Losers who can't even rip off tourists properly

Ed the Editor's personal blog corner

I have known some high flyers in my time and they all have good stories to tell about trips to foreign lands. One particular gentleman had an insight on the world of mega civil engineering projects, and boy, some of the things that go on would make you laugh and cry, both at the same time. When I heard the following story about a trip to Nigeria, the term, Who is taking the piss out of who? sprung to mind .

Small change in Africa

In Nigeria, the first thing that happened to him at customs was a subtle reminder from an official that he needed to hand over a tip, so he could enter the country. The guy was not used to this level of free enterprise, and was obviously unsure how to react. Not least of his concerns was, how much of a tip did the official have in mind?

He needn't have worried when the hand went out and he was asked to drop the equivalent of $1 in the sweaty cop's corrupt palm. And that was the end of his lesson. Everywhere he went, he carried a few loose "dollar bills", paid the bribes and had an easy time of it. If only bribes were so cheap over here.

Big bucks in India

I had a similar "small change" experience in India with a bike taxi owner. Those guys work like dogs to make ends meet and they aren't slow to spot a whitey and push their luck with the final bill. On one occasion, I had to travel across New Delhi to get a train ticket. The bike-drawn carriage scooted through the traffic, and the only incident of note was when a guy came screeching after the cab waving my Ventolin Inhaler at me. It had fallen out my pocket and dropped through a gap in the seat that I was clenching my ass on. Somehow he had seen it land, and even more amazing for a city full of robbers, (Indians' words not mine!) he did a good deed for the day, reuniting me with my spare lung, and didn't ask for money. My kind of Samaritan.

Long story short, the train ticket was not available from the place I had been advised to go to, so I had to scoot back to another side of New Delhi. Of course the taxi guy was happy with the extra work, and decided to celebrate with a stop-off at a water vendor. The cheeky git got me to pay for his liquid cholera - 2 cents. Ouch.

But the fireworks really blew when it came to journey's end. In a parking area where there were more people than taxis, he demanded the equivalent of $5 for his couple of hour's service. It sounded a lot to me, relative to what I had been paying, and I questioned the price. The next thing, a group of 6 or so well-dressed university types join in and they are calling the taxi guy a robber and a thief, and I wasn't to pay him a dime over $2 and he was a disgrace to all Indians and how dare he rip off the good people from wherever it was they thought I came from. It was quite the to-do. But most amazing thing was, the taxi guy would not back down!

That is when I put a realistic value on my time and realised that $5 for peace and quiet was $5 well-spent, so I handed over the cash.

You know when you look in someone's eye and you can see how they think they have got one over on you. It doesn't worry me any, because I rarely enter into a deal I can't live with, and being ripped off for $5 didn't worry me one bit. I just thought, who is taking the piss out of who? If he had done his research, he could have been nice about it, and asked me for a reasonable fare. I would have paid him gladly, and probably made it up to some ludicrous figure, like, $5. (So shoot me if I am too generous and a danger to local Third World economies with my extravagant ways.)

Anyway, I wouldn't go as far as to wish ill upon his family or anything, but I won't lose any sleep if his enlarged heart and arthritic joints give him hell for many a long year. Loser. (Come to think of it, I am probably the loser for thinking like that.)

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The architect who forgot the stairs

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Ed the Editor's personal blog corner

I once heard of an architect who had the contract to design and prepare the plans for new homes on an army base in Germany. They did their job, the military approved the plans and assorted builders priced up the work based on the drawings. The contract was awarded to the best tender. Work started on time, preliminary stages were signed off by the architect, and all was going well, until someone pointed out a minor oversight.

They were two-storey homes. The architect had neglected to include a set of stairs in any of the plans.

The architect was an idiot, the guys signing off the project were incompetent. You may also wonder what sort of builder would miss that sort of detail when submitting the original tender for work. I suggest the builders were very shrewd, and would definitely have played dumb when asked why they never pointed out the lack of access to bedrooms.

The point to remember is that in construction, some of the most profitable companies are the ones who exploit mistakes made by others. The builder knew very well that the architect had screwed up, and they probably laughed their heads off when they were awarded the contract to build hundreds of homes without stairs. However, they did nothing contractually wrong to quote the cost of building homes in accordance with the plans they had been presented with. It wasn't their job to question the design! That was the job of the military responsible for providing livable housing for their people.

As a result of that monumental cock-up, the builders earned a shedload of extra money putting things right. In civvy street, perhaps the architect and the paymasters of the project would have been bankrupted by the extra costs of redesign, remodeling and backtracking. But the money was government backed, safe and everyone would have been paid. Good work if you can get it.

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Flawed business plans

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Ed the Editor's personal blog corner

Yesterday I was bombarded with an ill-conceived business idea from an enthusiastic friend of mine. Thankfully today is another day and it seems that her enthusiasm has waned. Not another word about cooking for neighbors has been mentioned. Cool! As I breathe a sigh of relief, no longer living with the threat of supporting Mrs Ed in a catering enterprise doomed to divorce us, I am reminded of an equally flawed money-making opportunity I dreamt up once. In my defence, I was 12!

One summer holiday I was cycling past a local pub that specialised in good home-cooking. It used to get mobbed out by hungry drinkers, my parents included, and I thought, "The pub offers something different every day, they only have a blackboard at the door with the Dishes of the Day scribbled on it, I win prizes for calligraphy, why not offer them hand-written menus?"

With a head full of loose ends, I pedaled home to tell my father. He must have smiled inside when he heard my plan. "Hey, dad, I am going to prepare a sample menu and go see the owner of the pub and see if he wants to pay me to write say 10 new ones every day."

"How long will that take you?"

"Erm, don't know. 10 x 5 minutes?"

"And what about the cost of materials, delivery, some profits. How much are you going to charge for 10?"

I can't recall the figure I quoted but it made him look to the heavens. I think he could see I was not quite grown up enough to start a business that would turn a profit. Saving me from further embarrassment, he neglected to point out the technology of photocopiers, and patted me on the head and suggested I stick with a paper round.

On reflection, I came to my own sad conclusions too. I realised I would make about $2 a day and be cycling up and down a long hill at least twice before lunch. Apart from the risk of sweating all over my beautiful menus, the biggest hole in the plan was continuity. Why would a business pay for a service that was going to finish at the end of the summer break? (My mother had killed stone dead my idea that I would get up at 5.30 on schooldays to prepare the menus. Not that she wasn't supportive of my little plan, but pragmatic as ever, she pointed out that it already took her an inordinate amount of time to get me out of bed at 7.30.)

Oh, the exuberance of youth. And a shame that my friend of yesterday has still not tempered her child-like enthusiasm with common sense. Apparently the latest idea is for Mrs Ed to run weddings. Great idea, except the scheme has more holes than a Swiss cheese, starting with the minor issue that hosting weddings isn't a part-time proposition, and Mrs Ed has a great job already. Back to the drawing board for her, I fear, before the next whacko suggestion.

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The A-team ads

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Ed the Editor's personal blog corner

A long time ago I decided to offer a special place in the heart of The Pisstakers to sites with broad horizons. Not that the good blog friends I have met on my travels don't add a certain je ne sais quoi to this site, for which I am eternally grateful, but there are webmasters with the ability or the imagination to offer even more to the world than us funny, intelligent bloggers with natty nutty personal blogs.

If you look at the first little box on the left underneath the orange links, you will see a few different examples of what I mean by sites that fall outside the box, so to speak.

The man we know as Lord Likely has co-founded Gaup, a multinational corporation dedicated to humor. This puts him on a level way beyond us normal humor bloggers, and his ingenuity has propelled him into the box.

Tchirts give more to the world than funny quotes. They put funny quotes on tees, in English and Spanish, and in style. So they too have earned the right to join the hallowed party.

It goes without saying that Bonsai Studios will be forever jammed into the mix in light of their intrinsic role in the Pisstakers site. From the Rapidweaver theme design to those cool sidebar widgets, the Italian touch is everywhere, and will remain, for as long as it takes for us to be bought out by Yahoo!

Generator Land have a skew of really clever generators that just make you laugh. Their wares occupy too much of your precious lunch break, but they are welcome to occupy a spot in the sidebar box.

I had a feeling The Ominous Comma would take humor to a different level at some stage, and the final mainstays, Brohans, have been video blogging way better than the majority of us who let the videos do the talking. I just hope the pressures of employment or summer breaks don't get in the way of their particular brands of funny world domination.

If you have a site that goes beyond blogging and falls into the humor or tech bracket, let me know and I will see if we can work something out.

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Spend all ye faithful

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Ed the Editor's personal blog corner

Over the years I have lived in many different places, and once I was not far from a monastery run by Benedictine monks. Talk about businessmen in cassocks. They had a huge estate where they raised Guernsey cows, planted thousands of trees and generally lived off the land, using the produce to run a little tea shop for their curious visitors. All very pretty and rural, but the most interesting and lucrative part of their operation was a pottery.

There were full-blown electric kilns the size of a small house, several workshops with professional monks throwing plates and vases and all sorts on the latest generation potters' wheels, and a huge showroom that wouldn't have looked out of place on 5th Avenue or Knightsbridge. They exported their wares world-wide and made a fortune for god.

I remember once looking around their "Seconds Store" and got a good gauge for their commitment to quality and profits. Imagine a rack about 15 feet long 2 feet deep stacked to bursting with highly glazed perfectly formed salt and pepper pots - with no holes in them. Good one, guys. That's like selling single shoes, or jerseys with the necks sewn up, or a plane with no landing gear. I don't know how many they sold, but I am sure some enterprising person came up with a use for them. An item in a joke sure, most likely.