Globalization
I quite understand, except for one thing – why did they hire a psychic in Bangalore? Are there no psychics in Lincolnshire? That seems most unikely. It’s a mystical sort of place, Lincs – it must be crawling with psychics.
Now I know what you’re going to say – they’re psychics – they don’t have to be on the spot – der. It’s spiritual. It’s not all grubbily of the earth earthy; it’s immaterial, it’s floaty, it’s non-geographical. The psychic could be on Pluto; it wouldn’t matter. Thought travels through space and time, it does not need bodies or proximity. I know. I get all that. But what about the convenience of the people who are stuck in Lincolnshire? Surely it would be easier for them to chat with a psychic who was right there than with one who was in a completely different time zone.
On the other hand, I suppose the thinking is that if you’re going to use a psychic you might as well use the best, and obviously the best psychics are all in India. Fair enough. Forget I said anything.
Ophelia, this post might leave a reader with a sneaking suspicion that you are being less than entirely straightforward in your wondering, then ceasing to wonder. One might even suspect some sort of sarcastic or ironic intent – if history and experience had not amply demonstrated that you are quite above that sort of low humor. But, you being the enlightened soul that you are, I must set aside such suspicions and focus instead on the real lesson of this story: The failure of basic support services in Lincolnshire. Why wasn’t this bereft citizen able to call the Ministry of Housinge and ask for the man with the cat detector van to swing ’round? Has such a basic and vital public service fallen victim to short-sighted budget-cutting? Is this what we can expect from a Tory government? And so soon! If I were a citizen of Lincolnshire, I would launch a petition drive at the very least…
But then on the other hand:
Quote of the week. ;-)
As soon as I pulled up the photo of that cat, a cat mewed in The Archers! Spooky or what! Perhaps Oliver’s being held captive in Ambridge.
Being a psychic is potentially one of the easiest businesses to set up. All you need is cards, tealeaves or whatever, and a premium rate phone-line.
The ads for psychics in my local paper all offer a money-back guarantee. Curiously, this gives them an incentive to actually think about the problem and offer a likely solution, which perhaps means that it’s better than random suggestions.
“The ads for psychics in my local paper all offer a money-back guarantee. Curiously, this gives them an incentive to actually think about the problem and offer a likely solution, which perhaps means that it’s better than random suggestions.”
I heard of a tale of a foreign exchange ‘expert’ who gave a similar ‘guarantee’. He told half of his clients that the US dollar would go up and half of them that it would go down. He then sat back and collected his money…
If nothing else it shows little regard for the economic recovery of Britain that they choose to outsource their woo.
It occurs to me (not for the first time) that becoming a psychic is an almost perfect work from home opportunity. All you have to do is hang your shingle, make a few not terribly insightful but seemingly plausible predictions about current events, spin the results as testimonials on your website (and in carefully crafted press releases), and before you know it, you too can get paid for sharing utterly useless insights.
It’s like being a politician without having to be photogenic.
Oh yes, I have often had to fight off the thought that I could effortlessly pull in wads of cash by adding a sideline in psychic therapy or similar to my nerdish unpaid deskbound hobby-career. It would be so easy…
Anyone who has 1000 pounds to spend on a psychic to look for their cat should be paying more tax.
I remember hearing that there’s a psychic in New York who specializes in pets.
That tale about the foreign exchange expert reminds me of a thing I saw about “the most successful forex trader in the business”. Let’s say there are 1024=2^10 traders. There’s the better half and the worse half, so in the top half there are 512. Of those, there’s the better half and the worse half,…. and in the end of course _somebody_ must be the best. But it may be pure chance that it’s person A rather than person B. Focusing on this apparent success story is what astronomers know as observational selection: the tendency to focus on the brightest objects, which are not necessarily the most significant.
There’s a very interesting interview with Philip Tetlock here:
http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/17/pf/experts_Tetlock.moneymag/index.htm
(He’s the academic who has been studying experts’ predictions for years.)
Losing a cat under any circumstances can be very devastating to the owner. I once found my snow-white cat, called Bainin, stone dead, down a boreen. Evidently, she had been poisoned by stuff laid out by farmers. There was a fantastic rapport between us and I truly pined after her for a very long time. I had given all her off-spring to local folk in the past, so thus went frantically retracing my tracks, in search of one, hoping dearly to find one who somewhat resembled Bainin – in order to replace her. It was a fruitless exercise.
Perhaps I should have contacted the local psychic to hear her speak to me from the spirit world!
Why on earth did she have to employ a psychic from Bangalore, instead of Susan Winter on her own doorstep?