I’m a big fan of businesses that think about what their customers may want, perhaps even checking out what their competition offers and even doing some more formal mystery shopper evaluations. Regrettably and conspicuously this is something that many businesses, notably owner-operator businesses, often seem to forget about.

For many years I believed that people who operated motels had never stayed in a motel. If they had then they would have better understood what their patrons needed. Things like more than one towel, a lightbulb bigger than 40 watts in the main living area, bed linen that was more accommodating than then minimalist hospital-corners origami, a wall socket for the electric blanket, somewhere to sit to watch TV, and so on. My female travelling companion is bothered by things like no power socket near a mirror (for the purposes of drying one’s hair) and nowhere to spread one’s accoutrements in the bathroom – pedestal washbasins being a motel norm. Best not talk about beverage-making facilities, particularly anything involving coffee. Motel service standards generally are improving, slowly, as owners looking beyond providing the minimal possible standard that’s easy for them to deliver cheaply.

Restaurants are similar places of disappointment. Spurred by television cooking talent shows, many people think that a good restaurant is all about the chef, probably including chefs themselves. The reality is that it is the front-of-house service that is key, as that is where great service stops and starts. Excellent front-of-house service transforms good food into a great dining experience.

I believe that restaurateurs should ensure that all of their staff have at least sampled everything on the menu, including each day’s specials. Why? In case a diner asks for an opinion or a recommendation. A positive and interested response will impress an enquiring diner more than gormless disinterest from one’s “waitperson” who has no idea. I often ask my waiter for a recommendation, just to see what their response will be.

Getting front-of-house staff to take an active interest in what the business is marketing and its point of difference compared to its competition should be a primary focus for that business’s owners. That will impress customers more than will wetting the corner of the paper napkin to make sure it stays stuck in place when wrapped around a knife and fork. This annoying practice, which makes it near impossible to remove the napkin without destroying it, has become so consistently widespread I suspect that it is part of the official training regime for restaurant staff.

Another pet peeve of mine occurs in a restaurant’s toilets. Well not just restaurant toilets for that matter. It’s a thing called the air towel. English inventor Sir James Dyson claims to have built a better one. I think not. Toilet proprietors probably love them because they don’t have to be reloaded and have nothing to break or jam or need bins to empty. My dislike of these wooshing gizmos is because they’re slow and inconvenient compared with paper or roller towels.

I am presuming that women’s toilets are the same as men’s in that the rate-limiting step occurs in the cubicle or its equivalent. Bodily functions dealt with, hand washing and drying should be part of a seamless and stress-free departure. It used to be, until somebody installed an air towel.

Now one has to wait around for the thing to warm up to achieve its optimum performance and wait several minutes for one’s hands to dry. Where this tediousness increases anxiety levels is when there is more than one participant vying for the air towel’s attentions. People standing around with hands dripping wet waiting for their turn to delay everybody else in the queue. Paper towels ease this congestion marvellously. I don’t know what happens in the ladies but I can attest that hand washing decisions in the gents are impacted greatly by whether participants have to stand around for ages with dripping wet hands. It’s hard to strike up a conversation in such circumstances.

The air towel appeals greatly to a mind-set that understands cost rather than one that appreciates value or providing outstanding customer service. I certainly wouldn’t have given James Dyson a knighthood for building a better one.

One thing I have discovered in recent years is the joy of playing one’s own music. Some may construe this as some sort of male mid-life crisis. I believe that, like motorcycles, it is a mid-life enhancement.

Yes, it’s true. I am one of those who has embraced the ukulele. I should confess that I have more than one. Indeed one of my stable has a most excellent pick-up, allowing it to be plugged into an amplifier, sometimes through a Wah-Wah™ pedal and wound all the way up to 11. If my neighbours come hammering at my door of an evening, I can’t hear them. Life is good.

In my earlier years I had piano lessons. This opportunity became available at age 12 when my Big Sister disappeared to attend boarding school and access to the family’s piano became available. Unlike Big Sister I didn’t really have a gift for applying 10 fingers coherently to an array of ebony and ivory. Indeed it was all a bit arduous. Mr John Thompson’s method was OK, followed by a prescribed selection of material for grade examinations. Practice was all about mastering those and applying a bunch of black dots on things called staves to the keys in front of me. Playing for pleasure was never something that I connected with, so after molesting Mr Beethoven’s Für Elise for well over a year, I decided that enough was enough. I have not touched a piano for any purpose other than a spirited rendition of Chopsticks since I turned 16.

It’s a shame that I never connected with playing for pleasure or indeed playing because I wanted to, not because I had to.

I have always admired the ability some people have to sit down at a piano, or any other musical gizmo, and bang or honk out a tune. Indeed I have observed that some folk are so good at this they can make a living from it. There are even professional ukulele players!

I’m not sure quite what it was that drew me to the ukulele. But I am pleased I was drawn. The Internet has provided a whole range of useful material and contact with communities of similarly afflicted folks who believe that their ukes are legitimate musical instruments.

Most evenings I’ll grab a uke off its wall hanger, enhance its GCEA-ness, and then muck around with tunes old and new for a while. This process may even be therapeutic, as I appear to enjoy it. I have also become mildly evangelical.

Buy a ukulele and join the revolution! Don’t get a cheap one – spend more than $90 and you should be OK. As with other things in life, cheap is as cheap does. Spend another $30 and get an electronic tuner to do the GCEA bizzo. Fit Aquila strings, if it doesn’t come with those as standard kit, and Bob’s your father. Enjoy!

I have callouses on the tips of my left fingers. Je suis arrivé! 

It appears that the most dangerous thing that children and young people can do is go outside and play. Various “child safety” activist groups are now calling for laws to make wearing helmets mandatory while using any “wheeled device”, scooters now being the latest target.

Well intentioned paranoid people seem intent on driving the fun out of all leisure pursuits, except staying indoors to watch TV and play Playstation games. They’re also intent on imposing additional liabilities, compliance costs and worries onto any person or organisation that organises recreational activities for kids. Those costs are transferred to caregivers, who may think that a Playstation or broadband Internet is a cheaper, easier, low risk way of keeping the kids amused.

Apparently this latest outrage is about kids increasingly using scooters and getting hurt. How dare they! The missing statistic amongst accounts of Rivers of Blood is head injuries and the extent of damage caused by those. Also missing is any analysis of how helmet wearing may mitigate head injuries.

Current cycle helmet laws are flawed and I suspect that plastic buckets for the heads of scooter users will be equally silly. The laws, such as they are, are based on the premise that wearing a stylie piece of Styrofoam atop of one’s head can only be useful. I believe that the laws are flawed because they take no interest at all in whether the plastic hat complies with any reasonable standards or whether it is being worn properly. Police have better things to do with their time.

I see a lot of cyclists of all ages out and about most days. While all may be wearing a helmet, many are not tied on (straps flapping in the breeze); are too big (perhaps belonging to a parent or older sibling); are perched jauntily, perhaps on the back of the head; worn over a baseball cap; and so on. Compliance? Pass. Effectiveness? Fail.

I believe it would be possible to ride around town unchallenged whilst wearing a plastic colander held on with a piece of string. I may try this one day and see what happens.

The joy of riding a device like a scooter or skateboard, even a bicycle, comes from freedom and convenience. Complicate that by giving the users something else to cart around with them, such as a helmet, shin pads, knee pads, gloves, elbow guards, a mouth guard, a fluoro vest, sunscreen, bandaids, and a cellphone with a GPS tracker, and it’s easy to see why any magic moments evaporate.

Not to mention the dreaded “helmet hair”. Apparently this is a reason why the Dutch don’t have mandatory cycle helmet laws.

People are capable of doing silly shit at times. Sometimes, like Sir Edmund Hillary climbing Mount Everest, they get away with it. Sometimes they don’t. A story published today involves a teenager, presumably out with his mates, skateboarding down the exit ramp from a Wellington carparking building. Yee hah! The exit involved entering a city street. This particularly unfortunate story involves a collision with a passing car. I suspect that a helmet wouldn’t have helped on this occasion. Helmets aren’t that clever.

My cousins some years ago were playing catch with their Dad’s tools, as you do. It’s a great way of enhancing hand-to-eye coordination. One of them wandered inside with an 8-inch crescent embedded in his temple to see if his Mum could help. After she regained consciousness and uplifted herself from the kitchen floor, she took him to hospital. The offending spanner was removed with no harm done to it or its victim. If he had been wearing a helmet a lot of grief could have been saved.

I learned a lot of things reading stories out loud to my brother and more recently, other younger extended family members. I’ve learned about life’s realities, how powerful and compelling is a story well told. And I’ve also learned that when it comes to using language well, less is often more. More recently I’ve learned that many things I haven’t read for several decades are indelibly etched in my memory.

Brother Andrew is a few years younger than I am, and available children’s literature had advanced a bit in that time, meaning that he grew up on a diet of Dr Seuss and Asterix the Gaul that was denied to me at an equivalent age. My corresponding development stage drew heavily on stories penned by the now politically incorrect Enid Blyton – elephants have Big Ears because Noddy won’t pay the ransom.

“You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.”

I’ve always enjoyed reading out loud. Nowadays I only seem to do it as a proofreading check. But I am a child from a family of story tellers. Many of those stories were read from books while we were growing up. Others were Legends shared over dinner tables.

Our televisionless home did have a radio and, in those moving-pictureless days, stories were also told through that channel. Sunday night entertainment treats comprised chopped-up saveloys and tomato sauce and whatever the ongoing saga series happened to be pouring from the mantle radio’s single speaker. Luxury!

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.”

Nonsense notwithstanding, simple language is indeed a powerful thing. Devoid of references to outputs and outcomes, inter alia or viz, it cuts to heart and to the head.

“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”

I shudder to think how a corporate policy writer or an academic would rephrase an expression like that so it curried favour with their bosses or peer reviewers.

“I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I’ve bought a big bat. I’m all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!”

Damned straight! The art of planning compellingly illustrated, although perhaps not quite to the satisfaction of today’s politically correct Fun Police.

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

Which may be a reason why penners of corporate and academic gobbledegook do exactly that. Coping with corporate management systems and their method for allocating tasks is also a reality in the Valley of Vung, as anybody travelling to Solla Sollew will know.

“This is called teamwork. I furnish the brains. You furnish the muscles, the aches and the pains.”

“My alphabet starts with this letter called yuzz. It’s the letter I use to spell yuzz a ma tuzz. You’ll be sort of surprised what there is to be found once you go beyond Z and start poking around.”

That expression rang through my head when my high school maths teacher explained why zero isn’t a number. Life is often bigger than the limits that may be arbitrarily imposed on it. Peter Higgs of Higgs boson fame is probably a bit old to have been influenced having had Dr Seuss read to him as a child. But he has certainly done a lot of poking around beyond Z.

“So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.”

And that’s probably a good place to stop. Remember to take time to read children’s stories – out loud, to children. It’s great fun, and educational.

All quotes supplied by the inimitable Theodor Seuss Geisel, more famously known as Dr Seuss. Most people have a favourite Seussism, and even a back story. Feel free to share yours!

A child’s first words are a treasured stage in their developmental evolution and something every mother awaits with expectation. “Mama!” “Awww…” followed by much chin tickling, huggling and encouragement for repeat performances, particularly in front of other family members.

My mother, as others of her ilk do, awaited my first word with wrapt expectation. “Tractor!” Not quite what she had in mind. And she hasn’t been able to shut me up since. Loquaciousness is a dominant gene in our family.

The tractor that made such an early impression on me was my parents’ Harry Ferguson TEA 24, the legendary ‘Little Grey Fergie’. These tractors are often mistakenly referred to as a Massey Ferguson and painted red by people who don’t know any better. It was a constant feature of our lives. It could do anything and go anywhere, sometimes requiring rescuing from places in which it may have inadvertently ended up.

Dad had also procured a matching Ferguson System two-furrow mounted plough with which he had systematically ploughed the farm, as part of a development project aimed at introducing ‘improved’ pasture species.

That combination of Ferguson plough and tractor was the stuff of global legend, something that I didn’t fully appreciate until many years after my first word was spoken.

The ‘Ferguson System’ was an ingenious patented combination of a converging rear three-point linkage system and a hydraulic ‘suck’ valve. This meant that a plough could be mounted directly to a tractor, rather than towed, and that a constant load applied to the tractor’s rear driving wheels by the hydraulic draft control system automatically adjusting the plough’s depth. This combination of technologies revolutionised arable agriculture by making cultivation both straightforward and affordable. Now that Ferguson’s patents have expired, this system can be found on virtually any tractor manufactured anywhere.

Another example of a British Golden Age of mechanical design that also produced such gems as the Land Rover and the Spitfire, the TEA 24 is a consummate testimony to less being more. Its light weight, durability, reliability and simplicity were ideally suited to mass production, resulting in tens of thousands of these being built and sold around the world. Manufacturing alliances were struck with David Brown and with Ford to meet the global demand, fast-tracking both of those companies into tractor manufacturing under their own brands.

In 1953 the Harry Ferguson company merged with Canada’s Massey Harris. But it wasn’t until 1957 that the colour changed from grey to red, the name Massey Ferguson and the three merged triangles brand appeared. Massey Ferguson is probably one of the most enduring and famous tractor brands the world has seen.

No, I am not a tractor groupie or some sort of agricultural machinery geek. I am a collector of assorted facts and trivia that occasionally assemble themselves like a jigsaw puzzle in my brain. That said, I did major in agricultural mechanisation as part of my agricultural science degree some years ago, when there was only one Massey University (nothing to do with the tractor company) that offered a degree in agricultural science. I also had a Bit Of A Thing for hydraulics for a while. How times and fashions change.

All of these tractor snippets fell together after a dinner outing at a friend’s place on Saturday night. To my great delight, he has a collection of tractor models in his Man Cave, including a TEA 24 and a MF 35. My joy was unbridled. Seriously.

To me there are only two key things to the art and science of marketing: providing outstanding customer service, and constant innovation. In the 1940s Harry Ferguson was able to tick both boxes. Well done, that man.

Had he lived in the 1940s or 50s, Reuben James’ furrowed fields would have been ploughed by a Ferguson System, not by a mule pulling a single-furrow John Deere plough. I think that that would have greatly improved his outlook on life. I’ll explain this to Kenny Rogers next time we meet.