BlackMan Time

Archive for July, 2004

I’ve never liked the smell of bacon in the morning. I’ve never liked smell of bacon in the evening either! To be honest, I’ve never liked bacon. Actually, I don’t even like the animal from which bacon is produced! The pig to me is like the equivalent of an animal garbage disposal unit or a land scavenger.

Obviously, other people disagree so they see the pig as an item of food.

I can remember as a youth growing up in Jamaica being fed fried pork with my morning meal. The only way I could hold down this strange ‘meat’ down was by eating a sweat known locally as a ‘Bustamante’

A computer user switches on his pc as normal, in the way he has done umpteenth times before. It powers up, goes through the usual start up routine then tries to connect to his broadband connection account with Tiscali.

“Connecting Internet ADSL…”

Normally, this is a 20 seconds operation. But on this particular occasion after around a minute it was still trying to connect.

“Connecting Internet ADSL…”

After a while up pops an error box with the message.

“Error Connecting to Internet ADSL

Error 721: The remote computer is not responding…”

The customer has been trying this from the start of the business day at 09:00 and over two hours had passed with no luck connecting. Finally, exasperated, the user dials Tiscali broadband technical support’s 0870 national rate telephone number.

“Hello. Welcome to Tiscali broadband,” the female Asian voice greets. “My name is Anita. How can I help?”

“I can’t connect to my broadband account…” the customer begins, a sigh escaping from his mouth.

“Can I have your name and connection telephone number,” Anita asks.

After going through a whole list of “procedures” of account verification and outlining of the problem, the customer waits listening to some inane music, while Anita returns with a solution. Her voice on the line cracks the customer back to reality…

“Mr. Bee, it seems we have been having some work done in your location and you will have to try back in another couple of hours before you can get connected.”

“Really?” asks Mr. Bee. “I was not informed of this.”

“I’m really sorry, but this is the situation and there’s nothing I can do,” Anita said.

“You want me to wait another two hours before I can connect to use an internet service which I am paying for and have been trying to connect to for the past two hours? This is not good enough! ”

“Yes. I am sorry. But there’s nothing I can do.”

“I deserve some compensation for this because Tiscali did not inform me of this inconvenience and I am unable to use the service I am paying for. Does that sound reasonable to you?”

“I…understand what you are saying Mr. Bee. But you’ll have to try back in two hours…”

“Well, that’s not good enough! Give me the address of the customer services department”

“They don’t have an address. Just redial and press option 6.”

“Let me speak to someone senior then”

“Sorry. We don’t have anyone senior for you to speak to”

“What?! A company as huge as Tiscali and you’re telling me there’s no one I can I speak to about a service I am paying for and not getting? What kind of Mickey Mouse operation are you guys running anyway?”

The above is typical of many of the Internet Service Providers I have ever dealt with. They spend lots of money enticing you to use their services but their customer services is poor and/or the staff they have dealing with your problems are inadequately informed or trained.

This is only a small irritation, but it is the company’s assumption that customers can or will somehow absorb the inconvenience of not being able to use a product or service that they have paid or paying for. That’s taking the customers for granted or for a ride.

Who protects the customer’s right in a situation like this? What recourse does a customer have?

Usually, broadband internet accounts are a binding 12 month contract and if you decide to break that contract by leaving the company supplying you with service on month 7th say, then you have to pay for the remainding five months of the term left. This is patently not right, particularly if you are dissatisfied with the service. There should be a law against this kind of “handcuff” approach to contract making and customer service.

What do you think?

Today I made the decision to stop using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. It wasn’t an emotional thing. It was a business decision after examining the facts in the cold light of day thing. So I did not grieve.

I’ll tell you why I’ve switched in a moment…

I grew up with Internet Explorer, from the days when it was a trial software that you had to pay for. Back in those days, the 90s, Netscape Navigator (http://www.netscape.com) was the king of browsers. It was fast and unlike Internet Explorer, it was free. Hackers were not as prominent in those days of course or if they were their antics did not make the headlines as often.

They did not take a set on IE because Microsoft did not consider the internet important enough to bother with. That came later after the realisation that if they didn’t enter the internet race they would lose massive market share in later years.

Could this decision to apprently rush into the market force the people to overlook certain important things like security and bug checking and is this why IE and Microsoft technologies seem to attract so many hackers today? Whatever it is I have reached the point where I am literally sick of living apprehensively while I surf, fending off hackers and attackers attempts to gain access to my pc.

I have always been careful about what sites I visit and what links I click on when I surf, not to mention what firewall and anti-virus software I use. But, no matter what the odd virus and anomaly still crop up on my pc.

Until I decided to switch to another browser that is.

That soldier is Opera browser (http://www.opera.com). It makes IE looks like an amateur when it comes to features. And the best feature of all is that it does not attract hackers! At the end of the day the safety of browsing the internet should not depend on the browser you choose to use, but in my reality this is what I was finding.

This is why I decided to switch browsers. If anyone from Microsoft would like to win back my custom they need to improve the quality of their browser. Promises are no good any longer. Time to deliver a bug-free, hack-proof, usable, reliable graphical interface that won’t leave you open to exploitation from others online.

Is that too much to ask?

I am in mourning. I am grieving the loss of Serena Williams in the women’s finals of the Wimbledon tennis championship, yesterday.

Serena was playing to win the title for the third consecutive year and was battling against the tall, blonde and beautiful 17 year old media babe Maria Sharapova. But it seems that whatever bed Serena got out of in the morning, she must not have had a good night’s sleep. She lost in straight sets in one of the most disappointing and unsatisfying matches I have ever seen her play.

Full credit, I suppose, has to go to Maria who looked like she was hardly trying but on whose face determination was etched for every point.

It seemed that not even the memory of the death of her sister last year, nor the fact that previous to this match she had only dropped one set, was sufficient motivation for Serena to go out there and give it her all and play as if her life depended on it. But then, why should she? It’s only a tennis game, right? And after all she’d just come through injury and an 8-month long lay off.

Nevertheless everyone expected Serena to win and her loss made it all the more remarkable for her opponent whose victory is now being heralded as “amazing” and “incomprehensible”.

Maybe there were sufficient cobwebs still on Serena enough to subdue her. Either way we can’t wait to see her back on winning form. When she and her sister Venus dominate the women’s tennis game, it is good. It is a source of immense pride (not to mention pleasure) when Black women are on top. Trust me when I say that!

Besides, I really can’t stand this mourning business for too long…