Wednesday 24 August 2005

Pic of the day: More dissatisfied customers ... this time from the anime Final Approach. (The red fiery aura is used in anime to signify anger.)

Telenor sucks again!

So at 8PM the DSL line was still not up. I turned off equipment and turned it back on. At 20:14 I called my ISP again and asked about the progress. A friendly guy told me that the problem was that they had increased the speed on my line (as they had promised to do, earlier this year) but it hadn't worked. (Yeah, right. At 10PM on a Sunday? They don't even fix errors at such a time, unless they be errors that come on national broadcasting.) He then supposedly wrote a note that it must be fixed the next day.

I don't know whether he actually did that. But I am pretty sure their computer programs track the activity on the log, so that as long as I force them to call up the log every day, there will be tracks of some kind documenting my attempts. And rest assured that if they try to bill me for this time, I will see them in court. I'll not ask them to refund me the money I've paid for online games and subscription to The Economist that I can't use because my DSL is down. After all, one should show mercy if one needs mercy. But some sliver of righteousness must prevail, lest the big keep riding on the back of the small and notice it not.

Around this time, the Internet withdrawal symptoms start to become noticeable. It gets harder to concentrate on anything. A feeling of unreality envelops me. I know that only some mental activities are actually unavailable, but I have to consciously think to remember which ones. Whereas the first days I automatically assumed that I could do anything and then suddenly found that I couldn't, now I start to automatically assume that I can't do anything until I think it over. This gradually increases over the week. (No, I didn't become clairvoyant. Rather I am writing this on Sunday.)

***

In financial news this week, Telenor is rumored to plan another round of sacking hundreds of employees. The markets generally like it when large companies sack workers, since they assume that the remaining workers will do the job the others did as well, without any extra pay. I think a few calls to Telenor's customer service would effectively wring the neck on that crazy notion.

A more durable approach would probably be to sack the bosses and use those millions to hire techies to solve common people's problems. Because it is actually the customers who pay the bills, not the investors. Hopefully. If the customers leave, the investors will inherit the bills eventually, but they won't love you anymore.