One distinction between the private and the public sector is that the former generally has an incentive to offer customers a variety of levels of service, while the latter doesn’t. That’s why you can get a pizza delivered to your home when you’re feeling fine, but you can’t get a doctor to visit you when
Last summer we picked up a hire car at Inverness. As I was dumping the rental paperwork inside the glove compartment I unearthed a forgotten pair of sunglasses so hideous in design it suggested that the previous renter had been either a porn star or a German, perhaps even both. That he was at least
As you probably know (to your cost), Amazon purchases above a certain value incur no delivery charge. This offer works because so many people buy extra books to lift their order above the free-postage threshold. Predictably, in every country in which the retailer has launched the scheme, there has been an immediate and sustained uplift
There was formerly a rude custom for those who were sailing upon the Thames, to accost each other as they passed, in the most abusive language they could invent… a fellow having attacked him with some coarse raillery, Johnson answered him thus, ‘Sir, your wife, under pretence of keeping a bawdy-house, is a receiver of
Local newspapaers usually have a slightly dotty reverence for the area they serve. My own local paper recently described Winston Churchill as ‘the former Westerham resident and wartime prime-minister’. The Evening Standard has the opposite problem in that it is a London paper which really doesn’t much like London. In fact it wants its readers
Following last week’s article, someone wrote asking me to dissuade them from buying the new ultra-thin Apple Air laptop, to which they had become curiously attracted. Delighted to help. In fact anything I can do to deprogramme you from the Apple cult will be time well spent. With luck you may end up devoting yourself