Who’s pulling our strings?

Time was when conspiracy theorists were made fun of by the bulk of the population, and to a certain extent that is still the case. However the joke is starting to backfire upon the mockers as it becomes increasingly obvious there very definitely are conspiracies and the theorists are quite often bang on the money.

I’m not talking here about moon landings, 911, Kennedy assassinations or reptilian shapeshifters, interesting though they might be; I am talking about ‘everyday conspiracies’ if you like. These are the ones organised by Governments, powerful cartels in strategic industries and businesses where competition is less robust or the major players fancy themselves as being more entitled than others.  

A great example of this is the sort of nonsense that goes on around sponsorship deals; especially those associated with a major international event.

Last year we saw an example of this with Addled Ass and the ridiculously overpriced souvenir All Black jerseys. This was a conspiracy in that Addled Ass was able to do this with the compliance of:

·         The IRB, who could have made some rules around the sales of merchandise

·         The NZRU, who could have made some rules around what their branded product would sell for

·         The New Zealand apparel retailers who went along with it and sold the items at the overinflated retail price instead of telling Addled Ass to shove them.

This year I learn Workers at the Olympic Games Village in London have been told they must not eat any chips other than McDonalds’ in their onsite canteen. That directive would be enough to make a bloke give up chips for life. Anyone who has tasted those limp, skinny, greasy bits of goop that McDeaths call chips knows they might be a lot of things, but like most of the toxic waste served under the golden arches their only claim to being food is that some silly buggers actually put them in their mouth.

The games bosses have relaxed the rules for the workers after a shit-storm of protest, but for those who can be bothered attending the games it will be nothing but McDeaths. To my way of thinking that is just making what would already be a dire experience a deadly one.

This might not seem like a conspiracy, but actually it is. After all to be a conspiracy, it only needs to be a plan agreed to by two or more parties and designed to commit a crime or a harmful act. The parties here are of course the International Olympic Committee and the Purveyors of Poison. And while it is not a crime to leave people with only a choice of McDeaths or McDeaths, (more’s the pity), it is definitely an act that is designed intentionally or otherwise to bring harm to a group of people. And you have to wonder why an event that purports to showcase fit and healthy people would want after finally encouraging people to leave their couches and attend the games to have them trough out on a load of unhealthy rubbish.

A couple of years ago we had a similarly stupid situation where Bug Wiser was the official beer sponsor for the Soccer World Cup and a bunch of people in orange T-shirts were evicted from the games and accused of ambush marketing. Of course that is exactly what they were trying to do, but the action by Cup officials to eject them was excessive. While it is true the orange was the colour of the Dutch brewery they were representing; it was also the colour of the Dutch soccer team. I’m only surprised the officials didn’t make them change their shirts before taking the field. Once again a conspiracy had been hatched between FIFA and Bud to deny the attendees any choice.

These are just three examples of corporate conspiracies, and while they are annoying, we can refuse to go along with them by boycotting events that allow the sponsors to hold such sway. It is much harder, though to counter the activities of companies with whom we have no option but to deal.

Telecommunication companies are a good example of this and they seem to be getting even more powerful.

As we all know the Telcos act pretty much as a cartel and they are forever lavishing money on lush adverts and PR to tell us how they are going to cover the whole country in Megultraincrediblyfast broadband which is crucial to all of us (so they say). In reality most of this warp speed stuff is of no particular advantage to us regular punters unlike reliable cellphone coverage or in many rural cases even a moderately fast broadband connection.

But no, we can’t have that because this fasterthanthespeedoflight shit is the bomb. Of course the reason is that this stuff is what is wanted/needed by large institutions that pay large sums of money for their set-up and Hooray Henrys who have more money than sense and like to show off they have the biggest and fastest broadband connection in their social circle. The rest of us would be thrilled to be able to use our cellphone from home or watch movies without experiencing a frozen screen at any stage.

 You know it’s a conspiracy when Vodafone made $151.2M net profit for the year ended March 2011 and recently spent $840M buying TelstraDim, while Telecom had net earnings of $878M for the 6 months ended December 2011 yet rural customers are still having to wait years for broadband and many city customers can’t get cellphone coverage. These guys certainly don’t lack the money to sort this inequity out; but they do lack the collective will.

The law and order situation in New Zealand is another example of a conspiracy. In this case the co-conspirators are the Government, the judges and to a lesser extent the police. The way it works is that the Government has been encouraging the police to work as a business according to departing Northland area commander Paul Dimery (an unfortunate name for a police officer).

Paul’s claims start to make sense when one looks at the sorts of targeted campaigns police have run lately. Most have focussed on matters that result in fines and many have already accused them of revenue gathering over their obsession with anyone who exceeds the speed limit by more than 4km/h. It has also been noticed that judges are for the most part handing out fines (along with disqualifications) for drunk driving. Surely if we want to stop drunk driving we should be handing out quite uncomfortable penalties rather than fines which are seldom paid and disqualifications which are often completely ignored by the offender? And surely if we want safer roads we might be more concerned about people who can’t keep on their own side of the road, failing to give way at roundabouts and intersections or who are driving erratically?

On the other hand if your plan is to ignore the safety aspects and simply collect revenue then I guess you would do exactly what they are doing now.

Makes you think, though, doesn’t it?

Chorus hit bum notes

Oh my blog I’m running late. And why am I running late? Because this has been a week of hassles beyond belief, that’s why. But as with everything in life, you have to take what lessons you can from it and my lesson for this week was that you have to speak up and make a fuss if you are not happy. And don’t mince your words if somebody has really stuffed you around; go on the attack.

So why am I so fired up? Well the first thing to get me going this week was a problem with my Internet connection. I say this week, but in actual fact this problem has been with us for months. We had complained to Vodaclone many times and they weren’t listening properly. You see the fault is a regular one that causes our connection to drop out virtually every day at approximately the same time of the day (within a 3 hour window at the most), and it lasts between 2 and 15 minutes each time.

When you get a problem that is as predictable in its behaviour as this, it is more likely than not to have the same cause each time. Yet Yodafone didn’t seem to be able to understand this and each time put us through the usual nonsense of switching off the modem and the computer waiting 3 minutes....if you’ve ever had to deal with these companies you will know the rest of the script. And therein resides the first problem. It is a bloody script. I am convinced these people have been given little or no training whatsoever and instead been issued with a list of FAQs and the corporate answers that must be used to customers. Should the customer ask about something that was forgotten in the FAQ list, the call centre operative finds the next nearest one and answers with that. After analysing the answers I was given I came to the conclusion this must be the case as they were all so carefully structured and rigid. Each time I queried the logic it resulted in a long wait listening to poorly recorded and mostly awful music while the operative rushed off to their supervisor for advice or another handful of ‘stupid’ pills.

That is the background to this fiasco. Zapping forward to the present, things came to a head last week when we got fed up again and decided to insist on somebody coming and sorting the problem out. We reasoned there must be a simple explanation for it and it was looking increasingly like some sort of outside force was impacting on our connection each day. Somebody must be doing something around that time each day that affects our line. This time for no apparent reason we were taken more seriously and told Chorus would be sent out to check on the fault. He was to come on Friday 16 September at around 1.30pm. We told them the tech had to contact us before he came or turned anything off as we needed to know for work flow reasons.

Friday ended with no sight or sound of any technician. On Saturday we went out for part of the day and when we got home there was a message on our answerphone saying the tech had been but we weren’t home and to ring for ‘another appointment’ which was rich since he hadn’t turned up for his first appointment. On the Sunday we also got a text saying something else which I am still struggling to understand. My best guess was they were coming at 7pm that night (once again without making an appointment).

Sunday came and went unlike the Chorus guy who did neither. On Monday I received another text saying they had been again and we weren’t home and to make another appointment. This time we had not been out so we knew this was complete bollox.

So I rang Chorust Almighty and asked them what they were talking about. It transpired they had gone to an address in Pyes Pa that is not remotely similar to ours and where we have never lived.
My next call was to Vodastone and they got an earful for giving the Choruster the wrong address.
By this stage my pupils had disappeared and my head was about to start doing 360s. I hurled myself upon my unfortunate victim savaging her ferociously and demanding compensation. My teeth had barely grazed her skin before she conceded and admitted they had fucked up owed me BIG TIME. All good. However we still had that matter of an Internet connection that likes to disconnect itself for a while each morning.

So it was agreed the Sodaphone person would inflict some of the nasty wounds I had given her on the contracted choir and arrange for their tech to come to the correct address – always useful if you want to fix the correct connection. She promised he would come at around 11am that day (to the correct address).

You just knew this couldn’t just self correct at this time, didn’t you? And you are so right. The technician who looked about 17 turned up to meet a very angry Writerman who said unto him, ‘It’s a good job you turned up now because the Internet is off again – and this is the second time this morning.” Yeah, I’ve just been working on it,” the fresh faced fool then said.

Of course he claimed nobody had told him we needed to know BEFORE he turned things off. At this point my wife remarked the company was probably called Chorus because they all seem to be singing from the same song sheet.  To which I said, but what a shame none of them can sing in tune?

As of this writing we still haven’t had the fault fixed although the Song & Dance company have stuck a 72 hour analyser on the line to find out what is happening. So we wait yet again, but as I have already pointed out to Vodagroan my meter is running and the longer it takes the more it will cost them.

Don’t worry about the brain drain, there’s nothing left to go down it.

I can’t believe this shit only happens to me. It must happen to everybody, but folks, I just don’t think we are making enough of a fuss about incompetence. I am referring not just to incompetence in general but to the sort of monumental I’m-brain-dead/I-don’t-give-a-fuck type of incompetence that has thoroughly infected large corporations, retail stores, government departments and councils. This is incompetence due to bad attitude rather than lack of aptitude and it is rife throughout not just this land, but also the rest of the world.

There are times the universe appears to be conspiring and we encounter a large number of these micro-intelligences over a short period of time.

I’ll give you a couple of examples of a bunch of microbial life forms I have encountered recently and the names of the guilty parties have been published to avoid any further illusions any of these charlatans know which end their arsehole is.

First up to the plate is Contact Energy, possibly so named because their abilities in this sphere (making contact) are even more abysmal than their abilities to manage their power resources. You can waste a lot of energy trying to contact these numb-nuts, and marvel at their complete inability to manage simple one-on-one communications. My conflict with Contact Inertia began after a particularly lazy meter reader from a company who shall remain nameless, but we’ll call them Wells, failed to read our meter or leave a card to let us know he’d been for several months last year. When I realised what had happened I did a read myself and found the geniuses at Compacted Inertia had underestimated my gas bill (at summer levels) all winter. I had a massive bill to pay all in one go. I negotiated a settlement with accounts and then a complete retard manager sent me a letter threatening recovery action. But when I tried to speak to the culprit I found I had to spend the next three days arguing with nitwits on the phone that refused to put me through to her. Eventually it was sorted, but it should have been on the day I first rang them about it.

Second on the agenda is Westpac Bank. They effectively stole money from me. We filled out forms to cancel two insurance policies and I took them to the Greerton branch to action. An imbecile whose job description has him as a customer banking consultant invited me into his office ostensibly to discuss my decision and check the forms. However he simply asked me why we were cancelling. I told him they were overpriced and he smiled weakly and took the forms. Apparently it never occurred to him to check them, despite this being part of his job, and it would seem they were not entirely correctly done, or at least one wasn’t. The reason is minor, technical, long-winded and unimportant here, but what happened next is not. Wankpac duly took the forms, cancelled one policy, and then waited two weeks before sending out a letter advising of the error in one of the cancellation forms. In the meantime they had removed a further premium for the policy that, given it was handed in at the same time and accompanied by the other and were obviously intended to be cancelled. Once again resolution took several days and the ‘letters of apology’ I had demanded were more attempts to justify their own incompetence than any acknowledgement they acted unprofessionally and incompetently.

Vodafone also qualifies as extremely stupid, although by telecommunications standards they are one of the better ones. Their problem is the Vodadrone website that says you can click on a button for webspace and then doesn’t have one. It also has a button for transferring or registering a domain name, but when you click on it you only get the option of registering a new name. I subsequently found that if you overlook that little discrepancy and click anyway, it takes you to that option. But how the bloody hell would anyone know that?

The next two nongs managed to turn up on the same day and both are international companies.

International nitwit number one is Skype who for about the four hundredth time informed me my subscription is due to run out – except that it isn’t. It had several months to run before they sent me an extension recently due to an outage they had recently that left all subscribers without the service. What makes this interesting is that when these cretins send you an email about your subscription it is one of those ones you can’t reply to. Okay, so go on the site and hit the ‘contact us’ button or better still Skype them. No actually you can’t do either because Skype website has no ‘contact us’ button and if you want to contact them you have to go through tons of hoops until you get to a place where you can finally bang in a question although even then it will attempt to drag you off to one of its forums. Incredibly one can’t find a way on the website to phone the people at Shype.

And last but not least we have a delightful new business relationship between me and a domain and web hosting company called Just Host. Well it certainly ain’t Just Ice, I can tell you that. These guys are incredible. First of all their website advertises the cost as $4.45 per month and advertises a 20 percent discount on that. What it doesn’t make clear is that if you only take out two years instead of four, the price is $5.95 per month. Not satisfied with that, when I ordered the package Just Ass added two add-on services which they asked me if I wanted during the ordering process and which I rejected and of course billed me for them.

These matters might not seem of great import in isolation, but when you consider this level of incompetence is going on every minute of every day, you can see why the entire Western world is a collection of economic basket cases. What’s more obscene is that most of these companies continue to make more money than many third world countries and control large sections of their various markets.

We could turn parts or even most of this around if we just all refused to be treated as afterthoughts rather than the stuff that puts food in the gaping maws of these troglodytes. The time is well overdue for us to vote with our wallets and slash with rapier sarcasm. Tell them bluntly and without any chance for misinterpretation exactly why you’re pissed off with them and what you expect to be done about it. Humiliation can be a great weapon.

In the worst cases, if you can find an alternative to your latest dickhead retailer, ISP, energy company or whatever, then do so at the earliest opportunity. But tell the new ones why you’ve chosen them and don’t forget to give the old lot a suitable goodbye wish so they know why you left. They won’t notice one or two, but a flood is pretty hard to ignore