Andy's Mind

It’s 17 km (10.5 miles) from where I live to where 4pi is located. It’s not the farthest stretch across Warsaw, but still it’s through the center and over the river. Since I’ve been doing some projects for them recently I have been there frequently. The most obvious way of getting there is, of course, by car. However, since I sold my car recently and don’t plan to buy a new one for a while I had to consider other methods. Naturally, I ended up using public transport a lot (after at least six years of never boarding a bus).

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A few days ago as I was eating breakfast I switched on a news channel and there was a short report from Germany about the state of… petrol stations along their border with Poland. It turns out that due to huge difference in the prices of fuel (both petrol and diesel) and lack of border (and duties) between the two EU members Germans go to Poland to fill up. En masse. The report pointed out that policies of big oil corporations regarding pricing make the situation even worse, since the petrol is cheaper in Berlin than in Frankfurt am Oder which is on the Polish border.

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I have a habit o switching off my cellphone once in a while. And I don’t answer it if I don’t feel like talking to anyone. I’m then asked by some why I was not answering the phone or why my phone was switched off. Within just a few years this idea that a fellow human being is only a touch of a button away got so deep into people’s minds that when someone isn’t they get angry.

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It was early morning and I had lots of paperwork to do. It was my first watch on this ship, the Caroline, being transferred to it just two days ago. I sat alone on the bridge as she moved south-west through the Atlantic at steady twenty knots. The ocean was empty, with nothing on radar for hours now so I looked up at the horizon only every ten minutes or so, working dutifully on all declarations, forms and other sorts of paper torture devised by appropriate authorities and our corporate managers. It’s funny that in this modern age computers can steer a 6000 TEU box boat almost on their own but can’t really reduce the paperwork required by all those containers.

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