Will the Machine Stop?
E M Forster’s short story ‘The Machine Stops’, written in 1909, tells us about a future where, in effect, almost all human beings live their lives inside what we now call the Internet.
Every person on Earth lives alone in an identical room under the surface of the Earth, having collectively abandoned the surface and its messy ‘humanness’ for the predictability and comfort of what is, in all ways except name, a vast and universal hotel where all services, and all life’s needs, are delivered in the rooms. At a command, a bath rises from the floor or music plays or the enormous maintenance and repair system, out of human sight, and apparently now out of human control, responds.
Through a console (Forster’s word), each person in his hexagonal cell (think prison, as well as bee-hive) is in permanent communication with the rest of the world, by sound and vision, unless they choose to isolate themselves, by specific action, as the default position of this Internet is ‘On’. The main character, Vashti, ‘knew several thousand people’. Forster comments, ironically, ‘in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously’.
When the story starts, the manual for operating the room (and the console) has taken on the status of a Holy Book, just as the Machine also, in many minds, has become deified. Some people have even developed personal rituals and taboos surrounding the Book.
Physical travel now happens only rarely and with great reluctance; the door out of the cell has fallen into disuse for most people. A transport system of underground railcars and intercontinental rocket-planes survives, but the trains and planes often move empty. Only to fulfil ones reproductive duty (also organised by the Machine) does one travel any great distance and then only once or twice, and then only with permission mediated by the machine.
People, it seems, do recognise the existence of their mothers, but they rarely meet. Contact through the Machine is enough for most people, but not for Kuno, who has decided that he wants to meet Vashti who is his mother. He tells her he sees ‘something like you on the plate [screen], but I do not see you’. She goes to visit him across half the world but the visit is sterile and the journey disturbing.
People feel they are happy and it’s implied in the story that those very few dissatisfied are somehow dealt with, possibly exiled to the surface, where Kuno eventually also goes, through an ancient airlock, out of curiosity, to see the stars, and is briefly both poisoned and exhilarated by fresh air.
‘Ideas’ (might we now call them ‘memes’?) rule – and have to be ‘interesting’. They sweep in minutes round the world, just as quickly fading away. Vashti gives a ten-minute lecture on ‘Music in the Australian period’ ranging from the pre-Mongolian epoch to the ‘great outburst of song that followed the Chinese conquest’. She has an audience, she has a chat-room like response and then everyone’s interest sweeps to the next thing, which, it is certain, will be another commentary or second-hand recounting, but about nothing experienced first hand. Even as she flew over the Himalayas and the oceans she ‘got no ideas’, and closed the windows.
All is fine until … the machine stops. This happens slowly; images on the plate become fuzzier, sounds less sharp. The repair mechanism slows and finally the recycled atmosphere itself deteriorates.
The final scene in the story is of all the people stumbling out of their cells into the dark and barely used corridors as the atmosphere fails to refresh, lights dim, systems run down and then ‘the unexpected terror, silence’ replaces the permanent hum they had barely been aware of.
Reading ‘the Machine Stops’ again recently prompted me ask how right and prophetic E M Forster was. Are the roads we have followed and the world we now live in similar to what he predicted?
Certainly 97 years later, in 2006, we float in a sea of data and information of which a large amount is not accessible directly by our senses without tools or instruments. I can read a book or a print-out, but unaided I can’t read a CD or a flash disk, and now my new laptop can’t help me read a floppy disk, of which I still have quite a stock.
Like Vashti I can watch the FIFA World Cup, or something like it, in Germany and, yes, through various electronic devices I can communicate with huge numbers of people.
Yet, in 2006, it’s not really about slavery to computers. The computer is still more of a servant than a master to most people, though it can be alarming to consider how much autonomy we have given these servants, and how we have come to trust systems, like bank computers, electronic voting systems, air traffic control, or databases, or automated medical tests which are not ‘transparent’ to us.
In a recent general election in Uganda the whole national result passed from the constituencies through the laptop of one technician who had set up the national network. I know him, I believe I trust him but I am relieved that the ballot papers are publicly counted at the polling station at the end of the voting day before they are entered into the electronic system.
In a similar vein, it’s not in being confined to cell-like offices or inward-looking malls, or rooms without outside windows or the spread of tele-commuting. An outdoor life remains a desideratum in the West at least; sport, physical culture and tourism ensure that we don’t stay at home all the time and life in the open air is still available to most of the world’s population, albeit obligatory to many, like refugees and displaced people in Darfur.
It’s not in being restricted to fixed or limited means of communication. The portability of elegance of the mobile phone, a true thing of beauty, especially when compared to the clunkiness of the Internet on PCs, was not foreseen by Forster. The democratisation and personalisation of transport, whether Easyjet in Europe or buses in Africa, and the concept of mass tourism, were also not predicted by most writers of Forster’s day.
No, it is more about wondering how disconnected we are becoming from the sources of what keep us going, economically and physically, socially and intellectually. How many of us in the ‘developed world’ know where our power, our water or our food and, importantly, our information come from? Does it matter?
As the Millennium midnight approached I fantasised (as did Ray Bradbury in the fifties about the then nascent national telephone networks) that someone high up (in Microsoft?) might use a single switch – or virus -- which would take control of everything or switch us all off at once, a premise in not a small number of modern techno-thriller films.
Would the effect have been so devastating? Those who embrace intelligent fridges (that tell you when the milk goes sour and order new milk for you) and those who live at the top of a skyscraper would certainly have been affected, as I was in my eighth floor flat in Kinshasa when the power (which also supplied the water pumps) went off.
Some would be locked in or out by their electric security systems (don’t ever believe ‘fail safe’). Over-computerised medical machines might collapse with quite a lot of flat-lining. Quite a number would be turned away at their banks because ‘the lines to Bangalore are down’.
However, much of the world would be less affected. I am based in Entebbe on Lake Victoria, where because the lake level has fallen, we have electric power only every second day. I normally work in small towns in Eastern Congo and Southern Sudan (huge areas, by the way, not small corners of the world) both of which are recovering from war and isolation. These towns have no municipal water supply; if you want electricity you get a generator (with fuel at nearly £1 a litre).
Such areas would quite welcome the Machine, one would suspect (just as my A level literature students in Kenya thought that, given the hardships of rural life, Brave New World was a jolly good thing).
Since globalisation with its return of most complex economic activity to the developed world, even batteries for our radios which used to be made locally are imported, as are light bulbs and bicycles, so to that extent, we are in thrall to the world economy.
Our pastor in Sudan would tell you the same. He needs glasses to read (yes, also a ‘tool’ to access information!) and relies on well-wishers to send them to him from the west or outposts of the west like Nairobi or Johannesburg. The second hand computer that was donated is also languishing since there is no power supply. On the other hand mobile phones have been of immense use and they are slowly penetrating to the smaller towns. One simple example of their value has been a local organisation called Foodnet who send out the prices of commodities in the main city markets every morning, thus helping the rural farmer immensely by cutting out the middle man.
Since globalisation many things that were made here, like batteries, light bulbs and bicycles, along with the skills needed to make them have all disappeared -- along with some of our youth who believe they will do better in the west.
It’s not a rural idyll though. There is the issue of fuel which is imported, over long routes from the Middle East. The mobile phone has to be charged, the operating theatre needs air-conditioning, the newspaper needs to be printed so the generator needs fuel. Solar power has not lived up to its promise; it has never become cheap enough for ordinary people to use. The latest wind-up/solar radio, beloved of aid workers, costs 8 times as much as the little Chinese battery radios you can buy anywhere.
Then there is medicine. The internationals are trying to stop the local factories making generics. My own blood pressure tablets can cost ten times more if I can’t get generics. For people with AIDS the price difference is simply life or death.
In tropical Africa outdoor activity is as common as indoor activity. The open veranda or the garden is the best place to be in the early morning or evening. Here, we know exactly where our food, water and electricity come from. If the water does go off, we don’t just telephone an office to find out but we go along the water-pipe to the source or the leak, or ask the woman on the bicycle who passed there this morning if anyone is working on the pipe. Since mine is a world where the power does go off without warning and since I can make a very good estimate of my risk, I prepare. I keep extra water in the house, and torches and a lot of batteries. I make hard copies of everything. If my work is bringing in enough money I could have a small generator, or very expensive solar lighting.
Further, I usually have someone around in my house or my compound: a refugee student from a neighbouring war who does my garden for his college fees and so he can have a place with light where he can study in the evening. Another, as a night-guard when I live in the areas where human violence is a greater danger than that from animals, from car accidents or from bad drinking water. Indeed, visitors from the labour-deprived world, comment that I have a cook, implying that I exploit her; I counter that the only difference is that everything my cook does for me is visible, and this includes slaughtering the chicken for lunch. The exact same tasks are done for people in the west, but behind closed doors.
It is difficult to imagine the Machine stopping having quite the same effect on me and my neighbours.
Barry Sesnan, Goma 2002 and Entebbe 2006 bsesnan@yahoo.com
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
Roll on Global warming
A few millennia ago a substantial (or small and very fertile) proportion of the human race in the Northern hemisphere made a serious mistake and moved north. Some went the whole hog and lived in igloos, hunted seals, followed reindeer around and wore fur clothes; others just went part of the way and just shivered most of the time, consuming a huge amount of resources to keep warm, farming and storing food and forgetting.
These latter have, in recent centuries, developed quite complex explanations and justifications for their bizarre decision to leave sunny climes and move north or to the centre of cold continents, especially after, with the rise of nation-states, they got trapped within the boundaries of one country or another.
These explainers fall into two types.
In the first group are those who say: It wasn’t our fault, we were driven to it; the ice ages caught us unawares, we didn’t realise that winter would come every year.
Others, in a curious inversion of logic are proud of the hardship and, in the good tradition of cold showers and running out the sauna into the frozen lake, say: It was good for us. We needed the hardship to become great, to learn how to plan, to rule the world, to create tropical empires.
Many of these people, truth to tell, are now edging their way south again. The population centre of Britain drifts further and further south; Britons are overflowing into Northern France. The population centres of Norway, Finland, Canada and Sweden are just about as far south as they can go already, and could be argued to be actually somewhere near the Mediterranean for a good part of the year..
There is timeshare on the seasons. Northern denizens from St Petersburg to Glasgow jet off south for longer and longer periods of the year. Some do it in summer, many in winter. An invading force attacking Scandinavia or the Netherlands in August would probably find no one in. That may soon be true in winter too.
In the tradition of the stubbornness of human nature there is, of course, a contrary movement. The Sicilians, West Africans, Sri Lankans and the Jamaicans do move north, to freezing countries which offer larger salaries, suffering hardship on the way and rejection on arrival, while their unwilling hosts are actually packing to fly off to, you guessed it, The Gambia, Sri Lanka and the Caribbean.
But even the illegal immigrants would stop in Italy if they could. On the whole people prefer being warm to being cold, and it’s certainly a lot cheaper to be warm.
It is very curious therefore that so many people get exercised about global warming. After all, it will make Scotland, Canada and much of Russia warmer and whole areas of Canada and Siberia will be more cultivable than they are now.
Having been brought up in a freezing apartment in Edinburgh, I rejoice in the idea of more warm days and a shorter winter. I am looking forward to the effects of global warming.
I am not a global warming denier, though it seems to have become almost as wicked as to practice Holocaust denial. I am a global-warming accepter. I think that there are many benefits to be had from global warming. I am a believer in the ingenuity of the human race in the face of change. I do not believe in focussing only on the negative effects of global warming.
My heroes are the Dutch who make their country bigger by holding back – and pushing back – the sea; the American Pilgrims who after a rather slow start embraced the newness of their environment and learned how to live with it and develop it; the ‘Bushmen’ who find water in deserts; the Jesuits in Peru who developed quinine, the health pioneers of Victorian England who found out where cholera was coming from, and decided to do something about it.
They are the people who look at Mars and say: We can terraform that. They will look at the global warming changes and do something about them, rather than just rolling over, moaning and dying complaining about the mosquitoes.
We are told that an insect here or a plant there may die out. Well, tough, that’s life if it really happens, and anyway we are told already that species are dying like flies. But, surprise, surprise, like suggested in a recent article on coral, it often isn’t happening.
Lo and behold, the coral has not heard the pundits and is adapting in many places (though quite why this is a surprise is unclear since we were taught at school that coral, by definition, is a creature ‘on the edge’).
We are told that Bangladesh or the Maldives may disappear. The recent tsunami illustrates this, we are told, but we have to hold our horses a little. Firstly, the tsunami was not a climate event and secondly, most places did actually survive, including the Maldives. That people died was due to the suddenness of the event. There is no reason to believe that an event taking decades would have such a pernicious effect. After all, along the coast of Sri Lanka and Thailand the momentary rise in sea-level didn’t go more than a couple of hundred metres inland. This would be the case over most of the world’s coast-line.
When Mount Nyiragongo erupted in the early morning in Goma there was enough warning of the lava flow so there were almost no deaths when it reached the town in the afternoon. With their previous experience of natural and human disasters, the population walked quietly out with their most valuable possessions and returned the next day to find out what was left and start rebuilding. At the time the lady in charge of American aid declared that no help would be given by the Americans until Goma, a city of half a million, was moved out of danger! Though, to where, given that the volcano was to the north, the lake to the south, Rwanda to the east, and previously fractured land to the west, was not very clear.
Needless to say, Goma is still there under the still-smoking volcano, and Los Angeles is still on the San Andreas fault, Fuji overlooks Tokyo , and Bangladesh floods every year already but still functions as a country. In all these places people are aware of what might happen, but are unwilling, or unable to leave, for a mixture of straightforward and complex motives.
The one thing that is sure about global warming is that the effects will be complex. There may be more cloud cover which may mitigate the effects … or intensify them … depending on what you read. There will be more ‘weather’ in terms of higher wind-speeds, more storms, … or there won’t, since much weather is actually quite local.
There will be more mosquitoes further north (or south); but there may be more flowers, and more honey. Some crops will not do so well in some areas, others will do better; the Mediterranean diet will become easier to obtain locally in Britain. Lesser-known crops, long forgotten, may thrive.
Just look at some of the benefits of a warmer world by looking at fuel supply. Far less fuel will be used for heating; the transport of fuel around the world will be reduced and some oil-rich, politically unstable areas will come to have less political clout. There will be less need to travel to hot climates for recreation. Hot places will be nearer.
From the perspective of where I live most of the time, 1300m above sea-level beside Lake Victoria, exactly on the Equator, the predictions about what might happen in the tropics have been so woolly as to be meaningless. Our daily variation of temperature is from 15° to 35° so a couple of degrees more isn’t going to matter. Most of our rain is local; maybe it will cycle a bit faster. In fact, for ten months of the year it clouds up in the afternoon already since there is warming every day. In January, the lake appeared to be falling a little after a couple of months of drought, but now in April, there are floods all over the region.
For people who live in the tropics the wider pattern is always one of change, not far off the seven lean and seven fat years of Biblical repute. In the seventies the desert was going to march so far south that everyone would be living in the Sahara, surrounded by goats eating up the last plants.
In the late nineties, we had so much rain that I could hardly recognise some places that had been bone-dry. Interestingly no one talked about the retreat of the desert; that might be too optimistic, not doom-laden enough.
So, let’s have a bit of this global warming, accept it and enjoy it. The British holidaymaker may be able before long to get his timeshare cottage in Lerwick so he can spend some of the summer on the balmy beaches of Shetland, eating local mangoes and swatting the mosquitoes.
Barry Sesnan, Entebbe 2006
1533 words
A few millennia ago a substantial (or small and very fertile) proportion of the human race in the Northern hemisphere made a serious mistake and moved north. Some went the whole hog and lived in igloos, hunted seals, followed reindeer around and wore fur clothes; others just went part of the way and just shivered most of the time, consuming a huge amount of resources to keep warm, farming and storing food and forgetting.
These latter have, in recent centuries, developed quite complex explanations and justifications for their bizarre decision to leave sunny climes and move north or to the centre of cold continents, especially after, with the rise of nation-states, they got trapped within the boundaries of one country or another.
These explainers fall into two types.
In the first group are those who say: It wasn’t our fault, we were driven to it; the ice ages caught us unawares, we didn’t realise that winter would come every year.
Others, in a curious inversion of logic are proud of the hardship and, in the good tradition of cold showers and running out the sauna into the frozen lake, say: It was good for us. We needed the hardship to become great, to learn how to plan, to rule the world, to create tropical empires.
Many of these people, truth to tell, are now edging their way south again. The population centre of Britain drifts further and further south; Britons are overflowing into Northern France. The population centres of Norway, Finland, Canada and Sweden are just about as far south as they can go already, and could be argued to be actually somewhere near the Mediterranean for a good part of the year..
There is timeshare on the seasons. Northern denizens from St Petersburg to Glasgow jet off south for longer and longer periods of the year. Some do it in summer, many in winter. An invading force attacking Scandinavia or the Netherlands in August would probably find no one in. That may soon be true in winter too.
In the tradition of the stubbornness of human nature there is, of course, a contrary movement. The Sicilians, West Africans, Sri Lankans and the Jamaicans do move north, to freezing countries which offer larger salaries, suffering hardship on the way and rejection on arrival, while their unwilling hosts are actually packing to fly off to, you guessed it, The Gambia, Sri Lanka and the Caribbean.
But even the illegal immigrants would stop in Italy if they could. On the whole people prefer being warm to being cold, and it’s certainly a lot cheaper to be warm.
It is very curious therefore that so many people get exercised about global warming. After all, it will make Scotland, Canada and much of Russia warmer and whole areas of Canada and Siberia will be more cultivable than they are now.
Having been brought up in a freezing apartment in Edinburgh, I rejoice in the idea of more warm days and a shorter winter. I am looking forward to the effects of global warming.
I am not a global warming denier, though it seems to have become almost as wicked as to practice Holocaust denial. I am a global-warming accepter. I think that there are many benefits to be had from global warming. I am a believer in the ingenuity of the human race in the face of change. I do not believe in focussing only on the negative effects of global warming.
My heroes are the Dutch who make their country bigger by holding back – and pushing back – the sea; the American Pilgrims who after a rather slow start embraced the newness of their environment and learned how to live with it and develop it; the ‘Bushmen’ who find water in deserts; the Jesuits in Peru who developed quinine, the health pioneers of Victorian England who found out where cholera was coming from, and decided to do something about it.
They are the people who look at Mars and say: We can terraform that. They will look at the global warming changes and do something about them, rather than just rolling over, moaning and dying complaining about the mosquitoes.
We are told that an insect here or a plant there may die out. Well, tough, that’s life if it really happens, and anyway we are told already that species are dying like flies. But, surprise, surprise, like suggested in a recent article on coral, it often isn’t happening.
Lo and behold, the coral has not heard the pundits and is adapting in many places (though quite why this is a surprise is unclear since we were taught at school that coral, by definition, is a creature ‘on the edge’).
We are told that Bangladesh or the Maldives may disappear. The recent tsunami illustrates this, we are told, but we have to hold our horses a little. Firstly, the tsunami was not a climate event and secondly, most places did actually survive, including the Maldives. That people died was due to the suddenness of the event. There is no reason to believe that an event taking decades would have such a pernicious effect. After all, along the coast of Sri Lanka and Thailand the momentary rise in sea-level didn’t go more than a couple of hundred metres inland. This would be the case over most of the world’s coast-line.
When Mount Nyiragongo erupted in the early morning in Goma there was enough warning of the lava flow so there were almost no deaths when it reached the town in the afternoon. With their previous experience of natural and human disasters, the population walked quietly out with their most valuable possessions and returned the next day to find out what was left and start rebuilding. At the time the lady in charge of American aid declared that no help would be given by the Americans until Goma, a city of half a million, was moved out of danger! Though, to where, given that the volcano was to the north, the lake to the south, Rwanda to the east, and previously fractured land to the west, was not very clear.
Needless to say, Goma is still there under the still-smoking volcano, and Los Angeles is still on the San Andreas fault, Fuji overlooks Tokyo , and Bangladesh floods every year already but still functions as a country. In all these places people are aware of what might happen, but are unwilling, or unable to leave, for a mixture of straightforward and complex motives.
The one thing that is sure about global warming is that the effects will be complex. There may be more cloud cover which may mitigate the effects … or intensify them … depending on what you read. There will be more ‘weather’ in terms of higher wind-speeds, more storms, … or there won’t, since much weather is actually quite local.
There will be more mosquitoes further north (or south); but there may be more flowers, and more honey. Some crops will not do so well in some areas, others will do better; the Mediterranean diet will become easier to obtain locally in Britain. Lesser-known crops, long forgotten, may thrive.
Just look at some of the benefits of a warmer world by looking at fuel supply. Far less fuel will be used for heating; the transport of fuel around the world will be reduced and some oil-rich, politically unstable areas will come to have less political clout. There will be less need to travel to hot climates for recreation. Hot places will be nearer.
From the perspective of where I live most of the time, 1300m above sea-level beside Lake Victoria, exactly on the Equator, the predictions about what might happen in the tropics have been so woolly as to be meaningless. Our daily variation of temperature is from 15° to 35° so a couple of degrees more isn’t going to matter. Most of our rain is local; maybe it will cycle a bit faster. In fact, for ten months of the year it clouds up in the afternoon already since there is warming every day. In January, the lake appeared to be falling a little after a couple of months of drought, but now in April, there are floods all over the region.
For people who live in the tropics the wider pattern is always one of change, not far off the seven lean and seven fat years of Biblical repute. In the seventies the desert was going to march so far south that everyone would be living in the Sahara, surrounded by goats eating up the last plants.
In the late nineties, we had so much rain that I could hardly recognise some places that had been bone-dry. Interestingly no one talked about the retreat of the desert; that might be too optimistic, not doom-laden enough.
So, let’s have a bit of this global warming, accept it and enjoy it. The British holidaymaker may be able before long to get his timeshare cottage in Lerwick so he can spend some of the summer on the balmy beaches of Shetland, eating local mangoes and swatting the mosquitoes.
Barry Sesnan, Entebbe 2006
1533 words
The tyranny of hotels
I have just spent a couple of days in a hotel outside Kampala, said to be one of the best in its town.
The stay set me off again thinking about hotels I have known, and wondering why it seems so difficult for hotels to ‘get it right’. I am not talking about short-time lodgings which can manage with a 40 watt bulb because the guests have not come to look at the furniture, but hotels that may host consultants, staff who are coming to seminars or visit field offices and have to work, or tourists who want a comfortable rest after travelling. It should not matter whether they are Ugandans or foreigners.
Here are some thoughts based on recent experience.
Light
Why should a hotel provide rooms that look directly onto a blank wall? I have just experienced that. The room was so dark that when the power was off during the day, I needed a torch in the room. Of course no candle or alternative light was provided, and the hotel kept its generator off as long as there was the tiniest bit of daylight outside, even if it did not penetrate the rooms.
Food
Why in a country full of fruit is it usually a really hard job to get a hotel serve a decent amount of fruit with breakfast, or with any other meal for that matter? The world is moving to healthier eating, but not in our hotels it seems.
While thinking of food, why are the menus so limited in practice. You ask the waiter or waitress what actually exists, rather than bother to read the menu. Very few things are available and if that includes fresh vegetables you are very lucky.
It’s a real problem at breakfast. I happen to like soft-fried eggs (with the yolk runny), but it usually requires two days to train the kitchen to do them without doing violence to the eggs to make the universal omelette.
Or you have to discover the code word. Recently it was ‘semi-fried’. In Kenya they are called ‘macho ya ngombe’. But the mystery is why a hotel doesn’t know about them already? It is the commonest way to provide breakfast eggs in many countries.
Sockets
Is there anyone these days who stays in a hotel who does not have a mobile phone that will need to be charged?
In the last room I stayed in (the one with the wall blocking the window) there was only one socket which had to do for laptop (plenty of people have them also nowadays), fan and television.
As it happened the television did not work anyway because in building the wall the cable had been cut. No one bothered to mention that when I checked in, by the way.
Anyway the socket was on the opposite side of the room from the fan and TV and their cables were too short to reach it. After a day of requesting and waiting an extension cord was provided. But this was a fairly new hotel. Why couldn’t it have at least two sockets, even more.
Size
The builders of some hotels seem to have no idea of planning or measuring or even how big a human being is. In one room the wardrobe wouldn’t open fully because there was no space for it to do so. The room was just slightly longer than the bed. In other rooms in the same hotel that cost less, the room was also so narrow that there was no room for a table. But I must say those rooms did have a view, which would compensate for not having a television.
In another the toilet was so placed next to the wall that even a smallish person would not be able to sit there without discomfort. For us larger people it was a punishment. Just to make it worse the toilet-paper holder was well out of reach.
Oh, and then we have to remember the lodgings that provide no hook or hanger for clothes, including one hugely expensive hotel which I stayed in - in Juba, Southern Sudan.
Consultant’s ideal
Some people actually have to work when they come to a hotel. A sizeable table at working height, an upright chair, sockets as mentioned before, a table light.
Guest as victim
In Uganda if you visit someone you put yourself in your host’s hands. The host even has to give ‘permission’ for you to leave. Some hotels go further than that and treat the visitor as their prisoner or victim.
From the staff who hang around the lounge shutting the bar and waiting for you to go to bed so they can lock up, to the hotel in Mbarara which was unable to provide breakfast before 8 a.m. because that is when the manager came in and he had the keys to the fridge.
So if you have to leave early or start work early, then there is no breakfast for you (though you have probably paid for it).
There was a hotel in the west where they did not switch the water on in the morning though the majority of its guests wanted to get to Queen Elisabeth park in the early morning; another that switched the water-heater off early in the evening.
Running on the cheap
Some of it is just running the hotel on a shoe-string.
Hotels that have only one set of towels, so when you go out they wash them and you need to wait until the evening if you need a towel.
Hotels that won’t employ qualified staff or provide their staff with training.
Hotels that think a 100 watt bulb is a waste of money or that a tiny piece of soap the size of a matchbox will do for 24 hours.
The hotel in Rwanda where the TVs in all the bedrooms show only the programme that the people in the lounge want to watch.
Lack of communication
Many guests don’t bother to express their desire for improvement, perhaps because they know it gets nowhere.
The problem is made worse by the serious lack of communication between the junior staff and the management. Most junior staff I have talked to are frightened of telling the management what the guests are complaining about, and they seem to have no book for recording complaints. Everything is ‘solved’ ad hoc’.
Anyway, the manager is rarely in the hotel. If a manager comes in he or she seems unable to try to experience his hotel from the point of view of the victim, sorry prisoner, sorry guest.
In one hotel recently almost every visitor tripped on the staircase. Why? Because the steps were all of different heights. Why was such a staircase accepted from the builders? Was I the only one who noticed the problem, even though one visitor fell quite badly?
In another, breakfast was seriously late every morning because not enough food was released at once to the cooks. The manager, when we managed to track him down, seemed to regard us as the nuisance and then started blaming the waiters and the cooks.
Ugandans are too tolerant!
I have just spent a couple of days in a hotel outside Kampala, said to be one of the best in its town.
The stay set me off again thinking about hotels I have known, and wondering why it seems so difficult for hotels to ‘get it right’. I am not talking about short-time lodgings which can manage with a 40 watt bulb because the guests have not come to look at the furniture, but hotels that may host consultants, staff who are coming to seminars or visit field offices and have to work, or tourists who want a comfortable rest after travelling. It should not matter whether they are Ugandans or foreigners.
Here are some thoughts based on recent experience.
Light
Why should a hotel provide rooms that look directly onto a blank wall? I have just experienced that. The room was so dark that when the power was off during the day, I needed a torch in the room. Of course no candle or alternative light was provided, and the hotel kept its generator off as long as there was the tiniest bit of daylight outside, even if it did not penetrate the rooms.
Food
Why in a country full of fruit is it usually a really hard job to get a hotel serve a decent amount of fruit with breakfast, or with any other meal for that matter? The world is moving to healthier eating, but not in our hotels it seems.
While thinking of food, why are the menus so limited in practice. You ask the waiter or waitress what actually exists, rather than bother to read the menu. Very few things are available and if that includes fresh vegetables you are very lucky.
It’s a real problem at breakfast. I happen to like soft-fried eggs (with the yolk runny), but it usually requires two days to train the kitchen to do them without doing violence to the eggs to make the universal omelette.
Or you have to discover the code word. Recently it was ‘semi-fried’. In Kenya they are called ‘macho ya ngombe’. But the mystery is why a hotel doesn’t know about them already? It is the commonest way to provide breakfast eggs in many countries.
Sockets
Is there anyone these days who stays in a hotel who does not have a mobile phone that will need to be charged?
In the last room I stayed in (the one with the wall blocking the window) there was only one socket which had to do for laptop (plenty of people have them also nowadays), fan and television.
As it happened the television did not work anyway because in building the wall the cable had been cut. No one bothered to mention that when I checked in, by the way.
Anyway the socket was on the opposite side of the room from the fan and TV and their cables were too short to reach it. After a day of requesting and waiting an extension cord was provided. But this was a fairly new hotel. Why couldn’t it have at least two sockets, even more.
Size
The builders of some hotels seem to have no idea of planning or measuring or even how big a human being is. In one room the wardrobe wouldn’t open fully because there was no space for it to do so. The room was just slightly longer than the bed. In other rooms in the same hotel that cost less, the room was also so narrow that there was no room for a table. But I must say those rooms did have a view, which would compensate for not having a television.
In another the toilet was so placed next to the wall that even a smallish person would not be able to sit there without discomfort. For us larger people it was a punishment. Just to make it worse the toilet-paper holder was well out of reach.
Oh, and then we have to remember the lodgings that provide no hook or hanger for clothes, including one hugely expensive hotel which I stayed in - in Juba, Southern Sudan.
Consultant’s ideal
Some people actually have to work when they come to a hotel. A sizeable table at working height, an upright chair, sockets as mentioned before, a table light.
Guest as victim
In Uganda if you visit someone you put yourself in your host’s hands. The host even has to give ‘permission’ for you to leave. Some hotels go further than that and treat the visitor as their prisoner or victim.
From the staff who hang around the lounge shutting the bar and waiting for you to go to bed so they can lock up, to the hotel in Mbarara which was unable to provide breakfast before 8 a.m. because that is when the manager came in and he had the keys to the fridge.
So if you have to leave early or start work early, then there is no breakfast for you (though you have probably paid for it).
There was a hotel in the west where they did not switch the water on in the morning though the majority of its guests wanted to get to Queen Elisabeth park in the early morning; another that switched the water-heater off early in the evening.
Running on the cheap
Some of it is just running the hotel on a shoe-string.
Hotels that have only one set of towels, so when you go out they wash them and you need to wait until the evening if you need a towel.
Hotels that won’t employ qualified staff or provide their staff with training.
Hotels that think a 100 watt bulb is a waste of money or that a tiny piece of soap the size of a matchbox will do for 24 hours.
The hotel in Rwanda where the TVs in all the bedrooms show only the programme that the people in the lounge want to watch.
Lack of communication
Many guests don’t bother to express their desire for improvement, perhaps because they know it gets nowhere.
The problem is made worse by the serious lack of communication between the junior staff and the management. Most junior staff I have talked to are frightened of telling the management what the guests are complaining about, and they seem to have no book for recording complaints. Everything is ‘solved’ ad hoc’.
Anyway, the manager is rarely in the hotel. If a manager comes in he or she seems unable to try to experience his hotel from the point of view of the victim, sorry prisoner, sorry guest.
In one hotel recently almost every visitor tripped on the staircase. Why? Because the steps were all of different heights. Why was such a staircase accepted from the builders? Was I the only one who noticed the problem, even though one visitor fell quite badly?
In another, breakfast was seriously late every morning because not enough food was released at once to the cooks. The manager, when we managed to track him down, seemed to regard us as the nuisance and then started blaming the waiters and the cooks.
Ugandans are too tolerant!
In August I went to do some training for an NGO in another country. I found that ‘Giving participants enough to eat spoils them’ (and letting them have any idea about when they might be fed is a state secret. Suddenly in the middle of a training session everyone is summoned out to eat Breakfast? Lunch? Dinner? ).
‘Letting people know anything about their training programme in advance is a sign of weakness.’ This includes the extremely weird idea of informing them in time about anything at all. He actually boasted about how they had all been summoned at the last minute (from all over a huge district with no roads or public transport) to attend a training without being told why they were being called or how long for.
‘It is subversive to think that the trainers might need to duplicate anything, use a visual aid etc’ (There was no generator, thus no power either in the office, the guest house or in the venue). In the guest house, the fridge hadn’t worked since I was last there in May.
The slightest attempt to help is a threat to the guy. So before going I got the HQ to agree, on the basis of previous dreadful time-keeping, to renting a second car for my week (and the other 4 facilitators). He refused to do it saying there was no need, but mainly because he felt criticised by the request. So huge amounts of time were wasted.
‘Letting people know anything about their training programme in advance is a sign of weakness.’ This includes the extremely weird idea of informing them in time about anything at all. He actually boasted about how they had all been summoned at the last minute (from all over a huge district with no roads or public transport) to attend a training without being told why they were being called or how long for.
‘It is subversive to think that the trainers might need to duplicate anything, use a visual aid etc’ (There was no generator, thus no power either in the office, the guest house or in the venue). In the guest house, the fridge hadn’t worked since I was last there in May.
The slightest attempt to help is a threat to the guy. So before going I got the HQ to agree, on the basis of previous dreadful time-keeping, to renting a second car for my week (and the other 4 facilitators). He refused to do it saying there was no need, but mainly because he felt criticised by the request. So huge amounts of time were wasted.
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