I returned from holiday this summer and met a friend who asked where I had been. I told him I visited Istanbul and had taken advantage of two other national trips, which were super deals and in comparison no more than the price of second class seat on a national-rail train, one way ticket. One of these was a five day tour of the south mediterranian coast to include Antalya and Bodrum. The other, a three day trip to Cappadocia. Both of these trips included inter city flights, half board hotels and tour guides supervising the group professionally on designated coaches making the trips extremely convenient from collection points to and from the airport. The pretty much all inclusive five day trip including eturn flights from Istancbul cost just 139 pounds. The Capadocia tour was even less.
My friend said he had always fancied Turkey as a holiday destination but he said he was particularly avert to overwheming attitudes of certain sales people trying to draw tourists in to their shops to buy things that they didn’t really want. I understood eactly what he was talking about as I had myself experienced that difficult scenario upon former trips abroad. He was right, the last thing a tourist wants is to be pestered by salesmen with poor English trying to lure them off the street and into their shops to sell them souveneirs that they didn’t want or even perhaps they had already bought and they were no longer in shopping mode but just sigh seeing or trying to get to places they had planned to see.
Thankfully, this tradition of pestering tourists and in some cases playing with their emotions to buy goods they didn’t have any interest in. In recent years the Turkish government has not only outlawed street beggars but men stood outside independent stores drawing customers in are no longer a problem either.
Back in the UK and recently my combination boiler, which is over 15 years old broke down. I had already exhausted all possible means of support to keep the boiler running as the manufacturer with whom I had a maintenance contract had alreay written to me to say they would no longer be supporting this boiler and our maintenance contract was terminated accordingly. All third party service engineers who had visited to service the boiler since also advised that I should simply give up on it and they would be happy to install a new one, at a cost that equates to almost 300 hours of work at minimum wage rates… In other words, for a lot of money!
I have one way or another managed to keep my boiler going for at least five years since the industry totally gave up on it and and recently came across another failure mode. I had turned off the Central Heating functions at the start of summer as the weather settled into summer temperatures so heating was not needed. At the end of summer temperatures dropped again so I tried to turn on the Central Heating and it simply didn’t work even though hot water was still consistent and working as well as expected.
I got out my installation manual for the boiler and followed the diagnotics flow charts. This helped me to narrow it down to a component. Now all I had to do was find a spare part and replace it. It was at this point that I noticed a similarity between the pushy sales people on holiday in the past, right here at the cradle of advanced technologies and high standards of living.
So, it turns out that the primative Artificial Intelligence(AI) used in modern search engines used across Europe and in this instance I’m talking about eBay, I put in my search criteria of the part number and not many hits since this is an old part number and no doubt the original manufacturer had sold off that part of the business to companies who had changed part numbers to suit their business, so the information I was looking for was buried and difficult to find. Obviously, eBay like many other on-line retail platforms are geared to sell ‘something’ even if not what I am looking for. So, in an effort to eliminate the possibility of changed part numbers and other possible boilers where the same component might have been used, I began entering a description of the part instead of the original part number.. For example a permutation of keywords including “Worcester Bosh boiler Cenral Heating Temperature sensor” and relentlessly the site spewed out dozens of options ranging from complete boilers to hundreds of parts that I am not at all interested.
This where the similarities of pushy sales people on holiday dawned on me. This is not the first instance where I have specified exactly what I am looking for to a search engine and in return, it has suggested a thousand and one other things that I have no interest in buying. And of course nowdays it is not uncommon for cookies to kick in so search engine service providers fire off our seach behaviour online to thousands of ‘associates’ who all take advantage of our geolocation, keywords used and throw useless information at us about what they think we should be looking for and ultimately buying. I wondered if this was any different to pushy sales people who approach us while we are trying to enjoy our holidays abroad to sell us useless products that we have no interest in whatsoever.
It turns out that my friend is actively looking for a destination for a holiday and I hear he has settled for Majorca – again, presumably because they will not be encouraged to spend money on things they do not want there even though back at home, where ever that is, during our daily routines to source items of interst, we are persistently bothered by virtual sales entities to stray away from what we are looking for on a daily basis and this doesn’t seem to bother us, yet the thought of a human equivalent that might approach us while we are on holiday forms the basis of where we will not be going on holiday.