Oddities......

MISCELLANEOUS FACTS

ONE

"The human brain weights about three pounds.  It contains at least 30 billion neurons, or nerve cells, and one million billion connections or synapses.  If you started counting these synapses right now at a rate of one per second, you would just finish counting them 32 million years from now"

(from Page 15 of the book  WIDER THAN THE SKY - the phenomenal gift of consciousness  by Nobel Prize Winner Geral M Edelman.  Published 2004 by Penguin Allen Lane)

COMMENT: No wonder many human beings do not think alike!

TWO

The CONCISE (note: CONCISE) OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY has 240,000 words and phrases. Let's assume that these include approximately 40,000 common nouns (like 'angel, man and wedding') together with 4,000 common verbs (like 'approach, marry and succumb') then Steven Pinker estimates that the number of possible five word sentences in the English language (such as 'the angel married the man') is 6.4 trillion.  To crank them all out, taking five seconds per five word sentence, would take a million years.  However a sentence of over twenty words (like this one) is not at all uncommon and it is estimated that there one hundred million trillion of them in English. To count these one would need to be born as Adam or Eve and live for ever (almost)..............

(information provided on Page 7 of the book WORDS AND RULES by Steven Pinker. Published in 1999 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

COMMENT:  No wonder many human beings do not think alike - let alone say the same things!

FURTHER COMMENT:   Every day we are presented with an INFINITE NUMBER OF OPTIONS from which to choose - and this has an impact for good or for bad on customer service, on our individual performance as well as upon the success and failure of the company. No one organisation, despites its attempts with policies, rules, regulations and systems can ever prescribe the exact behaviours and communications needed to please a customer. This is why scripted welcomes and automated communications can often alienate customers. Force-fitting employees into a total compliance with procedures effectively treats them as a robots (programmed to speak and behave in a certain way).  Customer relations means human relations - and this in turn means making positive emotional choices from the infinite number of options presented to us every day (like whether to make eye contact, open the door for a customer, what to say or not to say, how to say it etc.)