John Linton
......or maybe I simply allowed myself to drift in to a way of earning a living that was and is totally unsuitable to whatever comprises the sum total of "me".
It seems that being a responsible person makes me completely unfit to be part of any management of the provision of comms services to customers. So, it's much easier to blame someone else and also blame them for removing the ability for me to actually change anything in later life by my own actions.
This pointless exercise in something approaching self pity was occasioned by recent events but triggered by today's IT Communications email (not that I'm inferring that there is anything wrong with that publication itself) which had a bold ad at the top that said:
"We hear you want delivery, not just possibilities"
This ad was placed by a supplier who, from my personal experiences over three recent years, makes an art form out of offering possibilities in place of delivering anything close to the promised services on so many occasions I've lost count.
The trigger wasn't anything beyond the brief consideration that so many commercial organisations spend money on 'marketing' that would clearly be better spent on the the nuts and bolts of the services that they are offering and how I wish I could have five minutes with the people from some of these company's marketing departments explaining to them that misusing images of wildlife while murdering the English language is not something that any reasonable member of the human race should waste any part of their lives doing (particularly when their claims about their services and the delivery standard of those services have no actual relation to each other).
On brief reflection I thought that rather than waste words on people whose knowledge of the services they are promoting is clearly non-existent it would be better to move them to an office in Sydney's Western suburbs and make them use the same services they are spruiking to communicate with each other for a week. After not being able to receive emails with any regularity, having any web site they might wish to visit fail to load and when they went to make a telephone call finding that not only that they couldn't but there was no timeframe possible in which they would be able to do so perhaps they would actually consider that their crapulous hyperbole was an insult to anyone with an IQ larger than their shoe size and may well make them, personally, liable to prosecution for attempting to obtain money by deception.
But that's my parents fault and, of course the school teachers I had in my formative years that somehow managed to inculcate a life long belief that you should tell the truth and take responsibility for your actions - something such people seem incapable not only of actually doing but they seem to totally fail to understand that it is something that they could consider doing.
In reviewing three situations I'm currently involved in it seems blindingly obvious to me that there is a general malaise in the Australian communications services provision segment of the Australian economy where a pre-requisite to becoming a decision making manager within a communications company is to take no responsibility for the quality of services that you are responsible for supplying and to take affront if someone has the temerity to suggest that perhaps part of your responsibilities are to, honestly, deal with shortcomings in what you are providing.
I wish I'd had parents like those of three people with whom I'm dealing at the moment. Those sensible parents clearly impressed upon their offspring that the only way to deal with all the nasty bits of life was to run away or, failing that opportunity, to simply close both eyes and ears and yell that there was nothing bad about the service they were supplying that they could either see or hear.
...and it's only !@#$%^ 9.15 in the morning and I've got to get through the rest of the day feeling like this!!!