« March 2007 | Main | May 2007 »
April 26, 2007
The Computer Says "Nie"
True story: an Irish friend of mine went to the bank in Gdańsk for a loan. Everything went swimmingly until it was time to type in his PESEL, the Polish equivalent of a social security number. My friend only had his Irish number. "How many digits?" asked the clerk. "Nine." "I'm sorry, it has to have 11 or the computer won't accept it." There is no formal-legal requirement to have a PESEL, but the computer says no.
Similarly, in parts of Poland it is necessary to register with the labour exchange as "homeless" in order to get access to jobs on offer from outside the administrative district where your home is...
Posted by hgrodsk at 09:26 AM | Comments (1)
Leech Farms
Romuald Rytwiński, director general of GM Opel in Poland: "The situation is still far from normal. 600 or 700,000 new cars should be selling on the Polish market [every year], not 200 or 300,000 as is the case now."
Blackadder: "It wouldn't have anything to do with leeches, would it?
Doctor: I had no idea you were a medical man.
Blackadder: Never had anything you doctors didn't try to cure with leeches. A leech on my ear for ear ache, a leech on my bottom for constipation.
Doctor: They're marvellous, aren't they?
Blackadder: Well, the bottom one wasn't. I just sat there and squashed it.
Doctor: You know the leech comes to us on the highest authority?
Blackadder: Yes. I know that. Dr. Hoffmann of Stuttgart, isn't it?
Doctor: That's right, the great Hoffmann.
Blackadder: Owner of the largest leech farm of Europe."
Posted by hgrodsk at 09:22 AM | Comments (0)
Death and Tabloids
It is probably tempting fate to use the words "new low" and "tabloid" in the same sentence but I cannot resist: Polish tabloid Fakt has hit a new low. Their animatronic reconstructions used to be just ridiculous pandering to their non-literate readers but this...
Former minister Barbara Blida was arrested in her home on suspicion of corruption yesterday. A gun went off and she died. The official story is she committed suicide (by shooting herself in the chest). Fakt's photoreporters could not be there to witness this exciting event so they cobbled together a gun-blazing reconstruction and published it on the front page today. Barbara Blida has a sister. She lives upstairs in the same building. She also has a husband: he answered the door to the police. I don't know the sister or husband but I would guess they have feelings.
Posted by hgrodsk at 09:14 AM | Comments (0)
April 25, 2007
Budget Vodka
How much money would the marketing department of a posh vodka manufacturer have to spend on translating their slogan into English would you think? Maybe ten, twenty euros? Surely enough, anyway, to avoid this one: "The king is only one." Yes and we are many so let's kill the king. I presume they meant "there is only one king" but like the red dot on the map labelled "here you are" instead of "you are here" the economy is false.
Posted by hgrodsk at 01:53 PM | Comments (0)
April 22, 2007
Rzeczpospolita Polska
While prying through some personal files late one night last week in the local IPN branch I came across one that caught my eye. It was the file of a certain university professor, doctor... well, let us call him "Dr. Wykształciuch" for the sake of discretion. The top sheet was his CV and at the top of his CV was his father's name and occupation. Your background was very important in Communist Poland, of course. Priority was given, at least in theory, to the sons and daughters of workers and peasants. Needless to say, in the bad old days before democracy one's birth was very important in Poland as elsewhere. But now, in free, democratic Poland, grown men still tell their prospective employers what Daddy did for a living? The ruling parties talk seriously about judging people by the role their families played in the anti-Communist opposition...
I sometimes wonder if Poland has grown or ever will grow into a republic.
Posted by hgrodsk at 07:18 PM | Comments (0)
April 17, 2007
Unilever Again
Unilever’s campaign for real profits continues. A full page advertisement appears in the women’s supplement to Gazeta Wyborcza. It includes a picture of the masterminds of this operation. In case the irony is not abundantly clear, I’ll put “masterminds” in inverted commas. These are in fact the Polish drones, acting on instructions from Higher Up, in Western Europe, or possibly the States, wherever it is those clever people from Unilever think up their schemes. Six women are pictured. They are, from left to right, the “face” (but don’t worry, the pic includes her body too) of the campaign, the product’s PR woman, the campaign’s “ambassador,” two marketing bods, and Katarzyna Figura, a Polish actress. The point of this campaign is to stress that fat, ugly and old people can also contribute to Unilever’s shareholders’ dividends by buying chemical potions and slathering them on their sagging, flabby and inferior skin. And it’s true, the ambassador is quite rotund. But the rest of the plain ordinary, not particularly beautiful folk? In a radical departure from type the two marketing women are young blondes with – I’m just describing what I see – large busts. The PR woman might, at a stretch, if you were particularly mean, be described as merely “okay.” The “face” of the campaign is a stunner (in the spirit of accepting herself for what she is, she has changed her hair colour since her picture was put up on the campaign’s homepage). And Kasia Figura? This is Kasia Figura. Hideous, isn’t she?
Not one of the pictured women could by any violent gymnastics of the imagination be described as "old" or "ugly." Unlike you, you tubby old boot.
Posted by hgrodsk at 10:06 AM | Comments (0)
April 12, 2007
Tax
It's always been a matter of some surprise to me that I have never been busted for tax evasion. I've worked in a dozen countries under a kaleidoscopically variegated set of tax systems (Poland alone has at least three different kinds of employment contract) - none of which I have ever understood. A snotty letter did come from the British Virgin Islands but I dealt with that. And now this bombshell, dropped on me by Gazeta Wyborcza: "Every investor has to fill in a special 'capital gains' tax return. What's worse, you also have to pay tax." And I thought it was only people who worked for a living that had to pay taxes.
Posted by hgrodsk at 12:31 PM | Comments (0)
April 10, 2007
News
They have this TV station here called TVN 24 - yes it is original, isn't it? - devoted to news only. I happened to catch sight of it over the tremendously boring Easter holidays here. As befits a creative industry, they have copied the western habit of having a ticker tape at the bottom of the screen with news headlines on it to distract you from the talking head on the top half of the screen. And what alarming news there was when I looked: "Jesus Christ crucified," it said. Only 2007 years late.
Posted by hgrodsk at 03:48 PM | Comments (1)