I currently define frustration as the act of sitting at a computer screen surfing endlessly and vaguely researching IT fixes when I should really be putting the time and energy toward creative pursuits.

I’ve been sitting at Monash library Clayton for a good 2 hours. I’ve written a single email, fixed a problem on a site, logged into a couple more and done a whole lot of facebooking and reading news articles about things I just don’t care about.

Now I’m blogging about being frustrated.

It’s kind of perverse really.

1. Call any of their 13 numbers.
2. Get annoyed when the automated system keeps on at you to enter a valid telephone number for the address where the fault lies; eventually enter 00 00 00 00 00 00 just to shut the bloody thing up.
3. Tell the call centre staffmember where the geographical location of the problem is – the street number of the building it’s outside, street name, suburb and postcode.
4. Repeat the location and then spell the name of the street of where the problem is, complete with the postcode.
5. Repeat the postcode.
6. Twice
7. Wait while they look up the location and confirm again where the manhole cover is located.
8. Repeat the number of the address nearest the manhole cover. Again.
9. Wait while they do more looking up and nod wisely when they tell you the manhole cover was apparently repaired a week ago.
10. Repeat the manhole cover is definitely broken now.
11. To the question: “Is the damaged cover a danger to the public,” say “Yes”.
12. When asked if the manhole cover was damaged deliberately or not, say nicely that you don’t know as you weren’t there when it started to fall into the ground.
13. Tell them your name.
14. And surname
15. When asked, spell the surname.
16. Wait on hold while they get a job number reference.
17. Thank them for their help and admit that no, there is nothing further they can help you with. Ever.
18. Agree that you will have a great day now you’re going to be off the phone to them…

I’m happy to announce I’ve found the full document which covered my issues with the “Three” phone company way back in 2004. I post it here for posterity, and as a terrifying warning of what to expect when you mix bad hardware with bad software, or even just simply because I’m a vindictive bitch who’ll get her kicks any way she can.

ps. Just noticed I wrote I’d never go the fully integrated camera-phone-pda thing after my experiences with the Motorola A920 (“A” for Arse). I think an Apple device gives one pause for thought on how nice electronics can actually be, and my fully-fledged godphone (or Jesusphone to its friends) has healed my broken heart. Thanks Steve, with big smoochy kisses!

Three months of crap

My last mobile phone was one of those handy-dandy 3g telephones. It’s gone now, and I am a far happier person for it.

I am going to state now that this story is long, involved and does not have a happy ending for the technology offered by the “3″ company. It has a happy ending for me because I went back to tried and tested technology and won’t be going the fully integrated-pda-camera-3g-phone route while there is breath still in my body.

The story begins 3 days before a wedding when I was to do something for some very good friends, the Guru and the teacher. The guru is my friend who is an Uber Geek. The teacher is someone who makes 8 year olds cry for a living.

My task for the wedding was twofold: I was to pick up a cake (No big deal) then I was to take the cake to Melbourne zoo where my friends were to be married. Easy. That was until my existing telephone died on me. No phone, no way to contact with the guy inside the zoo who had to open the gates to let me in.

I’d thought of upgrading my palm and mobile to an integrated 3 phone for some time; and the one I had in mind was the Motorola A920. My Palm IIIc was getting slightly temperamental and the call rate for the 3 phones was better than average. I took the plunge.

Problems began immediately.

Over the 3 months I posessed this waste of plastic known to some as a mobile telephone, I experienced:

Connection problems – on days 1 to 2 because the system hadn’t picked up that I’d taken posession of the phone, and the rest of the time because the network intermittently didn’t like connecting incoming or outgoing calls.

Crash problems – where a known bug in the Motorola software – not mentioned on the day I’d purchased the phone – would completely shut down the windows box to which it was connected during and at the conclusion of a data synchronisation, no warnings, nothing. The computer screen would just go blank and the machine would start up like the Reset button had been pressed. The work around was – laughably – “don’t do anything while the system is synchronising”; the old “don’t do that then” solution. A fix was “…confidently expected any day now”.

Outlook calendar problems – where the calendar events would be reset to occur on different days to those they were originally set up.

Spontaneous restart – where the phone would go through a restart sequence up to 15 times a day for no apparent reason. I eventually had to turn the thing off because the unbearably loud startup tune was keeping me awake at night. Yes, LOUD. Loud when there was complete silence around, nonexistent when any sort of background noise occurred anywhere in the general vicinity. Go figure.

Billing problems – where I had set up my bill one way and was being billed another, regardless of how many times I was told by the support staff that the problem had been rectified.

The 3 company is able to offer such good call rates because they contract their call centres off-shore. In India. I didn’t know this when I made my first complaints, and in my initial conversations with them about the phone, was surprised to get several Indian people in a row answering the calls. I asked where they were. They told me. The penny dropped.

No slight against the Indian people as a whole, but the ones employed by the 3 company in their call centres had no idea. Every month I would call at least once a month about these problems, and every month I would be told the problems had been fixed. In addition, the ones that were trying their best to help were being thwarted by the obviously non-functional software which handled the systems. I hope to hell that they’re not using the software I’m currently employed to write documentation for, because if they are, both companies are in trouble.

After 3 months of problems, culmunating on Christmas eve, I demanded I be released from the contract. I was sick to death of being told things were fixed when they were not. I first made this demand at the Chadstone branch where, that fateful Friday in September, I had signed contracts with the company. There I was told the customer service people had the power to sell phones and sign people up, but none to handle complaints on any matter whatsoever. So I found a telephone and made another call to Customer Service and demanded to be put in contact with a supervisor. I was told by the man that the supervisor could not give me any more help than he had. I insisted. The supervisor, after listening to me for a while, put me onto a local (read, located in Australia) customer support representative.

After a tense discussion, that included the terms “Telecommunications Ombudsman”, and “Breach of Contract”, the support person said that the company would replace the obviously defective handset. They would send a new one out and the old one should be sent back.

There was a small problem though.

“Really?” I thought. How unexpected.

She explained that normally it would only take a couple of days to send out a new phone. The problem was one of timing. This part of the complaint was taking place just after Christmas, therefore it would take a little longer to fulfill the new agreement since the technical people were all on holiday. I would receive the new phone within 10 days

20 days later, I emailed the company this letter, then called them again and spoke with someone else. She had had obviously read the call history on the account and was prepared to accept that the service was – to put it politely – unacceptable. She agreed with my point of view and stated that I would be released from the contract with no questions asked. A courier bag would be sent and all I had to do was to place the phone and any other gear I had received into it, seal it up and send it back to them. It would all, after 3 months of argument, be over.

Except, to add comedy to the farce, the courier bag didn’t turn up. When I called again to ask where it was, I was assured one would be sent out that day. The next day I received two bags. Amusing coincidence or simple incompetence? You be the judge. A courier was called to pick the bag up. The courier didn’t turn up. The courier was called again and finally, magically, the bag disappeared.

I thought it bright to do some posterior covering at this stage and called again to request written confirmation that the contract had indeed been cancelled. I was informed, by an irriated customer support person, that they didn’t issue such documents under any circumstances. The tone implied I should be glad they’d released me from the contract, that they’d done me a favour and I should stop calling.

The End. Or so I thought.

The next month I received another bill. The bill contained information to indicate that my service was still continuing and that my balance had been adjusted in the wrong way yet again. A smiling cartoon character stated that all was well.

I called local customer service again and was told that the very next bill would be a zero balance and would state that the contract had been terminated.

I seem to recall that the March bill was in fact a zero balance. Well, they finally got something right.

PS. I have two friends who are still with them though. They own the NEC flip phone that has a known error in it where it disconnects from the network without warning the user. This bug will be fixed Any Day Now. Promise!

But wait, you also get…

Three story so-far:

After 3 months of gross stupidity, culmunating in the return of the telephone and release from the 24 month contract I signed, I went on a holiday to the UK to recover from the horror of dealing with the Three telecommunications company.

But when I returned, I found there was a sequel to the horror.

Now read on…

Three story continues

For those of you who read my adventures in telecommunications page, you will be pleased to know that there has been a second volume of gross incompetence created Just This Evening.

I dropped past my old home today and picked up a bucketfull of mail and a few items of general amusement (including a rather lovely pressy from my good friend – and new American – Jo).

Amongst this mail were three letters from the wonderfully efficient Three telecommunications company.

I was understandably surprised to still be receiving mail from the company, since – to cut a long story short – I gave their pox-ridden Motorola A920 phone back to them at the end of January.

But mail I was receiving; mail that stated that there were still charges being incurred on the account, but that since the account was in credit, I shouldn’t pay anything.

Thanks for that guys. There I was thinking I’d have to pay my hard earned dollars for a service that I have neither had the facility nor the ability to use in approximately 5 months. I’ve been overseas you see and Three does not – to my knowledge – roam over in the UK.

Moving on however, I called the highly efficient Three Care customer service number (henceforth referred to as Three Scare). After 10 minutes of waiting, a rather nice Indian lady (see three.gone) got on the line and asked me what my number was.

I explained that it wasn’t likely to work since the number had been ported to another provider in January, but I gave it anyway just on the off-chance that it would work.

Silly me.

After a few minutes thrashing around with the system (I really hope it’s not the one created by my former employer in Cambridge), I was informed that the number wasn’t on the system. I resisted the urge to say something appropriate; the poor girl was having a hard enough time as it was.

For another few minutes we chatted and I eventually asked if I could get something in writing to tell me the pain of dealing with this mightily incompetent company was in fact over.

I was put on hold.

Then the lady came back, read out a tracking number, took my home phone number and told me that someone would contact me about this matter. I’m still waiting for the call.

The Final Fucking Straw (part three of an ongoing story)

I should have known better. Another bill turned up at my old address this month. This one is $83.35 in credit, an increase of $16.67 on last month.

Funnily enough, it has occurred to me that the $16.67 is in fact the exact figure that was supposed to be deducted from my account each month.

I’ll ask you to cast your mind back to the first part of this saga. When I bought the telephone, there was a rather nice $500 credit offered to anyone that ported their numer from another mobile company. I made various enquiries, and asked that this credit be distributed across the life of the contract: 24 months.500 divided by 24 is $20. However, after finding out that the full amount of each bill was being deducted from the $500, I was assured on several occasions that the remainder of said credit would be distributed across the life of the contract. The sum that would be deducted from each remaining bill was – approximately – $16.

So, they’ve got something right at last.

Well, almost right. The $16 should be getting deducted, not added.

And of course, it’s a little late to be getting something right, when I don’t actually own a telephone with the company anymore.

But I’ll ignore this for the moment, and continue this latest chapter of incompetence.

I called the company on their customer service line once again. I waited to be answered while having jaunty hip and Now music played at me. Then a nice Indian woman came on the line and asked me my telephone number. I told her my number (0413 606 997) and then said she wouldn’t find it in her system. She checked. I was right.

She tried to help me, but I wasn’t having a bar of it. I asked to be put onto a supervisor. I will note that I have tried very very hard not to lay blame at the feet of the customer service people in India. Simple statistics would indicate that I can’t be running into an idiot each time I call up. I am firmly laying blame for the constant problems at the foot of the systems that the Three company is using for their billing.

I will also state again that I really hope the systems are not those created by a company I worked for in Cambridge, UK, who create a “best-of-breed” billing system used by many telecommunications companies worldwide.

More hold music later, I was finally speaking with a supervisor. She told me that she understood I was having severe difficulties. I confirmed this was the case, but restrained myself from saying “No, I really just enjoy stalking Three customer service people. The Indian accents are a real turn-on”.

Moving on.

She assured me that the bills would stop coming. I informed her that I’d heard this story before. Repeat for 10 minutes. I said I wanted written assurances from the Three company that it would stop billing me, and remove me from their systems. She said that she couldn’t do that. Repeat for the same 10 minutes.

My contention during this discussion was that the Three systems were obviously faulty and that at any time they could start charging me. Since I have no intention of paying for a service that I have neither the facility nor the inclination to use, the likelyhood that Three accounts would send my details to a credit collection agency are rather high in this event. I do not wish to have a bad credit rating levied against me because of the Three company’s gross incompetence.

In the end she asked if I would mind being put on hold while she found out if the written assurance could be sent out. After a further 5 minutes on hold, she came back.

She couldn’t give me a written assurance.

What she could do however would be to send out a document that contained a complete history of all of my complaints to Three since day one.

However, and there’s always a “however”, I had to send a letter to Three “authorising” this document to be sent out. She gave me a fax number to send the letter to.

Then, ten minutes later, she called back. The number she had given me was incorrect. She gave me another number.

I wrote the letter, with the help of my good friend The Teacher, and faxed it to the second number.

And guess what? The number didn’t pick up. After several attempts to send the fax we gave up.

Then something even more bizarre happened. We received a call from a person at the number. It turned out the number was a voice number for the Orange telecommunications company, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the Three company (other than, of course, the two companies being owned by Hutchison Telecommunications of Australia).

So, to summarise, the Three customer service people had given me the number for another company to send the fax to. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that this could have been a way for Three to “lose” the fax. The realist in me says it’s just another example of the company’s obvious lack of any sort of clue.

The next morning I sent the fax to the original number. It seemed to go through. But just to make sure, I contacted Three Customer Service again. We went around in circles for a while about who I was and what the problem was, and the gentleman tried a different tack. He took the details of the latest bill. This was – supposedly – because the billing systems there were offline. I wonder if they exist at all?

I was assured once again that the problem would be solved. I was assured that someone would be contacting me. I was assured that … blah, blah, blah.

I made it really clear that I had no issues with the gentleman in question, but I said I’d heard it all before and that there was no joy any of the 15 plus times I’d been told these things in the past.

They have until COB 23rd July 2004 before I call in the dogs of the Telecommunications ombudsman. We shall see what transpires over the next week.

The story so-far:

This is the letter I ended up sending the company Three in January to ask where the hell the replacement phone had gotten to.

Good morning.

I am writing to complain in the strongest possible way about the total lack of service being given by your company.

My problems are many, but the icing on the cake at the moment is the fact that after 5 months you STILL can’t get the billing right.

When I signed up with your illustrious company, I requested the $400 credit (for transferring my mobile number to Three) be provided over the life of the contract (24 months). I was assured on the day that this was indeed the case. I was assured the day after too, when I had to take the phone back because it didn’t work. I was assured the next month when I complained to your Indian service staff that the bill wasn’t set up properly. I was assured also in December. I was also assured by service staff, a manager and a complaints person 11 days ago when I had finally complained that the telephone was no longer suitable for the purpose for which it was bought (ie. as a telephone and PDA). For your information, the telephone won’t receive calls, intermittently turns itself off and on and completely screws up appointments (evidenced by the fact that it started beeping at me on Saturday morning about an appointment that was due to occur on Thursday afternoon).

The telephone is in the back of my desk drawer at the moment and will not be retrieved.

If you managed to get this far, you will possibly realise that I am NOT AT ALL HAPPY.

I was also assured by the complaints department who I was transferred to over a week ago that a replacement telephone would be sent to me within 10 days and that this was the only way I might be able to either get a working telephone or released from the contract. This has yet to appear.

I would appreciate your getting back to me today about this matter. Suffice it to say that you won’t be able to do so on my mobile because it’s in the drawer. You can do this via the email address stated below or by calling me on +61 3 9999 9999.

This is the last time I intend communicating with you about what is laughably called your service. The next communication will be via legal means through a solicitor or the telecommunications ombudsman.

Sincerely,

Lisa Sinclair.

The story so-far:

This is the letter I ended up sending the company Three in response to nine months of incompetence.

Dear Sir or Madam,

Your customer records will no-doubt indicate I have contacted the Three Company on several occasions since January 2004. Following a telephone conversation with a Three Customer Supervisor today, July 16th, I have been requested to formally document the ongoing problems I have been experiencing.

As your customer records will indicate, my contract with the Three Company ceased in January 2004. This was after long and protracted discussions over a period of three months concerning:

• functional difficulties with the Motorola A920 telephone, and
• constant billing issues.

It was agreed that I would be released from my contract, and that I would return the telephone. I duly returned said telephone by courier envelope.

However, I am still receiving tax invoices some 6 months after the telephone was returned. This is difficult to understand since:

• I do not possess a telephone with the Three Company, having already returned it,
• My mobile number – 0413 606 997 – was ported to Virgin in January 2004 as part of the contract termination agreement, and
• I was outside the country and therefore unable to access any Three Australia services

On my return to Australia in June, I contacted Three Customer Service to request information as to why I was still receiving bills. I was assured – once again – that the billing issues would cease and that there would be no more correspondence from the Three Company. I was also informed I would be contacted about the matter. However, this contact did not occur and I am still receiving correspondence. Please refer to customer reference 170170 for further information.

Point in fact: another tax invoice from the Three Company arrived in the mail just this week. This was rather interesting as I was under the impression that the problem had been resolved and that I would not be receiving any further bills. I once again spoke with a Three Customer Service Representative. She – like all the other representatives – agreed that there was a problem.

I feel that this dispute has gone on long enough. As of today, July 16th, I have demanded formalised documentation that states clearly that the Three Company will:

• no longer send documentation of any kind to my address,
• cease and desist all billing within the Three Company systems under my name and under my terminated account number.

If I do not receive this documentation, together with a list of the complaints to date, by COB 23 July 2004, I will be advising the Telecommunications Ombudsman of these difficulties. Furthermore, I will also be considering legal advice and may choose to contact the media about this matter.

Sincerely,

Lisa Sinclair

PS. I was contacted 20 minutes after my conversation with your Three Customer Service Supervisor, and was told that the original fax number I had been given was incorrect, and I was given a new number, 07 38362754. However, after 5 separate attempts to send this fax to, a number provided by your Three Customer Supervisor, it turned out to be a direct voice line to Orange Customer service. Once again, I ask myself how things could get so massively screwed up? The answer of course is that I should have known

The story so-far:

This is the letter I wanted to send to the company Three in response to nine months of incompetence.

Dear Sir, Madam or Fuckwit

Re: The Final Fucking Straw!

It is with no surprise that I am having to contact your moronic company for the fiftieth time in 9 months with regard to yet another problem that adds to the existing list of gross incompetence that I have so-far encountered. Quite frankly I’m getting sick to death of having to call your customer service staff up at least once a month to ask them what the hell is going on with my telephone or the billing. This could have been a positive relationship, but the jury is back and has given a Guilty verdict. The charge was – of course – terrible service, appaling telephones and network coverage that was equivalent to covering an amputated leg with a bandaid.

Once again I have been forced to threaten the involvement of a third party before you actually start paying attention. In this case, the dogs of the Telecommunications Ombudsman will be tearing down your doors unless you do exactly what I am going to ask.

But before we get to my demands, I will – for the sake of completeness – give a brief run-down of the history of this dispute. I hope you’re sitting comfortably, because this is a story that makes the adventures of Odysseus look like a quick run down the driveway to grab the junk mail.

The first issue was that the telephone would not link up to the network as promised. You are the first company I have come across that has had difficulty with this apparently simple procedure. Telstra, Vodafone, Optus, Orange and Virgin had no problems with this task. Why did you screw it up? How hard can it be to change something like a phone number over to another network? For a supposedly brand new, third generation network, I would have thought apparently simple things like this would not be a problem. I’d be inclined to remove the “h” and substitute a “U” for the “i” in the word “third”, which would result in the network being named according to what it actually is. That was an insult by the way.

Back to the story however.

The next problem was a doozy. Now, I’ll state for the record that I am not a Microsoft fan. Their software is buggy and prone to crashing in the same way as a blind man behind the wheel of a road train in rush hour traffic. THEY DON’T NEED ANY MORE HELP FROM YOU!

I present exhibit “B”. Defective software that crashes computers when used.

The Motorola telephone that I purchased had a function that meant that the data could be synchronised with the data on a computer. That means that the telephone and the computer records end up the same. Of course, being the sort of person I am, I expected this to actually work. Silly me.

I found out later that the fact the computer crashed – that is, turned itself off and on again with no regard for anything that happened to be open at the time – was a “known issue”. This meant that whenever anyone with that type of telephone synchronised their data, they ran the very real risk of losing lots of work without any warnings, or pauses; just a black screen and then the Microsoft windows logo appears on the screen. It would have been nice to know this before buying the telephone!

If this wasn’t enough, I had to fight to get information about this issue. I ended up at one of your stores who knew nothing about it. They called technical services, chatted for 10 minutes before putting me on to explain the situation. Then the tech-head on the other end needed to have the it explained three times before confidently announcing that the problem was a known issue and that they were waiting for Motorola to come up with a fix. Brilliant! Another huge leap for customer service from the Three company. Later in the overall dispute, I also found out that the calendar functions were totally screwed up by using this software. A case in point was being reminded of a Friday afternoon meeting on Saturday morning. What? Meanwhile, nobody was being told of these issues were they? You kept selling these pox-ridden telephones without warning your customers of the potential for disaster if they actually dared to use the functions that were advertised!

And then there were the billing issues. I took advantage of the $500 credit for porting my telephone number to your network. When I signed the contract, I asked that this credit be distributed across the 2 years I was under contract. This meant that I would have to pay $20 less on each bill.

And this got screwed up too. Of course, I complained and was told it would be fixed. And I complained the next month and was told it would be fixed then as well. I began to consider the possibility that I was being deceived.

The next problem I had was that the telephone started turning itself off. Then it would turn itself on again. This repeated 15 times in a 10 minute period over Christmas 2003 before I finally pulled the battery off of the device in order to shut it the hell up. I’ll note for the record that I hate Christmas on general terms. The defective telephone did not improve my mood.

Further calls to your customer service staff revealed more stupidity. I must ask whether you specifically requested morons during your recruitment drive, because you seem to have hired at least a third of the world population of idiots. I repeated my problems again. I was put on hold. I repeated the problems to someone else, and to someone else after that. Is it too much to ask that you provide some way that your staff can record issues so that they can be passed onto others? I understand that you’ve got your customer service department in India to reduce costs, but you’ve got to give them something other than an etch-a-sketch to work with! I’ve heard of cutting costs, but this is ridiculous!

And then I was told you would send me a new telephone out to replace the obviously terminally defective one that I owned. Funny how it didn’t turn up though. Given our past rocky relationship with promises kept (or in this case, not), I wasn’t surprised.

Finally in January 2004, I spoke to one of your customer service people – located handily in the same country as I was – who agreed that the service and the telephone were not up to any meaningful and/or dictionary definition of the word “standard”. In order to finally be rid of the Motorola A920 telephone (I’m sure now that the “a” stands for “Albatross”), and be released from the remainder of the contract, all I had to do was to send the telephone back in a courier envelope. The customer service representative said she would put an envelope in the mail that day.

And then, surprise, surprise, the envelope didn’t turn up. I wondered if I should do some research and find out I’d angered the god of telecommunications, because my problems were becoming biblical in proportion. I felt like Jobe being tested by God. Every time I looked over my shoulder I wished I hadn’t.

After a brief call another envelope was sent out. Of course, then first envelope turned up as well!

So I returned the phone and ported my number to Virgin. And all was good; Virgin Just Worked. There’s a message there if you care to look for it.

Of course, I should have known better than to count my blessings. The vengeful god of telecommuncations threw another thunderbolt in my direction.

It was the bills again. Always the bills.

The problem was that bills kept coming. Sure, the quantities on the bills decreased, ending at zero in March, but then I received a bill in April, May, June and July. To date I have $84 credit on an account that should not exist, for a telephone I no longer own, and with a company that has not in any way redeemed itself in the anals of customer service, and which is at the top of the same list that One-Tel was just before people started asking pointed questions about its service. If there was an Oscar for worst performance, the Three Company would be a multiple award winner and would go down in history as having won more than The Lord of the Rings!

Why am I still receiving bills I ask myself? Surely you’ve gotten the message that I don’t want to talk to you anymore. This is the telecommunications equivalent of stalking. Constant harassment from you will not make me like you. No matter how hard you try, this relationship is over, consigned to the dustbin of partnerships. I can’t even say I have fond memories of the good times, because, quite frankly, THERE WERE NONE!

And now to my final demand. You will no-doubt be happy to know that I have no intention of contacting your company ever again.

No, if you insist on sending me bills for a service I cannot use, the next contact you will be receiving will be from the Telecommunications Ombudsman, closely followed by the cruddiest tabloid television current affairs show I can find, or my lawyers; whichever can get to the telephones first.

Because, after 9 months of this, I am completely at a loss to understand how I can convince you just to go away. I don’t want to speak to you. I don’t want to hear from you. I have no interest in the Three network, or any Third generation telecommunications. I use public telephones rather than mobile telephones these days! See what you’ve done? I’m now telecommunications phobic thanks to our relationship!

Please, just take the hint and go away.

No means NO!

Yours in revulsion,

etcetera…

It’s been a while.

I’m writing because I’d like to be able to watch Pixar’s “Wall-e”.

Funny thing to want, but there you are.

Now, to stop speculation before it starts, I’ve actually hired the movie, and bought an (ex-rental) copy.

So, you might say, why don’t you stick it in your DVD player, sit back and enjoy?

Well, my DVD player is a Mac Mini, that’s why. It’s a really nice centralised system — with a 20 inch Apple screen — which has hitherto been able to play everything I wanted it to. Except a Goldfrapp CD (“Black Cherry” from memory. That got sold at a garage sale a year ago and I bought the album on iTunes instead. I think that experience resulted in a rant discussion about the merits of Digital Rights Management, Copy Protection and which particular orifice these should be stuffed into.)

What I object to the most is being treated like a thief.

I’ve paid my money for a copy of this movie, completely legitimately. I’ve even hired the movie from a DVD rental place. Legitimate use I’d call that.

Yet, my system, purchased at great expense, is unable to play the disc. The disc has been set-up NOT to conform to the DVD standard, and has effectively broken the DVD for use on this kind of system.

What the funniest thing about all of this is that it’s legitimate users that are targeted by copy protection. No, that’s actually ironic – the fact that the people who are happy to do the right thing and hand their hard-earned money over for a real-live copy of a movie that’s been produced by a movie studio (and in the aforementioned CD example, by a music studio — in that case I think it was Sony, whose stock in the music-listening-community must surely have reached rock-bottom by now) get penalised for having a particular style of system.

In fact, this attitude plays right into the hands of the pirates, for what’s a person to do – they want to purchase the movie and it’s broken. They’re prepared to hire the movie and it won’t play. What other alternative is there if the demand exists?

That’s why DRM is doomed to failure – because of the very supply versus demand principles that the western economy is based upon: The supply in this case is useless, but the demand is still there – so people (not me in this case, for I’m not at all like that) will try alternative means to obtain what they’re after.

It’s the same principle that whole countries are applying to AIDS vaccines and anti-retroviral drugs. The pharma companies won’t supply these life-saving drugs to countries that “can’t pay for them” and so the countries themselves say “screw that” and make their own.

In short, all that DRM says to me is that the companies producing the products that use them are  one thing over all else: Greedy.

Back in the days of yore, everyone and their dog was copying records onto tape and playing them. Did that send the music industry into a tailspin?

People were copying movies back in the 80s… did that send the movie companies to the wall?

Here’s a thing: I don’t think copying movies or CDs is a bad thing – I think it’s great for the artists involved because — like social networking — it has the potential to get even more people to view or listen to a piece of work.

But DRM and “Copy Protection” is all about the production company dinosaurs hanging onto outdated marketing and supply strategies. The world has moved into a new place, where information is open to all. When the companies finally do wise-up, they’ll jump on this bandwagon and will make a mint doing it.

But while they hang onto this idiotic selling model, based on a shortage principle (rather than the open “abundance” principle mentioned above) then yes, they will continue a slow downward spiral until hopefully someone in government will stand up to these idiots and say “no more” – you are not allowed to penalise customers for doing the right thing. You are not allowed to sue mums and dads for having a couple of copies of a movie on their computer – we shall call that henceforth “fair use”.

I hope it happens soon.

Is Skype getting odd for anyone other than me?

I keep getting dropped conversations and messages delivered minutes — and sometimes days — after they were written.

Yesterday I had a delay of 50 minutes between my friend S sending a message and actually receiving it.

Tonight we had a similar incident, though it was only a 10 minute delay.

However, just to kill some time, I wrote this (time markers and other related items edited out):

Really?

“It’s just sickening,” one boss was heard to say.

I am constantly gobsmacked at how hard some “professional” applications make things.

Take for example something as obvious as a shape with a dotted line.

I want to make some buttons for a website. Ordinarily I’d just create a shape in something like Keynote or Powerpoint with the appropriate line, cut and paste into something like Seashore and cut the bits I need. No it’s not the “ideal” way to do this, but it consistently works and takes me ten minutes, tops.

But I’ve recently become a Photoshop person. I like the layers, which PS will do. But try getting a dotted line on a shape. Really.

Finally after hours and hours of searching, I found how to do it here.

Surely they can make something like this simpler? Or is this the now standard “exclusive” approach rather than “inclusive”? After all, we can’t have just *anyone* doing graphic design can we? There’s lines of demarcation to worry about.

Bleh.

It’s been an annoying and underwhelming week. I don’t know if I can lay it all at the feet of the new moon which is chucking all sorts of amusing energies around the place, a case of partial malnutrition due to a lack of money (and — obviously — food), a terrible spot to sit at work (right beside a major highway), the weird weather (last week, freaking freezing, this week, mid twenties), the constant chatter of geeks around me getting on my goat, Sysadmin buggering around with my computer or Microsoft products.

I’ll take the twin powdery lines of least resistance.

Last week we had the “new product launch” thing here at work, and my desktop image was hijacked by Sysadmin. Their reasoning was that Marketing should have checked it with everyone, but all I found was that it was irritating to have something changed on me without telling me, and — goddamn it — I don’t like being advertised at.

So I trolled the interweb for a hack, and managed to get into my own registry (as it had been disabled by the aforementioned twonks in Sysadmin) and dug through layer-upon-layer of MS contortionistic bollocks until I found the particular key; which I changed.

I had to keep changing it daily because those wacky Sysadmin guys had worked out that the easiest way to piss me off was to push updates through to the computer when no-one was looking.

Fortunately, they weren’t able to stick advertising on my desktop, as — thanks to the help of a co-worker — I’d disabled sysadmin access to the folder on the local computer which acted as suppository for said marketing crap.

But that, unfortunately, isn’t what’s annoying me.

Today I had to fight with a WindoZe 2003 Server. That was fun.

It’s hosting the TWiki instance which I’m working with, madly converting existing and creating new user documents for the happy little proles in the call-centers. I don’t know if they’re happy, I’m making that part up. They could be mad as a dozen jihadists on a party line; they could be as nutty as a conkertree, what do I know?

Anyway, I was finding the computer was running morbidly slow.. the sort of slow that indicates something is about to go “ping” within the black svelte Dell — Hell — plastic box. So I wandered over to it…

…I haven’t said that I dont’ work ON the server physically. I link to it through a web connection and through a Run window if necessary to do Jiggery-Pokery…

… and found there was no keyboard or mouse.

Fucking thieves.

So I tromped downstairs, found the guy who has a box full of keyboards and mice and asked if I could get one of each, please.

These items of dross thus obtained, I returned and plugged them into the server machine, to be greeted with two messages asking if it was okay to restart the computer because new software had been installed.

I restarted.

Then, while the Dual processors churned away happily, with all the expertise of a cheesemaker in a particularly well lit barn, and the dulcet tones of another worker’s music trilled away happily in his absence (what’s wrong with bloody headphones? What IS it with people?!), I waited for the machine to restart.

So I got in, and the frigging change password message came on.

Now, there’s a lot of things which are irritating and boring, and one of them is this sodding message.

Your password will expire in 14 days. Do you want to change it now

Fourteen fucking days? Half a bleeding month? What the F*ck is that all about.

Oh, again, it’s the wacky fun-loving guys in Sysadmin having fun with everyone.

No, I said, and clicked the appropriate button; then waited for another few minutes while the rest of the system updates were finished off.

If I’d had any money, I’d have wandered off and had a crafty Chai. Not the stuff downstairs, which is like drinking hot water mixed with a quarter cup of sugar and a pinch of cinnamon; what’s THAT all about?! No, I’d have walked a couple of blocks to where i can get a decent cup of — albeit pre-brewed in a bottle – chai.

Perhaps that’s one of the things bugging me. No, not the bloody chai. The money. Probably. Comes from being constantly whacked over the head with “you need money” from my father for twenty fucking years… my brother believed him and got money obsessed, I took the other route which occasionally leaves me in the shit, but on the whole removes the whole fear-factor of financial ruin. I’ve been penniless in France and Australia; it’s hard but I’ve worked through things like that, as I’m working through them now.

So the computer started up again, and I tried out the wiki… except it took Freaking Ages To Load. Even got a warning message saying “a script is taking longer to load than expected, do you want to abort”.

No, I don’t. I want to get to the bottom of why this Server with not one but TWO processors is grinding to a halt like it’s been dipped in a bath of Golden Syrup.

There’s a funny memory – I used to eat Golden Syrup on bread as a kid.

No bloody wonder I can’t handle sugar now.

I started uninstalling things; Google Desktop was the first. That was an utter bag of powdered offal if ever I saw one. When I was running it on twin displays it crapped-out like it was the victim of a dozen cases of salmonella.

I progressed to windows components that weren’t useful; easy done and happy to remove them. I had to restrain myself with my desire to frag the whole OS; unfortunately I don’t know enough about Linux to install it, and would have had to spend a couple of days reinstalling TWiki.

And I restarted.

No, I Don’t Want To Fucking Change My Password.

Churn…churn…churn…

Right, up it comes again.

Silly me, let’s try it in Internet Exploder.

A message came up talking about PHishing and whether I’d like to enable or disable the filter, or be asked again next time until I caved-in and did what the heathen gods at Redmond want me to do. Never!

Only I couldn’t do anything. That’s because the damn thing had locked-up. IE, already low in the opinion scales, in the same way that chewing my own elbows off is, had disappointed again.

I killed the process and tried again.

And killed the process after chucking the mouse at the screen, while uttering “fucking Microsoft Crap”.

I tried again in Firefox, and got the same error (the one about the script).

I tried the defrag…but it conked-out at 3% and didn’t move again — even though there’s hardly anything on the bloody computer.

I think it’s going to kark it. I should get it changed-over.

*sigh*

What else is irritating me? Could be a conversation I had with a friend yesterday… could be emails from over the weekend…

Could be I need something to eat. I’m down to Very Fucking Little at home, but thankfully am being paid tomorrow. This means there will be much rejoicing and a big breakfast out to reward myself for my hard yards in the malnutrition department.

I might even do a Bikram class; I’ve been too shagged this week to do one… especially after the hardcore coding I did over the weekend.

But you’re a writer I hear you say… go on, you can do it.

Yes, comes the answer… but I’m branching out for the sake of my sanity into other areas: web design and pinching other people’s CSS and Javascript to name but three.

And seeing as the first time I actually used JavaScript was in the wiki at work about a week and a half ago, the things I’ve achieved in the site I’m putting together are nothing short of Bleeding Miraculous.

However, the site isn’t quite right yet, and lacking the years of experience in web design that most people who happily use that moniker share, I have catching up to do.

Doing my best is sometimes all I can do… but again, I am tripped up by the vampiric hordes of Redmond with their twin abominations, Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7.

Render a website one of you.

Why won’t you do it properly.

You are doing it properly?

How come your distant cousin Firefox, and the grrl down the street Safari can do this.

Oh, it’s because you’re the mutant offspring of your ex CEO and new CEO.

And you try, and I understand that you do… the issue I have is that your creators can actually fix you both up, and refuse to do so, that’s what I find so awful.

Really.

Can someone explain to me why IE6 and IE7 can’t be patched to render pages in Exactly the same way as every other damn browser on the market?

Is it some kind of perverted weird-arse Holier-than-thou, we’re-bigger-than-anyone, 90% market-share arrogance of their cross-eyed knucklehead management?

Someone? Anyone?

w00t for the power of the citizenry.

But that’s not the reason I’m posting this entry.

I’m posting the entry because of the apparently slack standards of news services. This — and many other reports I’ve seen lately — appears to have been either:

(a) written by several different people and not copy-edited

(b) cobbled-together from several reports around the world and not copy-edited

(c) not copy-edited

Notice the common-denominator in the above points.

Seeing the same piece of information repeated several times in the same report smacks to me of apparent laziness.

And in the award for Shameless repetition, we have:

“…Qian Xun was nicknamed Pumpkin, after the Pumpkin Patch-brand clothing she was wearing when she was found in Melbourne…”

“…She was nicknamed Pumpkin, after the Pumpkin Patch-brand clothing she was wearing when she was found in Melbourne…”

The award for the most gratuitous use of the same fundamental points goes to:

“…Murder suspect Nai Yin Xue was found by police with his pants around his ankles and his hands tied with his own belt after being captured by a group of angry Chinese Americans…”

“…”They had basically taken his pants and tied his legs up and taken his belt off and tied his hands up, so he was very much in custody by the time our officers got to the scene,” he said…”

“…”Local authorities got wind of the incident and arrived on the scene only to find the suspected murderer hogtied and detained by a number of men.”…”

The award for emotive geography goes to:

“…The abandonment of Xue’s daughter caused outrage in Australia and New Zealand, and led to the establishment of the Little Pumpkin Trust in both countries…”

“..Qian’s half sister helped establish the Little Pumpkin Trust in Australia and New Zealand…”

The award for television over-exposure is for:

“…Authorities in America had recently said they were closing in on the fugitive, and his image had appeared on America’s Most Wanted…”

“…The website for the America’s Most Wanted television program says Xue was caught after Chinese-American locals recognised him…”

“…”The arrest was based on the news reports and the internet and America’s Most Wanted,” Hession said…”

The Where’s Wally award goes to:

“…Xue had now been transferred to the Dekalb County Jail where he will be held until US Marshalls take him into custody…”

“…Xue is now in custody while it is determined what legal jurisdiction he faces….”

The Stating-the-bleedingly-obvious award goes to:

“…Murder suspect Nai Yin Xue was found by police..”

“…He is accused of Liu’s murder…”

“..Xue, who is suspected of killing his wife, has been charged with being a fugitive and for being wanted in New Zealand…”

I’m sure there’s more, but the point is well and truly made: it’s an abominable news report and the “with Staff Reporters, stuff.co.nz and Agencies” is little more than a disclaimer rather than giving proper credit to the sources of the report.

This is really sloppy journalism, but I’m up for alternative interpretations (other than a 5-minute deadline, which is just tommyrot on an online newspaper).

Finally worked-out one of the reasons I’ve been so fundamentally and astonishingly unable to concentrate at work.

And it’s a classic CLASSIC case of forgetting something.

Last year when I was working for Hellstra, I found that the environment I was in was not at all conducive to working. For one there were lots of people talking like they were deaf. For two there were not one, but THREE radios on people’s desks playing radio fairly audibly. And none of these radios were on the same station.

My solution at the time was simple: White Noise. No, not some bizarre def-metal rock band (from the gagralaca mind-zones, who are not only believed to be the loudest rock band, but the loudest noise of any kind in existence; sorry, channeling Hitch-Hikers Guide there).

So, white noise; it helped me focus, it helped me drown out the background crap, and aided my concentration astonishingly.

Why I forgot it is part II of this problem; the ADD I was diagnosed with late last year. I dispute the name (It’s not Attention Defecit, it’s Attention overload; we pick-up everything), but the diagnosis explained a whole lot of stuff, and I got some good tools and information to deal with the issues of an over-sensitive mind.

Which I promptly forgot. Just like with sugar (I eat some, I eat some more, then get all depressed and wonder why).

So, now I’m back on the White Noise bandwagon, and suddenly all the external influences, noises, music playing at A’s computer, people’s phones on speaker-phone because they can’t be arsed holding the handset up to their ears while on-hold, tennis balls bouncing, people walking past, people chatting nearby, conversations across the office, the nice guy who’s in the call-center actross from my desk talking to his callers… well, all of that is pretty much drowned-out.

Why not then listen to music, you might ask.

Well, because I listen to music.

Read that again, you might get it.

If you don’t, I’ll explain. Music: I enjoy it. Basically it’s another distraction. The tracks click over and I am distracted by the lyrics, the beat, the good guitar licks (why are they called licks btw; there’s no tongue involved is there?), the point of the music… and it dislodges the creative part of my brain and I get all sorts of story ideas.

Do I get any work done listening to music?

Not really.

White noise on the other hand isn’t a beat, isn’t rhythmic or anything else. It’s just constant sound. It’s not squeaky or changing, it’s not water pouring down a river, it’s not waves on a beach; both of these create an image to my mind you see, which leads to the aforementioned creative outpourings.

Not that creative outpourings are a bad thing mind you; especially when halfway through a second book and one third into the third in a series which one hopes will make me almost embarassingly rich and leave me with no option than to demand they wheel Parkie out of cryogenic freeze because he’s the only interviewer who I’ll speak with. It’s just that when I’m at work, I’m being paid to do shit, and that shit isn’t being done at present.

Not anymore however; now I’ve found a 20 second MP3 of white noise on Freesound. A quick download later and I had it in iTunes playing on an endless loop.

And thus I can concentrate again.

The only other way I’ve found to concentrate is to stay late at work when there’s no-one else around. Don’t want to do that anymore; it eats into my Being At Home time.

What is it with the current spate of Baby movies?

Example One

Example Two

There’s another one too, but I can’t work-out what it was called… and while this thread is in imminent danger of collapsing, I have to add the following one, which covers a subject which seems absent in every story I’ve heard about teen pregnancy:

4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days

My original point was to ask what the hell was going on with regard to this sudden spate of baby movies and the whole “motherhood” thing… and to ask whether the American media is attempting to encourage its viewers to squeeze one out for the country (as they’ve lost a few in that international skirmish called “Iraq”).

However, as I’ve only got three examples as compared to the 17 plus “Action” movies, the thread is officially unsustainable.

However, what I will ask is:

• Why Hollywood seems obsessed with making women who want kids and women who are pregnant odd and weird? This whole “hormonal” instability thing is really boring.
• Why there aren’t more believable heroines out there in movie-land (that’s with an E, meaning a female hero, not the nose powder of the incas).

I don’t include those horrendous mis-fires Catwoman and Elektra which were terrible!

Let’s see a movie about Boudica or Jenny Sparks, or even Judge Anderson. Fiction and fact is rife with strong female characters*, yet we keep getting Jane Austen thrust down our throats!

There are plenty of strong females in history, and in fiction… so why are they ignored?

————————

* Co-incidentally, Sigourney Weaver, who played one of the most believable female heroes of the last 30 years is in Example One