It’s a dog’s life in Brazil

Back in London, I had my Staffordshire Bull Terrier, Matilda. Matilda has a great temperament, is very friendly and intelligent – she even once featured on Channel 4’s TV show about the most intelligent dogs in the UK.

It was normal for me and Matilda to go walking together in parks, cemeteries, playing fields, where she would roam off the lead. Going for a sniff here and there, and going to say hello to any other dogs and people out walking.

The interesting paradox in the UK is that dogs get a lot more freedom in a city like London because dogs can walk freely in almost any open public place. In the English countryside there is always the concern over livestock – dogs can’t worry farm animals, and many beaches have dog restrictions.

Here in Brazil it’s all different for dogs.

Many people have pet dogs and there are not a huge number of strays wandering the streets – like India where stray hounds are all over the place. But it seems the dogs fall into one of two camps. They are either guard dogs or toy dogs with very little in between.

So, you can walk past a house and an aggresive Rottweiler or German Shepherd will do it’s best to attack you. Making you fear that the gate might open and a dog resembling the one in the Omen might get you. Or you walk past someone in the street who has a couple of tiny toy dogs that are so aggressive, it’s impossible to get close to them.

And it’s not possible to let them off the lead in parks. In fact, it’s not possible to even enter the park, because most parks ban dogs. Given the way most dogs here behave, that’s understandable, but it compounds the problem because what most of these dogs really need is socialisation with other dogs and people. Banning them from parks, banning them from being able to run free anywhere, and encouraging them to remain locked up at home all day, or walked around the block for just ten minutes each evening means most of the dogs here are neurotic and anti-social.

I sense an enormous business opportunity. Not kennels or training, just offering a safe place for dogs to play and socialise together in a place where leads are not required and owners can chat together and allow their mutts to meet. I’m sure I could earn a fortune for setting up something that’s available in every single park in London.

The day the brakes died

I crashed my car last Saturday. A lot of people have been asking me about it on Twitter and Facebook, so here is the story… fortunately it all ends pretty well considering how bad this could have been.

In May me and Angie bought ourselves a new car. New to us at least, but it was actually a fifty-year-old VW Beetle – or ‘Fusca’ as the Beetle is known in Brazil. Considering it was a 1961 model, it was in astounding condition with a new engine having done fewer than 500km and all new interior and seats… it looked great and we wanted a car just for weekends anyway. This is a big city of 20m people, believe me, the bus and metro are better options during the week.

We used the car a few times around town and a couple of weeks ago put it in for some maintenance work. All the normal servicing work like brakes, sparks, filters, oil… plus our local garage told us the suspension was a bit dodgy and the carburettor was shot, so we had everything done.

I collected the car from the garage last Saturday and was pleased to find it running so nicely. The gear changes were noticeably better and it just felt that way cars do after a big service and tune-up – improved.

Unfortunately, on the way back from the garage I was running along a long downhill stretch of Rua Diana and the lights turned red. There was no rush, so I slowly applied the brakes. Then suddenly the pedal felt like it snapped. It went to the floor. I pushed it up and down a couple of times only to find it was completely loose and we had no brakes!

A taxi had stopped at the red light and we ran straight into the back of it.

I hurt my hand as it was still on the steering wheel and my thumb was torn backwards… it’s still sore now. Angie had it worse than me as her seatbelt broke so she was thrown into the windscreen, banging her head on the glass and bashing her knee into the dashboard.

Thankfully though, we were both OK and able to walk out of the car to talk to the taxi driver and figure out how to get our car off the road.

I was angry with myself for not yanking the handbrake, but then the time between the brakes failing and us rolling into the car may have been a couple of seconds at most – I was focused on the brake failure and just never had time to take alternative action…

It was particularly annoying to have just spent a lot of money at the garage, and to have all the brake pads changed, only to find the brakes failing on the car. I was initially pretty angry about the situation. We could have been going faster, there could have been a person instead of a taxi, or a child could have stepped in front of us… the situation could have been a hundred times worse and yet we had supposedly just had the brakes fixed up.

The short story of the aftermath is that the taxi driver was very philosophical about it all. He lost a day of work, but was actually OK about it – enjoying his day off. He asked us for about £200 to repair his bumper, which he has still not come around to claim so he is in no hurry. He has chatted on the phone and talked of his sorrow at seeing a nice classic car all broken up. He was sorry for us and we had crashed into him!

Our car has a damaged bumper, bonnet, and wheel arch, but remarkably the axle and steering are all OK so it’s superficial damage that looks worse than it is. We are waiting for a couple of repair estimates still, but it shouldn’t be too much.

The garage where we had the work done rescued us with a tow-truck and they have kept the car all week. They are sorting out the brakes. It was a hydraulic failure – so all the pressure was lost suddenly. Though we were pretty angry with the garage, they had not done any work on the hydraulic system itself so it was just one of those things – it could have happened anytime. And in any case they are now fixing it up for us without any labour charges.

So, it has all turned out OK in the end. The damage won’t cost too much to repair, the guy with the taxi was more upset about our car than his, and our injuries were only minor and already healing.

On the evening of the crash itself though I did find it hard to sleep, just thinking about all those possibilities. For a total brake failure, we had just about the best possible conditions, fairly slow, running up to a red light, with a car in front to take the impact rather than sailing out into a main road. It could all have been so much worse, and with Angie’s seatbelt breaking with only a minor crash the thought of what might have happened if we had been going faster was quite disturbing.

Angie now doesn’t trust the car. It’s romantic to have a beautiful fifty-year-old car rather than some boring grey motor from GM, but this episode with the brakes has shaken her. We may well be selling it as soon as it looks perfect again… and getting the typical city-dwellers 4×4.

I never thought I would say that, but I’m also thankful to still be here after that experience.

9/11: Boys of Queens

There is a beautiful song written by Andy Nolan and performed by the Biblecode Sundays called ‘Boys of Queens’. It tells the story of an Irish-American soldier in the present-day Iraq conflict who – just before he dies – recalls how he lost his own father and brothers in New York on 9/11,  all of them with the FDNY.

September 11th 2001. It’s almost a decade since then and an awful lot of American history has taken place during that time.

As I listened to the song on my iPod last night I decided that I wanted to capture as many memories as possible from that moment ten years ago. To hear from people who loved and lost family members, to hear from those who worked endless days and nights in the most horrific of circumstances, to hear from those who were thousands of miles away, but found their perspective of life forever changed.

I’m going to use the Internet to find those memories. Ten years have passed. Soon it will be twenty and thirty years on and a generation will have passed. There will be adults leaving university in another ten years who were born after 9/11 and only know of the event from history classes and memorials.

What I want to do:

• Collect memories from people across the world of how 9/11 affected them, their families, and perhaps how the event changed their world.
• It could be from those directly affected by being there or those who were intensely affected just by the event itself and how the world has changed since then.
• I will collect these memories for the remainder of July, edit them in August, and by September 11, 2011 I will produce a book of memories that can be purchased anywhere in the world – using Lulu.com.
• I’d like all proceeds from the book to go to the Michael Lynch Memorial Foundation – a tribute to one brave FDNY firefighter who lost his life that day. The foundation funds higher education scholarships for the children of firefighters.

What I need you to do:

• Write down your memory of September 11, 2011. Be as intensely personal or direct as you want to be. Aim to write somewhere between 500-800 words, but more or less is fine if you want to say less or more.
• Let me know who you are, so I can give some introduction to you in the book. And if you want to remain anonymous then that’s fine, maybe just let me know how you want to be credited.
• Send your contributions here: boysofqueens@gmail.com [before the end of July please]

I’ve spoken to the guys from the Biblecode Sundays and they fully support the book and will no doubt promote it at some gigs around September 2011.

Nothing we do now to remember that day can change what happened, but out of such great pain, perhaps we can create some good, help some people, and capture the memories of today for the next generation to come. So they never forget.

Stephen Bullas and eCode: Avoid like the plague (Captive ReLease)

Note added after initial publication: The government involved in this blog asked me to remove their name in case of any confusion between their position and that of eCode. I have done so and replaced each mention of the country name with XYZ. However, there never was, and is not now, any claim that the government itself was ever at fault in this case – they paid eCode. It is eCode that did not pass on the money. Apologies if there was any confusion within government XYZ, but I hope this is now clear.

---

This blog is longer than usual, but read on and you will learn:

• How consulting firm eCode has refused to pay me £3,000 they accepted into their bank account on my behalf.
• How a major international analyst group suffered a similar, though much more expensive fate at the hands of eCode.
• How it pays to contract with a client directly, rather than believing a prime contractor will ever pay you.

The European Centre for Offshore Development sounds like an august institution. At least it sounds that way. One look at their website gives another impression. It looks like something Rodney Trotter knocked together in his night-school classes. That’s right. Possibly the only organisation in the world today still building a website that only works in Internet Explorer. A browser I don’t even have installed on my computer, though I can run through Chrome, Firefox, and Safari trying to improve things, this is a story that doesn’t get any better. I’m digressing from the main story, but it’s interesting to just state upfront how the impression one gets from the website can be reinforced by the behaviour of the company and its executives. More than a year ago, on June the 30th to be precise, I had the first meeting with Stephen Bullas, the MD of eCode regarding an interesting little project for the government of XYZ – specifically XYZ Enterprise, the government agency promoting trade with XYZ. A project that already had the prospect of follow-up work with the government, so although it was initially a fairly small gig, it looked like it could grow. I also had known Stephen for a number of years from the analyst and outsourcing conference circuit, so it seemed a good idea to get involved. eCode had been asked by XYZ Enterprise if they could write a independent research report analysing the good, bad, and ugly of the XYZ offer for IT outsourcing, call centres, and business process outsourcing (BPO). eCode decided to make the report more comprehensive and independent by producing it as a research coalition – so I would focus on the BPO research, eCode would focus on the IT, and one of the leading global analyst firms was employed to work in this partnership, to produce the call centre analysis. Contracts were drawn up. eCode was the prime contractor, the only organisation to have a direct contract with the XYZ government. The analyst firm and myself contracted with eCode, with an agreement that our payments would be made on a back-to-back basis… ie eCode would be responsible for getting cash from the XYZ, but as soon as payments are made, we would not need to invoice eCode again (other than for accounting purposes), payment would just come immediately to us as eCode receives money. As far as I was concerned, the project needed me to visit XYZ in September 2010, with an analyst from the analyst firm and Stephen Bullas from eCode. All expenses would be paid for a trip lasting just a few days. I would get £6,000 to go on the trip, gather information by interviewing people, then writing up my part of the report. I was also offered an additional £1,000 by the XYZ government if I would speak about my findings at a Financial Times conference in November 2010. I went on the trip in September 2010. XYZ is a very nice place and I highly recommend visiting during the European summer. The meetings went well and I filmed many of them, editing together 10 or 11 interview videos that I threw into the deal as a bonus – I never charged anything more for doing this. I received £2,000 in October 2010 – this was a ‘mobilisation fee’ and had been invoiced in September as the project commenced. I wrote up my notes, edited the video and sent everything off to eCode. In November I did my speech at the conference, and I even chaired an additional conference on the same day for the XYZ at a National Outsourcing Association conference. The previous evening I had dinner with the XYZ High Commissioner at his beautiful house in Kensington. When he had told me that he had a few spare dinner places I reached out into my network – again as a favour – and managed to bring along the technology chiefs of several organisations including the Metropolitan police, Transport for London, and the Department for Work and Pensions. The XYZ paid the £1,000 for me to speak at the conference, leaving a balance of £4,000 owed to me. I like XYZ. I had to write in the report that they have a few challenges in the global services market. I live in São Paulo in Brazil and the population of this city alone is about 47 times the entire population of XYZ. So they need to focus on specific services and not try to compete with places like India. But they realise this and, to their credit, they interfered very little in the editorial content of the report – except where they very strongly believed we had factual errors. Time went on. The XYZ government were a bit slow paying up the remainder of the money because of various internal disputes about which part of the government was paying… enterprise or the IT ministry. Time rumbled on, but by March they had paid everything that was owed – an email went out on March 1st thanking everyone for their patience with the editing process and agreeing that the project was complete. I expected to get my money. The project was finished, the client was happy, there was an email closing it all. But nothing happened. I chased eCode. Nothing. I was hesitant to go to my own contacts in the XYZ government because I was a sub-contractor of eCode – it was not up to me to chase payment to the prime contractor. But eventually in May I started asking my XYZ contacts what was going on. “We have already paid eCode!”, was their surprising response. So I started chasing eCode. No joy. Eventually, after what amounted to a series of mild email threats, I discovered that the head of accounts at eCode, John Dee, was on safari somewhere in Africa and Stephen Bullas had recently been taken ill on a flight from Germany to Egypt. I was asked to wait longer. Stephen would be out of action for weeks. I insisted that there was supposed to have been a back-to-back transfer of my £4,000 as soon as eCode was paid. John eventually relented and transferred £1,000 to me, saying that I would have to wait for Stephen Bullas to authorise the rest. I waited for Stephen to call. He did after a couple of weeks only to tell me that the cupboard was bare. His company had collapsed because he was ill. Contracts were failing all over the place because he was not working and he had no cash in the bank to pay me. “But it was never your money to keep. That was supposed to go into your bank account then out to me on the same day…” I cried in frustration. Stephen told me that there was nothing that could be done, other than to wait for him to return to work and to drive more revenue into the business again. I waited. I called him back three weeks later only to find he was still not back at work. I gave him more time because he explained a series of “deals just around the corner” and even an elaborate “we are about to be bought” story that turned out to be just as false as his promise to pay me on the day he got the money from the XYZ government. I waited through the rest of May, I started losing patience in June and gave Stephen some deadlines to pay, but he kept on forcing me to postpone any debt collection action by promising some special deal coming the following week. As July came around I realised that I have now spent more than a year on this contract, for just a few thousand pounds. I wish I had never agreed to work with eCode. eCode still owes me £3,000. Money that was paid from the government of XYZ to me for the work I did, only passing through eCode for the convenience of reducing the number of contracts required. eCode still owes the analyst firm a lot more than me. They were charging much more than me for their time and brand value, so they are much more in the hole than I am, but then as a large organisation they can afford to get a debt collection agency to go after Stephen Bullas and eCode. I personally have filed a case with HM Courts and Tribunal service for the money I am owed. Given that I was promised a back-to-back transfer, this amounts to little more than theft in my eyes. I know it’s not theft in a strict legal sense, but I keep asking myself why did I trust him? Why didn’t I contract directly? Why did I trust Stephen Bullas and eCode?

• An organisation that has not paid me what I am owed and has consistently avoided my calls and emails on the subject.
• An organisation that has not done this to me alone, but to one of the biggest and best known analyst groups in the world – and probably has other creditors too.
• An organisation that has not paid me or the analyst firm, yet the homepage of the eCode website is advertising the XYZ report for £1,250 (see the screenshot above).

If you are thinking about hiring eCode, buying eCode, or purchasing their research then ask yourself a question: Do you want to get shafted? Just don’t do it. Don’t buy from eCode. Don’t buy them. Don’t believe a word Stephen Bullas says. If he can lie to ‘friends’ he has worked with in the industry for years, then what do you think he is capable of doing to those he cares about even less? Welcome to business with eCode, where eCode hires internationally known and respected analysts to produce research eCode then sells without ever paying the analysts involved… I will see you in court Stephen Bullas and eCode. I’m sure the big international analyst firm have their own plans for you too…

Identity headaches in Brazil

I had an appointment at the federal police office in Lapa recently. It’s the big building in São Paulo where foreigners need to sort out their papers and Brazilians get their passports…

I was due to collect my RNE – my permanent ID number that effectively gives me an identity in Brazil. I have a social security number already, which has allowed me to at least open a bank account and get a phone contract, but the RNE is needed for anything more complex.

When I went to collect it they told me they can’t issue it because none of my papers show my mother’s name. My passport, driving licence, marriage certificate, birth certificate… nothing shows the name of my mother. I offered to write it down for them, but they wanted some kind of proof – not just trust in me that I would give them the correct name.

I had to leave empty-handed. None of my documents show the name of my parents, so I wondered what I could do. Eventually I found that the British Consulate General issues certificates of identity, which seemed like the answer so I paid them a visit today.

They refused to give me an identity certificate because I could not prove the name of my mother… but they did at least show me how I can make a request for a new birth certificate to be sent from the UK with my parent’s names on it.

So I now need to apply for a new birth certificate, so I can then get some consular ID, so I can then get my RNE, so I can then get my Brazilian driver’s licence… each document appears to be waiting for another one to be approved.

Welcome to Brazil, where a passport and original birth certificate are entirely useless if you can’t tell someone the name of your mother!