As I've reported before, in Finland cars park mainly in the open at night rather than in garages which makes it almost essential that there is a way to heat them. That way is to have internal heaters (and car motor heaters) that are powered by electricity provided by a parking meter like post with a timer that you connect you internal heater (via an outlet at the front of your car) to.

I've found that it's wise to use this system any time when the temperature is likely to go below +5C (40F) during the night as then you have both a warm engine and a warm interior.

This year I finally stopped using the system for good around the end of May and of course it then took another 6 weeks or so to get round to taking the heater and cable out of the car.

This morning, only 3 weeks later, I could have done with it again. When I got to the car to drive to work it was just 7C (43F) and had probably been less during the night. Even *inside* the office it feels freezing today.

Now Finns look forward every year to their summer. A time away from the coldness and darkness of the long winter. Usually it's worth staying in Finland for reasonable weather - yet never too hot with temperatures usually around 25C (72F).

Well this year we had about 4 days of good weather (at a time with maybe 2 other odd days that weren't bad) and the rest of the so-called summer has been a major disappointment.

So if you meet a Finn in a rainy and depressing winter European city this winter, don't be surprised if he's even more depressed (and in need of a drink) than usual. He hasn't this year got the automatic lifting of spirits that the Finnish summer usually brings.

So much for global warning ... or is this yet another of the effects? Little snow in the winter because it's a couple of degrees warmer, so everything stays dark then and yet rotten, cold, weather all summer.

I think I prefered it before.

As far as I can work out, summer this year was last Thursday and Friday.

They were the only days in the five weeks I was off work (in the traditional holiday period for people in Finland) when the temperatures were such that it actually felt hot.

("Hot" in this country means more than 25C so don't start thinking about Athens in July)

By the time I had to go back to work on Monday we'd gone however back to 10C (48F) in the morning and a fairly chilly 20C (64F) in the afternoon with the sun appearing only now and again.

Typical Finnish August weather in fact.

Can it be that those two days were it for this year?

Certainly in the mornings (when I need both a sweater and a coat to make it to the car without catching a cold) it seems like that.

Like many people who finally come to live here my first experience of Finland was in the summer. Being here in the summer always gives you a rose-tinted picture of Finland because it's in those few summer months that Finns smile and occasionally don't walk staring at the ground.

I was luckier than most because that first summer (where I "worked" (= went to office and stayed there between 8 and 4 every day) for 12 weeks in all (with a few days off in the middle for a student trip to Eastern Finland and Leningrad) I was staying in a room in a private flat that was within walking distance of the city centre and even the southern shore of the peninsular (if I walked a lot).

So I noticed Helsinki as a quiet city that was virtually empty of people.

They were all of course most of the time that I got to central Helsinki (i.e. the weekend) somewhere else (in their summer cottages or on the sea somewhere or maybe even at one of the beaches I never found when I was living there that summer).

Well now it's July and it's just the same. Everyone is away - during the week too - and if they are not at their summer houses outside the capital city area or on their boat in some archipelago or other; they are at one of those beaches that I now know about but am too old (and flabby) to visit except off-shore via canoe.

Sometimes however they are at the oddest of places.

I left home at 7:10 this morning (Sunday) thinking I'd get to the golf course (which officially opens at 8) before anyone else was up and I'd have it all to myself.

At first things looked promising. The suburban roads leading to the motorway were empty as always at that time of hour at the weekend; the motorway stretch had just me and a couple of other cars; the stretch of outer ring road had only a few cars more and the country roads closer to the golf course had only that single little red car ahead of me who was sticking to the speed limit and who I was relieved to see the back of when he/she turned off. So for the last 10kms there was just one car, mine.

I then drove past part of the new course. Empty. Happy days.

Only then I pulled into the golf club car park and it was almost full. (The expansion car park was empty but I was thinking maybe two cars and mine not almost full)

What's more it wasn't just single players like me hoping for a quiet empty course. No, there were noisy groups of 3 and 4. Men of course. All looking like ice hockey hooligans. Horrors.

Aside: Finnish men don't talk in normal circumstances but get a group of friends/acquaintances (especially in their mid thirties) doing any kind of sport and they bond by getting extremely noisy and usually are very inconsiderate of anyone around them. (They are admittedly *slightly* better once they've actually started playing golf especially if a stranger has been added to their playing group)

So, if you ever come to Helsinki in the summer, stay there. You'll enjoy a very clean city; waterfronts etc. and you'll have it all to yourselves (and all the people from the various cruise liners on their way to or from St. Petersburg).

All the Finns have taken themselves off - to summer houses; the sea; beaches; AND (to my regret) to the golf courses.

The Center Party is the party that represents by-and-large the rest of Finland. That is, most of its MPs represent rural districts.

Of course once they are MVPs they spend most of their time in Helsinki and become somewhat suspect to the people who elected them.

Not however it would seem suspect enough to not elect them next time.

So we had in the now distant past the case of a Center MVP who when he was a minister was accused of coupling a personal request for a loan to his own company with him as minister granting some aid to the bank in question.

As a result of the doubts about this he was - after a long process - finally kicked out of Parliament (something that has happened only that once in the almost 20 years I have been in Finland). However not long after there were new general elections and he stood again and the people in his rural community elected him back and he turned up again as if nothing had happened.

(He was finally not elected at the last general election, after being re-elected at least once more after that first time.)

The reason I bring this up now is because for the past couple of years (and especially the last year) the Center Party has had a general secretary who has spent most of his time making public statements that are completely out of touch with what the prime minister and other Center Party ministers have been saying publically.

So with him standing for re-election this time, there was an alternative candidate (a former minister - if I remember correctly, one who temporarily replaced a female minister while she was off "work" to have a baby) who stood on a platform of the party secretary working alongside the leader of the party rather than in opposition to him.

Needless to say, the old general secretary was confirmed in office by something like 1200 to 400 votes. Apparently the (mostly rural) voters at the party congress saw him as a representative of traditional Finnish values as compared to the "Helsinki-oriented" views of the party leaders ...

Traditional Finnish values like disloyalty to your party leader, perhaps!

This is the time of year when final year students having earlier taking their final year exams (the results of which are used when deciding who gets to which University or other further education place) get their final score(s).

It's also the time of year when based on those scores there's a league table of all the grammar schools (US: high schools) in the country and of course the competition among schools in the same general geographic area to be higher up the list than each other (even though we might be talking about halfway down the total list) is tough.

(The "dirty tricks?" are coming soon)

Now what seems to happen is that one person (or set of people) marks the tests and another (presumably more qualified) person then checks that the marks given are reasonable and if not can adjust them up or down.

What also seems to happen is that the head teachers are given the preliminary results for their school based on the first set of marks.

One head teacher (female) in a school in the West Coast of Finland noticed that in one subject 19 of her 25 pupils had been marked down by the checker. So she asked the central system who the checker was and found out it was the head teacher (female) from the next school along the coast!

As a result of the suspicion that this downgrading had been done intentionally to cause that person's own school results to have a better chance of being better, someone else was given the job of re-reviewing the same papers. As a result of that 10 of the 19 papers were put back to where they had been.

It does seem that it was a case of "hang the students from that school and their chances of getting to University, I'm going to try to make sure my school is higher up in the lists than the neighbouring school" but unless the second head teacher is taken to court and the matter judged by the lawyers, we're going to have to assume it was all just a coincidence.

At least officially.

Meanwhile I'm not holding my breath that any further action will be taken. This is Finland after all ...

I have cable television and have a digibox connected to the cable system so that I can see the transmissions (nowadays only digital not analogue) on my TV.

The cable tv system has a base set of about 11 stations (mostly Finnish) which you get (for nothing) if your digibox is connected to the cable system, but if you want more stations you need to sign up for one (or more) of various "packages" which the cable company offers where they bundle several (foreign) TCV channels together.

However in order to get those additional stations via your digibox you need to have a card that costs 20 Euros a year which tells the cable company it is you so that it knows which channels to let you watch.

Fine so far. I had a single digibox; put the card in and I got my standard channels and my additional channels.

However now that there are only digital channels available, I would only have one channel available to me at a time (before I had one analog channel and one digitial channel available) so I bought a new digibox with a hard disk that allowed me to record from two channels at a time and watch a third one (provided it was being sent by the same transponder) which to a certain extent solved that problem. My card telling the cable company it was me was of course transfered to that digibox.

The old digibox (now without card) then went upstairs where it was connected to my PC monitor which also has component input so can see TV pictures. Because it didn't have a card, I was restricted to watching only those 11 or so normal channels upstairs and the seven other channels (1 package of W. European language stations) I had access to downstairs weren't available upstairs.

But then I got a mailing from the cable company that said that they now had a "rinnakkais" (=abreast; side-by-side; parallel; even co-existent) card which would allow me to see my cable stations in another room or upstairs by adding this card to a second digibox.

This would cost 10 Euros a year so it seemed like a no-brainer even though the odds were that I would rarely watch those extra 7 stations upstairs.

The first snag was that the local place (a Stockmann store) that sold (as a reseller) the services of that cable company didn't sell that parallel card. That could only be got at one place in the city centre.

So I trapsed off there after work and found there was a massive queue with 30 people before me most of whom seemed to be negotiating new contracts in order to get cheaper recording digiboxes and thus were taking a lot of time about it.

I finally (actually less than an hour) got to one of the assistants and said I wanted a parallel card. Things were going smoothly until he said "you'll want your package on it?" which was a bit odd as why else would I want the darn thing. But this he trumped by saying that "you'll get the 9 Euros (a month) bill for that just as you do today". This second warning that things weren't right got me to react. "Are you saying that I need to pay for the package TWICE?".

That's what he was saying and so suddenly the no-brainer 10 Euros a year became 118 Euros a year just so I *could* record two of those seven channels downstairs while watching a third of them downstairs AND recording a fourth one upstairs. NOT exactly very likely and thus a complete waste of money.

As I'd spent about an hour in that queue, I asked a few questions to make sure I wasn't missing the point here, the main one of which was that if I can see those basic 11 stations without a card, what is the point of me having a parallel card if it doesn't give me access to the stations I've already paid for ?

There was no answer of course except for the fact that if I had a different package it wouldn't cost me the same amount again for use via the second card but would "only"cost me half as much again ...

Still not a convincing offer especially as I don't have (or want) any of those other packages.

So there you are. More than an hour (I had to go home from work via the centre of Helsinki rather than directly) wasted and all because the cable company's advertising of this new service was less than exact ...

I wonder how many people didn't realise they'd be charge twice for the same channel until they got the first bill. If I hadn't been half awake it would have happened to me too.

We've just been off for the yearly visit to Tenerife, the main reason of which is to tank up on sun during a period when Finland generally has none.

My other reason, which I tend not to shout about, is that I need the occasional rest from Finns and Finland (my wife is excluded from this requirement!). So for me the holiday only starts when the Finnish charter company's bus from the airport has arrived at the apartment hotel (and thus there's an end to the endless babble in Finnish from the representative about the "trips" you could make) and I've checked in.

I reduce this time by always being the first to check in - even though this time there were (shock/horror) 39 Finns checking in to the same (large) hotel compared to the usual 6 or so. My method, naturally, I'm not going to divulge here, but suffice it to say that Finns on holiday walk around as slowly as they do in Finland and any tactical brain they have has obviously been dulled by the plane journey. As (nearly) always I'd completed check in for us just before the first Finns had arrived at the check-in desk with their luggage.

Usually that's it. We have one of the same blocks of rooms as every year (an e-mail several weeks ahead of arrival works wonders) and from there you go directly to the reception and out of the building rather than having to walk through the hotel complex every time. However this time "our" apartments were not available until later in the stay and so we had a new apartment elsewhere in the complex which seemed to be in mini Finland judging by the conversations we heard in the stairs and in the chairs outside that building not to mention in the cafeteria the outside part of which we had to walk through too.

Not good then for people "needing a rest from Finns".

Anyway after a week or so we finally escaped and were back to our normal apartment in a Finn-free area.

However when the holiday was over and it was time to fly back to Finland, I noticed that a) I was glad to be coming back and b) I was very happy to be on a Finnair flight (even a charter one) with the typically very capable (if not particularly good looking) air stewardesses. An efficient baggage handling system and then a good airport taxi service at the Helsinki end completed the picture.

So ignore for at least a month or so any of my mutters about non-moving Finns blocking slow-moving escalators and slow-moving Finns with large trolleys doing their best to block my speedy way through food stores. I like them really ...

(But why can't they learn to stand on the right and to leave trolleys not exactly in the middle of passages ....)

Finnish TV showed a documentary at a prime time at the weekend that was probably made for the international audience as, despite being made by Finns, it had an English soundtrack with the English Neil Hardwick (Cambridge graduate; ex Finnish TV talk show host; occasional actor; TV and theatre director and ex-columnist in the Finnish Time/Der Spiegel equivalent) providing the sound.

It was about - what else (everybody sigh) - the sauna. Again.

My Finnish newspaper said before it was aired that it went on (ca 50 mins) for far too long and they were right. The 30 mins they suggested would have quite enough as it jumped from history to present day and back again virtually ad infinitum.

However the reason for this blog item is the soundtrack. There was a sort of underlying meaning to the way Neil Harwick read his words that gave at least me the impression that he was telling the people able to spot the nuances "yes, this is cr*p isn't it". [No doubt the Finnish people behind the film hadn't a clue.]

This if nothing else made the whole thing mildly amusing and certainly without that soundtrack the whole thing would have been boring in the extreme - do we really need to know how many saunas the Finnish UN peacekeepers built in the Golan Heights, Sinai; Gaza Strip etc. etc. ?

Oh yes, and if you are imagining lots of female breasts on show, don't. This is a Finnish documentary after all about an almost holy Finnish institution, you'll find more in any 80s German Krimi such as Derrick (or of course any 60s Finnish cinema film with Jörn Donner).

I've forgotten most of the details but the state organisation that deals with foreigners in Finland has had its name changed to reflect its supposedly new focus on customer friendliness.

The idea is that foreigners trying to get permission to live and work in Finland will in future be treated as "customers" rather than (hidden subtitle of the newspaper piece on that) as dirt.

We'll see how that idea plays out ...

That change happened at the New Year so it came too late for a couple of very qualified Russian researchers who according to the Swedish-speaking paper here (Hufvudstadsbladet) yesterday finally gave up after 14 years of barely being accepted here.

The tale is interesting because cases of Black Africans with doctorates who could only get jobs in the sorting office of the Post Office have been folk lore for years, but these are people working in a University environment who look like Finns.

The man and his wife moved to Finland in 1994 because the man - who was then working in Portland, Oregon - was offered a post at the University of Turku.

During the entire period of time until 2005 he was offered only a series of short-term contracts and his position was never made permanent. In 2005 he was told there no longer was a short-term contract and since then "he has worked without pay". What happened in 2005 was that he had requested to be paid the same rate as his fellow Finnish researchers, many of which had lesser qualifications (and, according to one comment in the article, didn't work as hard). The inference of course was that it was this requested to be treated as equal that had led to a sudden lack of a follow-up contract.

Meanwhile his wife wasn't allowed to work at all for the first couple of years before finally being granted the kind of visa that allowed this and then she too became a researcher. In the early 2000's she applied to be a Finnish citizen and had her otherwise valid application rejected because the state organisation (probably the same one that is now going to be customer friendly ....) had not accepted the qualifications of the person (at the University) who had certified that the woman spoke a "state of Finland" language (probably Swedish in her case rather than Finnish hence the above construction - either are however acceptable in Finnish law). Her appeal against this had now been (after 2 years) accepted but that only meant that she would have had to apply again.

(In the meantime the daughter (26) now working as a researcher in Brussels, but as far as I can gather with her base still in Turku - and with a degree from the Swedish-speaking Unversity there ("Åbo Akademi") had been granted Finnish citizenship earlier with no problem.)

Now that girls parents were moving back to the States, fully aware that, if they had stayed there in 1994, by now the man would long have had tenure at some US University.

It's hard for me to relate directly to this. Certainly in my previous company I was mostly treated well and as far as I know had a salary that didn't differ that much from other people with my experience. However salary isn't everything and what I have noticed is that I haven't been used for things that it would have been more logical to use me for rather than a Finn.

In that previous company, I had been the only IT person who had been involved with the entire course of a proposed purchase of a ready-made software application from a US company and had been used throughout (in addition to having a normal IT role) as a link between the Americans and the Finns. Then came the time to visit the US company and ten people were sent from my company for a week to S. Carolina - five from IT and five users. Needless to say (considering the subject here) I wasn't one of them. A couple of the IT people (and some of the users) had never even talked / listened to the Americans when they had (often) come to Finland; nevertheless they were sent to the US.

Similarly when my present company was taken over by a British-based more international company, I expected that I would be used in some kind of role for the transition projects. I wasn't. All the members of the transition projects were Finns and some of them (as I heard when I was located near a tele-conferencing room) had poor English. Nevertheless no thought was given to using someone like me as a bridge.

I'm not sure what we can blame for this. These days it is popular to say that Finland needs qualified immigrants yet at the same time there is either a reluctance to employ non-Finns in jobs which match those qualifications or a reluctance to accept any different approaches to working than standard Finnish approaches. I remember when many years ago I went for a job in Germany and the boss there said that he liked the combination of British and German IT people - roughly because the British wanted to do everything quickly with little or no planning and the Germans wanted to plan, and plan, and plan; thus the combination produced good work in a reasonable time. This wouldn't in my opinion happen here. any attempt I've made to work in non-Finnish ways and perhaps more effective ways has either been ignored or has been shot down in flames.

(In Finland it seems the concept of testing boundaries isn't known. Instead of a gentle rebuke when you in effect poke your foot just over the line (so you stop!), nothing happens. So you move the whole leg across ... and nothing happens. And so it goes on until your entire body is across the line and Bang! you are threatened with dismissal. True story.)

(Another thing that has happened to me twice (at least, I noticed it particularly twice) is that (again in my previous job) steps were taken while I was on holiday to reverse things that affected me. In one case I had spent a lot of time creating and constantly refining an Excel model that proved beyond all shadow of a doubt that buying a third-generation SAN system from H-P was better (for all reasonable variations of parameters ) over a three to five year period than buying a second-generation IBM SAN system where initial costs were lower but where maintenance started earlier and a second system would be needed earlier (etc.). When I came back after holiday my boss had replaced my model with a different extremely simple spreadsheet which ignored all parameters and just simply listed the rival quotes for Year 1. That same boss had a year earlier agreed with me before my holiday a division of work with a Finn only to announce publically on the day I was back (with me hearing this then for the first time) that two/thirds of what had been agreed was my responsibility were to be dealt with by the other person. I don't know if this is part of the same Finnish trait (as in the testing boundaries story) of not wanting to face up to unpleasantness or not.

Whatever, I look forward with interest to seeing whether renaming a state organisation will have any real effect on the "customer-friendliness" of the Finns staffing it. Somehow I doubt it.

At 8:30 *AM* I'll be going to the office "party" of the company I work for. They will be serving porridge and there will be no doubt a short pep-talk from the divisional boss.

We also yesterday got our "Christmas present". It was a book token that had to be used for one of 8 books all of which were in Finnish.

Both are thus better than nothing (my Finnish wife got to pick a book) but not exactly worth writing about.

So why do I ?

Simply because it reminded me of the norm in my companies in Germany. Typical of that time were four things.

1. There was an extra month (or month and a half) salary at Christmas time. (Beats a book token for a single book ...)

2. Each working group had a restaurant lunch in December (during the week) paid for by the company. Food and wine/beer - lasting about 90 mins.

3. The place where we ate our normal office lunch had a special meal with free (good) wine.

4. There was an evening out somewhere for all the company - food, dancing.

2, 3, and 4 beat a bit of porridge and half-an-hour break from work, don't they !?

P.S. I was wrong. The short pep-talk was about a sentence with no pep. But we had to wait about 20 minutes before the porridge (which was rather good and which in England would be called "rice pudding") because of first a couple of interlude music piano solos (from an ex-boss of mine) and then several Christmas songs from a small choir. When I then woke up we could go and collect our porridge.

P.P.S. It's now almost three years since a group of ca 100 people from my previous company were outsourced to this one and today - just as with any occasion for the whole company - it was still 100% obvious that we would all sit together (free choice of table) rather than with the people we now work with. I leave you to draw your own conclusions about the respective company spirit.