arbitrary user

So we had a lovely dinner with my folks and then after they had said their goodbyes I checked my email and was left seething. An asshole ruined the entire evening.

I’m on a number of civic mailing lists for Observatory, the suburb we live in. One particularly active list is the neighbourhood watch list which is peppered with crime reports and the occasional report of residents aiding the police (who’re doing an incredible job) catching criminals.

It can be a daunting list to be on. Especially before you even move in. But soon you realise that crime is everywhere and that being on this list is like spending your days in the police station… You’re going to hear about a lot of crime.

Pessimists piss me off. People who think they’re being smart by saying thing like “Oh, It’s obviously going to go the way of Zimbabwe” etc etc. What these fuckers don’t seem to realise is that assholes like them have been saying shit like that since the dark ages. I have a friend whose grandfather sold everything in 1990 because he was convinced that Mandela was going to take his home. He died, bitter and twisted, in a caravan, while all around him the Rainbow Nation smiled.

Anyway, back to the mailing list. Some asshole, who has already fled the country, in reply to a report about a cash in transit robbery that happened in front of a child, felt the need to basically tell everyone that we’re fucked and “Get out of that hellhole which South Africa has become!” and “There’s no future in SA for you and your children”. He also went on about white suburbs and how the criminals hate our skin colour.

My reply was cordial. I suggest politely that he never post on the list again because we don’t really need his pessimism.

But here’s what I wanted to say.

You ignorant fuckwad. You racist, bigoted, coward. How dare you come onto a public forum and spout your simple-minded drivel, aimed at nothing else but undermining the good that these people are doing. The blood of generations of slain innocents stains our soil and punctuates our history…The struggle is not new or unique. Our legend is one of truth and reconciliation, of forgiveness and grace… and I would be honoured to have my own blood take its place in this soil while I worked to make this country better. You on the other hand ran away. You asked whether we love our children more than our country… My answer to that, you shallow dipshit, is that no parent wants to see their child hurt, but I would rather build a better future for all the children of this country than teach my own that running away is an option. In short, fuck you and the horse you left town on.

I didn’t post that because it’s a public list and we’re trying to be civil.

I had the pleasure of spending a few hours with a Zimbabwean the other day. He, like millions of other Zimbabweans, left their country because the realistic alternative was starvation or torture. He will never be anything but Zimbabwean. He has a passion and a deep love for his country. He knows that HOPE is greater than FEAR. He believes that normal people make a difference, even in light of insurmountable obstacles. He knows that the human spirit can stop tanks and dictators even when their bodies can’t.

A lot of what Tawanda, the Zimbabwean, knows about the human spirit was taught to him by us. South Africa.  A country where the story is so incredible that people would have not believed it if it were not for CNN.

This blood in our soil belongs to men and woman far greater than any of us can comprehend. Millions of unsung heros, children, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters… I could not dishonour their sacrifice by running away now.

And hey, I’m actually loving my life. You’re the miserable dude in the first world telling other people how fucked their lives are over the internet.

ps. I have no issues with people leaving the country because they just want to live somewhere else. My sister lives permanently in the UK. She left for a whole bunch of reasons, crime was obviously a factor but it wasn’t the biggest factor. She can’t wait to come home for holidays.

pps. I don’t have any children.

I love English. It is the only language I can even begin to express myself in and the older I get the more I grow to respect it. I am not however an English professional, which is lucky for me because I wouldn’t be a very good one. (I’m trying to be better though, promise!)

I do however realise that proper English needs to be looked after by the people who care for its future much like a young parent cares for a child. You can’t let it be molested by laziness because it will rapidly become an unrecognisable fat slob of a language.

So it is with great pleasure that I read one of the senior editors at The Sunday Express getting all frothy at the mouth over English abuse in one of the paper’s own editions.

My two favourite lashes were:

P5 – Someone is described as an ‘ex-pat’. At the very least that’s amateurish. Look, let’s make it really simple; if you don’t know what a word means or how it’s spelt, don’t f***ing use it.

P9 – The conflict in Georgia provides us with some classic bollocks. What is a ‘battle tank’? Does this mean wars now have referees who decide whether or not a tank is allowed to go into battle?

Are all other tanks to be described as big metal cars for soldiers with a decorative gun on top?

The thing I love the most about this kind of bashing is that it truly is done out of love for the language. Also, any toff who can throw in a few “f**k”s is my hero… (Mr Fry that means you!)

Read the rest of the rants here.

In case you weren’t counting, the year is 2008… In the past week I have received both the Spier Wants To Give You Free Champagne email and, more recently, the Microsoft Will Track This Email And Give You $321.56 For Every Person You Forward This To email. Both of these emails came from people I ~used to know… People who do not suffer from diminished brain capacity, amnesia or bouts of uncontrollable binge drinking & emailing. I’m tired of being understanding. Ignorance is not an excuse for not using your logical faculties.

Find your own internet, this one is taken.

Why must I be an asshole to get stuff done?

For about 3 years I’ve used Vodacom 3G without hassles. My usage has been random and it’s never made sense to buy a bunde (500mb). I just moved to woodstock and am going to be living without real internet for 2 months so, in an attempt to not be too broken by the R2 a megabyte charges, I “enabled” a 500mb ad-hoc bundle.

Within 5 minutes I got an SMS saying that my bundle had been activated.

That’s when my 3G stopped working.

Numerous calls on saturday and sunday left me dumbfounded. I heard the same story over and over again. Supposedly they had inadvertantly deactivated my data services on my account and just had to re-enable it and everything would be hunky dory again.

They’ve done that 4 times now, over 3 days, and it still isn’t working.

I’ve been told before that team leaders would call me back, that consultants would call me back… etc etc. NOBODY has called me back. Sounds a lot like Telkom actually.

I’ve now dealt with a callcenter team leader called Shakiel who supposedly is going to fix my problem… but it’s going to take 4 hours to “activate” the data services… He will supposedly call me at 5pm.

So when I needed 3G the most it completely fell apart. Well done Vodacom, your brilliance astounds me. Idiots!

UPDATE: It’s working again. Thanks to Sonny at Vodacom. It seems being as asshole works.

Benny Hinn is a swindler and a thief and it is high time that honest, god fearing christians spoke up against him. The ridiculousness of the church (as a community) not calling him on his outrageous fraud –  because he’s a ‘christian’ and they don’t want to ‘judge’, is perhaps only slightly more stupid than far right christians believing that George Bush is ordained by god to return America to its christian roots.

There is only one thing more insipid than people who are stupid enough to give their money to this charletan, and that is people who know better but prefer not to rock the boat. Good men are doing nothing.

“Everyone had to donate $1 000 because an exceptional blessing rested on $1 000.”

Read the News24 article here.

(Note to the reader: These sorts of antics, and the church’s general acceptance of it, do nothing to redeem the church, or its religion, in my eyes. Feed for poor, clothe the naked, for God’s sake.)

Every few months or so I begin to ask myself the age old question; Is there crack in the ground water?

This time it’s over the property industry, particularly the rental people. We’re looking for a nice cosy garden apartment and we have a fair sized budget, it shouldn’t be all that hard.

But there are forces conspiring against me:

Firstly, the steaming pile of web un-usability that is GumTree really needs to catch a wakeup call. My single biggest gripe is simple; now that all modern web browsers support tabs you really should allow users to open up a particular item in a new tab. Instead they use some nonsensical javascript navigation that even I, who remember, am the Elvis Presly (the fat narc’d up one) of javascript, can not make sense of… I mean, I understand how it works, I just can’t understand why they did it. Funnily enough, there are actually html anchors for regular links and they’re set up properly, but then they also have this javascript onclick event that strongarms the browser and forwards you to the same page the anchor tag does. You know in case your browser happens to support javascript but doesn’t support html.

(I know there are firefox plugins that allow me to selectively disable javascript for particular sites but as you can imagine, other elements of their site break horribly without javascript)

Secondly, it’s the lazy lazy property people who seem to be about as effective and hard-working as the employment agencies. Why would you be more than happy to have tens of potential customers drive out to some block of apartments, struggle to find the place, only to find that the place is a cesspit? TAKE A FRIGGEN PHOTOGRAPH AND PUT IT ON THE INTERTUBES!!! It’s free! It has got to that point where I no longer trust listings without photographs, but then the optimistic care bear that resides in the cockles of my heart says things like “maybe it’s a really nice place and the granny selling it pre-dates chemical photo-lithography“… maybe indeed, until I discover it’s a property agency with a website.

Thirdly, if you’re paying attention you’ll see how this is close to number 2. If you’re going to take pictures of your “apartment”, please include 1 or 2 pictures of, I don’t know, YOUR APARTMENT and not 3 photographs of your garden… and only your garden. I can think of only one reason why you would post 3 pictures of your garden and none of the inside of the apartment… 1960s decor!

Fourthly, NINETEEN SIXTIES DECOR! There was a lot of drugs being consumed back then… I think there must have also been a lot of crack in the groundwater because seemingly normal human beings thought that bright/dirty orange melamine kitchen cupboards (complete with plastic air venty hole things) were a good idea. Also, puce bathtubs. As much as I like the idea that someone named a colour puce, I don’t want to bath in that in case I fall asleep and wake up thinking I’ve accidentally overdosed on nutmeg and vomited in the bath, again.

Fifthly (I don’t care if that’s not a word). Please use accurate descriptions without making up new words that are left to interpretation. “Non-modernised” is not a widely used term. Google only found 411 examples of it being used, and mostly by ponsy antho students. Unless you actually mean that there is no flush-based-human-waste-disposal-system I think you might be better off using the words “Old” or “Dilapidated”. While I’m on the topic of descriptions “Near KFC” is not a selling point. Also, “Upmarket” and “Classy” are now terms exclusively reserved for woman in the service industry.

Lastly, (fine, sixthly), If you are in the business of selling property and you put ads for said properties on the internet please don’t be surprised when I get pissed off at you for replying to my email by asking me to call you. Firstly, (here we go again), YOU SHOULD CALL ME, I’m the customer. Secondly, PLEASE DON’T CALL ME, I like the impersonal vapid communication that is the internet. It means I can shoot up to numb the pain while I type my reply to you, you stinking crack addict.

I dealt with two robots on Friday. One good and one Bad.

The good robot was at Cavendish (A nearby shopping mall). When I drove into the parking garage I noticed that above every parking bay was a little sensor with either a red or green light on it. Red meant taken, green meant free. This means that from the one side of the garage you can easily spot an open bay… Combine this data with a direction system and you have digital arrows above the lanes that point you towards open bays. I drove in, the arrow said turn left, I turned left, another arrow said turn left, I followed and then bam, there’s my open bay. I realise that the electronics and software involved in something like this is all really not all that complicated, but when put together it forms a flawless system that just works ™. I love technology like this; stuff that is so simple yet so effective. No more driving around aimlessly looking for that mystery bay, no more getting stuck at dead ends with 6 cars behind you. The only tragedy of systems like this is that it’s so simple to “use” that we’ll take it for granted within no time.

Henk Kleynhans wrote an interesting post a few days ago about why software developers should do tech support. I agree with Henk and I think I have some additional insight. One of my biggest projects was building a pretty large system that managed the day to day business of a very large online travel company. It was a CRM, ERP, Accounting, Web Analytics etc etc application that was for the most part born out of being at the coal face and seeing what people were struggling with or what took more time than necessary. No one could have written a system specification for the final product… You just would not have been able to see all the opportunities in the beginning of the project, and you almost certainly would have ended up developing tons of functionality that someone thought was a good idea but would never have been used. The key to that project’s success was having a “no rules are good rules until proven so” attitude. This meant challenging every single process until it was as refined as it possibly could be. It meant that sometimes I would have to bang heads with some of the most ingrained procedures in the business, but ultimately the system was, and still is, a success. I still get a kick out of hearing people who initially moaned heartily about its introduction, now wax lyrical about its many virtues and how it saves them so much time etc.

Anyway, those three years, plus some “formal” education in the Business Analysis world, taught me to do what I’ve always done: Question Authority. If there was a procedure in place and it wasn’t immediately obvious why it was there, I had to find out why. And this is where I want to add to what Henk said. Not only should developers be taking tech support calls (which will essentially root out bugs and bad usability) but they should also, in the absence of good business analysts, be actively involved in the day to day running of the business, constantly on the look-out for better ways of doing things or areas where some software could improve the lives of the customer and the business operators.

There was nothing wrong with the Model T Ford. Tech support/engineers might have tightened some nuts or strengthened a part that kept on breaking, but essentially it would have stayed a Model T Ford. The engineers and designers who built the new Audi R8 have improved on decades of learning. It took engineering principles of “how can we make this quantifiably better?” and design principles of “How can we make this work better, feel better, look better etc” to end up with the R8. Henk’s developers are already on this journey with some of the functionality they’ve introduced… they’ve seen a problem that has two solutions. 1. The easy one, make the customer change some settings. or 2. The hard way, Figure out how to solve the problem once so that the customer doesn’t even know you’ve solved their problem. This is the same as the pretty lights in Cavendish… within a few years this sort of technology will be ubiquitous and young drivers will probably wonder why we need little arrows telling us where to go… I mean, a parking lot is easy, you drive until you find an open spot, right? Well, as anyone who’s ever been stuck in a busy parking lot knows, it is a painful experience.

Which brings me to my Bad Robot.
The City of Cape Town still thinks I live in Pinelands and still sends my electricity bill an address I used to live at about 10 years ago. This is despite numerous faxes to the contrary. Once again I found myself on the phone arguing with a call centre employee. They are unable to change my address over the phone because they need a fax. They can’t do it over the phone because I could be anyone. They can do it with a fax because a fax has a signature. They have no idea what my actual signature looks like. Ergo, anyone could send them a fax with a bogus signature on it, ergo, no safer than just doing it over the flipping phone.

I asked the girl if I could speak to her manager. I wanted to relay the vulnerability to someone more senior in the hopes that they might say “Hey, you know what? You’re right, that is a dumb rule”. Nope. The manager was busy (har har) and besides, “She can’t change the rules either”. “So who can change the rules?” I asked. “Nobody, they are rules” she said. “Nobody? I asked… “Surely Thabo Mbeki could change the rules, so maybe someone else high up in the municipality could change the rules too?”. She didn’t understand my example. She was a bad robot. She refused to question her rules, and in her painfully little world the rules were rules and you NEVER change the rules. I like to console my pain with the thought that the very fact that she can’t question rules is the reason that she works as a call centre employee and probably always will. It’s sad, but I guess the world needs droids.

Oh, and their fax number isn’t working. YAY!

over and out.
j.

Graffiti is and always has been a part of society… go read up about it. We’re talking thousands of years… even before Jesus.

Now obviously my title is rather exaggerated and designed for the express purpose of increasing my readership, but the thing is, I really am starting to get pissed off at those “Jesus Saves” people walking around painting over what they deem inappropriate.

First there was the international graffiti competition held in Cape Town where some of worlds best contemporary artists painted f-ing amazing murals on walls that made you want to stop your car and take a deep breath. 2 days later the Jesus Saves people painted that incredible wall full of art work grey. Not white, grey.

I was willing to tolerate that since graffiti is supposedly against the law… never mind the fact that supposedly these guys got permission from the owner of the wall.

Then there was “FREE ZIM!“, a piece of artwork so poignant and powerful that it made me seek it out and photograph it. It said everything that needed to be said and was a constant, daily, reminder to thousands of Capetonians of exactly what had to happen in Zimbabwe. It was also beautiful, with stencilled birds taking flight reminding me of the phoenix to our north.

Then in the height of the xenophobic attacks against Zimbabweans (and other foreigners) the “Jesus Saves” crew painted over it in a dull grey that angers me intensely every time I drive past.

Which leaves me to say, like some graffiti artists mural’d on a nearby wall: “Jesus must hate art”.

ps. For the kids out there who are going to start screaming about tagging. I am not talking about tagging. I am talking about art. Tagging is the equivalent of taking a shit on the pavement and expecting people to think you’re cool for doing it.

Catch up: In case you missed it, 10 days ago my car was broken into and a bag containing pretty much all my clothing was stolen… 10 days ago I reported the theft to momentum insurance. 10 days later I have nothing but a bunch of empty promises and a few lies. Read all about it here.

—————-

Yesterday (Tuesday) Tselane (the team leader) told me that she definitely would call by the end of the day (yesterday) with an answer with regards to my claim.

She never called.

It’s now the end of Wednesday and another 24 hours has passed and once again Tselane has gone home without calling me like she said she would.

I called to speak to either Tselane or Carina and neither of them were available so I left a message… but this time I was smart.

After leaving my message and just before Thabiso, the message center person, was due to put down his phone I asked him why he didn’t give me a message number. Remember, Carina said that the message centre staff *ALWAYS* give the person who leaves a message a message reference number… This was her way of squirming out of not calling me back when I left repeated messages for her to call me. Well guess what, the message center people don’t give out numbers unless you specifically know that such a number exists and ask for it.

Thabiso’s exact words were “I didn’t think you wanted one“… well, Thabiso, how would I have known one even existed? Shouldn’t you have asked me?

I asked to speak to Thabiso’s supervisor who, surprise surprise, is not available. Funny that… So once again I’ve left a message for someone else at Momentum to call me and we’ll see what happens… I won’t be holding my breath. The supervisors name is Andy.

Momentum, if you want proof of all this, go listen to the call. The message number is 6264743. I asked.

A list of people at momentum who don’t return their calls.

1. Carina - The Consultant

2. Tselane - The Team Leader

3. Andy - The Call Centre Supervisor (We’ll see in a few hours)

IDIOTS!

I started this whole thing upbeat… remarking how I was lucky to be in a position to be insured and have money to buy new clothes in an emergency. I’m now more angry at Momentum Insurance than I ever was at the idiot who stole my stuff. I don’t pay the guy who stole my stuff a few thousand rand every month only to be ignored and lied to. Thieves and Liars the lot of them.

—–

Update: Thursday:

More and more ridiculous by the day. In the past week I’ve left about 10 messages with the message center people at Momentum. Not once have they given me a number without me asking for it… This morning was the best one. I spoke to Nonte (ref: 6268767) who went completely silent for about 20 seconds every time I asked her why she didn’t give me the number. I’m not exaggerating.

Me: Why didn’t you give me the message number

<silence for 20 seconds>

Me: Hello? Hello? Why didn’t you give me the number?

Nonte: Would you like me to give you the number now sir?

Me: No, I’m asking you why did you give me the message center number?

<silence for 20 seconds>

Me: Hello? I can hear you in the background… Why aren’t you speaking?

<silence>

Nonte: Would you like me to give you the number now sir?

Me: No. I want to know why you didn’t give me the number?

<silence for 20 seconds>

Nonte: Would you like me to give you the number now sir?

Me: okay, yes.

Nonte: 6268767

Me: Okay, so why didn’t you give that to me earlier?

Nonte: Because I thought you were in a hurry.

I.shit.you.not.

It’s like I was dealing with a robot who went into a cpu intensive loop every time I asked her a question that wasn’t in her pre-programmed database of question/answer pairs.

Tselane is apparently busy. Carina called me at 7:30 this morning. (I wake up at 7:30)

I finally got to speak to Carina and she said that Tselane asked her to call me and tell me that they haven’t forgotten about me but that my claim is being escalated to some other person who isn’t available… So it’s now 8 days since I was told that I would definitely have an answer by the end of that day.

I give up.

(If you came here via Google you should probably check out this page… The story gets worse)

Carina didn’t call yesterday like she said she would… she didn’t call today like she said she would… and every time I call Momentum she’s “on the phone”.

Is this really the kind of service I give you THOUSANDS of rands a month for?

j.

Update: OMG, I AM PISSED OFF.

Just got a call (it’s Tuesday morning) from Carina at Momentum… She is now spinning herself into a web of ineptitude. She claims she never got my message and then when I pushed her for a reasonable answer for why she didn’t call on Wednesday (or Thursday) like *she* said she would, she said she was waiting for me to call her.

My exact words to her were: (And I’m quite proud I didn’t swear)

“Oh ABSOLUTE RUBBISH!! Besides the fact that I did call multiple times on Wednesday and Thursday, what possible reason could you have for waiting for me to call you? You have all the answers here Carina… you are the only one who can move this forward.”

Add to that the following:

ONE: My car was broken into on monday. I phoned on monday afternoon/evening (about 6pm) and they fixed my window that night. On Tuesday I gave Momentum all my details including where and when I bought my undies and whether I paid cash. Apparently my claim was only submitted on Thursday… When I flipped my guava about this Carina said that I only called her on Thursday… but I never even spoke to her on Thursday. (Remember, I tried to but she wasn’t available.)

TWO: Then I questioned her about this and (after ruffling through some computer files) she said that she only got my info on Tuesday… only on Tuesday, like, I dunno, THE DAY AFTER IT HAPPENED, which was also 2 days before Thursday…

THREE: Then she floored me by saying “I only called you after your broker asked me to call you”. I don’t have a broker. She couldn’t back this statement up.

FOUR: As to why she didn’t call on Thursday after I left repeated messages she said “What was your message number?“. HUh? My whowhatnow? “The message center people will take your message and give you a message number“… Um. No they don’t. I have a txt file open on my computer within which I record ALL the info with regards to this escapade and not once have I typed a message number. Oh, and by the way. SINCE WHEN IS IT UP TO THE CUSTOMER TO PROVIDE YOU WITH A FRIGGEN NUMBER TO PROVE THAT YOU’RE NOT DOING YOUR DAMN JOB!

FIVE: I was plainly honest with them from the very first moment. I told them I had a large bag stolen off the back seat of my car in the middle of the day parked on a busy road. They are now treating me like a criminal by phoning up 5 other insurance companies to verify that I don’t have insurance with them as well.

DON’T YOU THINK THAT IF I WAS A DODGY BASTARD TRYING TO STEAL MONEY FROM INSURANCE COMPANIES THAT I WOULD HAVE JUST LIED AND SAID THE BAG WAS IN MY BOOT?

Idiots.

Update 2 - End of Business, Tuesday.

Zolani, Carina’s Team Leader, whom I spoke to when I asked to speak to her supervisor, *promised* me she would have an answer for me by close of business today. She has not called. Should I be suprised? Momentum Insurance just seems to go from bad to worse. This is after my claim was, in her own words, “escalated to a team leader”… Escalation my ass… Leader my ass.

Idiots!