There's more

Another frustrating attempt to get in to London to the CQI on a mixture of private and public transport. Interesting job getting through the snow in my car. Front wheel drive and wide tyres on packed snow is no fun! The news is telling us that the country has run out of road salt. Talk about quality planning - this weather has been forecast for weeks!

Those of you from climates more used to this weather must be laughing your socks off! We only need 2 cm of snow and the country is paralysed.

Is there anyone out there who can shed some light on how Sweden, Austria and Switzerland (to name but a few) can cope with weather extremes without blinking an eye while we can't. Putting it into a quality context - what happened to process robustness, lessons learned, benchmarking etc., etc.

A final weather aside - don't you find attempts by rail (and airline) operators to communicate infuriating? I was standing on a frozen platform on Monday (have I made commuting sound appealing yet? ) and the announcer - in the absence of any news on when we might have a train to take us home insisted on apologizing for the lack of service from my (only) Train Operating Company (TOC) due to 'adverse weather conditions.' Fair enough, you might say, but while they are telling us it is the weather's fault a series of high speed trains from another TOC and more freight opererators are merrily hurtling through the station - are they operating in different weather?

It reminds me of when the airport announcer apologizes to us for flight delays due to 'operational reasons' ... which tells us precisely nothing. The age of communication without information.