John Linton ...and then there's Telstra's reality.
I wish I had read Eric Blair's most famous novel more recently than during my last year at prep school (back in the days when there was still attempts at providing real education) so that I could better reference my views that there can be no closer extant example of the embodiment of the "Airstrip One" society since the end of Enver Hoxha's regime than that of today's Telstra.
You may recall , should you have read 1984, that in the world of Airstrip One words meant what Big Brother said they meant and he could decide to change the meaning of any word should he choose to do so - exactly the way that Telstra's employee's seem to use language as a sort of asymmetrical warfare, without exception from my personal experiences over the past 20 years of dealing with several dozen Telstra employees. While it would be foolish to extrapolate one person's dealings with a tiny sample of over 50,000 other people at any given time the remarkable consistency of that unrepresentative sample does give a fairly strong indication that it has some credibility.
The amount of "Newspeak", Duckspeak" and their instigators - "Doublethink" while still sometimes including more than a few words of "Oldspeak" make it impossible for me to actually hold a "conversation" with a Telstra employee because I end up doubting my own sanity (even more than usual). I have attempted to restrict the contacts I have with Telstra employees because, it seems to me, that I speak a form of English and Telstra employees speak something that sounds similar to an English-like dialect, which at first hearing seems to closely resemble some version of what most people would recognise as "English" but where many of the words, although they seem to be familiar, actually appear to have a completely different meaning in their usage than they would if I had used the identical words.
Not only do they have a completely different meaning the first time a word is used but when the same word is used a second or subsequent time, although the pronunciation appears to be identical ,the context in which it is used seems to imply it means something completely different each time it is used. I can realise why this sounds like I am the one with the comprehension problem - possibly I have developed dementia but people have been too polite to point this out to me. Let me cite some examples likely to have been used in Eric Blair's novel to attempt to clarify my point:
"No fault found" - a fairly simple phrase that is commonly used in the communications industry.
My understanding of this phrase is that it means that some sort of error/fault was reported that on thorough investigation turns out to be not true.
An Airstrip One's citizen's understanding of this phrase means that every fault reported by Exetel on behalf of a customer turns out not to be true irrespective of whether the fault reported by the customer existed up to the time an Airstrip One employee/contractor visited the premises and the fault was then rectified because it never existed and therefore the customer (Exetel) would be charged for the false reporting of a fault that never existed.
"A true statement" - something that is commonly used to define the accuracy of a set of words formed into a sentence.
My understanding of a true statement is a set of words that describes a situation that several independent observers would agree represents a correct description of the subject of the statement.
An Airstrip One's citizen's understanding of a true statement is anything they say or that is said by another Airstrip One citizen to a non-Airstrip One citizen is a correct statement even it apears to be self evidently completely illogical or just plain untrue.
"A false statement"
My understanding of a false statement is a collection of words formed in to a sentence that a disparate group of independent observers would mutually agree did not correctly describe the subject of the statement.
An Airstrip One's citizen's understanding of a false statement is any statement made by a non-Airstrip One citizen that contradicts, either completely or in part, any statement made by an Airstrip One citizen even though the Airstip One's citizen's statement may have contained a direct contradiction within its own wording or directly contradicts another staentin an immediaely prior or subsequent sentence.
I was reminded of this inability of mine (which renders me completely inadequate to discharge the duties inherent in the job I struggle with daily) when I tried to decipher what the words spoken in this video actually meant:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/Video-Telstra-s-Milne-backs-iiNet/0,130061791,339293549,00.htm
I suppose I had trouble from the very first statement - to the effect that "Telstra had never received any copyright infringement notices from anyone". As someone who has worked for 5 different ISPs over the past 15 years (all of whom were/are far tinier than Telstra) where the number of copyright infringement notices were a daily occurrence I had to wonder what immunity from those automated processes Telstra enjoyed to allow a 'senior executive' to make that claim on a public forum?
On the basis that the first statement was an indication of my ability to comprehend the meaning of any subsequent statement I stopped watching the video.
I must get hold of a copy of the two novels so I can better understand today's Businessspeak.