That sounds absurd, right? OK, you might agree to split the bill evenly and maybe come out one drink in profit - but it's still a bit of a social faux pas to deliberately make money off your mates.

Recently, I was asked if I'd like to run a market stall at a geek event. There would be a bunch of traders there, and I could have a little pitch where I could sell the various gadgets, trinkets, and bits of art I've made over the years.

But the whole thing weirded me out and I'm trying to understand why.

Everything I could make and sell would involve me buying stuff at wholesale price and selling retail price. Like, I get that's the way commerce works, but it also feels kind of… I don't know how to explain. Rude?

If I buy 100 things at £10ea, assume I only sell 75% of them, plus VAT, plus credit card charges, then I have to sell for £16.50ea just to break even.

That doesn't account for my time spent buying them. Nor does it include dealing with returns, breakages, or any other expenses. I also need to pay corporation tax on my profits.

Speaking of which, that £16.50 above doesn't include any profit! If I wanted to make the enterprise worthwhile, I'd probably need to charge at least double the wholesale cost - which would probably reduce the number of people buying.

Last time I did anything like this, I used pre-orders to reduce my risk and reduce the cost - but I'm not sure how many people would pre-order something to pick up several weeks later at an event.

I've loved all the weird things I've purchased at hackspaces and conferences. And certainly I don't feel ripped off by the merchants. I can't wait to buy my friends' art, books, and gadgets. But it feels weird when it is me doing it.

I guess one issue is that this isn't my main source of income. I'm gainfully employed - so any extra income from selling stuff would really be in the category of fun money. Don't get me wrong, more money is always useful, but this would be a lot of effort for a relatively small amount of money, all of which I don't really need.

Also, and I realise this is my problem, I don't see my time and expertise as valuable in that way. I'd much rather show you how to build a thing, or blog the instructions, or help you understand how something works.

Finally, I think I feel this way because I see all the people I meet as friends. If we're at a weird hacker event, there's a good chance we have something in common and I'd be delighted to share a pint with you.

Does anyone else feel this way? Do you happily make fat stacks of cash from your peers? Am I just weird and neurotic? Let me know in the comment box. It's free.

For years, the biggest lie from customer service call centres was "Your call is important to us!"

Then, a few years ago, it became "Due to unusually high call volumes, it may take longer than usual to answer your call."

Now, it is "Due to the unprecedented situation, please bear with us while we try to answer your call."

Well, no. It has been a year. I totally get that the first few months of trying to get people working from home successfully were a chore. And lots of your staff may be off sick. But if you haven't managed to adapt by now, then I don't know what hope there is for your organisation in the future.

The only certainty is change. The next thing to disrupt you might be a pandemic, or a meteor hit, or something commonplace like a flood or fire.

About 8 years ago, I helped my office prepare for a "Disaster Day" - like an unannounced fire-drill. We ran an exercise where at 6AM one morning, we declared an on-site emergency and shut the office. How many staff members turned up for work because the information hadn't been cascaded to them? How much work wasn't able to be done because a crucial file was left on a desk? Which teams were unable to spend a day on a VPN?

The conclusions were dispiriting. Some teams thrived - others were unable to do a day's work without access to post-it notes. It highlighted where the problems were and suggested some solutions.

Anecdotally, that company did better than some of its competitors during the early stages of the pandemic. The disruption was prepared for.

But it is hard. It is so hard. We're all living with unimaginable pain and sadness. But through adversity to the stars. We have to get used to constant turmoil. The book Antifragile makes a compelling case that the only companies which survive are those which are strengthened from volatility.

It has been a year. Things are going to get better - but that should just give us more time to prepare for the next disruption.

It boiled down to this. Was there a way we could make normal people want to be on a conference call with their family and friends?

Let me explain. ARPU - Average Revenue Per User - that's all mobile network operators care about. When it's up, the money flows like wine. When it's down... the drought makes people do crazy things.

Voice revenue had been falling for years. Skype and WhatsApp mean you can call the world for free. The only people you call on the phone line are your grandparents, the pizza company, and your employer's conference call system.

If social-conference-calling became a thing, ARPU would go up.

Here's how the system we built worked.

1. Install an app (duh!)
2. Select phone numbers from your address book. Say your mum, dad, and brother.
3. Hit "Go!"
4. The app dials the number of our conference call system.
5. As soon as you connect, the system dials your mum, dad, and brother. But - and here's the magic - it uses your Caller ID, so they think you're calling them directly.
6. When your mum picks up, she's put into a conference with you. If your dad doesn't pick up, the system cuts off rather than playing you his voicemail message.
7. You brother misses the call, but dials you right back. Here's the second bit of the magic - the network redirects his call into the conference system.

You get it, right? We came up with a dozen user stories (5-aside football team, curry night, wanting a lift home, granny's birthday), and built demos of the technology.

It worked! The network integration was tricky, but possible. There were a few rough edges, but it was good enough to try out.

Customers... were split. Some people got it straight away. It was perfect for their needs - kids calling separated parents, managers wanting an ad-hoc team call, that sort of thing.

Other people were ambivalent to it. No one like conference calls at work, why would friends and families enjoy them?

But the thing that killed it - what always kills products in the mobile industry - was how to charge for it.

Many years ago, when SMS cost 12p a go, the mobile networks launched location based services. For 12p you could have your location sent to your phone. Then Google came along and fucked it up for everyone by making location services free.

That's OK, because networks could still charge £2.50 for a premium rate SMS to deliver a game - and take 50% of the revenue. Then Apple came along and fucked it up for everyone by making games free.

Still, that SMS revenue, eh? Oh, look, WhatsApp has fucked everything up by making messaging free.

You see the pattern, right? People like free stuff.

How would you charge for this? Here's a quick run-down of every charging scheme that was rejected.

• FREE! Not quite as dumb as it sounds - most people already have unlimited calling. This gives them a reason to love their mobile network.
• Just as a normal call.
• Pro-rata. You call three people, you get charged for three calls.
• In-app billing for a subscription to the service - perhaps with a set bundle of minutes.
• Ever increasing levels of complexity which would have been a nightmare to bill for and impossible to understand.

Unsurprisingly, the last one was the most popular with the network. Complex billing leads to misunderstandings, which leads to increased ARPU. Until people get fed up and churn to a different provider.

The project spluttered out, and never took off. Maybe it would have flopped anyway, we'll never know.

The central challenge to the mobile phone industry is "Why do I need a mobile network?"

Skype and WhatsApp provide calls and messaging at a higher quality and lower price. WiFi is free and plentiful. Everything a network can do, someone else can do better, faster, and cheaper.

At the moment, a mobile network is just a company which gives you a payment plan on a £1,000 smartphone.

Mobile networks used to be afraid of being a "dumb pipe" - that moment has long since passed. They're now embracing being a loan company which sponsors a sports team.

It was the early 2000s and the large mobile telco I worked for had just spent billions of pounds on a 3G license.

3G was the future! Sure, faster data would be nice, but the real money was to be made in Video Calling!

What could Video Calling be used to improve? The answer was obvious - Interactive Voice Response menus. You know the sort "Press 1 for billing, press 2 for accounts, press 3 to bang your head against a brick wall."

It's annoying to listen to a robot read out 9 different items. And then another 6. And then 12 more. Wouldn't it be easier if you could see what all the options were? Yes! YES!

LET'S TURN VOICE MENUS INTO VIDEO CALLS!!!

We built it, tested it, demo'd it, and then quickly abandoned it.

Here's all the ways it failed:

• Early 3G phones didn't have touch screens. People would see the menu item in the video and try to press the screen, rather than the phone's telephone buttons.
• The phone's screens were small and low resolution - it was hard to fit more than 3 menu items on screen at any one time.
• Video resolution and bandwidth was limited. You can recognise a friend's face over a poor connection, but recognising low-resolution text is much harder.
• It was expensive for users - video calls were a premium product. These were the days when SMS cost 12p a go - so it was, I think, 50p a minute.
• It was expensive for companies - not only to integrate with their existing IVRs, but there was a licence fee to pay and per minute charges.

It was a flop.

A few years later we tried again - using a new-fangled technology called "apps". This app would detect that you were calling our helpdesk, pause your call, and take you through a series of questions to help you either fix your phone or get you to the correct department.

Customers hated it. I've never seen a focus group react so negatively before.

They hated being interrupted. They resented a machine questioning their choices. They despised being interrogated about why they were calling.

So we killed that idea as well.

Would it work today? I've been thinking about that. People are more comfortable with video-calling, and the prices have cratered. Phones are bigger and touch-screens are moderately popular with the masses.

But I still think it would fail today.

The mental model of shifting between voice and video seems hard for many people. There a more fundamental barrier. Generally, people only ever ring if something has gone wrong - so the customer is already stressed. They want a human and humane response. For many people, prodding on a screen is not a calming experience.

I filled in a few forms, answered some questions, and the very professional looking lady marked up my paper and said, "I see that you're a Scorpio. That means you're focused externally, and you deal with things rationally and logically. You do have a tendency to act via your intuition - sometimes to your detriment."

O...k..., I thought, that's a bit of a weird thing to bring up in a business context. Working for a high tech company, I thought we were supposed to use... I dunno... science rather than make-believe. I expressed these concerns to the woman running the course.

"Ah," she said, looking through my results, "I see that you're also Chinese Year of the Goat. That means you tend to value personal considerations above objective criteria. So you often give more weight to social implications than to logic."

I was left rattled and confused. How can my personality be so restricted and codified by something as random as the time of my birth? Was there any research behind this, I ask?

"Oh yes!" She confidently replied, "Astrology has been practised for a long time. And thousands of top companies use it to make important decisions about who to hire and promote. By looking at the stars, your business can gain a competitive edge!"

...

Let that sink in for a moment. Companies are assessing their workforce and promoting their rising stars based on the planetary alignment at the time of their birth.

Does that even sound plausible? What rational company would do that? Surely no responsible person uses astrology to understand themselves or others.

Gentle reader, I am teasing you! The above conversation did happen but it didn't involve the Zodiac; it involved Myers-Briggs.

For those who don't know, Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, the mystery writer Isabel Briggs Myers, invented the Myers-Briggs system during World War Two. There was a growing need to place women in the workforce and, therefore, women needed to be assessed to see what sort of work they were suited to.

The pair undertook no scientific study, looked at no test results, and didn't consult with any qualified psychiatrists, psychologists, or social scientists. Which, considering that they held no qualifications in these fields, didn't bode well for the accuracy of their project.

Despite claims that they based their system on the work of Carl Jung, he rejected the idea of simple stratification out of hand.

"There is such a factor as introversion, there is such a factor as extraversion. The classification of individuals means nothing, nothing at all." Carl Jung - McGuire, William and R. F. C. Hull, eds., C. G. Jung Speaking (Princeton University Press, 1977).

Today, Myers-Briggs tests are taken by millions of people every year. This nets the private company which owns Myers-Briggs around $20 million per year.

Oh, yes, this isn't a scientific test in any sense. It is a programme specifically designed to make money. If you want to take the test, you need to pay. If you want to administer the test, you need to pay.

Whenever scientists have attempted to study it, the results have been overwhelmingly negative. The most common complaint is that "personality traits" are meant to be fixed - yet when people take the test repeatedly, they often find that their types change radically.

Myers-Briggs is, to put it mildly, bullshit.

Magical Thinking

People want a pill which will make them thin. A herb to make their hair glossy and their skin clear. One simple trick to make $$$ working from home. A mantra to chant which will just make everything better.

We have magical-thinking-syndrome. That if we just invoke certain incantations, and do a certain course, all our troubles will just vanish into thin air.

Creating a team is hard work. Self improvement is hard work. Communicating with others is hard work. Becoming part of a Cargo Cult is no substitute for deeply examining yourself and your working environment - and then making changes to both.

You can't simply shortcut it by find your secret, magic code.

But that's what we want, apparently. That's what sells. Perhaps businesses love magical thinking like Myers-Briggs and NLP because they want to show that they care but they don't want to do the hard work that will actually make positive changes to their working environments.

People want to have a simple, foolproof method which will allow them to overcome their difficulties. Myers-Briggs, NLP, Astrology, and sacrificing chickens will give us the illusion that we are doing something.

But then, I would say that; I'm a Scorpio.

Moderation Policy

I welcome all comments and criticisms. I am, however, the evil overlord of this blog. The commenting rules are as follows...

• "MB / NLP works for me therefore" style comments will not be accepted. The plural of anecdote is not data.
• "Studies have shown" comments will be accepted when linked to an actual scientific study.
• "You are so closed minded" is a fair argument - but it is up to you to show me the proof.
• "These major companies / important people use X therefore it is good" is argumentum ad verecundiam. It can also be easily refuted by pointing out that Lehman Brothers was heavily into Myers Briggs.