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I was on a train the other day when I saw a woman who was asking for money. She was doing that thing that is now very common which is that you stand at one end of the train and ask very loudly for the attention of the entire train. “Good evening ladies and gentlemen, I’m very sorry to have disturbed you this evening, but I need just 12 pounds to be able to get in a hostel this evening and so that I don’t have to sleep rough again tonight”.

It is strange that this speech is now standard across a wide variety of people asking for money. I wonder how that happens? Although I suppose it might simply be that when people have managed to get themselves into shelter for the evening that they then exchange war stories of how they scraped up enough money for the evening.

On this particular occasion a woman who was sitting next to where I was standing gave her twenty pounds. It seemed an incredible amount of money to give. And I wondered both about why she gave so much, what was going on in her life so that she would give that much and also what twenty pounds would mean to the woman asking for money.

I was pleased to see that the woman who had received the money did get off of the train at the very next stop and didn’t ask anyone else for any money. She didn’t want to be greedy I guess. Also though as I was getting off of the train at the same point I was able to see that she wasn’t a professional beggar as so many Daily Mail readers would believe. As she was walking along the platform, twenty pounds in her pocket, she picked up a fag butt off of the floor. It had clearly been smoked up to the bitter end but she clearly thought there might be something there so she put it in her pocket (after testing it in her mouth).

But what was it that made the woman give the twenty pounds. Had she never heard anyone tell this particular story? Was it that she felt solidarity for the beggar as a woman? Or was it simply that she decided to give something and a twenty was the smallest thing that she had but felt that it would be rude to ask for change?

I will never know. I really did feel moved to strike up conversation with the benefactor but I decided against it. I felt that she’d be charitable enough without testing her patience as well. And I really didn’t want to discourage her which I felt I could have done when in fact I was simply curious.

I had got on the wrong train by accident and this wrong train had taken me down a different fork of the line. Either I could have gone back into London or somehow I needed to cut across to the other arm of the fork. Taxi seemed to be the only reasonable option, but unfortunately they only had one taxi in this tiny little town. So I had to wait and wait I did. Unfortunately the little room that they had for waiting in was being kept at a healthy 100 degrees and the lady running the place was chain smoking so the room was humid, clammy and smoke ridden. And so I announced that I would wait outside.

I couldn’t tell if it was actually cool outside or just in comparison to the heat of inside. But it was that kind of cool rush that you get sometimes which is so deliciously enveloping.

Anyway, while I was waiting there the taxi driver arrived. He as a young Hindu guy and he’d been told by phone that I was waiting for him so when he walked up to the taxi rank he said “Are you the guy who wants to go to Otford”?

I told him that I was. He said, “Hi I’m the Turbanator”. And then he popped his head around the corner of the taxi office and said, “I found my fare, I’ll be back”.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch they say. Although I did go to a corporate evenings entertainment with my friend. We went along to drink beer in the sunshine, chat and eat canapés. And that’s exactly what we did for four hours, and yet at no point were we approached by any member of the host firm. We have never bought any product from that firm and if anything we feel less keen on doing so simply because if we continue not to we have a free lunch story which beats what most economists think is going on.

There is another example of “free lunch” economics going on, or rather “something for nothing” which sounds perhaps more palatable and certainly is a more flexible phrase. The comes from two charities, both connected.

The first is a charity called play pump. Their idea is breathtakingly simple. They install a water pump for people who need water in Africa. But they install a childrens playground on top of the water pump and they install this playground next to schools. The simple plan is that when the children are playing on the round about they are, unwittingly, pumping water for everyone. This simple idea is so powerful and fantastic. It really is something for nothing. Their website is here: http://www.playpumps.org/

Also play pump have inspired another charity which is a little bit closer to home. It is a charity called One Water. It’s a very strange kind of charity in that they basically just market and sell a product, bottled water, but all of the profits from the sale of the water go to play pump. It’s a strange idea similar to the fair trade mark I suppose. But it does make sense. By buying water you are providing water for others. Their website is here: http://www.we-are-one.org.uk/ You can buy this water instead of other water and yet the water you’re buying is making a difference. Also something for nothing.

Here is a video about one of their projects, it’s about 10 minutes long, but probably worth watching.

The other day I was talking about Automagic Shock (Automagically), the sudden realisation that you have no idea how the device you are using actually works. The flip side of this is, in many ways, the situations where we miss the realisation of how making something slightly less complicated might make it better.

I have had much experience, and I’m sure many engineers and software developers are the same, that releasing something that kind of works is very dangerous. Because if you release something before it is ready then it can be the hardest thing in the world to convince people to upgrade to the new thing once you’ve fixed it. This is not the same if the new thing is just the same design but faster or cheaper, in those cases people will happily upgrade. This is specifically in the case where there is a barrier to them getting the new thing.

For example: Consider a toaster. It is very simple but it has problems. What if you want four slices cooking at the same time (then get a four slice toaster), what if you only want to cook two slices once you have a four slice toaster. Or if you have an uneven number of slices. You will no doubt have experienced that if you have only one slice of toast in a toaster then it doesn’t really work as well. Only one side of the toast seems to get cooked. Also we know that when we’re making toast to be buttered, the second slice of toast gets cold while we’re buttering the first slice. The bread is often a different size than the size of the toaster. The bread is often too thin or thick and it’s difficult to quantify before you’ve cooked some what the thickness means in terms of the number on the dial. What about the different needs of different toast eaters – some like lightly brown some burnt. And what about that second set of toast that comes after you’ve already done one set. The first set needs more time than any of the others because you’re heating up the element too.

I’m sure all of these problems and more have been solved in different toasters on the market (I know that there is even a toaster that delays the cooking time of the second slice of toast specifically so that it will finish toasting just after you’ve finished buttering the first one). But the problem is that people in general think that toast is kind of fine. It’s sorted really. And because people want a non-complicated life the maximum complexity that a toaster has is the dial on the front. And maybe the humble toaster doesn’t need to get fixed but if it doesn’t need to be fixed then why do people keep designing a new toaster?

I didn’t know how rubbish my video recorder was until I had a PVR. Once I could simply navigate the television programs and press record and series link I realised how easy the thing was, but before then I always looked down my nose slightly at people who couldn’t program the video recorder because to me it seemed like it was so easy that they weren’t even trying.

If it had been up to me the video recorder technology would have probably stayed the same forever. But now it’s been fixed I love it and realise what an idiot I was being. This problem was solved because real users kept complaining that it was too complicated for long enough. It’s very rare that we should require users to come to us, we should always go to them.

All of those people who are designing new toasters are doing it because as geeks they can see an inefficiency. Something that is broken as far as they are concerned. And it doesn’t matter to them if something gets more complicated, they just want it to work. The video recorder worked for geeks, they understood it, and there wasn’t a single program they couldn’t record. But to most real people the situation was the other way around. The toaster is fine, the video recorder is broken.

So what’s the next thing that’s broken I wonder?