By the way, no more comments. At all. Ever again. I’ve had enough of spam, hatred, flame wars, and idiots of any kind. For those who played the game, thanks for reading and commenting in a constructive way.

A happy life to all of you.

I snapped the picture above yesterday evening, watching the riots in South Croydon, London, on a British TV channel called Sky News. Someone in charge of the programming thought appropriate to broadcast that event (literally) in parallel with the closing bell in Wall Street.

And when I say appropriate, I weight my words; answering my own question, I have to say that no, it is not a joke; it is sadly the way the world works.

The iPad is a better inflight entertainment system because…

• The touchscreen actually works. And when you touch it, you don’t disturb the person sleeping in the seat in front of yours.
• It’s lightweight.
• The captain cannot interrupt your movie or your picture to tell you some useless facts about the temperature outside or the altitude.
• You get to choose the music and the videos that you want to watch. You should just remember to get them prior to boarding, of course.
• You also get to choose the games you want to play. The choice of games is much larger, and it’s called App Store.
• You can even read newspapers, books, magazines, in the same screen. Reading the latest issue of the Economist on my iPad is priceless. It’s good to avoid being limited to the “in-flight” magazine provided by the airline (“your free copy!”), which tends to be quite lame, no matter which airline we’re talking about.
• You can answer e-mails while you fly (for the moment you cannot sent them, unless you fly in some airline that has a wifi network, and as far as I know, there are only a few with such a feature.)
• You could write a novel in iA Writer or Ommwriter for iPad, for that matter, all while you listen to Liszt’s “Evening Harmony in D Flat Major”. Or you could prepare a blog post, like this one.
• Coupled with noise-cancelling headphones, the quality of sound is years-light ahead of what those crummy airline headphones are able to provide.
• The battery. A whole 10-hour flight on a single charge is absolutely possible.

‘Nuff said.

1. 1992: QBasic
2. 1993: Turbo Pascal
3. 1994: C
4. 1995: Delphi
5. 1996: Java
6. 1997: JavaScript
7. 1998: VBScript
8. 1999: Transact-SQL
9. 2000: C# + Prolog
10. 2001: C++
11. 2002: PHP
12. 2003: Objective-C
13. 2004: Visual Basic.NET
14. 2005: Ruby
15. 2006: LINQ
16. 2007: Erlang
17. 2008: Python
18. 2009: Go
19. 2010: Lisp
20. 2011: Haskell

The trend has roughly been an evolution from procedural during the 90′s, to object-oriented ones at the beginning of the 2000′s, and finally to functional languages right now.

And thus I realize, I’ve been programming for 20 years this year, 15 of which for a living.

He aquí la anécdota: la cosa era que nuestra escala era de 11 horas; llegamos de Durban a las 5 de la mañana, y el vuelo para Zurich era a las 4 de la tarde, así que apenas aterrizamos nos buscamos la manera de salir del (inmenso) aeropuerto de Dubai, y conocer un poco la ciudad.

Lo complicado de tal emprendimiento fue que Claudia posee un pasaporte boliviano, el cual requiere visas para entrar a varios países del mundo, incluyendo los Emiratos Arabes Unidos (donde se encuentra, justamente, Dubai). Así que fue medio tanteando la cosa que nos acercamos al mostrador de Emirates (la linea aérea) que nos dijo que, pagando lo que se debe (unos 50 dólares) no hay problema.

Dubai es el reino de la guita, y se nota hasta en estos detalles. Cabe aclarar que Clau no tuvo tal problema en Sudafrica, que es uno de los pocos países de Africa que permite el ingreso de ciudadanos bolivianos sin drama ni visa alguna. Gracias Nelson! Bueno, para hacer corta la historia, tramite va tramite viene, recién a las 8 llegamos (muertos) al hotel “Marco Polo” de Dubai, en la calle Al Muteena – que a mi me suena como un pariente lejano de la Almudena de Madrid, y seguramente tendrán algo en comun.

Para que se den una idea, en Dubai a las 5 de la mañana la temperatura era de 32 grados. Pasear por la ciudad se convierte en un ejercicio de acrobacia y estilo, entrando y saliendo de lugares con aire acondicionado; son temperaturas que ni los arabes se bancan. Apenas salís a la calle y se te empañan los anteojos de sol. Sentís que tu cuerpo te increpa con un “eeeeeeehhhhh que te paaaaasa???” a cada paso. El pavimento quema, las paredes de cualquier edificio queman, el picaporte de la puerta del taxi quema, todo quema.

Ojo, esto es a fines de mayo, por lo tanto en el hemisferio norte es verano; por ahí el clima es un poquito mas clemente en diciembre, pero algo me dice que no es así.

El gordo Casero habla, en una de sus versiones de “Aquel Maldito Champán”, de un calor en la Pampa donde “hasta las lagartijas andaban con sombrilla”. Bueno, acá ver gente cruzando la calle con paraguas no es raro. El sol árabe no es moco de pavo. 32 grados, a esa hora, hermano, me hizo recordar algún verano en Buenos Aires con esa temperatura, pero esta vez con muchísima menos humedad (casi nada). Muy sofocante, hasta te cuesta respirar. La sangre polaca en mis venas rechaza tales temperaturas con fervor patriótico, con ahínco y con estupor.

Y con sed. No se olviden la botella de agua mineral si salen a pasear, no es broma lo que les digo. En segundos te deshidratás, mal.

No solo todo es caliente, sino que, además, todo es amarillo; hay arena por todos lados, y los vientos calientes del desierto del Rub’ al Khali traen arena continuamente (suena la musica de Laurence de Arabia para acompañar este pasaje de mi relato).

Dubai es una ciudad artificial creada a partir de la nada, en un lapso récord, de solo 20 años. Y se nota; todo esta nuevo, reluciente, las calles son anchas y perpendiculares, es la apoteosis de la ciudad diagramada, una La Plata con esteroides, en la cual las diagonales fueron pensadas como autopistas desde el vamos.

Pero, para ser sinceros, este parece ser el lugar menos indicado del mundo para vivir, o al menos esa es la sensación. Y en medio de este horno, la gente es muy cálida (en todos los sentidos de la palabra, no es chiste); realmente hay una gran amabilidad en el aire, el trato es cordial para con el turista (sobre todo cuando no entendes pepa de arabe, como nos pasa a nosotros y a tantísimos otros). Y cuando digo gente, no digo arabes, porque en Dubai casi casi te diría que son minoría. La gente viene de todos lados; rusos, chinos, srilankeses, hindúes, africanos, todos están aquí.

El ingles es el nuevo latín que, al menos por ahora, mantiene la torre de Babel en pie.

Dubai tiene una actividad económica increíble, y eso se nota de dos maneras: primero, porque hay negocios de cualquier cosa, en cualquier lado, abiertos a toda hora, y por otro lado, porque hay unos atolladeros de transito que no se puede creer. Imagínense que hace 20 años apenas, a esta ciudad la conocía solo el jeque y los 30 pescadores que vivían por ahí. Parece raro, pero no hay manera de evitar atolladeros incluso cuando has puesto autopistas en cada esquina. O mejor dicho, aquello es causa de eso, justamente.

Dubai es la ciudad que mejor representa el “Antropoceno“, la nueva era geológica de este planeta, en la cual la raza humana se transforma en la mayor fuerza tectónica que haya jamas modificado la faz de la tierra.

Dubai da miedo.

Por ejemplo, se tiene que importar agua para regar los parques (que son hermosos), de otra manera no habría suficiente agua para mantener en vida una flora sorprendente en medio de una desolación absoluta. Porque el desierto no perdona.

Dubai es una lucha perdida de antemano.

Cuando salis de Dubai en dirección de Durban, la ruta del avión atraviesa el famoso desierto arabe que les mencione anteriormente; y créanme, visto desde el avion, es una desolación total. Un mar de arena, no hay nada. Al lado de este desierto, la Patagonia se parece al Amazonas. Al menos hay cardos y tenés alguna probabilidad de perderte y terminar en el Bolsón.

Acá, nada de eso. Te perdiste, sos boleta.

El aeropuerto de Dubai merece otro capitulo. Solamente la terminal 3 constituye en si misma el edificio mas grande del mundo por superficie cubierta, tiene dimensiones delirantes, unas 160 canchas de fútbol una al lado de la otra, y encima lo están agrandando; no solo eso, sino que están ya construyendo la terminal 4, como si no hubiese ya bastante espacio para recibir aviones y gente. De los 48 millones de pasajeros que transitan por aquí cada año, creo haber leído por ahí que quieren llegar a los 98 millones de pasajeros. Dos veces Argentina, por año, respirando este aire acondicionado, yendo a cualquier lado del mundo.

Como les digo, el aire adentro de este aeropuerto (como adentro de cualquier taxi, hotel, bar y cabina telefónica en esta ciudad) esta totalmente acondicionado, lo cual nos dejo pensando a Clau y a mi en la cantidad de megawatts por hora que esta gente consume en aire acondicionado. Creo que Itaipú, Atucha y el complejo Chocón-Cerros Colorados juntos no bastarían para sostener tal demanda.

Y finalmente, para seguir con la anécdota, después de una siesta en el hotel, dejamos las valijas y nos fuimos al Burj Khalifa, el edificio mas alto del mundo. Visita turística típica y obligada. Buscando la entrada para turistas, en un momento salimos a la calle, y siendo ya mediodía, la temperatura rondaba los 40 grados a la sombra. Como pueden imaginarse, volvimos corriendo a los pasillos del shopping center que esta al lado del edificio. No se banca, así nomas.

Con respecto al Burj Khalifa, miren, en junio del 2000 pude subir a las torres gemelas del World Trade Center de Nueva York. Unos 110 pisos de alto, una estructura que me dejo atónito en su envergadura. Despues el año pasado subimos con Clau al Empire State. Unos 100 y pico pisos de alto.

Pero el Burj Khalifa, muchacho, esta las manda al vestuario a esas, a las torres Petronas y al Taipei 101 todos juntos, con la cola entre las patas y como si el Barcelona las hubiese goleado por 5 a cero. No solamente por su altura, sino por una belleza intrinseca, casi organica.

Me hizo pensar por momentos a los cruceros Calamari que usan los rebeldes para destruir la segunda estrella de la muerte en “El Regreso del Jedi” (no se rían de mis referencias arquitectónicas, por favor). El Burj Khalifa es antisimétrico, altísimo, curvo, parece una planta que emerge del suelo. Es absolutamente delirante. Y la figura de este edificio transforma totalmente el perfil de la ciudad de Dubai cuando la ves desde el aire.

Siguiendo en la linea “Star Wars”, Dubai parece como si hubiesen construido Coruscant en Tatooine. El que sea fanático, que comprenda la comparación.

La visita guiada que te hacen en el Burj Khalifa te permite subir solamente (!) hasta el piso 125, desde donde podes ver que la cosa sigue para arriba de manera vertiginosa, imparable. Es mas; desde la terraza de observación para los turistas no se ve la punta, no se ve donde termina el edificio; y obviamente, de eso se trata.

Hay una desmesura en Dubai que supera lo imaginable. No voy a entrar en discursos kitsch sobre la “proyección al mundo”, la “demostración de poder”, nada de eso; simplemente digo, algo muy loco esta pasando ahí. Les dejo la imagen del texto que esta en la entrada, que habla por si misma.

El texto reza lo siguiente:

I am the power that lifts the world’s head proudly skywards surpassing limits and expectations. Rising gracefully from the desert and honouring the city with a new glow, I am an extraordinary union of engineering and art, with every detail carefully considered and beautifully crafted. I am the force of collective aspirations and the aesthetic union of many cultures. I stimulate dreams, stir emotions and awaken creativity. I am the magnet that attracts the wide-eyed tourist, eagerly catching their postcard moment, the centre for the world’s finest shopping, dining and entertainment and home for the world’s elite. I am the heart of the city and its people, the marker that defines Emaar’s ambition and Dubai’s shining dream. More than just a moment in time, I define moments for future generations. I am Burj Khalifa.

Escribo estas lineas escuetas mientras sobrevolamos el norte de Irak y Armenia en nuestro vuelo de regreso a casa. Este primer viaje nuestro al hemisferio oriental fue demasiado delirante; tengo los ojos llenos de recuerdos, las papilas con sabores nunca antes imaginados, los oídos con músicas nunca antes vistas. Y con preguntas sin respuesta.

2011/03 Mike Monteiro | F*ck You. Pay Me. from SanFrancisco/CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

Definitely one of the most useful videos I’ve seen in a while. Having to deal with clients in a regular basis, I can’t deny there is a great deal of common sense in it.

In my personal case, I do not do any client work without a contract in place, ever. I found it helps streamline the communication and the collaboration with the client, removing uncertainty and concerns upstream, instead of downstream. So far I haven’t encountered any client who didn’t want to have a contract in place; most usually we go through several revisions, depending on their legal team’s requirements or some other detail that has to be reviewed. But I’ve had people not respecting them. That’s another problem altogether.

I admit, however, that my contract model is far from perfect. And that’s where this video comes in handy. In particular, the “intellectual property transfer on last payment” part is the most interesting one for me; I’ve had payment problems in the past, even after an application was published on the app store, and I positively know that I do not want such problems in the future.

I hate the way you airlines cram hundreds of people into the smallest of spaces. Do you really think my femur fits the distance between your seats? Do you really think I enjoy being pushed sideways for hours by my seat neighbor because the armrest is too narrow for the both of us? Do you really think I can eat my meal when the seat in front of me is in the horizontal position? Do you really think I can’t avoid numb legs and feet during long flights? Do you really think I can go to the toilets without waking up all the people in the row in front of me or my neighbors?

I hate how long boarding and getting out of the damn plane takes. Haven’t you noticed that airplanes usually have more than one door? Then why the fuck are all 380 passengers of a 747 getting into the plane though the same, unique, small door? Can’t you design airports that take that into account? Can’t you, jetty makers, airport designers, add an extension to boarding gates that goes above the wing or below the tarmac so that we can all get in and out through several doors at once? I hate how you dare selling double tickets to obese people. Wouldn’t it be better to have a couple of special seats in the front of the aircraft for them? You don’t have any trouble overselling tickets and leaving people in the ground wondering what happened and begging you for a hotel voucher, but of course you can’t plan in advance for the 5% of potentially obese passengers that have to endure your fucking shit. And let’s not talk about families with kids, ok?

I hate your in-flight entertainment system. When it works (which, as per Murphy’s Law, most often don’t), your music sucks, your film choice is crappy, the sound is bad, and even worse, I hate how the captain interrupts my movie every 10 minutes to tell me that the outside temperature is about 3° Kelvin or other nonsense that nobody fucking cares about, babbled through speakers that sound like if they were built in the 20s. To begin with, haven’t you heard about that Dolby thing? And most importantly, don’t you think we are already annoyed enough, to just shut the fuck up and fly this thing in time? That’s the only thing we care about, you moron: to get outta here as fast as possible.

I hate your crappy food. I hate how it tastes, I hate the bad manners of the crew members serving it, I hate that I can never have meat instead of pasta because I always happen to sit behind the person who got the last one and that yeah, you’re very sorry about that. I’ll have a Coke, please.

I hate how airline websites fail big time. I hate how I have to always spend longer than required to find what I’m looking for, that your search engines are useless, that I have to spell correctly the codes of the airports, that your date picker is unusable without Flash or JavaScript, that the back button resets the whole form, that your animated intro annoys me every time I want to fucking spend money on your idiotic company because you happen to be the only idiots flying where I need to go. And airport websites are not better, so here goes a message to those dear airport webmasters: I want to know, right now, fast, without any more required clicks, if my flight is delayed, canceled or in time. I do not, let me repeat, I DO NOT CARE about how nice your first class lounge is; I will most probably never use it. The same goes for any other information. Put it behind a menu and don’t bother me. Thank you.

I hate how I get the same crappy level of service when I pay 25 bucks for a 2 hour trip to Madrid or when I pay 2000 dollars for a roundtrip flight to Argentina that lasts 14 hours. Are you fucking kidding me? What is your problem, you dickhead? Do you really think I do not see how you are fucking filling your pockets with my cash?

I hate how inaccessible, unfriendly, broken and even expensive, airports are. I hate how immigration booths are all closed but one, and you spend more time waiting to show your passport than in the flight. I hate how your tax-free shit shops are more fucking expensive than downtown shops, and how they shamelessly pretend to have the best prices on Earth. Do you really think I was born yesterday?

I hate the mind-boggling algorithms I have to execute in order to know which terminal my flight is leaving from. It goes something like this, starting with the basic questions, domestic or international? Air Exhaust or Air Compression? Oh, then it’s terminal G, door 257. You must enter through terminal N and then take our new air-magnetic-levitation-superconductor-enabled-robot-train and get out at terminal H, then walk through the panoramic gateway above the tarmac, and then you’ll see the checkin booths at your left. Oh, since it’s a code-sharing flight, you must use the booths of Blowjob Airlines to check in, then pay the airport tax in counter 734 and proceed through security and later through passsport control to gate Y35, but hurry up, your flight is boarding right now.

I hate how airport terminals are miles away from each other and how bad they are referenced and how hard it is to understand your information panels. Haven’t you noticed that small airports are usually faster to get in and out, have shorter distances between the plane and the terminal, people board using both doors and even better, are easier to get to from cities? The solution is not having two- or three-stories tall planes carrying 800 people at once; STOP THAT SHIT. That won’t work. If your airports can’t handle 200 people at once per plane, do you really think you can handle more? Really?

I hate how connecting flights are always clutching at straws. A small delay in a flight, a longer queue in the security checks or even the fact of having to recheck-in on the new flight (because some airlines can’t access the computers of each other in order to check you in all legs at once before departure), and your flight is gone. And if you are really unlucky, you will see the door of the gate being closed in front of you as you sweat your way to it, together with the grins of the ground team looking at you. You are then left to pray that you won’t have to pay for a new ticket, that you will get a hotel for that night, and that all the shit printed in the “passenger rights” posters behind the counter is true. By the way, showing those posters implicitly tells me that something has gone really wrong with your industry.

I hate your security controls that don’t protect anyone, that don’t prevent anything, that just annoy and harass everyone. I hate your assaults on my personal sphere. I mean no harm to you. Leave me the fuck alone with your security pricks. I hate listening to the same security information every fucking time we take off, about how to put my oxygen mask or how to fasten my seat belt. The airline industry might have a lower number of accidents than other forms of transportation, but when you are involved in a plane crash, the odds of getting alive are lower than in the highway. No wonder sometimes people applaud when planes land; we just don’t trust you to get us there alive.

I hate the inhuman conditions you airlines make your crews work in. I hate how they have to strike in order to have some attention, while you fucking MBAs running these companies get big bonuses at the end of the year. Because when you treat your employees like shit, they spit on my coffee, you shithead. They work overtime, they try to do a living in the worst of industries, and you treat them like shit. No wonder they get in strike.

I hate how you fucking dare losing my bags. I hate how I have to cross my fingers every time I travel to avoid having them sent to Timbuktu or Novosibirsk. Don’t you see the tags with the airport codes and the barcodes printed in them? And, even after losing them, is it really that difficult to send it faster than 3 days later to their owner? Really? Do you really think I will buy new clothes every time I travel just because baggage is handled by pathetic monkey-like systems unable to read correctly a tag? Oh, but of course, you will tax me for every extra kilo in those same bags like if I was carrying gold bars. Fuck you.

I hate how everything is a good reason to be late, or to not fly at all. Snow. Strikes. Rain. Late connections. UFOs. Other planes. Storms. Winds. Birds. Clouds. Thick air. Thin air. Engines. Flaps. Eyjafjallajökull. Wings. Terrism. Airport facilities. Tires. Oil. Gravity. Mountains. Plains. Seas. Passengers. Bags.

I hate how a plane can disappear in the middle of the ocean without a trace. Haven’t you heard about this thing called a satellite? Can’t you have a direct, permanent link with a satellite, so that in case of accident you can be notified milliseconds, not hours, later? We are in 2011, you fucking murderers. Black boxes were a neat idea in 1924, shouldn’t you be upgrading that thing anytime soon?

In other words: WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM? If you are unable to provide a service, well THEN DON’T DO IT. Do I provide healthcare? Am I a lawyer? Do I own a grocery store? No, because I know shit about those professions. BUT I DON’T PRETEND TO EITHER.

I do not trick people with nice advertising showing how big your first class seats are (probably the most useless kind of advertising ever). I do not fill my mouth with useless shit about your commitment to service. I do not lie to people about what I do and how I do it. Be frank: say that your service is as bad as anyone else. Say it. Admit it. Be as much as a failure as you want, but please, don’t be hypocrite.

The airline industry is deeply broken. It must be redesigned from scratch. If you are reading this and you happen to be the CEO of one of those fucking airlines, then please know that I wholeheartedly hate you, that you and your company are worthless, and that you have won the Guiness record for making the most millions of unhappy people per minute. Go to hell.

The job consisted mostly of waiting for the airplanes to park near the gate, open the cargo bays, offload whatever there was inside them, and reload them with more luggage, cargo boxes and mail bags. After that, we would close the cargo bays and stay clear of the engine ranges until the plane left the gate. Rinse and repeat. That was my routine, 4 hours a day, 3 to 5 days a week, from August 1995 until December 1997. Let’s be frank; as a whole, this job sucked big time, the pay wasn’t very good (20 Swiss Francs per hour, 25 after 10pm and on Sundays; I let you do the math), and there were many health risks. Then how on Earth could I stand for so long the blithering cold of Swiss winters, the endless humming of the reactors, the kerosene-filled atmosphere, or the killing summer sun reflected on the concrete of the tarmac, for hours and hours?

There were some good reasons:

• Because I loved aeronautics, and for me, being close to the landing gear of a Jumbo Jet or an Airbus A-400 was an out-of-this-planet experience. I still remember the first time I saw such a beast approaching.
• Because you could renegotiate your working hours every month with great flexibility, which is perfect when you are studying.
• Because it was an endless source of both funny and tragic anecdotes, many of which I keep telling to my friends to this day, and which would fill a whole blog by themselves.
• And, last but not least, because you could travel all over the world, wherever Swissair went (that was an awful lot of places back then, including my beloved Buenos Aires) with a tremendous discount.

And I mean tremendous; I could have a return ticket GVA – EZE in Economy class for around 180 Swiss Francs. You read correctly; after a certain amount of hours (300, if I remember well, which meant between 4 to 6 months of work in my case), you would get a special employee voucher, of which you could trade one for a discounted European ticket, and two of them for a transcontinental return flight.

The catch (there’s always a catch) was that your ticket was of the “absolute-low-priority-you-might-not-fly-at-all-you’ve-been-warned” kind, and there was always the risk of not getting into the plane because it was full; thankfully, that never happened to me. But, to compensate, if Economy was full, you could get promoted to Business class (which actually did happen to me once: a great flight from Buenos Aires to Zurich in Business class, never to be forgotten!)

All in all, I went 4 times to Buenos Aires in one year, for less than what you pay for a single flight to the same place. All while getting a relatively decent living every month (for a cheap student at least). Not bad, and definitely worth the hassle of smog, rain, snow, heat, pains in the back, and overall organizational chaos that reigned in Swissair back then.

Because the thing is that, internally, Swissair was a complete mess.

Actually I was not surprised when I learnt that the company had gone the way of the dodo a few years after I left (and no, don’t tell me it was a because of the cheap tickets to Argentina!). During my time there, the airline industry was undergoing a tremendous amount of change, and still, the management was pathetically convinced that people would still pay premium tickets for an EasyJet-level quality of service (Swissair tickets were extremely expensive back then). Middle and top managers started getting into the rotten habit of paying themselves huge bonuses while at the same time downsizing the staff. Employees’ salaries and benefits were gradually reduced and suppressed, security measures were skipped, everyone was treated like shit.

The SAirGroup came and went. Many reorganizations made the headlines. In Crossair (Swissair’s little sister company, serving short-range destinations), pilots were loudly complaining of earning around 3000 Swiss Francs per month (a relatively low salary by any standard in Switzerland), when some of their Swissair peers were getting much more, up to 6 times (!) that amount, basically doing the same job. One day, Swissair moved most of its intercontinental flights from Geneva to Zurich, and the direction of the GVA airport sold most of its Swissair stock right after that decision was taken. It was during that time that EasyJet came into the scene, and benefited enormously of all this mayhem.

For those who remember, Swissair during the ’90s was more a source of national embarrassment rather than pride. And to top it off, the catastrophe of the JFK-GVA flight 111 in 1998 did not help.

In our luggage handling service, which later was spun off into a company (IMHO clumsily) named “Swissport” (French-speaking workers would rename it to the French equivalent of “Swiss pork”), the uncannily shortsighted view of the management saw hiring more and more “auxiliaires” (like myself) as the perfect way to increase shareholder value (or some other MBA crap like that); lots of my friends did work there at the time, but the truth is, we never cared about a company that saw us (and treated us) as a commodity to be replaced at any time. As soon as we could, we took off (pun intended) for a nicer workplace or, like me, for another country altogether (my last flight on a Swissair aircraft was in January 1998, when I returned to live in Argentina; I never used the return ticket then).

Their long term employees were seen as a liability, instead of an asset. Everybody resented that.

In the end, it looked to us as if lots of powerful people wanted to destroy the company on purpose, an explanation that, even if looking like a conspiracy theory, is believed by many of my old colleagues. Since leaving I met several of them, some of which used to do this job full time; many have quite a few health problems now, the lesser of which are recurrent back or joint pains; frankly, just by breathing that shitty airport smog you could get very ill, very quickly, and that’s just the top of the iceberg.

Nobody is really happy about what happened to Swissair, but we all agree in one thing: all of this could have been avoided with just a bit of common sense, a better treatment to long term employees, and wiser leadership. The problem is, some Swiss companies just simply don’t know what common sense means, even less how to adapt to changing market conditions.

I’m writing this sitting in the waiting room of Gate D85 at Amsterdam airport, seeing the KLM employees unloading and loading stuff from those blue planes, and I remember a time when I used to do that job, too.

I think I’ll start pouring some souvenirs about those times in the months to come.

“Business is about giving and receiving”.

Now, don’t get me started on that chapter of “Friends”, where Joey writes a speech to celebrate Chandler and Monica’s wedding, and all he can come up with is a series of “giving and having and sharing and receiving” phrases. Stay with me; I will try to elaborate on this point. Being a constant learner in the business area, I take these phrases as precious information to shape the destiny of my own business. akosma software is my first company, and to my own amazement, my wife and I are able to live out of it; said like this, it might sound ridiculous. But it is a huge statement for me, an incredible source of pride. It is part of my very personal way of watching the world and ourselves.

Most people leave their employee status behind to start a company with the inner feeling of being the next Bill Gates or, these days, the next Steve Jobs. The idea, particularly in the tech business, is to become insanely rich. Much more than you really need to live a decent life. And to screw all those who block your path, and yes, why not, build an empire down the road.

Bullshit.

Let’s go back to basics: the basic idea of business, the one that lays at the bottom end of any human activity which involves the exchange of goods and services, is to be able to get what you need for a living, in exchange of your work or its product. Remember? That’s how it all started around 10 thousand years ago. And the basic ideas behind akosma software lie in very simple terms:

• To be able to live out of the product of my work, offering my own work, services and ideas;
• To be able to build something sustainable, that eventually might feed other people too;
• To learn new things, and to meet interesting people during the trip.

Most businesses have completely lost their touch with reality, not only because of the kind of products offered, but simply because of their way to perform their work. They treat people in such a way (inside and outside of their organizations) in such a way that it makes Jason Fried’s speech sound like revolutionary, instead of what it really is: good old, down-to-earth, common sense.

When Jason says that most companies do their best to get out of business, he’s absolutely right; simply because most people have forgotten why they go to work every day. That’s why books like Getting Real or REWORK are successful. That’s why Bob Sutton‘s books are successful. That’s why Tim Ferriss’ “4 Hour Workweek” became a bestseller.

Businesses, companies, managers, employees, we have all lost touch with reality.

Running a business is not just about how much money you can make; taking care of that is important, but not enough. It’s not about trying to screw people just for the sake of making a few more bucks, all while having nice words about social responsibility in your website. It’s not about filling your mouth with the ecology word while not even recycling paper in your printer room.

Don’t get me wrong; I consider myself a liberal. I believe in the free market and I resent governments sneaking into our lives. I believe in being able to associate and create new things respectful of what surrounds us as a society and an environment. I also believe that cooperatives are the best type of organization for small businesses, but I do not believe in democratic project management processes. I believe in vision and direction for products and projects, and I believe in a redistribution of the earnings (and the losses) among all those who helped create something new. I believe in small teams, committed to (not just involved in) their projects.

Most importantly, I want to believe in the people I work with. Let me repeat that: I work with people; they do not work for me, I do not work for them. I believe in us, whoever is “us” in that group.

Business is about not being hypocrite. Business is about being upfront about what you do, about the value that you add, about being passionate about your craft, about being proud of your work and your colleagues. Business is about saying no at the right time, and about never saying yes without care and attention.

Business is about giving, sharing and receiving. A good friend of mine told me once that I should never say “thanks” to him; a simple “wow, cool” was better. Being able to marvel oneself with whatever comes is a key element in happiness, the second key element being giving back to others whatever happiness we have.

When you focus business on people, long term partnerships invariably become strong friendships.

To put it elegantly, traveling by plane is a pain in the neck. In the 90′s it wasn’t better, but at least the Twin Towers were still standing in their place and there wasn’t a new “terrorist threat” every year or so, making the life of the rest of the travelers an ongoing misery.

Taking a plane exposes you to a staggering amount of things that can go wrong, from the most complex to the most ridiculous. They keep on telling us that traveling is the most secure way to travel, but they say nothing about the ever smaller and more uncomfortable seats, about the shitty food they keep on serving and the increasing number of destinations they keep on sending our luggage, more often than not exactly the opposite one we are going to. Without mentioning the amount of cancelled flights without warning, the non-guaranteed connections, the unbelievably ridiculous schemes of ticket pricing (why a return ticket is cheaper than a one-way is beyond me) and the oh so many other things that make air travel an utterly miserable experience.

Oh, but it is the most secure way of traveling. Yeah, right. Disclaimer: I’ve been a Swissair employee in the 90′s, so I know a bit of how an airline can go every year a bit worse, until it disappears completely from the face of Earth.

So now the ashes of Iceland have grounded the planes of a whole continent, generating losses of around 300 million dollars per day. Ups (and, by the way, what an irony and a colorful way Iceland has found to return Britain the favor of an incredible economic disaster, of which it was the biggest victim but not the most important contributor… I do think nature has a sense of irony after all.)

What I find interesting is that, if the ashes keep on clearing the sky from those shitty winged artifacts filled with unhappy travelers, we will have a chance to slow down, and we might as well have a chance to start enjoying traveling again. And by that I mean having the time to take a long distance train, and even better, to ditch those bad imitations of birds with nicer long distance, transatlantic boats taking 10 days to take us over the oceans.

Imagine boarding in Genova or Hamburg, Le Havre or Cadiz, and taking your time to go through the Atlantic again. Let’s be clear, this is not 1920; with email, Skype or iChat you won’t miss much in terms of meetings or anything, but you’ll get to New York or Boston without jet lag, relaxed, sipping a margarita on the main bridge while waving to the people on the shore.

I would enjoy it for sure. And if the Eyjafjallajökull (somebody please tell me how to pronounce this) keeps on spitting ashes, at least until the Jet Stream cleans up the stratosphere a bit over the northern Atlantic, we won’t have any other option, anyway.

In the meantime, let’s relax and enjoy the first spring with a really, really blue sky, without airplanes or long white smoke trails, in a long, long time.