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.

Much as I'd prefer to avoid the issue altogether and wish it had never happened, yesterday's shooting in a grammar school (lukio) in a semi-rural area north of Helsinki happened and needs at least to be mentioned here.

I first heard of it when I got home and turned on the BBC which I suppose indicates that no-one was discussing this at work and probably most people were unaware of it until they got home and turned on the regular news broadcasts.

After the BBC picked it up in their one hour news program and had included an interview with a Finnish doctor in charge of a quick response team and who seemed to be purposely trying to be as vague as possible, I turned on the TV and none of the Finnish channels had a special program on this (although of course there were some teletext reports).

When the news finally came on there was yet another interview with a person who seemed to be avoiding giving details and he then finally gave up and said something like "the police haven't told me what I am allowed to say and what not".

Meanwhile the statement on the situation from the police included a phrase like "there seems to be no more danger of any more shooting".

At the time this statement was issued the shooter (to remind you of at the figures late yesterday: 8 dead (headmaster; 5 girls; 2 boys); ca 20 injured some critical), who had shot himself in the head, was in critical condition and would that night die of his wounds. (The daily free paper had the headline next day  "shooting suspect dies" - carrying on this cautiousness with words that has been a (negative) feature of all of this.)

So the police seem to have forgotten the need for openness but the government system swung into action and within hours there were hot lines set up for the counseling of both school children and parents; a press conference from the government etc. (as well as from the police which I mostly missed but I guess they were still blocking and being evasive).

So Finland is being as efficient as usual but I have to wonder about the police. It's hardly their fault this happened so why all the evasiveness when dealing with it. Why not just say right out "The shooter has shot himself in the head and is in the hospital in critical condition" rather than "it seems there is no danger of more shooting" and why still call someone identified by masses of co-students a "suspect" ? It's beyond me but then I'm not in the police.

P.S. The eight shot dead by "the suspect" are of course a tragedy but I was using early figures when saying above "20 others, some critical". One is said to be critical while they rest are said to have cuts from glass (from jumping out of windows ??).

Some people are very sad at the moment and wondering to themselves "why didn't I wait".

These are the people who have just traded in their car (perhaps a 5-10 year old one) and bought a new car.

They have namely just lost a lot of money compared with doing that in 2008 (or in the rest of 2007 but valid from the 1st of January 2008).

The reason is that the level of car tax has been drastically changed.

But first most of you probably need to know about Finnish car taxes. Finland has a two-tiered system of taxes on any new cars bought here. There is the standard Value-Added tax (over 20% - I can never remember what exactly, 22% at the moment I think or is it 24?) that applies to everything, but there's also a special Car Tax.

This car tax used to be something like 122% (yes, really) and long ago the Finnish government realised that as a part of the Europe Union this wasn't going to work for long so they a few years ago decided on a plan of gradually reducing it.

The first reduction was about 10% (so car tax was then something like 110%) and all that happened was that within several months the car companies increased their pre-tax prices for cars being sent to Finland and most of that "gain" was lost.

So governments (quick to learn in this case) obviously realised that gradual change of tax levels wasn't going to work and started wondering about alternatives.

Now, several years later, the change has come and it's a big one. It also came without warning and is valid from the beginning of 2008.

The rate of car tax is now related to the amount of emissions from the car. So a small car with a diesel motor has typically the smallest amount of tax and efficient small engines (such as VWs new 1.4 TSI engine) are "better" than larger engines producing the same amount of power but with higher emissions.

The change in rates is dramatic and it also means that most cars have a lower car tax rate than before (so savings are said to be between 1 and 5 thousand Euros per car for most models) with only a few large cars with large engines having (heavily) increased car tax levels.

What this also means is of course than the price of used cars goes down - especially that of those reasonably large cars than have not seen their sticker price increased (as there will be from 2010 increased yearly road tax charges for them).

So imagine if you may someone like me (in 4 years in my case) who is planning to trade in a 10 year old car for a new one.

Done last month I'd have got a small allowance for my old car and will have paid todays price (at 110% car tax + 22% normal tax) for a new car. I won't have considered the yearly car tax when deciding which new car to buy because last month the yearly road tax was the same for all cars.

Done on the 2nd of January 2008, I'll still get the small allowance for the old car (because at that level 10% makes little difference) but I'll probably chose a car that has its price reduced by anything between 3 and 5 thousand Euros (and it will be one that will not have a high yearly tax rate from 2010).

No wonder people who did such deals last month are not happy today.

The ones that are of course are the people who bought large petrol-guzzling SUVs. They are in some cases saving tens of thousands of Euros (and no doubt there will be a rush to sign contracts for that kind of car in what's left of this year - no wonder the car sales people are smiling).

P.S. One of the people responsible for the public transport system in the Helsinki area has already pointed out one of the risks with much lower car prices - it suddenly becomes feasible to have more cars per family. I take that even further and say that the risk is that we have large increased population of young drivers. I've seen when I was in Germany that 18-25 year old males (usually males) are involved in a large percentage of car accidents and that hasn't been a major factor here because of the cost of getting into the car market (as high initial prices obviously rip down into high prices for used cars except the really old - and they need expensive repairs). Bad times ahead and not just for the bus companies.

In a quiet moment recently (and don't ask me why, but it was while I was waiting for an installation to finish!) I checked what would happen if I typed "Alexander Stubb" into Google.

Not surprisingly this active MEP's own site came first and it was followed by a wikipedia entry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Stubb

which contained one glaring mistake ...

When talking about Alexander Stubb's languages (which are many and good) it said that he "spoke Swedish, English and German in addition to French and his native Finnish".

WRONG, completely wrong !

Alexander Stubb is a member of Finland's Swedish-speaking minority and therefore his native language is Swedish.

Naturally he also speaks Finnish because he comes from the part of Finland where Finnish is the dominant language, but his native language is Swedish and he almost certainly (not mentioned in this article which started at graduating from an American college) went to schools in Finland where the teaching is done in Swedish (and where Finnish is the first "foreign" language).

Of course this makes me wonder who wrote the article. They seem to have found a good source of information because the article is detailed enough but the article can't have been written by a Finn because even the many Finnish-speaking people who voted for him in the MEP elections were all well aware that he came from the Swedish-speaking minority (and it didn't bother them).

If you now go to the site you will hopefully (unless this has been "corrected" back) see an accurate text as far as languages go, because naturally I corrected it (along with a few minor typing errors).

P.S. It's nice to be right on occasion. One of the references after the article itself is to Alexander Stubb's abridged c.v (on his own web site). In it you will find something that was considered unimportant to the (US American?) writer of the main text in that he/she while including Mr Stubb's matriculation from an American high school (in 1986) didn't bother to mention that he two years later matriculated from a school in Finland. That school according to Mr Stubb himself was "Gymnasiet Lärkan, Helsinki, Finland" Readers with Swedish will know that "Gymnasiet" is the Swedish word (including a "the") equivalent to the German "Gymnasium" (the Finnish word is "lukio") , and that Lärken (also Swedish - for "the lark") is a well-known Swedish school in Helsinki.

I put three new computer books that I had in duplicate on the desk of a guy who I knew was interested in the subject (with a note explaining the gift).

He works mainly in a different location so I didn't see him for several weeks (during which time the books disappeared), but I did expect to get a thank you note by e-mail.

Did I ? Of course not.

I was then there when he by chance was in the same location. I left the subject of the books until the late afternoon to give him the chance to thank me for them. Nothing. Even when I finally mentioned them towards the end of the day, all I got was a confirmation that he had them. No thanks.

The next time I had a book copy to give away I of course decided that someone else would get it. Again someone for whom the book would be useful. So this time I asked this new guy first if he'd like a signed copy of "Real World Computing SharePoint 2007" (which is what this one was) and he said he would. I sent it by internal post with a personal (and nice) dedication.

Did I get a "Thank You" message by E-mail? Of course not.

If I ever come across him, will he thank me then ? I doubt it.

P.S. Two and a half weeks later I got a thank you e-mail (for the single book). Maybe he's been on holiday ...