That's how long it took Roger Bannister to complete four laps of the Iffley Road track, 50 years ago today. It's also slightly less time than it took three of us to try to break in and emulate his great feat (and, indeed, his great feet) at 5:30 this morning.
I picked up my co-conspirators (both also called John) at 5:15 as planned. We drove to Iffley Road, occasionally sniggering at ourselves and the foolishness of what we were doing. A quick drive around the perimeter established the fact that we weren't going to be able to stray "accidentally" onto the track from the main road, and that what we would have to do to gain access was maybe a tad closer to breaking and entering than any of us had planned to get.
We dumped the car in a side street. Ordinarily, I'd have just parked it, but dumping it seemed more in keeping with the general dodginess of our behaviour. We established that we could perhaps vault over the fence by the sign commemorating the event, but the presence of a still-pissed student staggering home from a rough Wednesday night scuppered that plan. We walked to the top gate. Barbed-wire. Spikes. They really didn't want us to get in. We decided that our planned excuse if caught on the premises ("What? We aren't allowed in here? We thought it was a public track!") wouldn't really work if we'd clambered over a barbed-wire fence to get there in the first place, so we walked down to the bottom gate in the hope of finding a hole in the hedge.
And so we did.
Our conversation on the way there involved gruesome stories of people getting spikes through their feet in attempting to clamber over fences. Somehow we managed to clamber over the collapsed spiked fence and through the hole in the hedge with no greater casualty than the seat of my trousers, which I snagged a little bit.
Now we were inside the complex - albeit, a good way from the track. We waded through some thick grass, past a hockey pitch, and arrived at the trackside - but still the wrong side of a fence. We continued to circle in the hope of finding a gate, but succeeded only in finding first a CCTV camera, and then a groundsman. Strangely, he didn't seem overly pleased to see us.
In fairness to him, he swallowed our wide-eyed confusion rather than delving deeper (he's probably got a busy day today) and told us that the running didn't start until later. We apologised for causing any concern and wandered back through the wet grass to the hole in the hedge.
As a token gesture, we jogged back to the car. It wasn't a mile, but we still didn't manage it in less than four minutes.
A running track is a lot bigger in real life than it looks on the TV. Making it round there once in a minute is impressive enough, never mind doing it four times in under four.
It's a strange record, the mile. In 1913, it was acquired by one John Paul Jones (who later went on to play bass and keyboards in Led Zeppelin) and stood at 4 minutes and 14 seconds. 40 years later, Bannister had knocked the best part of a quarter of a minute off that. 50 years later again, the record stands at 3 minutes 43. By my reckoning therefore, on 6th May 2154, some bright young thing will be hurling himself around the track on the Iffley Road four times in an attempt to be the first to break the three minute mile. I hope he has more luck getting into the venue than we did.
Read MoreA Blonde and a Brunette Walk into a Cafe
Today is a busy day - Danielle and I are spending the majority of our day at the Client's site, recording narration and taking screen grabs etc. It's a hectic and complicated day trying to co-ordinate with a very busy Subject Matter Expert and a multimedia developer or two. We decided to break for lunch for half an hour at 12:30 pm and I followed Danielle down to the Cafe Krema on Symonds' Street.
We queued and we ordered and I knew Danielle wanted to finish up her final script for the narration audio we were to record in the afternoon. This is where reality separated:
Reality came together again with the realisation that Danielle had never left the cafe and I had misheard/misunderstood her and then not noticed she was at another table and I tried to reassure Danielle that I am, afterall, blonde and it's a miracle I get through each day as it is.
Read More| Michelle's version: Danelle said she was going to work on the narration script *back at the office* - so, when she paid for her tea and mouthed something to me I figured it was something like "I'll see you later *at the office*" so I said Yeh, sure thing. And thought I wouldn't be a copycat follower and follow Danielle back to the office to eat my eggy sandwich and watch her work, I'd be a grown-up girl and sit by myself in the Cafe and eat my lunch. Which I did - an eggy sandwich and a bottle of fizzy Ribena. When I had finished, I got up and left the cafe deciding to pop into Gordon Harris to buy a new pen for Danielle to make her stressful day a little better. Just as I was deciding that the Symonds's Street Gordon Harris wasn't as good as the Newmarket Gordon Harris, my phone rang as I was exiting the store. It was Danielle, she seemed a bit panicy "where did you go??" I had trouble understanding her question: I looked at my watch, it was 12:50pm a full 10 minutes before I was supposed to meet her on the Client's site so it wasn't making sense in my head. She asked again "where are you where did you go??" by this time I was out on the street and looking up there was Danielle walking away up the hill towards the Client's offices at quite a pace with her cell phone to her ear "I was in Gordon Harris. Where are you? are you walking back to the Office?" she said she was so I told her to turn around, which she did and I waved at her. She disconnected our call and let me catch up with her. Danielle's version: I told Michelle I needed to work on the script for the afternoon Narration. I ordered and paid for my tea, I told Michelle I'd grab a table and went to a nice one by the window in Cafe Krema. The morning had been a bit stressful and the narration needed a rewrite, so I got out the script and started working on it. After a while I noticed Michelle still hadn't joined me at my table. I looked up and saw she was no longer at the counter, but sitting deeper in the cafe, at a table by herself. I wondered why she hadn't sat with me, but thought she'd picked up on my nervousness about the day and the rewrite and had left me to some private space. I thought that was kind of nice, in a weird way and got back to the script I quickly scribbled in the changes and was quite productive. My concentration was broken by Michelle passing right past me and leaving the cafe! I couldn't believe it, first she didn't sit with me THEN she was just ignored me and LEFT. I sat there stunned for a few minutes. Maybe she was giving me private space but this was really just a bit *too* weird. What had I done to deserve being ignored? I grabbed my phone and phoned her, she answered and I asked calmly "where did you go?" She didn't seem to understand my question. I asked it again "where are you where did you go??" she was still acting as if she had no idea what I was talking about. I was starting to get a bit frustrated when she said she had been in Gordon Harris and now she was right behind me, so I turned around and there she was so I hung up. |
Everything's Relative
I don't think it's just me. I don't believe I am the only person in New Zealand who won't deal with Telecom unless there is no other choice - and quite often, there is no other choice - they have had a monopoly for years, and in some areas they still hold all the strings.
But one thing they are really good at is having terrible Public Relations.
Stories such as the widow who had to pay $45 to have her late husband's initials removed from the white pages listings because Telecom "couldn't have a contract with a dead person" are not unusual for this hulking great corporation.
Their advertising schemes seem to do nothing for their image either. Recall when they first introduced capped national and international phone calls - amazing to be able to telephone Australia for $5 and the USA/UK/Canada for $10 talk all you want!! Oh yes, and we did. We got into the habit of making International telephone calls off peak and talked for_ever. Then, after they felt the habit had been established, they tried to yank the deal, quietly, after 3 or 4 months. Customers began to realise they had huge toll charges, not having realised the offer had ended and complained. (If i remember correctly - and Lord knows I couldn't remember my way out of a paper bag even if MegaMemory was on the *inside*) Telecom tried to enforce the bills but the Commerce Commission said Telecom had offered the deal for so long, it was no longer a "deal" but a "rate" and Telecom had to abide by it until the end of the year. So they did, and continued until the end of the year and then changed it to "talk for up to 2 hours".
So it's no real surprise that Telecom's inititive to woo the lucrative txting market to their dark side has had them adjust their offer. Last year, Telecom offered a $10 per month txt-all-you-want deal to their 025 and 027 customers, luring txt-crazy customers away from Vodafone, who's smart media campaigns and clever business model was taking more and more of the cellular/prepay market by the day.
And it worked for Telecom. Lots of people switched. Hung up their 021's and went for the txting capped rate and started exercising their thumbs like never before. So much so, in fact, that now Telecom is saying "whoa" and capping the number of txts you can send per month to 500.
Now, I'm not a txt'r. I don't txt naturally. I can't abbreviate my "are"s and "you"s to "r"s and "u"s and I need to use all the punctuation available. Everyone of my txts is a hand crafted message that takes me between 20 and 30 minutes to make because I am a hardened chatter and txting's just *too slow*. So to me, the idea of 500 txts, (16 per day) is plenty. But to your average txting teen/twentysomething, 500 is only enough for a couple of days MAXIMUM - and when they've used their 500 they will be to spending .20 cents per message like they used to before the special rate - and that works out extremely expensive for your average non-working habitual-txting student. As you can well imagine, this news did not go down well to those who changed services lured by the $10/month special.
Last night, on the news, two young teenaged girls were interviewed over the change in Telecom's offer. When asked what they thought of the change one said "I was so mad, I had to txt people. Lots of people" she went on to say something like "We're gonna find out where these people are and go and get angry and chain ourselves to stuff.. and stuff".
Kevin Kenrick, of Telecom was also interviewed and had some interesting statistics that spun the reasons for the change. He said 5 % of the $10 txting customers were txt bombing those ones without the $10 rate. He also said that last month's highest user sent around 27,000 txts. That's a lot of txts - and it's also a lot of money Telecom's missing out on.
I'm thinking it has less to do with txt bombing or bullying or anything else other than the Marketing Department was charged with getting as many people as possible away from Vodafone - they came up with a scheme that did just that - then the Accounts Department saw how much money *wasn't* coming in from txting, and they also saw an huge increase in the amount of paper they had to buy in for the detailed accounts and said _cut_it_out_. I think the techies might have been up in arms about the pressure to the networks that service texting, but no one really cares about techies when accountants are about.
So folks, let this be a lesson for you - when Telecom come a-woo'n, remember they have a track record of thinking they're smarter than you, so stick with the service providers who treat you like the valued customers you are, no matter what temporary gilded carrot Telecom dangles in front of your nose.
(I find stories about companies I don't like by reading an online news service I don't like.. heh.. this is mostly due to the fact I'm not getting out into the world much at the moment)
Reporting yesterday that Lana Coc-Kroft was "feeling better" had me thinking she was awake, and speaking, and still poorly but visibly improved. Today's report in the Herald reminds me that everything is relative - she's breathing on her own again but still in a coma, and that's an improvement. I hope she keeps improving.
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