A Time of Magic

With the “click once to execute” culture that many people are increasingly settling into, it’s perhaps not surprising that they assume that the click is followed by instant action behind the scenes.

How many of us have clicked “complete order” and assume that someone in Amazon is immediately going to run along the shelves in the warehouse and start picking out the books for their order? Sometimes that may happen but I suspect that it’s very rare indeed for someone to be sitting there as your order comes in and immediately start collecting the books for it.

In our own case, we generally pick up reservations in the morning but that doesn’t stop people clicking “book now” and phoning within a few minutes to confirm that we’ve received the booking. It’s getting worse too. One interesting development that seems sure to grow is having someone book a room from their car and arrive within a few minutes. Quite why they bother to book online from a car that’s only a few minutes away is beyond me but it happened a couple of times last summer.

Surely people haven’t parted so much with reality that they think that everything behind the click is automated?

One basic assumption that just about everyone emmigrating to a foreign country makes is that the children will pick up the language very quickly and be truly bilingual from pretty much as soon as they can speak if they’re under 5 when the family moves.

This isn’t what happens in practice though.

What you find is that, unless you are careful, your children will grow up being able to speak to you in perfect english but unable either to speak to or understand other english speakers. Sadly, you’ll not notice this until it’s too late to do anything about it as they’ll usually appear to be completely fluent when speaking to you but they’re fluent in the sense that your 2 year old is fluent: your brain makes all kinds of allowances for the errors that they make and it sounds like proper english, but it, of course, isn’t for your 2 year old.

If you keep an eye on the children of neighbours in areas where there are some, but not lots, of expats you’ll find this effect gets more and more evident for children of ages from 10 downwards. Above that, they’ll tend to pronounce english words with the foreign accent but are still understandable by others.

That’s just the spoken language too: the written word is something for another post.

Do you ever think that calling a house valuer an “expert” is something of a misnomer?

For most of us, their job is very easy indeed. Before they go to a house to do a valuation they look up the prices at which similar houses in the area have been selling for. Unless there’s something very special about your house then that’s the price that they’re almost certainly going to run with although you’re going to be charged several hundred for that valuation all the same.

It’s different out in the country though. There houses aren’t quite standard and therefore the prices should be individual to each house. Indeed they should, but here again chances are that your valuer will have looked up similar houses either in your area or a little further afield if necessary and therefore will be coming along with a very good idea of what figure that he’ll be using.

Realistically, of course, they can’t do much more than that. After all, that few hundred isn’t really enough to do an in-depth study of your house such as would be required to give a true figure taking account of all the differences from your house and the way that it would have been built originally eg that kitchen you added, the garage you knocked down, etc.

The question nowadays though is: how come the valuers are required these days when anyone can look up house prices locally?