Five Things I Have Learned This Week #8

1 — The recent Suez Canal closure lifted after six days, an improvement on the previous closure after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which lasted eight years. During the war, Egyptian forces scuttled ships at both ends of the canal to block it, trapping 15 ships from eight countries in between. These ships came to anchor in the Great Bitter Lake, the widest part of the canal formed from a dry lake bed when the canal was dug.

The crews from these ships (British, American, West German, Czech, Polish, Bulgarian, French and Swedish) formed the Great Bitter Lake Association to provide mutual assistance. They started a yachting club, held a Great Bitter Lake Olympics to coincide with the 1968 games in Mexico City, staged football matches on deck. The sailors watched films on the Bulgarian ship, swam in the pool on the Swedish ship and sang carols accompanied by the organ on the German ship at Christmas. They set up a postal system, printing their own stamps which they persuaded the Egyptian postal service to honour.

And they drank, quite literally, boatloads of booze. One sailor estimated there are at least one and a half million empty beer bottles nestling on the lakebed as a result of the blockade. If you turned up to the Czech ship, a bottle of whisky was placed in the middle of the table, the cork was taken out and thrown away. You didn’t go back to your boat until the bottle was empty.

Eventually sailors were rotated out of the ships and returned home, but despite the ships being stranded in the middle of a warzone (Israel occupied one bank of the canal, Egypt the other), many sailors volunteered to return.

When the canal was reopened in 1975, the only two ships to make it back to their home ports were the two West Germans: Münsterland and Nordwind. When they reached Hamburg on the 24th May, 1975, they were cheered home by a crowd of 30,000 people.

2 — During the Suez blockage, oil tankers from the Gulf were forced to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, a much choppier route than through the Mediterranean. In response to this, two massive tugboats were commissioned to assist tankers in distress: the SA John Ross built in Durban, and the SA Wolraad Woltemade, built by the Robb Caledon Shipyard in Leith, on the very site the Port of Leith Distillery is being built today. On launch, the tugs held the record as the world’s most powerful.

The ship is commemorated on our Historic Ships of Leith map.

3 — Large companies can make outstanding April Fool’s jokes (Motorola’s Selfie Stick video from 2015 is outstanding), but gosh you have to be careful. I was completely hoodwinked on Tuesday when I heard Volkswagen was changing its name to Voltswagen in the US to boost its electric car image. The company later backtracked, admitting the rebrand was an April Fool’s gag released too early.

Compounding the company’s woes, various commentators then urged the SEC to launch an investigation, suggesting this stunt is in violation of US securities law. “This is not the sort of thing that a responsible global company should be doing,” Charles Whitehead, Professor of Business Law at Cornell Law School, told CNN.

It’s easy to label this an overreaction, but perhaps the issue is the gag was all too realistic. Tesla’s rocketing share price could easily have triggered the idea to rebrand the century-old company as a more modern, electric focused entity. Hell, I thought it was quite a good idea.

The real question is where does this leave the April Fool’s PR machine? I hope companies don’t cancel future pranks in case a selection of po-faced lecturers decry this kind of marketing as not becoming of a global company. (Only shareholder value should be discussed at the Board Meeting!) The answer is to pitch your prank with a headline that hooks you in, but the more you read of the story, the more you question it and by the end — you realise it’s obviously absurd.

4 — There are 2,373 squirrels in New York’s Central Park. Or at least there were on Squirrel census day back in October 2018. Squirrels were once so rare and fascinating that in 1856, an escaped pet squirrel in New York stranded in a tree drew a crowd so large the story made the New York Times.

Central Park’s squirrels were all introduced in 1859 and due to the park’s unwitting predator free, acorn strewn paradise design, numbers quickly exploded to perhaps 5,000 by the 1920s, though the 2018 census is the only recorded “official” count.

5 — Whilst we all pity the poor junior analysts at Goldman Sachs who launched a campaign recently to change their working practices, be rest assured they will be back in the office soon. Working through the night seemed to be tolerable if you were in the office, surrounded by your colleagues and could order takeaway food on the company account. Stranded at home in flatshares, with no access to company Deliveroo accounts, the 3am slog of changing font sizes in powerpoint was too much and a revolt hit the headlines.

David Solomon, the bank’s CEO, gruffly dismissed the uprising, suggesting they “take Saturdays off”. Thankfully for the analysts, he previously went on record on the subject of home working:

“This [home working] is not ideal for us. And it’s not the new normal. It’s an aberration that we’re going to quickly correct as soon as possible.”

Not many company bosses can afford to be so forthright on the subject of post-pandemic working practices, but I bet his thoughts are not uncommon. Personally, I hate working from home and I can’t wait to get back to the office.

I also really, really hope the conversation between Solomon and his aide-de-camp went like this:

ADC: Sir, sir, the analysts are revolting!

DS: I know, they really are! They’ve worked through the night every day this week and I haven’t seen a single one take a shower.

ADC: What? Eww, that’s gross. No, I mean they’re in revolt. They’ve downed laptops and are refusing to work.

DS: Bah humbug.

Perhaps Solomon is just taking revenge, he was rejected by Goldman when he applied for a graduate job there back in the ’80s.

https://paddy-fletcher.medium.com/5-things-i-have-learned-this-week-8-e2cbada660c0