John Linton
....which is quite the reverse to the effect heavy rain has on many parts of the communications industry. (apologies to Peggy Lee for my probable misquoting of her song).
Australia is a truly cruel country, not at all as Donald Horne described it in his dyspeptic opening to his "third rate" book:
"Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck."
The current widespread flooding in Queensland and many other areas of Australia is just one more repeat of the cycle of drought followed by flood followed by bush fire which is all too common an experience for many Australians.
I have no problem with his description of the people who have 'run this country' for the past 100 or so years other than to question whether those people being described as 'second rate' isn't vastly overestimating their displayed dedication, application and basic intellects.
I remember when I first heard a Telstra help desk person tell me that my BigPond ADSL problems were "probably due to the rain" that I almost burst out laughing at such a truly lame shrugging off of responsibility by some "help desk script reader". Later that week the Telstra engineer who dug down to the junction box connecting our house to the bearer running down our street showed me that indeed the 'pit' in which the connection occurred was indeed full of water and the insulation on the connection was defective causing the intermittent line problems as the rain filled the pit and then 'magically' repaired itself as the water slowly seeped away.
Since that time I've been more aware of the physical limitations of the aging infrastructure that is used to deliver 'essential' communications services to residential households and businesses. In my individual case the Telstra engineer said that the cable in the street had been laid in 1936 and the cable junction box connecting my house was an extension of a main bearer connection installed in 1963 - in his terms "relatively modern for this part of Sydney".
So you get a mental image of cable contractors over the decades laying cable and terminating building block connections to pits and trenches that have been dug in dry summer weather in topography that then existed which in the case of new 'suburbs' was about to be radically changed with the building foundations of new houses, the addition of swimming pools in back yards and the ongoing road repair/widening activities as well as new gas and water lines and the subsequent repairs to those structures and then drenching rain followed by scorching drought in continuous cycles.
It makes you wonder how anything works at all for very long and puts in perspective the plaintive 'my WOW pings are sooo slow - let's change ISPs to someone competent' scenarios that are the inevitable consequences.
These issues have re-occurred to me over the past few weeks as the drenching rain that has fallen over many parts of Australia and has caused so much very real and very serious distress to so many real people is matched, a more unforgiving person might well say 'drowned out', by the 'mewling infants' who bombard ISP and telephony call centers bemoaning the catastrophe that their deprivation of reliable internet is causing them and, verbally, aggressively with the addition of some truly dreadful 'language' demanding that "someone must do something about it" - like what?...change the weather? (I do hope the new Labour 'government' does actually deliver on one of its core election promises and re-introduce English language teaching in to schools sometime soon)
I made an observation to Annette more than 10 years ago that the internet was going to become the most dangerous 'drug of addiction' the human race has yet provided itself with and it was likely to make the negative aspects of heroin look benign before very long. I think that time has been very truly with us for some time now with so many people, and mainly very young people, almost in a state of withdrawal if, for whatever reason, their internet is unavailable to them for more than a few hours.
I wonder if there's a set of call centres dealing with complaints about beach closures due to the Easterly and residual cyclonic effects that have made beach going a pretty iffy proposition since Christmas?