For whom the Cock crows

A long time ago, I spent a lot of time in Berne, the Capital of Switzerland. I was out there bugfixing for Nortel and the Company tried to lure me away to work for them on more than one occasion. (Their Engineering Manager was a Brit called Terry who certainly looked after me during my many visits. Whilst I loved Switzerland, I didn’t want to up sticks and move there. Now I’m not so sure…)

During my extended visit I sometimes stayed for the weekend rather than commuting back home via Zurich airport and I did lots of touristy things in the Berne area, notably cable cars and rack railways up in the mountains. Piz Gloria was a breathtaking revolving restaurant at the top of the world with stunning views of the Eiger and the Toblerone Mountain, the Matterhorn (with the aid of a telescope). Many of the Swiss went up there with the intention of walking or skiing down of course but armed with a timetable in a country where transport is super-reliable, I never suffered any transport problems.

Berne is something of an elaborate fake in some ways, with very old looking buildings in the downtown peninsula but much of them modernised behind the old facades. It is still well worth a visit though, with the bear pits (still with Bears), the Cathedral, the colourful statues and the medieval towers complete with performing clocks.

The oldest tower of all in the Town is the Zeitglogge which houses the merchant measurement sticks fixed to the wall at ground level and above the archway is the clock mechanism chamber. You were able to visit for a guided tour at what I seem to remember was 5:40pm most evenings and sometimes the visit coincided with the official clock winder on his rounds.

The clock went through a bit of a performance which was rather twee for the 20th Century but must have drawn the crowds nearly 500 years ago and sometimes still does. From memory the sequence was something like this:

A couple of minutes before the hour, the rooster crowed. The rooster was a kind of mechanical bagpipe and it sounded rather insipid. Then the bell chimes were rung and the parade of characters started, a turntable of figures spinning for a short time in a gothic type stone structure. Then the actual hour was struck, followed by the rooster again to finish off the sequence. The clock face also showed the moon cycle and astronomical information, all picked out in gold leaf on a highly elaborate face.

Above the mechanism chamber was an exhibition room behind the two large clock faces. Carrying on up the tower was the belfry and it was possible to go up another stair and look out on the town from a rooftop dormer window. Depending on the guide, the order of the visit might vary slightly  but you would be near bells or the mechanism when there was stuff going on.

During my stay, several Brits joined the Company team as ex-pats and it was arranged for them to get lessons in Swiss German. (Swiss German doesn’t sound too German but they do write in “High German”). After a few lessons, however, the teacher realised they were all struggling and there was a simple reason for this- they didn’t actually understand the concept of languages with nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. So, to resolve this, they were sent on a crash course in understanding English!

I have to say that I sympathise wuith them, because I can never remember my nouns from my verbs either, having mostly learned by rote.

What I do know, however, is when words get distorted from their original use, especially with the corruption of management speak. Terms such as facilitating, branding and Paradigm Shift give me a wry smile.

When I was a Manager in the late 80s, (before I got off the treadmill and took up my hobby as an alternative career,) there were a number of buzzword bingo phrases that used to come up in meetings. Eventually, they became ironic and it was a challenge to use them in the most unlikely scenarios, whilst trying to keep a straight face. Three that spring to mind were “Vertical marketing”, “Cooking on gas” and “Throwing the baby out with the bathwater“.

Every now and then, I read a technical white paper that isn’t really very technical at all (as it is aimed at Board Members) and a sentence makes me squirm. here is one I encountered yesterday.

As enterprises evaluate technologies to connect geographically dispersed locations, their choice is increasingly driven by the networking requirements of the various applications that they use in conducting their business and the ease with which they can leverage the talents and resources of their service provider.

I have to say as a rather cynical jaded older  telecommunications manager that getting any form of talents and resources out of any service provider I have encountered over the last thirty years where it involves anything outside of the box have generally failed miserably. If nothing else, they will be victims of their billing systems and be totally incapable of charging you properly for the service.

What i really twitch at, though, is the word leverage. Now I was taught that lever is both a noun and a verb , a lever being a method of mechanical advantage and also the action of levering something. So to my mind, you apply leverage to a wooden plank under a boulder to shift it but you don’t actually leverage it. Indeed if you simply replace the word with “use” it makes more sense.in the above sentence.

Wikipedia has an amusing explanation of the suffix:

-age- this suffix is appended to mundane words to create a more official tone, as in, “I noticed some breakage on that item. We might want to facilitate signage so there’s some verbage out there as to proper usage.”

Let us consider another mechanical advantage device, a hammer. A hammer is an implement for applying force to something and to hammer is hammering someting such as a nail. I could even say that the art of knocking nails into a think plank is hammerage, so I will refer to the ease with which we can hammerage the talents and resources of our account manager.

By the way, I have a hammer at home in a cheap toolkit, the sort you buy for £3.99 at the garage. (You get lots of tools, but they aren’t exactly tempered steel). The upper shaft of the hammer has a safety warning that the operator and bystanders must wear eye protection whilst utilising the implement. Thanks for telling us Nanny.

Story over, let the rooster crow.