrow. A 200mm wide top opening won't swallow a helmet. But a nice touch is the lids can be secured without locking them. Instruments are very basic, consisting of a single tank-mounted speedo and fuel gauge, and an array of warning lights. There's an LCD panel that houses the odometer and clock, two trip meters and tank range. The last lot are all accessible via a single thumb switch on the right handlebar. I should have liked to see a cruise control fitted to this cruiser.

I didn't ride it enough to measure fuel consumption, so the next bit is from the internet: I'd expect to be refilling the 22 litre tank every 250km or so. Nobody buys a 2.3 litre motorbike and expects it to be economical.

The three cylinders exhaust into a single manifold that then splits into two silencers. The example I rode had some rather loud aftermarket exhaust pipes that caused popping and banging on over-run. If I owned the bike I test-rode, I'd put the stock silencers back on.

Overall, I liked it. Definitely, it's a bike to put a smile on my face. And Beloved Wife likes the looks of the machine, which is a bonus. But would I buy one?

"Not this year," says Beloved Wife.

I returned the Triumph and rode my GTR home. I still like my sports-tourer more.

Thanks to DusejaMoto of Dubai for the test ride, and for fixing my brakes.

]}:-{>

There and back again

Thank you so much, Beloved Wife, for the Christmas present of an EWI. What is an EWI? It's an Electric Wind Instrument; essentially a synthesiser that the player blows into, and produces music by fingering the keys as if it's a flute, or recorder, or oboe, or saxophone. I use the term "music" loosely, but because the instrument is electronic, all the tooting and parping during practice can be limited to the player's headphones.

The EWI came from Sax.co.uk in London, a shop that specialises in saxophones but that has a sideline in other woodwind instruments. They were very helpful.

Unfortunately, my EWI has a fault, in that it won't play if it's plugged in to an external power supply. Sax.co.uk have agreed that the unit should be replaced. All I have to do is get the existing one to London and they'll swap it. Simples.

Herein lies the problem. Aramex, who do so well with their Shop-n-Schlep service, won't insure the package without seeing the original receipt. I did show them a document entitled "Customer Receipt," but apparently that's not good enough. Aramex also want a sizeable portion of the value of the instrument just to ship it: Five hundred dirhams.

At least the thing will run perfectly on four AA batteries, and you can buy a lot of Duracells for less than five hundred dirhams.

But I've encountered Aramex's reluctance to ship from the UAE before. How is anyone supposed to ship used goods when they won't accept them for carriage without seeing some form of invoice, and they won't insure without an original sales invoice that Aramex alone will decide is acceptable. I didn't have any sales paperwork for a small gift that Aramex refused point-blank to ship to Australia.

One solution is to use Emirates Post, where they'll accept a package provided the sender fills in a customs declaration that gets stuck on to the package. Another is to beg favours from colleagues, friends or relatives who are travelling internationally.

]}:-{>

Suggestion box

Gary Larsen - The Far Side

Since September, I have been undertaking the Identity Card Experience, and I still don’t have one. Well, I do, but it expired last July and when I started the Experience, the nice man at the typing centre punched a hole through the chip and rendered the old card useless.

In order to prevent anyone from falling through the cracks and not getting an ID card, the current procedure is to apply for the card before obtaining a Residence Visa. In fact, Residence cannot be confirmed until proof is supplied that the resident has applied for an ID card. The ID card application is automatically rejected because there’s no residence visa on file. Then, once the visa is in the passport, the applicant goes back to the same typing centre where the original application was made, a scanned copy of the visa is put on file, and the ID card arrives within two weeks.

Based on my experience, I have a couple of suggestions that might make this simple process even more of a pleasure:-

If there is a problem with the application, such as the passport and visa serial numbers held by the Identity Authority not matching those held by the Immigration Department, the applicant should be contacted and advised. It is not helpful simply to tell the applicant that his card will be delivered within two weeks, and then to repeat this lie for three months.

The Identity Authority should ensure that if the applicant is told that someone will speak to him by telephone within a week, then that phone call should be made. Cancelling the entire application two days later “for not performing the required modification within the communicated deadline” is not the way to ensure customer satisfaction. Particularly when no required modification nor deadline were communicated.

One of the reasons why it takes five hours of waiting at the Identity Authority office to learn that the problem lies with the Immigration Department is that up to thirteen of the sixteen available desks are unoccupied. Employees working at the occupied desks should serve customers and not stare vacuously into space, nor fiddle with their bottles of antiseptic hand lotion for ten minutes between each customer.

Someone at the Immigration Department has to type the new passport and visa details into a computer in order to produce the printed sticker that goes into the applicant’s passport. It would be helpful, then, that these records are proliferated across the Immigration Department and Identity Authority’s computers so that out-of-date information doesn’t frustrate the ID card application process.

There is little point in the Immigration Department opening at 0700 if the computers don’t come on line until 0800. The servers are presumably working continuously to process people entering and leaving the country at any time, and it isn’t really rocket surgery to provide Immigration officials access to the database whenever they’re at work serving customers. Whoever pays the Immigration Department salaries would surely appreciate not paying for an hour of non-productive time every day for every employee.

Is it really necessary for updates of Immigration records to be undertaken not at the Immigration Department but at a separate office in the central Post Office?

]}:-{>