NOTES FROM BIG BEN … Musings Fromthe Scepter’d Isle BY PETER GUEST
older than me, but since in his youth he was chairman of one of the world’s biggest investment companies, I guess he’s working with the “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it”model.
M Me, I am supposed to be techno-savvy, but I don’t under-
stand the Internet and all its machinations. I am too old, and it’s too complex. Take “Facebook,” for example. Some time ago, someone told
me that I could track down a friend living overseas using Face- book. I “Googled” Facebook – there’s another one – and got on to a website that allowed me to trace my friend. Trouble was, I got
As amotorist, you weremore likely to get a ticket for parking at ameter than for parking in a no-parking area – very British.
onto the site only because my daughter had been on my PC, and she got prettymadwhenmy friend tried to contactme via her con- nection. (No, didn’t ask to use my PC, but I was in the wrong – goes with the territory.) Anyway, my daughter “signed me up” to Facebook, and now
I am apparently able to talk online to the world. Or not, because I should be doing that via LinkedIn, to which I have also managed to get registered/enrolled or signed up. I am not quite sure how. But it seems a pretty daft thing, because I have more than one e- mail address, and it seems that every time one ofmy friends wants to be linked to me via this system, if they don’t use the “right” e- mail address, it blocks them. I can’t deal with this, so for anyone out there who thinks I am
snubbing them: It’s not me, it’s the bloody system. Recently, I asked someone for a copy of a presentation I had
seen themmake; they gaveme a link to yet another website where I could download the required PowerPoint file. Doing this appar- ently linked me to another network called Spludge or something, and next thing I get an e-mail from a friend who wants to be my Spludge buddy. The weird thing is that this was the very person I tried to track down sixmonths ago; go figure.
Learning English Customer service is all important when you run an airport,
and a year or so ago, Her Majesty’s Government decided that the Spanish-owned British Airports Authority (BAA) had too
44 FEBRUARY 2011 • PARKING TODAY •
www.parkingtoday.com
big a slice of the action and was not operating a good enough service. The government forced BAA to sell off airports, start- ing with Gatwick, London’s No. 2 airport and about the eighth- busiest in Europe. Gatwick was bought by Global Infrastructure Partners, an
investment fund that already ran London City airport (one of the most pleasant airports that I have used). The new owners announced their intention to proceed with a
previously agreed £1billion investment program to upgrade Gatwick and expand the airport’s existing infrastructure to trans- form the passenger experience. They certainly have transformed the parking experience. At a time when many other airports are being squeezed for
business and dropping their charges, Gatwick has increased the cost of parking by nearly
70%.And the reason for doing this?A spokeswoman forGatwick said priceswere put up “to ensure there was space for travelers, by discouraging people who were not using the airport fromusing its car parks.” So I have now learned that “transforming the customer expe- rience”means “putting the price up.”
Y FRIEND BOB WRITES ME letters, on paper, puts them in a stamped envelope and mails them; he doesn’t do electronic correspon- dence, apart from phones. He is
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