The Art of Unnecessary Innovation

Yesterday I collected a Lexus IS 220 from a compound near Coventry to take home for the night and then deliver to a dealership in Oldbury this morning. I had never driven this model before and when I was handed the key I realised, with a certain sinking feeling, that it was not a key at all, just a small black plastic fob.

There are several makes of car nowadays that have ‘keyless’ ignition systems. Some require the fob to be fitted into a slot in the dashboard somewhere, before a button can be pressed to start the engine. Some will not let you start the engine at all unless you have your foot on the clutch, or the brake pedal. Others will only start if you press the button for the right length of time – press it for too long and you will instigate an ‘instrument check’, which involves a few seconds of flashing lights and messages on the dashboard before the whole thing goes dark again. The only thing that all of these systems have in common is that even when you have figured out exactly what hoops you have to jump through in order to start the vehicle it will never be any quicker or easier than just putting a key in the ignition and then turning it.

(In case you’re wondering, the combination for the Lexus turned out to be a foot on the clutch and then one quick press of the start button.)

It’s hard not to think that there are a lot of people employed in car design these days who have run out of ideas for making genuine improvements and who have resorted to endless tinkering and tampering instead in the hope that their superiors might not realise that they are no longer performing any useful function.

I recently picked up a vehicle, whose make I can no longer remember, and was driving through Birmingham with my bag on the passenger seat. At one point, as I rounded a bend, my bag moved slightly. This caused a hidden sensor somewhere to deduce that my bag was a living, breathing passenger, who ought to be wearing a seat belt. This in turn set off a flashing red light on the dashboard and a loud continuous pinging. There was nowhere to pull over and so the only way to stop the alarm was to reach across, while driving, and fasten a seat belt around an inanimate object.

I wonder if this uber-safety measure has yet resulted in anyone becoming safely embedded in the front of an oncoming vehicle.

On another occasion I was driving north to Scotland along the M6. It was very early in the morning and the road were deserted. Let’s just say I may have been traveling in excess of 70mph. In the distance I spotted a police patrol car on a bridge and immediately braked hard, hoping that I had slowed down quickly enough to be able to glide inconspicuously past the officers. But the car turned out to contain an on-board nanny which had other ideas. It decided that everyone in the vicinity needed to be aware of how sharply I had braked, and automatically put on the hazard warning lights. By the time I had realised what had happened, and then found the button to turn them off again, the bridge with the patrol car on it was already in my rear view mirror.

Yesterday, I arrived home with the Lexus, pressed the button on the fob to lock it, and nothing happened. I tried pressing the button just once, then double-clicking it and then holding it down, and yet the vehicle remained resolutely unlocked. I eventually concluded that since there was nothing of value in there and no visible buttons on the doors to show that they were open, I didn’t really need to solve the mystery and left it unlocked.

I returned to it this morning to find that it would not start – the battery was drained to the point where even the dash lights would not come on. The AA man who eventually arrived to jump-start it suggested that it had probably been picking up a signal from the fob in the house and that this all-night communication had been enough to run the battery down.

Of course there are ways around all of these pointless innovations – make sure you always put a seat belt around anything on the passenger seat, and make sure you know where the hazard warning light switch is. And, if you are determined to buy a Lexus IS 220, all you have to do is buy another car as well so that you can transport the fob to another address a safe distance away every night and then retrieve it in the morning. Just make sure this extra car isn’t also a Lexus, otherwise the process will never end.

The Strange World of Forex

The wage I get for working as a trade plater varies a lot depending on how many vehicles I deliver and how many miles I drive, but generally it ranges from adequate to abysmal. For a while now I’ve been doing other bits and pieces to top up my earnings. Recently, the main one of these extra-curricular activities has been ‘matched betting’, a system by which you take advantage of the free bets and other bonuses that bookmakers offer as incentives to open an account with them. There are ways of guaranteeing yourself a profit from these regardless of the outcome of the events that you bet on. The only problem with this is that you eventually start to run out of new bookmakers to sign up with (I now have accounts with over fifty of them.)

As a possible replacement for this I have been learning about spread betting on the foreign exchange markets (forex). This basically involves betting on whether the pound will rise or fall in value against another currency. For each point that it moves in your chosen direction you win a certain amount, and for each point that it moves in the other direction you lose that same amount.

I know nothing about economics, and whilst researching forex I’ve come across some odd facts. Did you know that seventy percent of Britain’s Gross Domestic Product now comes from ’servicing’ ? I’m still not sure exactly what this means but we are clearly no longer a nation that spends much time making anything anymore.

On an average day over three trillion dollars is traded in forex – more than twenty times the total of all the other financial markets put together. Here’s another odd fact – ninety percent of this trading is not done by institutions or individuals who have any use for the currency they are buying or selling, instead it is pure speculation. And another – most of this speculative trading is not carried out by human beings but is executed automatically by ‘bots’ – software which analyses previous price movements and then predicts future ones.

With stocks and shares it’s possible for the big traders, hedge funds etc, to influence prices to suit their own ends, but this cannot be done with forex, the market is just too large. This lack of control makes it more likely that exchange rates will move up and down in recognisable patterns making it possible, apparently, to consistently make money if you adopt a system that suits the currencies and timeframes you are trading in.

So, if it’s that easy why isn’t everyone doing it? Most likely it will turn out not to be that easy. But on the other hand there clearly are a lot of people already doing it. It’s worth noting that even in the ‘mugs game’ of conventional gambling there are systems such as arbitrage and each-way thieving which are reliable enough in the long run that if a bookmaker realises what you are doing they will usually pay you the compliment of closing your account.

There is a part of me that wants this plan to work well enough for me to be able to give up plating and be free from the downsides of the job – the stress of dealing with my stressed-out controller, a vindictive public transport system, those staff at car dealerships who save their charm for the people who might want to buy something from them, and those middle class homeowners who can’t wait to ask me for some identification when I arrive on their doorsteps to collect their vehicles.

Imagine if I could make a living just sitting at home trading currencies? I would never have to pretend to like anyone again.

But as a former know-it-all left wing activist there is also a part of me that is uneasy about the idea of making money without actually doing anything to earn it. And where would the money really come from? If I made £100 in the forex markets would I have won it from some other speculator who made the wrong guess, or does the whole of this great tide of speculation have some wider impact? Would I be a smart gambler or a small time capitalist?

But anyway, all I’ve achieved in three months of trading with a demo account is to lose one hundred and ten pretend pounds, so maybe I shouldn’t be worrying about the moral dilemmas of joining the idle rich just yet.

One Down

‘C_n_i_e.’

‘A fitting farewell. It’s a trick, with one plus one plus one minus zero (7).’

Bloody crosswords. Why does she have to make one clue impossible so you can never finish the things? It only took me half an hour to do all the rest of it, and now I’ve sat here for another half hour just trying to figure out this last one. Who does she think she is, the compiler for the Sunday Times or something? It’s only for the bloody parish gazette. What’s the point of making a clue so hard that none of the handful of our fellow pensioners who actually bother to look at the thing will be able to do it? She’s most likely just showing off.

I stare at the hand-drawn puzzle, rattling through the short list of words I can think of that fit there, and trying yet again to see how any of them might have a connection with the clue.

If she gets back from that witches’ coven of a book group and sees that I haven’t finished it then she’ll have won a petty victory over me. Well let her have it, I can’t be bothered anymore.

I toss the piece of paper onto the coffee table, next to the half-eaten plate of sausage egg and chips that has long since turned stone cold. I pick up the fork, idly skewer a piece of sausage with it, and then hold it up to watch a blob of fat drip slowly off the end. I put it back down with a sigh. On the other side of the table lurks a glass of my horrendous damson wine. I only drink the wretched stuff out of principle. I started making it with the idea of getting something for nothing, ‘owt for nowt’ as my old dad used to say, and now that it’s ready I feel I ought to get through it, otherwise the end result will be nothing for something – all that effort for no return, and as a Yorkshireman it’s not in my blood to accept such a thing. But at the moment the thought of it seems to make my stomach wince.

I pick up the remote from the arm of the sofa and switch the TV on. Antiques Roadshow! I had forgotten all about it. This is more like it! I settle back into the sofa and relax. I could watch this programme every day for ten years and still learn nothing, but for me that’s not the point. I love the enthusiasm of the team, and the etiquette with which the show is conducted. That is how life should be. None of those charming people will go home tonight and find themselves sitting on a threadbare sofa, picking at cold food, drinking nasty wine, and gazing at the TV over the top of their propped up feet, with one toe sticking out of an undarned sock.
On the screen an elderly couple are being told that their collection of garish clay pots, made by a long-deceased distant relative, should be insured for around two thousand pounds. They beam at each other and nod their thanks to the sagacious man in the tweed suit and red bow tie.

When was the last time we looked at each other like that? When was the last time we really looked at each other at all? Silence and sniping are the ways we communicate nowadays – everything else has withered away after thirty-nine years. Like that old joke goes, I could have killed her and been out by now. Could have killed her maybe three times over. That woman has been a millstone around my bloody neck.

I think I’m as fair-minded as the next man, but sometimes it seems to me that the world was a more sensible place before womens’ lib. came along. These days every woman must have the right to try and upstage and belittle her husband at every opportunity.

‘C_n_i_e.’ What the hell is it?

But then again, what is the point in fretting? We are both too long in the tooth to change our ways now. This is how things will be until one or the other of us pops our clogs. Probably me.

Lord, how I depress myself sometimes! I brace myself and then pick up the wine glass and knock the contents back. It leaves a coating on the inside of my mouth that feels as if it could take the skin off. I decide that I’d better have a glass of water to wash it down with and so I heave myself up and head for the kitchen. As I’m returning there is the sound of footsteps on our gravel driveway. About time! She must have been gassing to her cronies again. But the letterbox flaps once and then the footsteps recede. I frown and make my way to the hallway to find that there is a glossy leaflet awaiting me, extolling the virtues of a new pizza delivery firm. I drop it back onto the floor and return to the sofa. The last one of those we tried had so little flavour that we may as well have eaten the bloody leaflet instead. What a con!

Con?

The word rings a bell somewhere in my head. Yes, of course! That could very well be the ‘trick’ part of the clue!

I pick up the sheet again and see what progress this makes. If the first part is ‘con’ then the whole thing probably means ‘a fitting farewell’, while the last four letters somehow signify ‘one plus one plus one minus zero.’ A standard clue for the letter ‘i’ is ‘one’, as in Roman numerals, so that is probably one ‘one’ taken care of.

‘Con_i_e.’

Confine? Confide? What kind of farewell begins with ‘con’? I wouldn’t put it past her to use Latin or some other foreign language. Au revoir? Adios? Auf wiedersehen? Nothing even close. I stare across the room at the tattered old dictionary sitting heavy on the bookshelf. Can I be bothered? No – there must be hundreds of words beginning with ‘con’.

On the TV a middle-aged gentleman is having his collection of distinctive walking sticks examined. He has about two hundred of the things. Whoever would have thought there would be so many different types worth collecting? He owns one ancient stick which has a gargoyle’s head on top of it, and which was apparently once owned by royalty.

But I can’t concentrate. That damned clue has wormed its way into my brain. I’m so close now; all I have to do is get the dictionary and start ploughing through the ‘con’s and sooner or later I’ll have the answer, and then the victory will be mine.

The gentleman is being told that his collection could be worth up to six thousand pounds. Six bloody grand! I look at my own plain old stick propped up in the corner and sigh as I get up to fetch the dictionary.

I pull it down from its perch, find the ‘con’s, and then begin to scan through for any that are seven letters long, ending in ‘e’. The first possibility is ‘concise’. This can also mean pertinent, and could therefore perhaps be the ‘fitting’ part of the clue, but there is nothing that could be interpreted as meaning farewell.

Next comes ‘confide’ and ‘confine’, which are similarly unhelpful. Then after a couple more pages I find the odd-looking ‘coniine’. The double ‘i’ leaps out at me straightaway – ‘one plus one’. And the ‘ne’ on the end could be ‘one’ minus ‘o’. But how is this ‘a fitting farewell’?

The definition is: ‘n a liquid, highly poisonous alkaloid found in hemlock (Conium). – Also conia, conine or conin. [Gr koneion hemlock]‘

I can’t see a connection there, and yet the rest of it seems to fit so well. I ponder over this for a minute and then throw the crossword down again in frustration. I’ve had enough of the bloody thing. The silly old mare has probably made a mistake anyway.

I stand up to put the dictionary away, but find that I have to sit straight back down again, my head is spinning and I am suddenly short of breath. What on earth is going on? My mind starts to race.

Should I phone a doctor?

Could I even get to the phone?

Maybe I should give it a minute. Maybe it will pass.

But the panic just seems to make my breath grow shorter still.

I look up at the clock. Twenty past seven! Where the hell is that bloody woman?

This story was short-listed for the Fish International Short Story Prize in 2005, and appeared in Raw Edge magazine in 2007

Changes

I’m widening the scope of this blog to give myself a break from only writing about trade plating.

If anyone has been unable to access the site in the last couple of weeks this was due to me changing the privacy settings while I made some alterations, and then forgetting to change them back.