Why I hate my Smartphone

Those of you who know me well would know that my smartphone and I are inseparable.  We have a completely unhealthy and symbiotic relationship.  Like most people I also spend more quality time with my phone than I do with my loved ones.  Sometimes this quality time is spent in the most cumbersome of places.  When I am bored my phone is always there.  When I am in an awkward social situation that I want to dissociate from I have my phone to use as a social barrier or to utilize as a form of escape.  When I am waiting for a meeting or standing in a queue I have my phone to occupy me.  But lately I have come to realize that I have started to resent my smartphone.  Actually, I have come to realize that I maybe not only resent my phone but that I possibly also hate it and this is why…

Siri is a bitch.  She seriously is.  Whenever I ask her to call my husband she wants to phone some guy on my contact list that I don’t even know.  She clearly is either confused or homophobic.  You see, a couple of months back I tried to “come out” to her.  You know, because she lives in my phone and my phone and I are always together and I thought she needed to know.  Let’s just say it did not go well.  She refused to acknowledge that I was gay and towards the end of our very unproductive conversation she hinted that I was being vulgar.  Ok, so I did call her some nasty names but she provoked me.

Siri also sometimes pretends not to understand what I am saying even when I speak American to her.  Other times she is vague with her answers and answers questions with questions which I hate.  She also refuses to tell me what she is wearing or what she was doing before I spoke to her.  In short, Siri is super judgmental and not helpful at all.  But if Siri doesn’t frustrate me enough then there is also the addiction side of smartphones – the games from hell!

My phone made me a Flappy Bird addict.  Now this is not something that I am proud of and all you parents out there should really talk to your kids about the dangers of Flappy Bird.  If you have never heard of it, God bless you and the rock you live under.  Flappy Bird is a super frustrating game and it will ruin your life.  I started playing it a few weeks ago and I suspect this is the reason I started biting my nails again.  Currently my fake high score is 99 (long story) but my real high score is actually only 27.  It’s been 27 since last week and I just cannot seem to beat it.

I have also since developed a phobia of green pipes and yellow birds.  I know I should really delete this fucked up game from my phone but I just cannot bring myself to do it.  Flappy Bird has found my weaknesses and is exploiting all of them.  It’s no joke you guys.  I fear this game might be the beginning of the Zombie Apocalypse and y’all should be running for the hills screaming.  You should be running with axes, guns and preferably with Daryl from The Walking Dead and then remember that you were warned.

My phone has also invaded my toilet time.  I know most of you also take your phones to the toilet and it is disgusting and we should all collectively be ashamed of ourselves.  But in my defense, I get bored when taking a dump.  I mean really, am I just supposed to sit there while I squeeze out a chocolate brownie and stare at the floor, tiles and the door.  That is like totally unproductive and I could be doing something far more useful during this time because bodily functions really should not make you lazy.

I could be reading and answering my emails, answering whatsapp or wechat messages, updating my Facebook Fan pages, reading some articles or playing Flappy Bird.  Coincidentally, my Flappy Bird technique is better when I am making a number two.  Also, most of my fan emails I get from my blog are answered while I am on the toilet (I know this is an upsetting image that you now have in your heads and you are welcome).  The only thing I would not do on my phone while in the bathroom is answering or making calls and I definitely will also not do facetime.  That would just be rude.

Lately I also found that sometimes I fight with my phone and most mornings I end up negotiating with it and then end up late for work.  I sleep, like most people do, with my phone next to my side of the bed.  This is the most practical spot for it because this is where my phone’s electrical umbilical cord is.  Also, it is at arm’s length for easy snoozing of its alarm clock.

My phone’s alarm clock is an asshole and hates me.  The asshole sometimes tricks me in switching off my alarm instead of snoozing it.  This has caused me to wake up late, be in full panic mode, ruins my entire morning and my hair.  I then also end up late for work by an hour on average looking all flustered.  I swear the fucker does this on purpose!

I have also learned that screaming at your phone does not help.  If it forgets to remind you about a meeting, make you miss an appointment or if its battery decides to die unexpectedly during an important phone call about Flappy Bird, your phone does not give a shit.  You only end up looking like a crazy person; a crazy person screaming at a phone who requires specialized psychopharmacological help.  But I don’t only hate my own smartphone, I hate my husband’s as well.

Just call me an equal opportunity phone hater.  You see, both my husband and I are avid pinners on Pinterest and we are also active on Instagram.  However, one of us is more obsessed with this than the other.  And no, this time it isn’t me.  Whenever my husband has a chance he is on one of these two apps and it fucking drives me bat shit crazy.  He is on it when we watch television, when we are next to the pool and the only time he isn’t busy with these apps is when we are having sex.  I suspect he knows that would just be awkward and that it will cause World War III in our house.

In recent times this has gotten better, after several altercations, and we have decided to be more present when we are together.  I suspect smartphones may have been the root cause of many a broken marriage and I will not allow that to happen with us.  Because fuck you home wrecking smartphones!

Even though I do resent my smartphone for invading my life and personal space as it has, it is after all a necessary evil.  Without my phone I would be lost.  I mean if I have weird symptoms my phone and Google are always there to tell me that I am dying from some exotic disease.  My phone tells me when to be where and what time I need to do stuff.  Some nights my phone even hushes me to sleep with soothing ocean sounds.  But I do hate the fact that smartphones have become so intertwined in our daily existence and that they are so dreadfully difficult to escape from.

I have now decided that I will spend a couple of ours everyday smartphone free, only using it for what it was originally intended – for phone calls.  But for now I have to try and beat my Flappy Bird high score or else the world will spin off its axes and we will all die.  I am doing the world a favor really.  You should thank me.

Till next time.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Do you sometimes get the feeling that Google maybe knows you too well?  Do you also find it creepy how Google sometimes complete your sentences (not much unlike your partner does) when you do an online search?  In this day and age when we are so completely connected with smart phones, tablets and laptops and having so much information at our fingertips with vast amounts of apps, software and gadgets, I could not help but wonder, is this messing with our brains.

There are many days that I sit in my office surrounded with gadgets and I wonder what my office would have looked like in 1983.  My laptop probably would have been replaced with a typewriter, my email inbox with a physical inbox, my iPad replaced with a filofax and my iPhone with a pager.  When I think about it, I must admit, it makes me anxious.  I have become so used to technology and being effortlessly connected all the time that the thought of not being connected sends shivers down my gay old spine.  I know that people managed just fine without it, back in the day, but I am sure many of us cannot imagine our lives without it.  But this begs the question, with technology making our lives so much easier, what is the price we are paying for it?

Every day I see people in meetings, when having a smoke break with colleagues and even at home with friends and family.  I see how technology is adversely affecting us.  I see how technology draws us in and how it is making our real world attention span shorter.  It seems most people cannot go more than 20 minutes without checking their phones.  I am no different.  I check my phone even though I didn’t receive any push notification.  I check my phone even though I didn’t get an email.  I check it and I don’t really know why.  Do we do this because we are bored?  Do we do this because we are so afraid of missing something that we constantly have the desire to be connected?  I am not sure what the answer is, but we all do it or at least know people who do.

Then there are social media.  Being a social media whore myself I cannot be judgmental about it.  I am on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkeIn and Instagram, to mention but a few.  Social media is a great way of connecting with old friends, staying abreast of world events, networking for work and getting sneak peeks into the lives of celebrities.  But with it also come a plethora of dangers.  As you know, a couple of months earlier I discovered with a shock that I was friends on Facebook with a monster who cut up his boyfriend and ate a piece of his ass and taped it.  As it turns out this was not his first murder and he is in fact a Serial Killer.  As in life there are many dangerous and demented people on the internet, but unlike real life you can’t always tell until it is too late.

You can be anyone or anything on the internet.  Technology has evolved to the point that some people can life completely separate lives on the web with things like Second Life.  They can create a character for themselves, work, shop, have relationships and even have sex all in the comfort of some basement somewhere.  They can create a life for themselves that exists only on the internet and in the process become recluses who may lose the ability to interact with people in the real world.  Sure not everybody goes to that extreme, but ask yourself how many people with whom you chat with on Facebook on a daily basis you have or even plan to meet with in real life.  Ask yourself if that is any different from the folks who embrace Second Life?

Even scarier is how the advancement of technology will affect us physically.  Just the other day I heard a debate on the radio while driving home where one guy said that not so long from now we will have technology embedded into our bodies.  We will enhance ourselves and instead of having a handset for your smart phone it will be build into our hands.  We will have technology build into our bodies that will replace the gadgets we currently use.  This is not as farfetched as you might think.  It is already been done to body parts.  In the United Kingdom a man who lost his hand in a Jet Ski accident have been fitted with a fully functioning bionic hand.  But imagine when we get to the stage when we will voluntarily amputate our limbs to get fitted with a bionic limb that is better and stronger than our organic human one.

We have already seen this in sports.  Sure these athletes did not voluntarily amputate their limbs but the artificial limbs are better than the human limbs.  Just look at the athlete Oscar Pistorius.  In last year’s Olympics he competed with able bodied athletes, something that would have been unheard off ten years ago.  Is it so farfetched that in a couple of decades from now we will stand in line to get the newest version of the fully integrated hand, eye or leg, much like folks queued for the new iPhone 5?  Is it so farfetched that in a couple of decades from now all our homes will have WiFi and that all our software for our enhanced synthetic body parts will update while we sleep?  It is frightening, but as some experts believe this will happen.

I am ashamed to say that I really do think Google is making us stupid.  Who of us have not used Google to check the spelling of a word?  Not known something and then quickly Googled it so that we sound smart and knowledgeable on a subject matter that we really know nothing about it?  Maybe stupid is not the right word to use here, perhaps lazy is more appropriate.  Technology and the internet has made us lazy and in a few decades from now life as we know it will be vastly different.

With the advancement of technology we as a human race are figuring out and creating machines and gadgets that make life easier for us, but the one thing we are not realizing is that we are also making ourselves redundant in the process.  The more gadgets and machines we create the more the human factor is being taken out.  Soon machines will take over most of the function we as humans perform and the real question then is, who will the real Master be?  The creator or the machine?  I guess the answer to this question will have an exceedingly complex answer as half of the human body could, by then, be synthetic and a machine itself.  I am just very glad that I will not be around by then to have to figure this one out.

Till next time.

iBreakup

So I finally did it.  After a two year, and I might add, unhealthy relationship with BlackBerry we finally broke up.  It was an uneventful breakup.  There was none of those “It’s not you, it’s me” or “I feel like we have grown apart” bullshit.  I just finally one day grew tired of my BlackBerry freezing up, having to reboot the piece of shit and going without reliable service.  So when it was time to upgrade it was a no brainer, I switched to iPhone.  And I must say iLove it so much that I also forced hubby to embrace Apple like a sex starved bandit!  But being now fully connected in the iWorld with my iPhone and iPad, I could not help but notice how certain apps (most of which are free) could seriously cause problems in your relationships.  So please bear with me as I explain.

After we got back from New York I wasted no time in acquiring my brand new iPhone.  I was like a five year old child at Christmas time, all excited even though I knew exactly what I would be getting.  Yes, I was one of those children that had an internal tracking device for hidden Christmas presents and I was also quite efficient with opening presents and then wrapping them again without leaving any traces that the presents were disturbed.  When I arrived at my service provider I told the lady that I was due for an upgrade and told her what I wanted.  In her very thick African accent she said “Eish, OOOKy.  We only have the white one, you still want it?”  To which I responded “No, I want my BEE phone, I am NOT a racist!” which she did not find amusing at all, but I thought it was hilarious.

After about 20 minutes of paper work and some technical magic, my address book was transferred to my iPhone, my new simcard activated and my BlackBerry was no longer operational.  The poor thing looked sad as it knew it was destined to go into that drawer in the dining room where old cell phones go to die.  It’s like an electronic retirement village for old phones, iPods, displaced chargers and other unspecified electronics.  It is the kind of collection that hoarders keep for in case there is a zombie apocalypse and only old Nokias, BlackBerries and old digital cameras would be the tools that will help them to survive in order to save humanity from extinction.

Seeing as I have had my iPad now for a while, getting use to my new iPhone was a breeze.  They work exactly the same.  During this time I also was blissfully unaware that there were certain people who were frantically sending me BBM’s which I obviously were no longer getting.  “Did I do something that pissed you off?” the one private message read on Facebook “Why are you ignoring me?” read the other.  Clearly nobody knew that I have dumped my BlackBerry and they were taking my lack of replying to their BBM’s very personally.  Even worse were those friends who are fiercely loyal to RIM and who after learning that I got divorced from their product only replied via text message with “Oh, I see...  Hope you are “happy” with your new iPhone and Whatsapp”.  Their sarcasm was almost tangible.

Why people take the abandoning of a brand so personally I don’t know.  Did they not get lost in a strange town because their Garmap refused to work?  Did they not also go a week without service due to a server clusterfuck last year?  Do they not get annoyed when their handsets freeze up and need to be rebooted a couple of times a day?  Do they like that BlackBerry’s Application World was inaccessible for the last six months that I had my phone?  I guess not.  Brand loyalty can only go so far before you get so sick of shit not working and you decide to move on.  And this is exactly what I did.  It is true that iPhone has some amazing apps.  But there is also the not so much talked about darkside.  iPhone and certain apps have taken stalking and lack of privacy to a whole new level!

Take the Find Friends App.  Just this weekend I downloaded it to my iPhone.  On the surface it looks like quite a useful tool for checking up where you friends are (Like in physically.  Like in their actual accurate location within a 3 meter radius) After downloading the app I turned to hubby “Honey, I want to send you an invitation to a new app that I just downloaded, which email address should I sent it to?” I said in my sweetest and most innocent voice.  He gave me an email address and within minutes he turned to me and said “Are you serious?!  I am NOT accepting this!  What about my privacy, you may as well insert a tracking device into my arm!  WTF?!” Visibly shocked and disgusted with technology he asked me if this was legal, to which I said “Of course it is legal!  You would not be able to download it if it wasn’t”  To which he responded “But you made us register our phones to Botswana because South Africa is blocking too many apps, I am sure this is NOT legal”.

After some debate and talking about issues of trust, hubby finally accepted the request.  I mean honestly, if you can take a shit while your partner is brushing his teeth in the same bathroom, the issue of privacy becomes a little complicated to define, don’t you agree?  So, hubby became the first person I could track on my Find Friends App, and it works really REALLY well!  Coincidentally, hubby “forgot” his phone at home today.  I guess he wanted some privacy, after all he is not under house arrest or correctional supervision and he does not need full time monitoring – he is my husband and not my prisoner!  At least not this time, but I don’t speak out of the bedroom…

The Find Friends App really raises some important questions though.  If you have this app, is it morally correct to use it on your spouse?  If your spouse refuses to accept the request, do they have something to hide?  Does this cross the line and create the impression that you don’t trust your spouse?  All of this is something to think about while you search your spouse’s exact location and check if they are where they are suppose to be.

I no longer use the Find Friends App because even though it works really well it isn’t actually right, in my opinion, to spy on your husband or friends – people that is why we have Facebook!  If you have children, then that is a whole different story though because then you can rationalize it by saying it is a “Parenting Tool”.  Technology has really made some great strides since the days of those huge cell phones people carried around in the 90’s, but as I learned this week, technology can also cause some serious problems especially in relationships.  I have come to realize that you can choose to use technology for either good or for evil and sometimes the lines appear to be quite blurred.  I guess the moral of this story is don’t let your iPhone lead to an iBreakup.  Use your iPhone wisely.

Till next time.

The BlackBerry Apocalypse

Slap me in the face and call me Sally. I have to admit that I have the Techno-addiction. My BlackBerry have become like an additional limb and an electronic enhancement to my frontal lobe. I use it extensively and I never quite realized to what extend it has become an integral part of my life. After all, a wide variety of personal electronic devices and cyber platforms are all conveniently integrated and instead of having to carry around several different gadgets you only have one. And when that one device fails you, as I found out this week, you are screwed, screwed without foreplay, an explanation, consideration, KY or the option of a happy ending.

What makes this worse is the fact that when are at the precipice of such a electronic fail fuckfest you don’t even realize it and once you do there is nothing to prepare you for what is to come. My BlackBerry has not been working for the last three days and RIM (Research in Motion and NOT that thing you do to your boyfriend’s ass) ignored us. In the wake of the worst outage and Public Relations disaster by BlackBerry and RIM, and looking at my lifeless BlackBerry not being as smart a phone as it was four days earlier, I could not help but wonder – is this the beginning of the end for BlackBerry?

On Monday I was preparing for a business trip which I was leaving for on Tuesday. This time I was planning on driving instead of flying (carbon emissions & reducing my carbon footprint and all) and as such I needed to load the relevant addresses and coordinates onto my Garmin GPS on my BlackBerry. I managed to load two addresses successfully before the first inkling of the impending crisis arose.

As I was searching for the third address I got a “server connection error”. I tried several more times and got the same error. Thinking it was only a temporary glitch with Garmin, I decided to take a break to check my Twitter account. The last Twitter feed was recorded at 12:04pm. Oblivious to the fact that the BlackBerry apocalypse had started, I tried to refresh my Twitter feed and nothing happened. I checked my Facebook and that was dead too. So I hard rebooted my phone and at 13:12 it became clear - my phone was busted!

Firmly believing it was a problem with my phone; I logged onto Twitter via my laptop and asked whether anyone of my followers knew of any problem(s) with BlackBerry. Then the floodgates opened and #BlackBerry was being flooded with angry messages. BlackBerry was down in Africa. “What the fuck? How is that possible?” I thought.

Then Twitter messages streamed in from Asia and Europe, BlackBerry was down there too! Naturally thinking that BlackBerry would be aware that millions of people’s services were down, I checked out @BlackBerryHelp on Twitter. @BlackBerryHelp was tweeting everything except about the outage. If I didn’t know any better I would have thought BlackBerry didn’t know something was wrong. Naturally, my next step was to check out RIM’s website hoping to find a press release or at least some information about what was going on. What I found was astounding.

For two days RIM did not respond with a concise explanation. Only yesterday did they decide to release a vague explanation about this international crisis. Apparently some “switch” failed and the backup “switch” failed also, resulting in an epic fail for BlackBerry affecting Europe, Asia, Africa, Canada, North America and South America. Curiously, RIM also added that they have not been hacked and that the integrity of their systems has not been compromised. In the meantime all the pompous IPhone users were laughing their asses off at all the distraught BlackBerry users, but the biggest giggles I think must have come from Steve Jobs. As for me I was still being screwed and it was no laughing matter.

Being away from an Internet connection I was completely cut off from the outside world. No Facebook, no Twitter, no News RSS feeds and no damn GPS. I was out of town, at a place I don’t know from shit, completely isolated and I had to go places blind. Do you know when last I actually used a real map? Back in 2004, that’s when! I had no BBM, had no clue what was going on and I was reduced to using text messages. TEXT MESSAGES!

My 48 hour business trip could have easily gone awry had it not been for my natural instincts and a vague memory of how things were done back in the mid 90’s. I made it to all my appointments and manage to find my way back home. The 600 bucks speeding fine I got (which is a whole different blog post altogether) I also blame on the BlackBerry blackout! When I got home I went onto the Internet to try to learn more about the outage. I discovered that more sinister than RIM’s lame ass excuse for the blackout is the conspiracy theories that were surfacing. Maybe you have heard some of them.

Isn’t it odd that BlackBerry experienced the worst week ever just as Apple is about to release their new IPhone and applications that will rival and exceed that of BlackBerry? Isn’t it peculiar that BlackBerry had the worst recorded outage in recent history barely a week after the passing of Steve Jobs amidst fears that Apple’s stock price would plummet, but now BlackBerry’s stock price did instead? Why did RIM insist on saying they were not hacked or compromised, maybe they were. If they had been all affected BlackBerry users may have been unknowingly pick pocketed and your e-mail-, social media- and even bank accounts could have been compromised, your passwords stolen and not to mention all that “personal information” stored on their servers possibly now not being so “personal” or “private” anymore. Is all of this just one big coincident, I’ll let you decide for yourself?

With what must have been the worst week for BlackBerry since they started back in 1999, I cannot help but wonder if they will ever fully recover. I am sure that their Public Relations crisis management or the lack thereof will be studied in business schools for years to come. As for consumer confidence, I am not sure it will ever be fully restored. After all, this is not the first time this has happened, but unfortunately for them this time it happened on a much larger scale. The fact that there was no communication from them in this regard also did not help matters or boost confidence either.

With RIM already struggling with delays in getting new phones out, a tablet that's been a dud, shares that are approaching a five-year low and sales noticeably down, could this be the beginning of the end for them? I guess only time will tell. As for me, I am due for an upgrade in 2012 and whether I will choose BlackBerry again is largely undecided. I do love my IPod, maybe it is time to get a matching IPone?

Till next time.

Steve Jobs

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true." - Steve Jobs (Stanford commencement speech, June 2005)

Things that make me feel OLD

Here are somethings that make me feel old.  Sure they bring back fond memories, it's just a pity our younger generation have no clue what some of these items are or what they were used for.  Please tell me you do!



Cassette Tapes.  Remember them and Walkmans?

Turn Dial Phones. 

Typewriters.  A true dinosaur from our past.

Polaroid Cameras. 

The VW Beetle. 

Death Threat!

As most of my loyal readers know (all 8 of you) I am no stranger to hate mail.  My blog is a magnet for radical religious loonies and other vengeful under medicated homophobic assholes.  But this post for once is not about hate mail.  No it is far more hilarious it’s about a Death Threat.  You see a while back there was a spam e-mail doing the rounds and curiously enough it was very vague Death Threat.  So when one of my colleagues forwarded it to me today I was in stitches.  Imagine someone who is slightly paranoid receiving this in his/her inbox, add to that a few perceived enemies and this Death Threat could cause some serious mental discomfort.  Note the "Good Luck" right at the end!

Till next time LMAO....

DECLINED – It Brings Out the Bitch in Me!

I love travelling! Seeing new places, meeting new people and experiencing different cultures is an education in humanity – an education you can’t obtain from any University and can’t be entirely conveyed in any books you read. Next month I will be travelling to Kenya, and as my life goes this year, it will again be for business and not for pleasure. The last few days I have been preoccupied with finalizing my travel arrangements, transferring funds from Italy, booking flights, and as my good friend Murphy would have it, none of this has been smooth sailing. Technology has elevated the phrase “red tape” to a whole different dimension and left me wondering, is the technological substitution of computers over humans in business transactions really making our lives easier or has it in fact made it worse?  Either way both can make me behave like quite the bitch!

Sure shopping online is convenient, after all you can do it sitting in your boxers, while eating ice cream and smoking a cigarette, even burp or fart out load and no one will be the wiser. You can pretty much buy and sell anything online, from second hand sex toys to brand new Russian Brides. In many ways technology has made our lives easier, more convenient and to a certain degree cocooned us from the harsh reality of dealing with real sales people.

You see I prefer to book flights and pay for stuff online. Probably because I hate standing in lines, are too lazy to drive to certain places, having to first look for parking and then search for the company and/or shop I need to be at. Once you finally arrived at the place, you have to stand in a queue for a further 20 minutes, then when you finally reach the front of the queue you also have to deal with the sales person’s personality and whatever their mood is like that day. Dealing with websites seems faster, easier and far less frustrating. Websites don’t have queues, don’t have moods, don’t have an attitude problem and they hardly ever bring out the bitch in me. Well, that is until something goes wrong!

Yesterday the funds I needed for my flights to Nairobi finally got transferred and, as usual, the bank had a hundred and one questions before they finally released it. I was questioned like a terrorist or drug smuggler laundering money from Italy, but after a prolonged Q & A the bank was finally satisfied that I wasn’t militant or criminal and the cash was deposited. With money in my account I decided not to procrastinate and book and pay for my flights. So I went onto Kenya Airways’ website and what followed proved my theory on websites completely and utterly flawed.

Everything was going flawlessly. I managed to secure my preferred seats in Business class, earn my Flying Blue miles and then it came to the payment. I selected trusty old VISA, punched in my numbers and pressed confirm payment. PAYMENT DECLINE! “What?!!!!” The first time the website said this I was sure it was a glitch on their system. The third time those nasty words displayed, I was starting to doubt, and after the fifth time I actually went and checked my credit card balance to make sure there were sufficient funds and there was!

Quite irate at that point I decided it was time to deal with a call centre, so I dialled the number and an automated voice advised me they were closed and I should try again during business hours the next day. After consulting with my sister-in-law who’s a travel agent (which a whole blog post on its own) I contacted the call centre the next morning. “Kenyan Airways, Orbit speaking, how may I help you?” the voice said (I kid you not the guy’s name was really Orbit!) “Orbit, your website is broken! I tried to pay for my flights and your website declined my VISA! Declinnned it!!!” Orbit told me to call the airline’s website’s office, but the catch was it was in Nairobi “The call could be quite expensive if you call from South Africa” Orbit added. “Duh dude!” I thought as I vividly remember the nasty surprises I received in the mail, from my service provider, after my trips to Egypt, Madagascar and Luxembourg. So clearly phoning the “website fucker uppers” was out of the question.

“Orbit, I need to book these flights, give me options!” Orbit responded with options I didn’t approve off. I could book them telephonically but then there’s an additional charge. I can book them over the counter but then I have to drive to the Airport. I can book them through a travel agent but then they could be twice as expensive. “Orbit... Honey... listen to me very carefully. Give me online options, options that I can do from my laptop!” Orbit paused and then he said “Well... you can book your ticket online and choose cash payment instead of VISA, and then just do an Internet transfer of the funds into our account within 48 hours” “Isn’t that almost the same as paying by credit card anyway?” I asked quite confused. “Yes sir it is, but seeing as our credit card payment options is broken and Declinnned your VISA, this is the only remaining alternative left to suit your requirements, I do apologize for the inconvenience” he politely responded.

Orbit ended up being very sweat and helpful, and made me feel bad for being somewhat of a irate bitch at the beginning of our interaction. It took me a full 90 minutes from the first phone call to actually having my flights reserved, paid and finally confirmed. Orbit even dealt with the one thing that always causes arguments with staff at the Airport – my hand luggage. On 16 November, for the first time in my flying history, not only I, but my hand luggage too will be expected by both the ground crew and cabin crew and I was promised I will not have any hassles, and the same goes for my return flight on the 18th. Now that’s service for you! I hope this really will be the case as I don’t travel light. If they say the limit is 40KG’s I’ll pack 40 KG’s!! You never know what kind of trouble a Queen can get into while travelling and for that I need options of outfits and shoes!

Yes, in many ways technology, computers and websites have made our lives easier, more convenient and save us from dealing with rude people even though we can be quite rude ourselves. But sometimes technology fails us, declines us and all round just frustrates us. With my experience today, dealing with an actual human with a strangely appropriate name for his profession, I must say dealing with people isn’t always that bad. Sometimes you are lucky and they are friendly, helpful and competent. Kudos to you Kenya Airways for training your call centre staff well, and at the same time, shame on you for having a broken VISA payment page on your website – DECLINED, I mean really?

Till next time.

SHERRY VINE! - Forbidden Love

WHAT THE F..! No wonder I am a bitch.

They say bad things happen in threes. Well, I am starting to believe I am not the exception to the rule but rather I am setting a new standard for it. In one day my week has been ruined, communications failed and I am for all practical reasons stranded. Being sleep deprived which admittedly causes me to be more bitchy and short tempered than usual, a culmination of events almost pushed me over the edge and turned me into quite the bitch. Let me explain…

About a month ago I was in a small accident resulting in minor damage to my BMW. Luckily having good insurance it was an inconvenience but not the end of the world. My car went in for repairs and lo-and-behold just as they were almost done they discovered that one of my shock absorbers was also damaged. Naturally we assumed it was due to the accident. The insurance company sent out one of their people who concluded it wasn’t. I complained, they sent out another person who came to the same conclusion as his predecessor. It was ruled the shock’s damage wasn’t accident related and they could not find any evidence of the damaged being caused by a pothole or the weal being hit by a curb. Luckily the car was just 16 months old and surely the shock absorber was still covered under the warranty and/or motor-plan so BMW would repair it under these conditions, right? Yesterday my car was sent to one of their workshops, it was examined and the technicians concluded that the damage would not be covered by BMW’s warranty or motor-plan.
I was informed of BMW’s decision late yesterday afternoon; I arrived home wanting to send them a further enquiry via e-mail. I switch on my computer and it didn’t want to work. A few phone calls later my computer was arranged to be taken in for an assessment and repairs. Frustrated I went to bed hoping that a new day would bring new solutions.

Waking up this morning preparing to go to work I had my whole day planned and was optimistic that all would be resolved. That was a mistake! Firstly, my day didn’t go as planned. We were supposed to continue with the cross examination of the state witness but this was preempted by the defense bringing a motion for the judge in the case to recuse himself. This was a shock! The implications being that we will loose a whole week and consequently prolong this tedious trial and if the motion is successful we would have to start the whole trial from scratch. This set the mood for the rest of the day.

The second blow came when I was informed that my computer had a virus and it was potentially lethal to all the data stored on it. The diagnoses were later confirmed and the probability of loosing all my data was estimated at 90%. Now I was left facing potentially having to start from scratch with a complicated trial, having a computer infected with a virus that could cause me to loose 90% of data (both personal and some work related) and I had no mode of transport.
Not being able to do much about the trial motion or my computer at that stage I focused on the only problem I could actually try to resolve – my car. Having already called BMW’s customer care line that yielded no results I decided to escalate my problem to BMW South Africa. Eventually getting hold of someone the issue was painstakingly explained and it was promised I would be provided with a suitable solution within an hour.

Two hours later not having heard anything I phoned back. I was informed that BMW would have to send out their regional manager to inspect my car and he would make a final recommendation. Finally, I thought, I was gaining some ground until he muttered the second part of his sentence. The regional manager would only be available next month. Almost hyperventilating at this point I asked the guy in the most restrained manner I could what other alternatives I had as waiting another month clearly is not an option. To my utter surprise and disgust he told me I could fetch my car from the panel beaters and use it until the regional manager was available. Thinking I heard him wrong I repeated “So you want me to fetch my car and drive around with it while it clearly has a mechanical fault?” He answered in the affirmative. Shocked I asked to speak to his manager, he answered that he was the manager, asked to speak to his immediate superior and was told she was in a meeting in Cape Town. Completely at a loss for words a short uncomfortable silence followed ending with me putting down the phone in his ear.

As I was typing my formal complaint about BMW this afternoon on my very slow and old computer (the computer that was replaced with the one currently infected with a virus) I receive a “courtesy” call from BMW’s customer care wanting to know whether I was satisfied with the service my car received at the branch it was taken and whether all repairs were done to my satisfaction. The first thing going through my mind was “What the fuck?!” As I was not responding due to disbelief she asked whether I was still on the line and I responded by saying “NO!” It slipped out and confused her. She asked me “No your not on the line or no your are not completely satisfied?” The stupidity of that question set my off on a 20 minute rant and by the end I had her repeat everything that I had said to make sure she had noted it correctly which took her a further 15 minutes. Now both our days were ruined.

So yes I had a shitty day. The court case has been frustrated, my brand new computer has a virus and my BMW is still broken. There are two more days left of this week. If I am not going survive it I am taking everybody around me with me to the loony bin.

Till next time.

Kathy Griffin - Everybody Can Suck It

Virtual Coma

Technology has made our lives much easier, but at the same time it can also be a pain in the derriere. Mobile phones allow us to be accessible 24 hours a day every day. GPS gives us direction without having to ask strangers. The internet has made the world smaller and obtuse people brighter. I believe we have unconsciously become so dependent on technology that many of us will not be able to live our lives without it. So when technology fails us it can be more of an ordeal than just a plain inconvenience.

Last week my home computer fell ill. She kept on rebooting herself. This has been strike 3 in spate of near catastrophic technical failures in my life the last few months (first was our DVD player that’s now departed and disposed off, and then it was the clutch of my car which is now repaired). With my expertise in social sciences and not in IT, my first thought was that my computer has been struck down by a virus. In my mind when ever something ominous happens to my computer it must be a virus. Luckily I have a number of friends in the IT industry and a couple of phone calls and a house call later the diagnoses was made - her power-supply was broken. In the mean time I was effectively isolated from the rest of the world: I had no E-mail, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Msn, Skype nothing. All my friends that live inside my computer was trapped there, I could not reach them and they could not reach me. A part of my existence was in a virtual coma.
Even though my real live went on as normal, being disconnected from a part of my virtual daily routine was disconcerting. Even more unsettling was the fact that I planned on fixing my computer myself, because I am stubborn and impatient. I have never attempted anything like this, and it was either going to be a success or I was going to cause irreparable damage. At work I did some basic research with the help of Google and mentally prepared myself for what I was about to attempt. I bought the power-supply and now I was ready to reconnect myself with the virtual world.

Opening up my computer can be equated to cracking someone’s chest for open heart surgery. Seeing all the exposed wires and the nerves of my pc was a frightening sight. With great care I started to remove the power supply. After I disconnected all the wires and the supply was completely detached from my pc, the awful reality of my basic error was sitting on the floor in front of me: I disconnected all the wires but did not pay attention to what I plugged and pulled out where. I panicked, if I plug in the wrong thing at the wrong place I suspected that Guy Fawkes would come early this year. So I made another call to my friend, who I was sure at this stage was getting annoyed with me. He said the cables and instillation of the power-supply was “idiot proof” and straight forward (it may be idiot proof but was it “Pierre proof”?). He asked me to explain what wires I see in front of me and with great effort and by making up a number of new words I described what I saw. His step-by-step guidance was appreciated and helpful.

Twenty minutes later I was confident that everything was plugged in correctly and I was now ready to revive my pc. With everything screwed back, plugged in and hooked up the moment of truth was imminent. I switched on my pc and with bated breath waited, listened and watched. With all my senses fixed on my pc box and monitor I am anticipating an apocalypse inside my computer. Three seconds and no flames or smoke is billowing out; eight seconds no explosion; thirty seconds and the once irksome trade mark jingle of windows confirmed that my pc was alive again. My computer was brought back from her hibernating coma and survived open heart surgery by an untrained and inexperienced technician. I was relieved, and swore to never do this again, not to myself or to my pc.

Being awakened from my virtual coma, after 4 days, my appreciation for technology has been renewed. We never know how much we rely on it and how much time we spent using it until some hardware malfunction reminds us. Without technology we would be back in the dark ages. So even though people sometimes call me when I’m in the loo, my GPS sometimes gets confused and lies to me, I frequently have to reboot my satellite television decoder and my pc sometimes break down, I am thank full to have it in my life and for the ability to accessorise my life with it.

Till next time.

Dustin Black's powerful speech after he won an Academy Award for writing "Milk."