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On behalf of a half-baked company called “ixwebhosting”, Sparrow Chat would like to apologize for the almighty balls-up that caused said website to disappear from your monitors over the last forty-eight hours.

Normal service is not quite resumed, as certain images and other icons still need to be resurrected, but hopefully all will be back to normal within a day or so.

Good service: unfortunately, it’s becoming more and more difficult to find in this capitalistic world where money, not customer satisfaction, reigns as king, queen, and petty dictator.

Sparrow Chat’s back online, after forty-eight hours in the Stygian blackness, thanks to a web server host – ixwebhosting of Kentucky, a subsidiary of Ecommerce – who decided to upgrade their php systems without warning, sending God knows how many websites, including this one, crashing into the murky depths of technological annihilation.

No-one expects perfection. Problems occur in all walks of life, especially the technological landscape of the internet. It is, however, reasonable to anticipate some degree of consumer satisfaction in the form of a sympathetic ear, communication, and an assurance that all possible is being done to correct the problem that’s causing large quantities of one’s hair to cover the keyboard, as frustration mounts, and no-one, absolutely no-one, apparently is doing anything to put right the almighty cock-up that’s resulted in a bundle of error messages replacing the artistic, almost beautiful, webpage that graced one’s monitor just a few hours before.

In the trade, it’s known as “The Barricade”. Those of us with a few score years under our belt may remember a time when, not just lowly employees, but supervisors, managers, senior executives, and even company directors, were accessible to customers whose grouses might cause adverse publicity if heaven and earth were not moved to render their unhappiness nullified.

Now, “The Barricade” isolates these people from those they are contracted to serve.

“The Barricade” takes various forms. It may be a simple recorded message:

“Sorry, we’re not available till three weeks next Tuesday, and then only if it’s a leap year.”

Or possibly, a lowly, minimum wage, answering service employee, who’ll listen to your heart-rending tale of htaccess files interacting with modwobling server facilities in a critical mass of php overloads, while knitting her Filipino lesbian lover a new pair of gusset-free underpants, only to suggest you ring a number in Nor’ Nor’ West Bohemia and ask for Charles, who knows nothing about computers but can sell you ‘a luvly line in leopard-skin leotards’.

We’ve all, at some time, come up against the piece de resistance: the 1-800 number with sixty-five thousand different menu options, each one directing you to a further two hundred and fifty more specific alternatives, before reaching the moment of high delirium when it is vaguely suggested a human voice may be available by selecting a fifteen digit number with the addition of two stars and something called a ‘pound’ key. High delirium transposes to psychotic fury on being informed:

“You are only the three hundred and forty-second customer in our queue. Please hold.”

“The Barricade” is the latest capitalist weapon. No longer is it deemed necessary to supply customer service. Companies now are so huge that individual consumers have lost their importance. When there are only four or five companies in the world supplying a particular service, and four or five of those four or five are owned by the same multinational corporation, the loss of one customer due to bad service is hardly a problem when that consumer moves his custom to another of those four or five companies, owned by the same multinational.

Provided “The Barricade” is in place – a few low-paid, Indian or Mongolian, workers prepared to operate a headset for two bags of rice a month, – the executives can sit back, reap the huge profits, and not have to concern themselves with dissatisfied customers baying for their blood.

Such is ixwebhosting – a subsidiary of Ecommerce.

If Sparrow Chat disappears from your monitors again in the not too distant future, be not mortified. It will simply mean we’re moving servers. It may be difficult to discover a new web-host, not affiliated to Ecommerce, but the research is already underway.

Meanwhile, perhaps we should consider that the time has come when we, the People – like the French in 1789 – should gird our loins and prepare to storm, “The Barricades”.

Filed under: Customer dissatisfaction

I’m grateful to my friend, Flimsy Sanity,^[1] for introducing me to Sergeant Gray. Sergeant Gray was the subject of a program on American RadioWorks recently, entitled, “What Killed Sergeant Gray.”^[2]

Sergeant Gray was a young man who grew up wanting only to be in the military. He eventually joined up and was sent to Iraq in 2003. After a tour of duty that lasted a year, he returned home to America, physically uninjured. After a short time at home, he was sent to Alaska for retraining. While there, he took his own life.

The program asks, “What killed Sergeant Gray.” It fails, in my opinion, to reach any firm conclusions.

So, I’ll tell you what killed Sergeant Gray, or, if not this Sergeant Gray, then another, more anonymous Sergeant Gray, now lying dead in Arlington, or some other convenient place of disposal.

America killed Sergeant Gray. From a small child he wanted to be a soldier. Why? Because he was fed on heroism and patriotism, and the glory of being in the military. He grew up hearing about “heroes”. It became his life. He didn’t just want to enlist for a few years – he was in for the duration. Then he went to war. He quickly discovered that all his life he’d been lied to. There was no heroism; there was no glory, and the patriotism was false, because his war held no relevance to ‘fighting for his country’. His war didn’t consist of the glorious battles he’d dreamed of as a child. Instead he was forced to debase and torture other human beings, kill civilians, behave like an ugly barbarian.

How often does one hear the stories of men home from war, sitting forever on the front porch, eyes glazed, distant: “He never talks of the war – he just sits for hours staring across the street.”

War only serves one purpose: to teach men – real men – of the great lie they’ve been fed. Others never learn, or, if they do are too afraid to admit that what they were told to believe all their lives was a great untruth.

Sergeant Gray grew up inside a bubble of glory and patriotism, inflated by Hollywood fiction, video gore, and the insincere ramblings of political misfits seeking cannon fodder. He was taught war games in kindergarten; saluted the flag in first grade; watched Black Hawk Down fifteen times during high school.

Then he went to war.

Sergeant Gray could have ended up on his front porch, glazed, distant; lost to the awful conundrums wrecking his life, tormenting his mind, destroying his soul. It’s hard for any man to come to terms with the truth – that everything he’d ever believed, sworn to uphold, was prepared to sacrifice his life for, was worth less than a barrel of rotten apples.

Sergeant Gray didn’t spend his life sat endlessly on the front porch staring across the street. He died a lonely, suicidal death with a plastic bag over his head. Sergeant Gray had learned the ultimate lesson war has to offer. In many ways it’s the only lesson of war worth learning. Sadly, for many like Sergeant Gray, they learn it too late.

War is not glory; it’s not heroism, it’s not even patriotic. There are no heroes in war, we just let our media make them up afterward. War is a lesson in barbarity; it’s a test of the depths of depravity to which human beings can sink. It makes a mockery of patriotism, flags waving, and all the contrived rigmarole that passes for nationalistic pride.

The psych-docs will say Sergeant Gray suffered from PTSD, or mental breakdown, or something else with a long, fancy-sounding, name. It’s more professional than admitting he died of a broken heart. Broken because the country he loved lied to him his whole life, then sent him to war in Iraq and brutally exposed him to the truth.

It didn’t have to be Sergeant Gray, it could have been any young man.

It didn’t have to be Iraq; it could have been any war.

After all, for once let’s face the truth, they are all the same.

^{[1] “Flimsy Sanity”}

^{[2] “What Killed Sergeant Gray” American RadioWorks, undated}

^{In memory of the millions like Sergeant Gray whose lives have been wasted in politicians’ wars, take a few minutes to listen while Eric Bogle sings of “Willie McBride”.}

Filed under: The hard way

From Today’s Washington Post:

Palin’s routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric’s questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”^[1]

How ugly Adolf Hitler appears today, yet, in his time he too was considered physically attractive. Like Sarah Palin, he used his guile to win over people who should really have known better. Some folks are truly gullible.

On November 4th, America will learn how many gullible citizens it really has.

^{[1] “Unleashed, Palin Makes a Pit Bull Look Tame” Washington Post, October 7th 2008}

Filed under: Viper in sheep’s clothing