Yesterday evening, as I return late from the company outing, I look into my post box. And what do I find?

An IHK newspaper (Zeitung).

So far, I only knew the magazine (Magazin) by the same institution that has the same name. It, too, reaches me as undesired high-gloss waste at regular intervals – and sometimes several copies of it (see my artikcle on the last edition).

This time, it is the Wirtschaft 02 |2012. It is about “handing over the enterprise early enough” – and it says so in huge letters right in the middle of the title page. What a truly current topic! To be sure, it is certainly an interesting issue, but, hey, we have been hearing about this old shit for quite some time now from banks and advisors.

And at the bottom of page one, I also have to read:

IHK is sorry to hear how they voted with respect to the third runway.

Well, this makes me angry.

It makes me even more angry that, again, I get a paper in my post-box that I do not want. Basically, I have cancelled almost all subscriptions that meant paper in my house. On my letter-box and newspaper slid, you can find the stickers: “Please No Ads“. But still, the IHK keeps sending me this paper.

And then I see that it is not addressed to me. It is actually for my daughter Sophie. She is a student of mathematics at LMU, so you can bet she is not an “owner of a small firm” (according to the IHK website, the paper is especially designed for representing the interests of and being useful to that group). Neither did she order the newspaper or fill in a subscription form.

That makes me even more angry. We are forced to be IHK members – and the IHK sends newspapers without any added value but with a strong lobbyist tendency to our daughters.

It would be interesting to find out where the IHK found the address of my daughter (with the correct spelling of both first and second names). Since we are talking data security in this country all the time…

Why don’t we organize some sort of opposition to the self-portrayal of a system as totally remote from actual economic needs and as antiquated as the Chamber of Industry and Commerce? Maybe we should no longer finance them?

RMD
(Translated by EG)

There it is sitting in the grass, next to the other waste, not far from an overflowing waste bin. And what you can read on it is quite provocative:

Deposit-Free

In my book this means:

Feel free to get rid of me and throw me away wherever you may have emptied me, because I am deposit-free!

So here is how I feel about it: you should all boycott the products sold by this enterprise. I am sure the title “Münsterland” is also a lie.

Yesterday, I was also quite surprised to find how many different types of beer bottles and crates there are. They ask a deposit both for bottles and crates.

Since, however, there are so many varieties of shapes, brands and systems, the dream of handing back your empties is also one you can forget.

And I remember how nice the world was in the days when we had standard bottles…

RMD
(Translated by EG)

All through my life, I knew people not to arrive on time. To me, however, it seems that this tendency is now enjoying more popularity than ever.
And why not? After all, there is a perfectly acceptable excuse today – traffic jams on all kinds of streets.

Well, this is an excuse I, as a biker, cannot use. Consequently, I have to think of something more original. Naturally, the unexpected wind from the opposite direction will not suffice if everybody can feel there is no wind.

And in order to sound credible with a puncture, I would first have to soil my fingers, which is not something I want to do.

Mind you, people can be on time, if they only want to. It was again proved to me when I went to see the last concert of the Wise Guys last Friday at the Gasteig (of course, it was again completely sold out). All the seats in the broad carousel are occupied five minutes before the show starts. All of them? No! I actually can see two couples of vacant seats somewhere within my view.

Will the owners of those tickets come? Has something happened to prevent them from coming? Or will they be late? Two of the vacancies are in the second row. Now wouldn’t that be something? Well, not for me, since I have a seat in the first row. But some people sitting further back would certainly appreciate them, wouldn’t they?

The Wise Guys enter the stage and start the concert. Those seats are still vacant. But since the wise guys are truly nice, they pause after 10 minutes and four people are permitted to come to the front and take the good seats.

Well, this Wise Guys concert showed me that people can actually be punctual if only they want to or have to. Even if they go by car. And I have seen the same happen when I went to the theatre or cinema.

It is much the same as with the railway. You have to be at the platform on the dot, even though the train mostly will not be on time. Because if, just once, you are late by two minutes, you can bet that this is the one day when the train will leave on time.

Yet, if you come to see me, you do not have to be punctual.

So what do I do about it?

For me, it is not a terrible thing if people who have an appointment with me are not on time. Because I always have enough work, or else am happy to have a little leisure time.

I also know that for those people who come to see me and are late, I am not less important than the Wise Guys or the theatre or the railway. The fact that they are on time there is just something the system forces them to do. On the other hand, their not being punctual when they come to see me is socially acceptable and perfectly normal behaviour. Perhaps this is part of our automobile culture.

And as to myself, I always try to be on time.

Being a biker, I do not have much of a choice, do I? There is no excuse I can think of.

Besides – I do not think I find people not being on time so terrible.

Perhaps I even like them.

RMD

P.S.
Here is a song by the Wise Guys I particularly like:
Ich schmeiß mein Auto auf den Müll

Before I start my vacation, I am going to be really grumpy!

Yesterday morning, as I read the SZ, I discovered the following note in the local section:

The number of the day – 2.9 – successful harbour!

It is about the “Bavarian Harbour at Regensburg”. Here is what it says:

General tendency is growth!

Because during the last year, the turnover increased by 2.9 per cent, now being 7.6 billion tons!

Well, I think to myself, maybe then the Rhein-Main-Donau-Channel makes some sense, after all? And I am a little surprised.
A few lines into the article, I am no longer surprised. Because here I can read:

The growth, however, is exclusively thanks to the products transported by trucks and railway. Shipping only has a turnover of 1.5 billion tons. That is a decrease of nine per cent compared with 2010.

That annoys me!

Is that what they call the number of the day for the “successful Bavarian Harbour of Regensburg”? Or are we talking a container reloading site with a little shipping as a by-product?

But then there is the explanation that saves the day. The decrease is easy to justify, because:

The director of the local branch, Andreas Pippig, put most of the blame on the difficult weather conditions last year. Danube flood, ice locks and the week-long low water level in autumn kept making it hard for shipping.

Well, maybe the gentleman has never heard about the climate change? Perhaps someone should come and enlighten him?
So what do I do about it?

I try to be honest, instead of lying to myself and to others in such an unscrupulous way as at least the headlines of newspaper articles do.

RMD
(Translated by EG)

Currently, quite a few freelancers and entrepreneurs offering services are probably just as angry as I am. The due dates of big enterprises get longer and longer. They just extend the dates without ever consulting us –  neither do they care what the contracts say.

If I remember correctly from the days when I leaned economy at school, the German law (BGB) says that payment for a service is due when the service has been rendered. Well, it makes sense, doesn’t it, because you can hardly deliver a service and afterwards demand that you still own the product, can you? If there is an expert among you who knows better, please enlighten me …

Now, however, we live in a time when more and more absurd laws are installed. Said laws, however, are ignored more and more often. Perhaps because they are so absurd. And since in our times “the end justifies the means“ and the end mostly is defined exclusively by profit, the ancient business codes no longer play any role.

So what do I do about it?

I get annoyed. And I pay the bills of service providers in time. To be sure, it increases our risk. But it gives us faithful providers and a good feeling.

RMD

There she is sitting and grinning at me. The no longer intact glass bottle lying on the cyclist’s path. It has probably been thrown out of a car as it passed. And on the wide bottleneck, you can read the following note:

No Deposit!

Including the fat exclamation mark. It seems like this is supposed to swing your decision to buy towards a deposit-free product. According to the motto: take me and you will not have the additional problems with the “can deposit”.

That annoys me. They actually emphasize – as a distinctive characteristic – that a product will not take part in the deposit process. Even if our excuse for a can and bottle deposit system is far from perfect, it is at least better than none at all.

  At the same time, the note “no deposit” is a very visible piece of information for the growing number of poor deposit-bottle collectors: do not make the effort to pick it up. Regardless of the fact that politicians keep telling us that effort must again pay.

Mind you, it all happened because of a few leaks in a deposit bottle law that is already, basically, questionable. A law that forces people to not throw plastic bottles in the container with the rest of the plastic (which, incidentally, I assumed should also be subjected to proper recycling). Instead, they have to take it back to the shop, so that it can then be shipped to China in a controlled manner. Where it will then be used as raw material for synthetic clothes.

It is also just a fairy tale that cleaning glass bottles is more detrimental for the environment than using a one-time plastic deposit bottle. Why don’t you go and ask a medium-sized brewery, such as at Aying, how environment-friendly they clean your beer bottles today.

So what do I do about it?

I drink water out of the tap. It is the same place where, in our country, coffee and tea originate. An additional advantage of this is that I need not carry crates and can go shopping without a car. And if I go a long distance, I carry the good old thermos.

As a matter of principle, I no longer use plastic bottles. To be sure, it limits my freedom of choice a little – for instance I cannot drink the fruit-mix drinks of the pious firm Adelholzner that comes in half-litre bottles. But that is also something I can easily put up with.

And beer out of a plastic bottle should be just as much a taboo for a beer connoisseur as beer out of a can!

RMD
(Translated by EG)

Children, Church, Catholic

At regular intervals, you can read in the media about child abuse by catholic priests. For example this morning at Radiowelt on Bayern 2. They reported about a particularly spectacular case. The lady concerned apparently is now to get an audience in Rome.

And at regular intervals, I get annoyed. All this informtion, reports, criticism. And all these stories about the unhappy victims. Everyone pretends to be appalled and disgusted. The church promises to do better in the future.

But:

Humans will be humans and men will be men. And they just do have something like a sexual appetite. And as long as the drive is forced to be suppressed by the celibacy (Zölibat) and as long as a sexual theory stigmatizes sexual intercourse and onanism as sinful, the drives of the men concerned (and probably also of the women concerned) will always break taboos in some way or other. And there will always be other than the “normal ways“ of doing so.

Consequently:

As I see it, the abuse of children in the catholic church is systemically unavoidable. Basically, it is caused by the celibacy and an absurd and perverse moral code. If the church really wished to improve the situation, they would have to abolish celibacy.

But this is an area where they are more than deaf. That is why every promise to improve the situation is nothing but lip-service. Probably we are looking at deliberate lies.

So here is what I ask of the media:

Even if you think you need the reports of those who have fallen victim to the catholic clergy in order to keep up your circulation, please do not forget to think of the future victims. And then what you should do is use every article in which you report about a victim for reminding everyone that the celibacy and the perverse catholic sexual codes are the reason!
Otherwise this madness will never end!

RMD
(Translated by EG)

Today, I really have reason for being grumpy!

After all, I quite enthusiastically and in the best of moods started riding my bike from my home office at Riemerling to my real office at Unterhaching. Even the weather was absolutely fantastic. Full of inner contentment, I navigated my way through the streets, even though they were quite dirty from all the New Year’s Eve fireworks. But I looked forward to the view of the Alps from the cyclist’s path between Ottobrunn and Unterhaching.

After 1.5 kilometres, however, the joy was over! Another puncture! This time it was the front tyre – last time, when we rode home from the Eisbach (nice coffee bar in Munich, just behind the opera house), it had been the rear tyre. And again, the reason was grit.

These days, grit contains such small particles – and they seem to be as sharp as glass. Well, I must admit that I go by bike quite often. Even in “winter”. Consequently, the probability for me having a puncture is higher. Besides, I rode my “inexpensive” winter bike at the time.

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Now, I am grumbling about the SZ!

or

A review of last year based on the SZ title page!

Well, today, there is an overkill of papers for me to read. Apart from the weekend SZ, tomorrow’s FAZ also arrived today (see my last article).

As a matter of facts, I am really quite annoyed. Being a conscientious person, I first read the SZ title page. That, too, makes me angry. That is true for both the titles and the content.

I will give you citations and comments on all the headlines of page one:

Very prominently positioned, right in the middle of the page:
More and More Doubts About the New Electoral Law
It seems like Karlsruhe starts doubting the system of overhang mandates. That is the only item of good news. But basically, there was never any doubt about this, was there? We often discussed the problem and always came to the conclusion that this reform of the Federal Government cannot be called democratic (just like quite a few more of the things this government did during the last year!).

And then I read the right column from top to bottom:

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I am now grumbling about the FAZ!

Today is already the second time this year that the FAZ of Sunday sits in my letter box next to the weekend SZ (on a Saturday). Of course, the last time was exactly one week ago, on Christmas Eve.

Somebody is taking it too easy here – at least that is how I feel!

There used to be a time when newspapers were as important as trains. Is there still a train service on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve? Is this how the editor admits that newspapers in paper form are no longer necessary? After all, at the current rate of things happening, the word printed on paper is no longer competitive. Actually, I find more and more canned trivial texts in the dailies.

Or is it that the FAZ wants to make life easier for its employees? As far as editors are concerned, I find that hard to believe. Don’t they work around the clock, anyway? Or is it about the printers or the logistics? The poor newspaper delivery persons?

I think not. In fact, I believe it is more because they want to protect their new marketing strategies. I will start grumbling about it in a minute.

What I am talking is the so-called “baker’s shops” in front of which there tend to be long lines on a Sunday morning. Inside, a few industrious employees warm up deep-frozen bakery products that have been produced for a pittance by people living in neighbouring countries to the east and then carted to Bavaria in trucks. The finished products are then thrown into shelves without any feeling. From there, the customer can pick his own rolls and pretzels with iron tongs and put them on his tray, before going to the cashier’s desk and paying all the stuff. Of course, he will have to pack everything himself.

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