Imagine you are a caveman.  You hunt for your family as a living.  After a good day of hunting, you drag your catch home and make a fire.  You have mastered the art of preparing a meal – from the specific trees you cut down for the wood to use as fuel;  to your lucky stone which you use to light the spark and the special mix of herbs and spices your better half collected during the day.  You are an enthusiast of your art.  You have even started writing stories about your art on cave walls…

Fast forward to the 18th century and the advent of the stove.  Your art is disappearing, your role in the family is changing.

Today you still go out to earn for your family, albeit in an entirely different way.  To feed the family is mostly a quick task of cooking something on the stove, popping a ready-made meal in the microwave or grabbing burgers from the drive-through.  Sometimes, over weekends, you still light a fire and use that fire for a barbeque.  But it is no longer just about feeding the family.  It is about reconnecting with that caveman or some form of socialization…

The same type of change has happened to laundry.  Where it once was all hand-washed, it is now mostly done by a machine.  Instead of getting a workout doing the laundry, housewives can now go out for a yoga session while the washing machine does its thing.  But occasionally, some clothing items still need to be washed by hand as they are too fragile for the machine or, in my case, were too deeply stained in some accident involving something that fell off the pizza that was just delivered to my front door.

There are many such examples where technology has eliminated the mundane, but the old-fashioned item is still used from time to time.  Riding a horse, posting a letter, lighting a candle and going to the library – those are all very special things today.

As a car enthusiast, I read quite a lot about what other people, also enthusiasts, write about cars.  There is a general lack of enthusiasm for “green” cars.  The Toyota Prius hybrid gets ridiculed as the dullest of appliances and  the Nissan Leaf electric car also does not excite.  As governments crack down on air pollution, the Jeremy Clarksons of this world worry that cars running internal combustion engines may be outlawed soon.

Enter the Tesla Model S.  The electric car has evolved into something that even those in the know praise.  It even won quite a few awards from the motoring press.

My prediction is that fossil-fuelled cars will become something very rare and special very soon.  All of us will use zero-emission electric cars for our daily commutes.  I first thought we will just keep the gasmobiles for long road trips.  But Tesla’s expanding network of Supercharger stations, that aim to recharge the battery of an electric car in no time, may even put an end to that.

Perhaps they will become the future prized possessions of only a luck few.  Those with the financial means to own the space to store an extra vehicle and to pay the astronomic prices for heavily-taxed fuel will be the only ones to be labelled petrolheads.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man” – George Bernard Shaw.

Just last night my sister was telling me about South Africans that lived in Hong Kong for a few years and recently returned to South Africa.  They have been shocked by the deterioration of service levels in their home country in the time they have been abroad.  There are countless cases of South Africans complaining about service levels.  We talk about it a lot when we gather together – banks, cellular service providers, the post office, government offices and car dealerships are favourites amongst those who get complained about.  One guy even created a web-based business on our moans and groans… Others resort to mass protests and sometimes violence to voice their frustration.

The above quote often goes through my head when I feel my blood pressure reaching the ceiling due to the general apathy of service givers in this country.  I have no qualms with being labelled unreasonable in order to get things done.  That does not mean that I do not wonder about why the person on the other side – staring at me blankly, shaking their head in disbelief at my unhappiness or whispering something to their colleague in a language they think I do not comprehend – just does not get or care about me.  I am their paying customer after all…

Perhaps the cultural differences between myself and this person are just too big.

Perhaps the system of reward for this person discourages them from doing a good job.

Perhaps the system does not support them in providing good service and the problem can be blamed on someone else upstream in the service chain…

Sometimes I fear that my unreasonableness is shortening my own lifespan and I force myself to just accept it.  Fight the fights that matter.  Go all Art of War on it…

My partner’s little cheap and cheerful city runabout named Pixie, a Kia Picanto, went in for her second scheduled service about ten days ago.  Pixie is two years old and have about 17,000km on the clock.  As part of this service, we asked that her passenger-side rear-view mirror’s control be looked at.  We showed the service advisor how the mechanism has become very stiff and it was now impossible to adjust the mirror with any degree of accuracy…

When we went to pick up Pixie from her service, the same service advisor told us there was nothing wrong with the mirror.

Blood pressure rising.

I suggested that he shows me how to operate the mirror.  On our way to the car, he pointed out that these mirror mechanisms never break on these cars.  “So what?” I asked.  “Does that mean that this one is not broken?”

Uncomfortable silence.

So he attempted to adjust the mirror, only to then realize (admit?) that the mirror mechanism was indeed broken.  He called one of the workshop personnel to have a look too.  Same realization dawned.

As these things never break, they did not have the part available.  They will phone us when it was there.  Sun Tzu landed on my left shoulder and suggested that we just forget about the incident and the problem.  How often does one adjust one’s passenger-side rear-view mirror anyway?

To say that my experience with after sales service at car dealerships is jaded, is an understatement.  Three years ago, it took seven weeks and six visits to a dealership before the ABS braking, traction & stability control as well as cruise control (some rather important safety features, it could be argued) on my Mercedes SLK (still under warranty and maintenance program) functioned again.  The correct part was only ordered after about four weeks and three visits – that is, after I had contacted someone in a senior position at Mercedes-Benz South Africa I had previous dealings with.  Said part was then thought not to solve the problem and resulted in the follow-up visits.  After it was finally fixed, the service advisor admitted to me that the the new part was fitted the wrong way around on the first few tries…

That service experience was instrumental in my decision to swap brand to Audi.  It took four dealership visits over a period of a year for my brand new Audi’s one seat to stop visibly vibrating and audibly rattling.  This sounds pretty petty (unreasonable again?) until you realize that I stay in the financial capital of South Africa, where roads have so many potholes and irregularities due to fixed-up potholes that such nagging noises cannot be nullified by turning up the radio…

Along the way, the problems’ existence were denied and also blamed on the alleged after-market leather fitted to the car.  I had the car custom-built the way it is.  The leather was part and parcel of the nearly R70k’s worth of factory-fitted options I specified to the car.  Needless to way, the insinuation that I had after-market leather took my rpm way beyond the red line…

The pattern I have noticed, with myself and others, is that we can accept that mirror mechanisms and such things fail or break.  It is the banter and false promises from the service advisors that irk  us – the thought that the mechanism never breaks, the admission that the part was fitted the wrong way around, the insinuations that one mistreated the product…

After all this, you will share my shock and surprise when Kia Sandton contacted us yesterday to say that a new mirror mechanism has arrived for Pixie.  We could pop in for thirty minutes whenever we wanted and they would have her fixed up.  We did so around lunchtime yesterday.  I followed in the former rattlebox to the dealership to take my partner to lunch while we waited, thinking that thirty minutes would be closer to three hours.  It turned out to be forty minutes. 

Wow, I am impressed.  I guess that Mercedes-Benz and Audi, with products costing four times as much as Pixie each, have lowered my expectations to such an extent that when someone does what they promise, I am surprised.  No, shocked.

There are millions of articles, books, etc. about secrets to success.  Many read a book that shares Warren Buffet’s investment secrets, emulate that and then hope to succeed.  Said Mr Buffet himself is known to say that he is a follower of Dale Carnegie’s “How to win friends and influence people”.  Then there are articles that tell us that the world is changing at such a pace that whatever resulted in success yesterday is, well, history.

My observation is that there is something different for on-going success.  It is called re-invention.  Those who do it well remain relevant in a changing world, some have a mixed bag and those who do not succeed may disappear into obscurity.

Here are a few examples from my lifetime…

Hillary Clinton has gone from First lady to Senator to failed Presidential candidate to Secretary of State to so-far-fav for 2016 President with intermittent scandal along the way.  Maggie Thatcher, on the other hand, struggled to re-invent herself post-PM and ended up a sad figure played by Meryl Streep.  May the Iron Lady rest in peace.

Al Gore went from VP to the guy that lost to Bush in court to Environmentalist, winning an Oscar and the Nobel prize over the years…

Madonna went from Material girl to Sex kitten to B-rated actress to Ms Peron to Easter Mystic to American girl next door to Ms Ritchie to Mother figure to Britney to Kabbalah to who-knows-what-else…  Victoria Beckham did Posh Spice, then Mrs Becks and now is involved with the design and trim of Range Rovers.

Here at home, Nelson Mandela (terrorist, prisoner, peacemaker, president, father of a nation, AIDS activist) and Oscar Pistorius (Paralympic golden boy, fighter for equal rights, Olympic athlete, gun-loving bad boy, girlfriend killer – the last bit being intentional or not) come to mind.

Companies and brands go through the same.  Apple was the computer maker for eccentrics and became the provider of cool multimedia gadgets – disrupting the music, movie, book, telephone, newspaper industries along the way. Microsoft was IBM’s operating systems supplier, then became the world’s computing power, failed at emulating Apple more than once, succeeded at console gaming and still is what billions of workers in business have on their screen every day.

Volkswagen is another great example.  It started way before my lifetime intended as the people’s car for Nazis, post-WW2 became the people’s car of the recovering West Germany, the car of choice for hippies in the 60s, the go-faster yuppie boy racer’s car in the 80s…  As the German people became more affluent and their tastes became more discerning, VWs became more and more upmarket to the point where the VW Group now owns cheaper brands in Europe (Skoda and SEAT), de-content their cars for the cheap-and-cheerful Americans (current Jetta and US-market German Camry called Passat) and regurgitate older tech for the developing world’s people (the Golf Mk 1 as the CitiGolf and the Polo Mk 4 as the Polo Vivo here in South Africa;  as well as some similar interesting things in Brazil and China). 

Mercedes-Benz went through Hillary’s Lewinsky era when it replaced “Engineered unlike any other” with the not-so-reliable “Future of the Automobile”.  Thankfully it has returned to its former glory as “The Best or Nothing”.  BMW went from the stylish “Ultimate Driving Machine”, gained some dubious styling, then brought “joy” to the world and now is all Al Gore with “Efficient Dynamics” – all a bit confusing.

What do I learn from this for my own personal life?  Well, this is what I have been pondering about the last few months.  So, watch this space…

So I decided to start blogging again…

My previous personal attempts were deleted at a point where I had a sudden fear of the invasion of my privacy.  I guess my self-confidence or faith in the goodness of all mankind is at a point where I am brave enough again to share my somewhat banal thoughts on all and sundry in the online universe.  You can read some stuff I blogged for my former employer here.

Part of the reason why I am restarting this is that I handed my dissertation for my MBA in this morning.  So after a few years of blood, sweat and tears, it is hopefully done and dusted.  Now the long wait for up to 14 weeks start before I hear the final result.  Obviously I have views on the MBA program and I am sure they will crop up in future postings but I promise that this will not turn out into one of those things in life that promote the stereotypical view of those with the loved and loathed three letters behind their names.

But today is about contemplating what comes next.  Probably some mindless fun like reading slapstick fiction.  And doing some creative stuff – like starting a blog.