13 posts from 2008 (page 2)

A strange trend appears to have surfaced in our office after the holiday period where people went to see families and friends around the world.

Out of 12 people who went abroad either to see family or friends in their home country or otherwise on a holiday, 10 have gotten a haircut. So our otherwise shabby office is full of neat men and pretty women with their fancy and not quite so fancy haircuts.

On a business level, I see an opportunity here: 83% of people got a haircut when they went abroad. This is a Business Process (BP of the abbreviation in the title) which is already being Outsourced (and the 'O' above) without a direction from the corporates but from the individual. There's a real chance here, I tell thee.

And, belonging to a country where more than half of the rising middle class depends on the BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) for their livelihoods, I think I am better placed than your average joe to take this opportunity and turn into multimillion Rupess business success.

So, after much deliberation on how this idea could be materialized I have come to the conclusion that whilst sending your head to India for a haircut is the most efficient and cost effective way of driving this business but it probably is a leeetle impractical. And therefore, my idea is that it could be implemented by the creative kinds - the kind of people who draw pictures for Threadless!. I am sure there are many budding hair cut artists, several many who can't really make it to the Tony and Guy and the kinds.

We take these budding hair dressers, and give them your photo - possibly a 3D one so they can get the feel of your hair - may be even a strand of your hair could be asked from those who don't believe in Vodoo. A description of what you would like to be done to your hair, and then voila! they could give you step by step instructions on cutting your own hair!
Although I realise it might be slightly difficult to cut your own hair, may be you could get a friend to cut your hair? It could even become a facebook application where you could rate how each of your friends cut hair?

Ok, so may be for the first few times you friend might screw up and you might look stupid but hey it's hair and they are a renewable source of beauty!

Isn't this idea excellent? Given my laziness, I doubt that I'd actually follow this idea through but in a few years, when you read about a multimillion website called www.DIYhair.com then you'd know who to give credit to.

So, there was a guy at University who looked slightly weird, wore slightly weird clothes and spoke slightly weird but in my naviety, I befriended him. I spoke to him casually about classes and perhaps he took it to mean that I fancy him because FOUR years since I last saw him or spoke to him, he still keeps e-mailing me, adding me on social networking sites and sending him his birthday reminders!

Everytime I leave his e-mail unanswered I feel guilty. But I think it's the fact I exist on WAYN now that has ascertained for him that I am, in fact, still alive and he has his chance of e-mailing me.

So here goes his e-mail:
hi Olivia
I hope you are well.
 
What are you up to these days post uni?

I have seen you on WAYN, the social networking site?
 
How was your christmas? Mine went well. Get any nice presents? I got plenty of nice presents.
 
Have a happy new year,and send me an email soon.
 
Happy 2008.
 
Daniel
ex-<my uni>(I remember you from class in the 2002/03 academic year)

I want to reply, I want to tell him that please stop testing my patience by sending me these stupid e-mails. Earlier in the year, he had e-mailed me to say that he had become a porter at some hospital - and I wanted to reply back with no thanks for this information and wondered if I should tell him about my married life and three children alongwith 2 dogs.
But I chose to ignore in case, he goes mental at the new of my happily married life *cough*.

So this time I have chosen to reply with this:

and its consequences get more complex the more I think about them.

Half of the fight for Climate change is to maintain the lavish, even wasteful lifestyles of Americans and Europeans, while the rest of world goes on a mad goose chase to achieve the same.

Humans are adaptable. We have come a long way from living in the caves to comfortable centrally heated homes, work places and even smoking quarters. We are survivors - we will deal with climate change just like we evolved to survive everything else that's happened in our history on this planet.

Or at least some of us will anyway. Of course, life won't be same for anyone but we WILL survive - the question is how many of us?
Food, health and shelter isn't available to most of the human population. In countries where the NHS does exist, its future looks bleak. Within a decade, we will be unable provide medical support for everyone. In the most socialist republics, post war promises of food, clothing and shelter for everyone are already diminishing.

And that makes one question is or will climate change be the only threat facing us?

How long can we get our bananas from Costa Rica, coffee from Kenya And water from France? The answer is probably infinitely for a limited population.

There are only so many people our planet can support, we have by no means exploited all its resources but perhaps climate change has now become the limiting factor.

So the fight is not to save the human species but to save developers to automise everything else when the manual labour has sunk in the Bay of Bengal.

And for that, deeply personally, I feel that the fight is just as pointless as nobody really wants to give up their lifestyles...