John Linton .....seeing that so many customers and employees of other ISPs think I'm a total failure as a contributor to the management of a small communications company and clearly need a job more suitable to my few abilities. (yes, I stole the head line from Top Gun but I don't know the name of the script writer to whom I should ascribe the credit).
Despite the tyranny, I often get some pleasure from writing these musings as I find it helpful at the start of a day to 'digest' the morning's business news and then contemplate what I should prioritize in terms of the next things I need to address. I get more pleasure from the questions, comments and most of all the suggestions I receive from people who sometimes read these meanderings and Exetel has become a better and more efficient company from implementing many helpful ideas and recommendations from people whom I've never met.
Perhaps, in a perverse way, I get almost as much pleasure from the 'highly negative' communications I get impugning almost every aspect of my personal characteristics and the actions and services of and provided by Exetel. There appear to be no limits to my personal dishonesty and crass incompetence and these dishonesties and incompetencies ensure that Exetel is the very worst ISP that Australia has ever seen amongst the very worst of that long list of failures. I figure that these poor people must be really upset about Exetel's ongoing success to feel compelled to waste their time writing their hate missives to me - expressing their wish fulfillment? Why on Earth do they bother to keep reading what I write in the first place if it annoys them so much?
As someone who has lived for more than 60 years and, while not acquiring much wisdom over that time, has developed a fairly insightful view of my own lack of talents and abilities I sometimes wonder what I can ever have done to provoke such extreme and devastating hatred (a strong word but in the cases I'm referring to I think it is the only word to use) from so many people that I have never heard of. While I usually simply skim read their hate missives and then delete them I sometimes 'investigate' the ones that appear to be written by the same person more than a few times. Apart from the TPG employee who was a certifiable lunatic in sending me daily (except Saturdays) vitriolic aspersions of every aspect of my personal character and Exetel's business practices and longevity over a period of almost five consecutive months there is a surprising set of common threads that link these hate mongers.
I only comment on it now because the volume of 'hate mail' I have received since Friday of last week has risen to ten times the usual volume! Something I wouldn't have believed possible. So I looked in a little more detail than I normally do in an effort to try and understand why this sudden, and seemingly spontaneous, outburst of vitriolic abuse was occurring. I found some strange correlations among the 217 'hate mails' received over the past 7 days:
1) 42% were from InterNode IP addresses
2) 40% were from Eftel IP addresses
3) 12% were from TPG IP addresses
4) None were from Exetel IP addresses
5) One Internode IP address was the source of 17 separate hate mails using 11 different 'aliases'
6) 16 other IP addresses sent 2 or more hate mails
7) I could actually identify one person from TPG and two from Eftel by name based on (in the TPG person's case an email from the same IP address and in the case of one Eftel person their crazy syntax which exactly matched other written examples on the web where they identify themselves and in the case of the other aaNet/Eftel hate monger by the repetitive, and erroneous, claim he keeps making which I first saw him state in an email with his 'signature' I was 'copied on' some years ago).
What actually caused this upsurge in pathetic abuse is, and is likely to remain, a mystery to me and I'm not gong to spend any further time on it as - for whatever reason, like someone turning off a tap, there have been no hate mails over the last 24 hours having been 17 the day before.
But, for those people who, for whatever strange reason, spend their time reading my inconsequential thoughts for the sole purpose of then writing abusive emails to me, please note the following:
a) For the 33 separate hate mongers who claim that I am sending Exetel broke "just like you did at One.Tel - As any record, book, court case or any other verifiable published record would show - I never held any position at One.Tel that vaguely influenced its operations or its financial or other decision making (I was a minor consutant among many consultants). For you silly and pathetic people to claim otherwise simply describes how uninformed and totally stupid you are. I held a consulting assignment that was focused on, firstly, securing regional PoPs for the internet services and then securing corporate customers - neither of which had any affect on the basic issues that OneTel subsequently experienced.
b) For the 14 vitriolic abusers (some of them the same as the 23 in a) above) who claim I am sending Exetel broke "just like you did at Apple/iGreen - As any record, court case or other written record would show - I worked as a consultant on a specific project at Apple for 15 months and that project had absolutely nothing to do with the reason that Apple/iGreen was removed from its owners and directors by Optus in one of the shoddier pieces of commercial trickery I have seen in a relatively long business career. During my consulting assignment I had no access to, played any part in or was consulted about any aspects of the business that subsequently caused the problems (though I'd be the first to admit that I don't know any real details).
c) For the 27 cloud cuckoo land dwellers (some of whom were the same as a) and b) above) who claim I sent Swiftel broke which resulted in it being sold to PeopleTelecom - As any record will show I did 12 months of consulting at the then Swiftel on a completely separate project which resulted in the creation from zero of a quite large and successful ADSL operation at that time which, in fact, was a principal attraction for the purchase of Swiftel - nothing I did could be remotely described as being detrimental to the company - completely the reverse.
d) For the 68 incoherent libelers (some of whom are the same as in a), b) and c) above) who alleged that Exetel is on the brink of having receivers/liquidators/administrators appointed and had already sacked half its employees - Exetel has submitted tax returns for the last five tax years that showed small but growing profits with the 2008 tax year return reaching the dizzy heights of a profit after all expenses but before tax of a little over $A200,000. Exetel has made a miniscule profit for all but a handful of trading months over the past almost five years. For the record also - Exetel has NEVER sacked any permanent employee in the whole of its existence.
It's quite true that I have continually made references to the fact that I do think times are already tough and are going to be a lot tougher - which is why I, as a part of Exetel's decision making, have decided to do all the conservative things of raising prices, freezing capital expenditure, not replacing personnel who leave and not hiring people in Australia (and if we were stupid enough to have HR, Marketing, Sales personnel or we spent money on advertising I would have cut those areas too but we don't so it wasn't necessary). This isn't "because we are going broke" it's because it's a sensibly conservative thing to do in very unpredictable times and (and when I come to think of it what has almost certainly caused this upsurge in hate mail) basically these actions will more than double Exetel's monthly trading profit if the bad things we are anticipating don't actually occur.
Maybe the reason these morons suddenly got so upset was the realization that by adding the $3.00 account charge Exetel had actually protected itself from "going broke"?
But, while I know this is going to severely disappoint all you crazy (and I mean that literally - to write the way you do so constantly means you are in real need of psychiatric assistance) ill wishers - Exetel continues to make modest profits each month and isn't "firing any staff" and is unlikely to not be around for the foreseeable future.
Besides - I KNOW I'm far too old to drive a truck.
There is no known cure for either paranoia or intrinsic stupidity which each of you "hate mailers" clearly exhibit.