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"I had no shoes and complained, until I met a man who had no feet."-Indian Proverb

Ditto. I recently went through a similar experience with United Airlines. Heavy Indian accent, impossible to follow. Hung up and tried again 2 more times. Different agent each time, same Indian accent. So, I sent a snail-mail to United Airlines Corporate. No reply to that in 3 weeks now. On a different issue, different company, I got a fellow in Nigeria. Perfect accent (British), competent, friendly, and very effective.

Back in the Nineties, when outsourcing customer service was really getting started, there was a prediction that Chile would reign supreme because they had a large population of educated English speakers, a cheap economy, and were located well with the USA time zones. So much for predictions.

Italian rust of the period was really Russian rust.

It seems the Italian govt. made a deal with the Ruskies to buy cheap steel from them for favours now lost to me in clouds of political plottings. The result was so severe (for Italy), that Lancia was totally withdrawn from the British market. There’s a lesson somewhere in there.

Amen to that. We all better start to speak and understand English with a heavy Indian accent!

Hello Simon. Off topic, but still very much on it regarding the modern way of handling customer relations.

Some time ago, Weebly (my website host) changed its name to include the word square. Naturally enough, the automatic subscription renewal for the site failed to go through. Weebly sent me some communications regarding the failure, which I took to be fake, as earlier renewals had been faultless, and I had no idea about their change of name.

To cut a long story short, I spent an hour-and-a-half on the phone one morning with the card company, being pushed from one incompetent to another, several of them speaking a heavily accented version of English that I simply couldn’t understand. One actually gave me a telephone number to try calling in order to resolve my problem. Eventually, I was switched to a girl who spoke faultless English, and within three minutes she’d fixed my problem, even asking me to verify by turning on my computer and checking my website. Hooray!

The telephone number that I’d been given to try: it turned out to be the same darned number that I’d rung in the first place!

You’d couldn’t make this shit up.

Just watched this now, too.

He doesn’t come across, in this video, at all as I’d imagined him from his writing in LuLa.

Thank’s francois. I had an X1/9 for about a year, back in ‘78 - ‘79, and though I liked it, I had to let it go because of serious neglect in the factory: the alloy wheels came with the balancing weight clipped directly to the metal without any form of electrical insulation. Just one Scottish winter of salted roads was all it took for corrosion to set in. The dealer (a friend!) told me that, for a while, the factory had been offering free wheel replacements… too late for me. Anyway, all is forgiven, and though tiny, it would suit me perfectly today.

Our late friend here, Keith, had two of them… anyway, I made up a T-shirt in memory of the old thing, and several people have spoken to me about it, either having owned one, or wishing they had. Oddly enough, nobody mentions its embarrassing lack of power. Time heals many things, especially memory!

A friend of mine had an X1/9. I remember it very well because my head was in contact with the top all the time (in winter). Salt was not a friend of Italian cars back then. Another friend drove an Alfetta V6  and rust went through the lower panels in a couple of winters.

Hard times for world-class photographers.
Condolences to the family and friends.

Haven`t posted here for some time, but summer in Oman continues hot and humid. Not very photo - friendly. In the last month or so, I have made few trips, and below are some links to my blog with more photos. Hope you like them.

Turtles in Ras Al Jinz

https://blog.paulobizarro.com/?p=4389

Nizwa Goat Market

https://blog.paulobizarro.com/?p=4409

Pomegranates in Jebel Akhdar

https://blog.paulobizarro.com/?p=4434

Best regards.

Great scenery.