Way back in the mist of time, when dinosaurs ruled the earth and Bills of Lading were written in a neat copperplate hand in the blood of a galley slave, there were rules about packing goods for shipment.
Time passed and the cardinal rule that as things progress they get cheaper and nastier (or more likely dearer and nastier) went out of the nearest piece of fenestration and only the sad and lonely salty sea dogs remembered them.
In those days, if it wasn’t packed in a case or at least a crate, you couldn’t insure it for export.
Or rather you could until summat went awry and then you couldn’t get paid out.
“Insufficient packing” quoth the underwriters manservant, and that, as the Northern milliner would say, were t’hat.
When the big metal boxes kicked the dinosaurs out and themselves spanned the earth, a more reasonable age ensued and things have moved on apace since then. Nowadays you can pack your goods in all manner of wondrous things to coddle and defend them from the elements, to prevent spillage and seepage, to stop the contents from squashing, squishing and squeezing out from their neat little parcels.
First T/Chests, then boxes and cartons became the vogue, next was polystyrene, superb against shocks but not so clever when it ended up in the Sargasso Sea after blowing in all the way from Deptford or Illinois. Little plastic bags cunningly filled with air secured against shockwaves, Expandable builders foam kept even fine glassware secure from breakage as we moved toward a packing Nirvana.
But now, sad to say, things have moved on a little too far.
Take a look at what turned up this week, courtesy of Marks and Spencer.
Now I don’t know about you, but I think that’s overkill.
For those of you with a statistical bent here are the facts.
The empty box, measures 33 x 22 x 13 centimetres.
The mascara (for it is he) measures 10 x 1.5 x 1.5 centimetres.
In simple terms this means M & S have put one item into a box capable of holding 419 of said item.
That’s the shipping equivalent of loading a twenty foot box with a carton 50 x 40 x 40 centimetres.
That’s 20 x 13 x 13 inches to any as old as me but not so savvy when you start counting in tens.
There it is again look.
And yes, that is a pound coin to demonstrate the size (or lack of it).
But perhaps the Captain doth protest too much. This thing arrived (inside a plastic bag to boot) in perfect order.
The one thing we didn’t lose when we switched from the sturdy wooden crates of old, was the warehouseman’s (stevedore, docker - pick a term) ability to break anything due for shipment when in the mood.
Having spent over half my working life in and around shipping warehouses I have never ceased to be amazed by the unceasing and relentless talent that a man in a sweaty work suit can possess when he, unwittingly or not, sets himself to “handle” cargo of any description.
Here in tribute then, is a short video to that paragon of package placers (already credited earlier in this series) the ultimate destroyer of other peoples property – The Baggage Handler………….
And actually, come to think about it, just about every other profession.
I was putting together a piece this morning for the Handy Shipping Guide, a process which, as usual, involves a lot of fishing around, checking sources etc. and I came across a blog that caught my eye.
Now as blogs go this was a little similar to this one, an excuse for a tired journo to let off a bit of steam, to write in a slightly more colourful manner than one is allowed to when scribing the “front page” stuff.
The piece itself was on the current state of the US trucking industry and as I was drawing the threads together and reading this guys two pennorth, I realised that, once again, I was having to translate the thing in my head. This bloke doesn’t write in English. He writes in American, and not just American but a sub culture language, American trucking. In fact, to be precise, he writes in US trucking with a North Eastern American dialect.
If any of you don’t follow that statement then, unlike me, you don’t have to spend a lot of time on the net. In the course of our work here we have to study information coming in from around the globe seven days a week. Whether you study the US haulage market, Indian rail freight or Chinese imports you start exactly as with any foreign language only it’s a lot simpler.
If you wash up abroad in your travels then you listen out for details in a language you can identify and then try to make out the whole meaning. What I’m talking about is like that, only a lot easier. You understand the bulk of the words but there are bits that simply mean nothing, so you have to consider the context.
Take the word “drayage”. You’ll find it all over US truck sites but not in any English Dictionary (well not in my big Collins anyway). As there are about a million words in there and Mr Collins must have taken three lifetimes or employed a lot of his kids for a very long time to put this mighty tome together, you can more or less assume that most English speakers have never heard it uttered in anger. Dray – yes, from the Norse, Draga, also a vehicle or sledge for heavy loads (ah ha!) or bizarrely, a squirrels nest.
Before my American readers sign off in disgust I should make it clear that I’m not looking down my nose at their use of language (I shall save for another time the fact that “Color” actually has a U in it and that you are an “I” short in aluminium) no, it’s just we not only all speak differently but that this trait transfers over to the written word and language in general.
A US trucker reading the blog piece this morning would have probably followed it swiftly to conclusion understanding every line. Muggins here had to read each syllable through to the end then go back and translate. Here’s an example of what was written – “Drivers can’t be ticketed if they’re driving to a depot with a snow scraper” Now in this case any UK resident would understand all the words but most would say “snow scraper?” The blog is written in New Jersey, they’ve passed a very common sense law saying if you get nicked with a pile of snow on your rig, car whatever, then you get a fine. They get a lot of snow in NJ.
Now any English speaker knows what a ticket is, don’t they? Well no. Because anything we type in these little boxes goes all over the world there may well be an Inuit tucked away somewhere who knows all about snow but nowt about tickets.Equally the Thai Pirates mother in law had to be shown a handful of the cold, white stuff when on a visit to the UK as she’d never seen it back home.
Having read the above mentioned piece it turns out that a snow scraper is basically a set of football (sorry soccer) posts that you drive under to wipe the snow off your motor to stop the accumulated precipitation blowing back and wiping out granny in the Nissan Primera driving behind you.
A very sound and sensible idea by the way (brushing off the snow, not wiping out granny). Must be very sophisticated posts, $18,000 a set according to my source blogger.
Anyway whilst translating the above I realised that all industries tend to develop their own, sometimes exotic language which is hard to follow if you’re an outsider. The reason for this is tricky and complex. The ultimate example is the trappy PR/Sales type executive who spouts utter nonsense with an air of arrogant conviction. This language strangely seems uniquely transatlantic and I put this down to a sort of verbal one upmanship. Wherever your salesman hails from if he gets caught out by a word or phrase he can’t follow, he licks his wounded pride and simply catches out the next guy with it.
This new modern garbage is matched by a form of words used by the older professions which have somehow now become respectable due to the original insular nature of the profession involved (hence drayage) or simply by long term use what was a “buzzword” used in one particular trade becomes the norm.
This is particularly noticeable in shipping terms, which by their nature are trans global. So “Bill of Lading” evocative of standing on the quay as a clipper ship sails majestically on the morning tide, then slipping back down the frosty street for a pint of warm ale and a pipe of good shag in a welcoming tavern (sorry, went into Thomas Hardy mode there) becomes “Waybill” which brings to mind waiting at a formica counter for a quadruple rag bag of multi layered, multi coloured NCR paper of which the last two pages (your copies) are unreadable.
Shipping in fact has taken language to a whole new level.
Not content with bastardising existing words and phrases our transport forebears decided at some point to invent lots of terms and then turn them into acronyms. And so was born the set of Incoterms which now stretch into the realms of the fantastic, obscure expressions nobody outside of a hundred mile radius ever uses, like the myriad species of lake trout that are, well, trout with spots in different places.
Of course this hybridisation of language has gone on since man first started grunting.........
So to help you read this piece here is a glossary of terms used, just in case I puzzled anyone with anything.
Truck – Lorry – Rig Trucker - Driver - Chauffeur Bloke – Chap – Fellow
Haulage – Trucking – Shipping Drayage (work it out, we’ve done that one)
Nissan Primera – Toy Car Nowt – Nothing – Nada PR – B/S Sales Executive – Unemployed Politician Trappy – Gobby – Verbose
Garbage – Stuff and Nonsense Norse – Geezer with Horned Helmet
Geezer – See Bloke Buzzword – B/S Formica – Melamine – Shiny Plastic
Thomas Hardy – Possibly worst ever English novelist
Two Pennorth – Very badly misspelt Tuppenceworth – Twenty Cents worth
Misspelt - Misspelled – Just Plain Wrong
Acronym – Spending countless hours trying to turn a fairly meaningless phrase into a form of words beginning with both vowels and consonants, which, when the initial letters are all put together form a word which nobody but the author will ever like or remember the meaning of without looking up the full term on the internet using the aforesaid acronym.
So, another Police enquiry gets under way. News Corp's "News of the World" stand accused of listening in on hundreds if not thousands of private telephone messages left on the 'phones of the Great and the Good (and the ruddy useless, look at me I'm wonderful) brigade.
East Germany had the Stasi, USSR the KGB and we've got Ruperts minions. Now what's this to do with our world you may think ? Well pal it's dead simple. Someone, somewhere out there might want to know who talks to you, what you read, where you go.
Everyone's at it and although you may think it they're looking at each and every one of us. I just had to email someone about "Harvesting Spiderbots" (not eightlegged farmers with big arses) that track all the e mail addresses on all the sites out there. Why, for Gods sake? So they can tell me where I can buy pretend Viagra very cheap ?
Now you might not think you're very interesting, after all you spend your time reading shipping blogs, which, when you think about it is the 21st Century equivalent of collecting train numbers. But, my friend, you may be of interest to someone. From the bloke that sells loans, to the industrial spy. The moral of this is simple. If you don't want people to know your business then do your damndest not to make it easy for them. Don't answer surveys and get carried away giving out personal info. Don't put your real details on the plethora of "social Messaging" sites. If you want to talk to someone, go and visit, or phone or (now this is a shocker) write a letter.
Point is we live in a world where data is not only gathered but stored, forever. You can find your past from the 1911 census and it makes interesting reading a century later. That's because you can't read Great Grandads Facebook entry telling how he got to level 3 on Monsters of the Galaxy on his X Pox.
Now I'm not a great one for conspiracy theories but I do believe that this trend (which you could argue started around the time Willy decided a Domesday Book could be a good idea, just for fun you understand, nobody's going to use the information, not to collect taxes or anything) has now gone to a whole new level. If you aren't careful anyone can know everything about you.
And so to the NOTW story. You may remember they have previous on this. They even sacked the bloke they claimed was solely responsible (he also got nicked). So if the allegations are true, and this case is proved, plus these events occurred after the last debacle, something needs to be done. A line has now to be drawn between legitimate gathering of information and downright snooping. It's easy to see that, if proved, there has been a serious breach of the law. If, as before, the penalty to the offender is worth it in financial terms, the law is not performing its role. There needs to be a clearer definition of what exactly constitutes personal information. The 4th Estate, sometimes with good reason, always claims "Public Interest" but the Press Complaints Commission has a laughable record when it comes to censuring its own.
Watch this space, this one may unravel to reveal an interesting finale.
