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I attach my necklace, adjust my hair, slip my camera, notepad and pen into my bag. I snap the lid of my laptop shut. Time to head down to the main dining room, punctuality is key. I need to be there before the captain’s guests arrive at his table. I have the list of their names in my note pad, I must make sure I put the right captions on the right photos ready for tomorrow morning!
The other articles are ready for tomorrow’s edition of the Daily Seagull, accounts of the daily activities, the programme for the day to come, an article on the markets of Istanbul, another on the best restaurants, so the passengers can take this ashore with them when we dock tomorrow. It will be printed during the night and delivered to them with their breakfast.
On my way up to the dining room, I greet some of the passengers I have already met during this cruise. Reg will meet me later once I have finished snapping the blushing honeymooners, the retired lovebirds and the golden girls as they wine and dine. He has been busy running the cyber cafe; even on holiday there are still plenty of people who like to stay in touch, and during the days at sea, some of the seniors like to get a quick crash course in using the internets. He’s such a good and patient teacher!
Another 4 days and we’ll be back home, 10 days rest and then we’re off again for another 2 week cruise, this time it’ll be in the carribean.
I don’t usually remember my dreams, and they are very rarely worth talking about, they’re usually either insanely abstract or they involve running around looking for a toilet that doesn’t exist. But this one was so precise and clear in my mind that I thought it might be worth a post. I would like to add that not only have I never actually thought about this subject before and it has nothing to do with current events, I wonder if years of watching the Love Boats as a kid are now seeping back up into my subconscious for some reason…
Then again, if there are any cruise companies out there who would like to hire me (well, us), please get in touch!
The first time I stumbled across moo.com was on flickr. A little button below my latest uploaded pic which offered to print it onto business cards for me. I was intrigued, and I clicked.
The first thing that strikes you about moo.com is how simple and friendly it all is: the site design is light and airy without being too cold, coulourful, yet uncluttered and straightforward, and the tone of voice, my very favourite piece of the journey, is consistent from the tagline at the top, “we love to print”, to the emails you receive for confirmation and dispatch of your order. Below is an example:
Hello
I’m Little MOO – the bit of software that will be managing your order
with us. It will shortly be sent to Big MOO, our print machine who will
print it for you in the next few days. I’ll let you know when it’s done
and on its way to you.Flickr users, listen up: Please do not remove the photos from your
account, or change their privacy settings, until your order has been
printed, or some pictures may come out blank.You can track and manage your order at: [secure url]
Estimated Arrival Date: Mon 8 Mar 2010
Remember, I’m just a bit of software. So, if you have any questions
regarding your order please first read our Frequently Asked Questions
at:and if you’re still not sure, contact customer services (who are real
people) at:Thanks,
Little MOO, Print RobotMOO
“We love to print”
See, it’s all about personality. Just take the tagline, We love to print. We = people, love = emotion, to print = action. The message is cristal clear: the people at moo.com enjoy their work, and care about what they do. What that tells me, the prospective customer, is that they are real people, that they are passionate about their work, and that they will take care of my order and get it right. And guess what, they did! The products were of top notch quality, dispatched on time, and the payment and order process was a breeze.
Actually, let’s take a second to talk about the ordering process.
Moo.com is linked to several well known sites, such as flickr, facebook and etsy. Just pop in your login, and your photos are all there, inside the moo interface, for you to drag and drop, rotate, crop, sort, etc. There are a few things that could be added to the process, but to be honest, it’s such fun to use, it doesn’t have to be perfect! Pricing-wise, they are very reasonable, with mini-cards starting from £11.99 for 100, and a range of other products. As far as I know, their mini-card format, double-sided colour print on high-quality card, is fairly unique.
To compliment that, they also develop the community feeling, inviting people to send in examples of the things they have done with their moo products, and in turn, they have acted on those examples to create new products, new opportunities for sales, of course, but also benefiting the customers because they respond to their desires. For example, a lot of people really loved the funky format of the minicards so much that instead of using them as business cards, they assembled them on their walls or in frames to create mosaic-like pictures and displays. And lo!, moo came up with the minicard frame, £19.99, specially designed so you can snap your minicards into place and rearrange at will. They are currently out of stock.
Moo has a blog, a twitter account, and so-on, but unlike most companies they talk like real people. Probably because they actually are. Seriously, check out the blog, there are some awesome examples on there of the power of moo’s products and the things you can do with them.
Admittedly, giving your emailing software a cute persona may not be suited to all companies, and the tone of voice is very much part of every brand and is therefore obviously very different from one business to another, but I think a lot can be learned from moo.com’s smooth, simple purchasing process and their lovely tone of voice. When you buy from them, and get that email from Little Moo (I think I’m actually a little bit in love with Little Moo), you just feel all warm inside, and you’re excited about receiving your products.
That’s when you turn a customer into a fan, and that’s how you get people writing blogs about how awesome you are.
After several years of living in one of the smaller countries in Europe*, and an island to boot, you do tend to forget just how far one can just drive on the old continent. Since Aer Lingus weren’t yet doing direct flights to Toulouse, we decided it would be a good idea to fly to Paris, rent a car, and then drive down. It’s not that far, we’ve done it before, we thought to ourselves. Well, yes, but we have rather gotten out of the habit of those long drives. So it was long, and in the tiny Chevrolet Matiz we had been given by Hertz, it was rather rough. Not only was the car the size of a small yoghurt pot, but it has the same suspension as one and the engine of a small lawn mower. I would love to see Jeremy Clarkson do a review of it, but unfortunately he probably wouldn’t fit inside it, and I don’t think they do convertibles.
Anyhoo, once we were underway, it was time to indulge in one of the forgotten pleasures of the roadtrip: car games. The one we usually play is one I spontaneously invented one day, while bored on yet another long trip: it’s called Buzzard. It involves spotting buzzards. But only when they’re perched on the fence along the side of the road; buzzards in a tree, on the ground or in the air don’t count (these strict rules evolved over the course of many years of Making It Up As I Went So Hubby Would Score Less Points Than Me). This might seem frightfully boring and unlikely to happen, but down in the South West of France, you would be surprised by how common buzzards on fences can be. I think our record score on the one trip was something like 18-12. Of course, if you’re in a country where buzzards are less common, you can adapt it to the local fauna. In fact there is a very similar game mentioned in the most excellent film Eagle vs Shark, where they spot horses…
So on the trip down, I won with a pathetic score of 2-1, in spite of the gloriously sunny weather, the buzzards were being very shy. Or maybe they had somehow found out about our game and had decided to thwart our attempts to pass the time, for we saw quite a few of them in trees and flying around and I was left cursing my stupid rules. As we left the long, relatively straight lines of the A20 motorway and chugged off along the twisting roads of the Lot, we passed many alocal, leaning on their spades or their fence posts, watching us drive past as if we were the first car they had seen since 1965. I’m always torn when we go to see Hubby’s parents, between the loveliness of the countryside and the heartbreaking state of them and their house. It’s so sad when people just let go. But let’s not get bogged down in that.
During our 7 day stay, we clocked up over 2000km in our little yoghurt pot car. We saw a few buzzards, a lot of motorway, friends, family, and a few lovely places. In fact, on our way back up to Paris, a long, 7 hour trip, we took the main roads rather than the tolled motorway for a short stretch, and drove past the Hotel where the Tarte Tatin was invented, and one of the Cheateaux de la Loire! When using the car for needs-only transport, we do tend to forget the niceness of a road trip, long or short, just for the sake of going somewhere new. In fact, after many years of being driven around by my parents, it’s nice to go anywhere without having a massive argument.
Go on, go for a ride. Count the buzzards.
*Of course, I am only referring to proper countries, not the silly little ones like Andorra or Luxembourg.
Anyone who has ever met me will probably agree that I can not really be categorised as “cool”. Not by a long shot. Well, certainly not in terms of mainstream coolness. I was not a cheerleader at school. This was partly due to the fact that I didn’t grow up in an American sitcom, but if I had, I would have been the nerdy anti-hero. Or to be truly honest, I wouldn’t have even had a speaking part, I would have been one of the extras who weren’t even nerdy enough to be one of the uncool main characters.
If I may paraphrase a concept of my dear Terry Pratchett’s, un-cool is the true opposite of cool, it’s out through blandness and out the other side. I am simply lacking coolness. If extreme heat burns, and extreme cold burns, they are true opposites, like cool and uncool. I am somewhere just above 0 celcius. Just nippy enough to be uncomfortable, but not cold enough to make ice-cream. I could probably keep your salad fresh for a bit though.
So, like many people before me, I’ve always wondered what exactly makes people “cool”. What are those subtle differences that differentiate those who get to sit at the back of the bus on school outings? If one is to believe educational movies such as Grease, for example, the key to becoming cool and getting the guy you want is dressing in insanely tight trousers and taking up smoking. Ahhh, different times. So, is it the clothes, the attitude, what?
And then, out of the blue, as I was sitting in the Ikea restaurant, half way through a meatball, with a dribble of lingonberry sauce running down my top*, the answer popped straight into my head.
Cool people wear sunglasses, even when it’s dark.
Cool people wear hats, even when they’re inside.
Cool people wear vintage clothes when they could easily afford new ones.
Cool people wear corsets even though they don’t have back problems.
Cool people wear fleece-lined ugg boots on the beach.
Cool people lie on UV beds even though they have no vitamin D deficiencies.
Cool people drive cars that go way faster than any legal speed limit, can’t get over speed bumps and have ridiculously small boots**.
Cool people take horse tranquilisers even though they’re obviously not horses.
That’s IT! It’s all about wearing or using potentially useful things that you DON’T NEED.
Right. Next time I go out clubbing, I’ll be wearing a retainer, ski boots, a hazmat suit with an adult nappy over the top, I’ll be carrying a pickaxe and a beach umbrella in my Ikea Big Blue Bag, and I’ll drive to the club in a golf cart.
Coolness here I come!
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*This ALWAYS happens. No matter where I am, what I’m eating or how expensive the top in question, I will always dribble a drop of sauce down my front. Such is life.
**Boots as in trunks, for the Americans and other aliens who may be reading this. although it would be cool if cars ran on hundreds of tiny little booted feet rather than boring old round wheels.
My book(s) on lulu.com
