The mystery of spasmodic idiocy: is my bank’s computer drunk, or what? And a writing lesson from the Saiour of Tea

Do you remember GIGO – the acronym used in the world of data, computers and so on for Garbage In, Garbage Out.

I have decided that the computer at Lloyds Bank is fed nothing but garbage from morning till night.

Here’s why.

I visit the U.S. about five times a year, and have done for the past 12 years or so.  I almost always go to the same places – where my son Philip and my daughter Chantal live: Brooklyn and Montclair.

I always need money, so I go to banks’ ATM machines, mostly in Montclair or Brooklyn. And at irregular intervals my plea for cash is denied.

Has the art and science of feeding info to computers not reached the stage where they can recognise regular patterns of behaviour? The mystery is that this doesn’t happen every time. Just occasionally.

How do banks manage to combine incompetence and rapacity to such an unnatural degree? It really beats all.

***
My regular correspondent Andrew Gadsden sent me this today

One of my jobs is to write descriptions of teas for the website, labels, leaflets, etc.  It is quite hard to think of something different to say about them after a while – I have 150 types.  A woman was in our new shop / trade counter yesterday.
Woman: What does “super…    lat…  ive” mean?
Andrew: Oh, you mean “superlative”.  It means it’s really good.
Woman: So why didn’t you say so then?
Quite.  What seems obvious to us is not necessarily obvious to someone else. “Short words are best and the old short words are best of all”. 
As a plug for Andrew, whose firm are the proud producers of the world’s largest tea-bag you can

About the Author

In 2003, the Chartered Institute of Marketing named Drayton one of 50 living individuals who have shaped today’s marketing.

He has worked in 55 countries with many of the world’s greatest brands. These include American Express, Audi, Bentley, British Airways, Cisco, Columbia Business School, Deutsche Post, Ford, IBM, McKinsey, Mercedes, Microsoft, Nestle, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, Unilever, Visa and Volkswagen.

Drayton has helped sell everything from Airbus planes to Peppa Pig. His book, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing, out in 17 languages, has been the UK’s best seller on the subject every year since 1982. He has also run his own businesses in the U.K., Portugal and Malaysia.

He was a main board member of the Ogilvy Group, a founding member of the Superbrands Organisation, one of the first eight Honorary Fellows of the Institute of Direct Marketing and one of the first three people named to the Hall of Fame of the Direct Marketing Association of India. He has also been given Lifetime Achievement Awards by the Caples Organisation in New York and Early To Rise in Florida.

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