Today I can scream

A bit of way too personal info but I just have to say it somehow, somewhere, scream it or go out in a field and cry tears of happiness!

#1 My dad isn’t divorcing anymore after his second wife whom he had been married to for 15 years wanted to divorce him and split up the two children they have (my step brother and sister).

#2 My mum who has been diagnosed with a pancreatic tumour back in Romania and couldn’t get any kind of surgery there is leaving for France, Paris, Villejuif namely. I was (or still am) supposed to go with her being the only person that speaks French in the family. Being a nerd and studying French since first grade pays off at last! I am rather happy as I couldn’t stand seeing her in pain and hearing her tell me she’s ready to go if the intervention fails.

Peace of mind at last!

Course Overview

So far I’m trying to sort out my own modules at school and how to manage them – thank God there’s something like our eLearning portal where I can see lectures, tutorials, grades and messages from teachers or generally everyone to make things easier.

I’m currently ploughing through tons of hand-outs from lectures and tutorials such as:

• Principles of Marketing
• Communication Theory and Practice
• Consumer Behaviour
• Quantitative Methods in Business
• ITS/ICT
• Organisational, Professional and Academic Capability

Such a wonderful year and already two assignments and two deadlines! I never thought I would enjoy tea so much either!

Books

I’ve just started for three days now and I already have to buy books worth well over £100

• Principles of Marketing, Brassington & Pettitt (£45)
• Consumers, Arnould, Price, Zinkhan (£68)
• Consumer Behaviour, Solomon (£53)

So if you feel generous I shall love you forever!

Although I’m not sure whether I’ll want to buy all of those and more as I haven’t even started Quantitative Methods in Business and Communication Theory and Practice..or others Sigh, note to self. UCAS needs to tell students that bookstore bill will almost equal tuition…and they need to know that ‘admiration of english literature’ extends as far as watching pride and prejudice with colin firth and jennifer ehle on repeat when hungover.

Bits and pieces of uni life

Since we just started our year there’s nothing exciting going on around the halls except for random screaming at 3am, the doors being dirty with tarts and muffins in the morning, the sound of kitchen sinks all over the place screaming to be cleaned, dishes waiting to be washed, drunken morning lectures and hmmm oh yes the two for £1 offers, beer cans all over the place, Primark looking swamped and places like ‘every item £1′ emptied out, ASDA’s kitchen ustensils aisle emptied of everything under £3, flyers and leaflets with parties and random concert venues all over the halls and elevators, crappy 2am movies when you get home and there’s nothing on, taking random naps during the day and so and so on…

Of course that’s not Jack Trout next to Bridget Jones and Nick Hornby

Northern Rock

I arrived to the UK only to hear about five or six pieces of news – one was about Colin McRae who died in a helicopter crash, the other was about the McCann family returning to the UK and receiving very bad PR and dealing with it followed by some cheesy Sun and Daily Mail articles about how they’re trying to cope with it, some other was about two guys wanting to cut a third with a power saw and such…you get my point!

But one of them was Northern Rock – a situation which made me feel weird. The exact weekend I was in my hotel room in Manchester their stock value went down…through the floor I might say. One single mistake was enough to make Northern Rock become a not-so-safe-place-to-put-your-money. Media didn’t help the brand either as TV was only showing footage of long queues, people complaining about their website being down and everyone trying to calm everyone down that it’s going to be OK.

Still, in just two days over two billion pounds had been taken out of the bank before the Bank of England governor decided to save Northern Rock and reassure everyone it will still be a safe place to deposit money. The reassuring part came a bit late as the CEO had already talked about it and told customers that his money is still at Northern Rock and that it’s still a profitable company. His message was on the front page of their website for

Funny though, after being on the brink of bankrupcy, it managed to get up on its feet again – 80% of the customers in the days after the governor’s message wanted to deposit their money back again. This intervention was, as I said, a bit late, but for good reasons;

The Chancellor has made it very clear that all existing savings accounts with Northern Rock are safe and secure during the current instability in the financial markets.

Their image has been kinda severely damaged though, as Ed Cotton of Influx Insights noticed – an event so powerful can just blow it all away in a few hours (or days). Does it matter that Microsoft paid 300 billion pounds in a lawsuit? No, because Microsoft is a leading brand anyway, it could be on the brink of collapse and someone would still save it.

And to make things even worse, these banners which were in Newcastle railway stations as reported by Faris Yakob..heh

All in all I think Northern Rock will survive but it will never be the same – I’m actually waiting to see if this will happen to other banks as well just like they said it would but I somehow doubt it right now..

At least 12 of the UK and Europe’s biggest banks have now decided not to buy the Newcastle-based lender, according to the Sunday Times. Banks said to have turned their backs on a potential bid for Northern Rock are HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays and Lloyds TSB.

If I had my money with Northern Rock I guess I’d panic a bit – or maybe a lot and wouldn’t be sure whether or not to take my money out and put it under my mattress or something but I certainly wouldn’t want to be one of those interviewed while queing to get their deposits and life savings. But oh dear god, people panicked a wee bit too much this time. Did I say people? I meant media!

Culture Shock? No thanks!

The first thing that UCAS tells you (and keeps repeating) before you move to the UK after all formalities have been completed is that you have to be aware of culture shock – the amazing clash of cultures and various nationalities in just one country or city or wherever. That you have to get used to people who have different political or religious views from you, people with different habits, ways of communicating and who interpret gestures differently.

For instance even in university there will be Chinese, Indian, American, African students that will embrace eating out at Mc Donald’s as much as hanging their own country flag outside the window of their student flat in halls. There were Danish, American, Slovakian students who couldn’t wait for internet registration and who wouldn’t come out of their rooms for a drink because they were bored and couldn’t see the fun in it.

Anyway for me culture shock is a very overrated term – you could even get manic depression from it or whatnot but I think it’s a bit far-fetched. Learning how to live with different cultures around you isn’t hard provided people have common sense. But you know, the problem with common sense is that it’s not so common.

The weird thing is (from my point of view) consumer behaviour and generally the way people act and think here compared to Romania. So ok, I know Romania is a growing country and not an oversaturated market like Great Britain and Northern Ireland. OK, maybe it has less retail chains and less competition but it’ll get there in loads of years’ time.

For instance, things I find odd:

·When in a store, people are very careless about stuff they try on or look at – they’ll generally leave everything lying around for the staff to pick up and put back. I can’t say it wasn’t the same back in Romania but on a much smaller scale – in food stores people would open packaging and eat stuff even with CCTV cameras running and leave them somewhere else. I’ve not seen anyone eat and leave things lying around here but it kind of bothers me that I have to watch my step because no one will ever pick up something they dropped by walking too close to it or by accident. Sure, that’s what the staff is paid for, to do all of that so the customer doesn’t but it can’t hurt to put something back where it was…what if one day it’ll be the item you are looking for and the last remaining one is dirty because someone stepped on it – you’ll feel a bit bad.

·         In restaurants, every waiter, with no exceptions, will ask if you’re alright, if the food is OK, if you need salt, vinegar, oil etc. In Romania it doesn’t happen like that, it’s more of a ‘have your cake and eat it’ mostly because of employee lack of training I guess. I’d much rather have someone ask me if my food is OK while I’m eating instead of me having to call the waiter because my soup is too cold or there’s an insect in my meal. Also in restaurants, people almost never wait for the waiter to come past their table – they’ll call him or her by his/her name and wait. In Romania it would be considered a tad rude to call your waiter from wherever he/she is because they’re generally trained to look around and be on the watch for a subtle sign.

·         >When you ask for something here you’re never forgotten. The best example would have to be getting a laptop PC from a store – they said they were out of stock on that model and I should come by the next day to pick it up – my dad insisted that if they could bring it the same afternoon it would be great as he was supposed to leave and he couldn’t be there the next day to receive it. When we actually went there the same afternoon, the shift supervisor said it was downstairs and someone would bring it as soon as possible. We waited about one minute and when they handed it to us, they apologised about three times for the wait. Wow, I felt actually good for a while there – even if it was me asking them (or somewhat forcing them) to bring it one day early, they apologised for making me wait while they brought it from their storage room.

·         When it comes to free items, people here always abuse it – if they give out free condoms somewhere, they’re going to stick their hand in the bowl and grab about ten of them and no one’s going to say anything. Weird, since in Romania you’ll be pretty frowned upon doing that.

Mr. Man

Because there’s no “Mrs. Bump” I’ll have to go with “Mr. Bump” … like Andrew (Northern Planner)