So What About People

I have found myself recently thinking a lot about the amount of time people put into the things they do compared to the impact these have on the people who they do those things for. Here is my thinking, the objective of every human endeavor almost always end up with an impact on people. Whether such endeavor is making a speech, writing a book, designing an automobile or manufacturing widgets (whatever those are), it ultimately has an impact on someone's emotional, spiritual, religious or physical need. Despite this, most dialogue on human activity tends to focus on the thing aspect rather than the human aspect of the activity. I started this blogg because of this frustration.

This last week, we read so much about the effect of the Iceland volcano on the airline industry. We heared quite a lot about how aeroplanes were not able to fly and about how much the airlines were loosing and the financial impact on that industry. Most reports, at least those that I saw, focused on people in as far as using them as props in what was essentially stories about

the inability of airlines to do their business.

My point? I think the airline industry exists to serve its customers, the flying people and their travelling needs. However, most of the complaints were about how these customers found themselves not being informed by the airline companies in this day and age when anyone can publish anything at any time from almost anywhere. Who were the airlines communicating with.

Here is a taste. Yesterday marked 50 days before the World cup kick-off. From my window I witnessed a spectacle of revelry from the people across my building. For the first time in my life, sad to say, I listened to the melody of the vuvuzelas, the kuduzela and, I found out for the first time, the minizelas and the midizelas. What a spectacle!!! Such excitement invoked in me the need to have a cup of coffee at the coffee shop across the road from where I was. I ordered a cuppachino with cream on the side. When it came, it came with cream inside, not on the side. This off course is a minor thing in the large schema of things. However, the whole soccer cup thing is about entertaining people, both in the stadiums and the coffee shops and yet the major focus has been on the beauty of the stadiums and all the infrastructure associated with it and how FIFA is pleased. FIFA,mind you, not the spectators!!! The restaurant and hotel owners have forgotten to train their hostesses how to serve people. For today, I will end here.