Clive Simpkins

Jacob Zuma is a wily opportunist

This doesn't need to be a long post. The thought is simple. South Africa's President Jacob Zuma has called for a national discourse on morality. If ever there was audacity and blatant opportunism, this is it. His own Zulu cultural group have vilified him for serial affairs outside of the 'lust-protection' afforded by polygamy. They have publicly said that what he's done is not to be found within the Zulu cultural framework. 

Zuma, having been pilloried - now wants to get white South Africans in the main to be 'more sensitive' to 'cultural' issues. Even when your own people give it the lie? You are a fraud, sir! With or without your thuggish blue light brigade. 

You cannot and will not ever command respect among thinking people - which is why you wish to demand it. You are an embarrassment. 

What a travesty when the national discourse surrounding an about-to-be 68 year old is more about his penile predations than his political policies. 

Zuma has single-handedly made us a laughing stock. Nice legacy.

Discovery Health bad for your mental health

Discovery Health is bad for the mental health of members like me. They must employ a really smart team of people who conspire not to refund *whatever* they can avoid paying.

R 13 000 dentistry bill submitted, they think they're going to reimburse only R 1 200 of it. I don't think so. On pushing the issue, the claim from Cindy and then Haley (her supervisor) in their call centre is that the lab invoice (for just under R 4 000) is 'illegible'. Told Haley that's bullshit. It means that some sigmoid sphincter at Discovery scanned it into their system at an inappropriate resolution since I gave them the pristine *original*. Their e-mail address is a hoot. [email protected] Oxymoron of the week. They need serious help with their member communications.

Haley has until this afternoon to resolve the issue at their time, inconvenience and expense or I shall take this baby to the Ombudsman. I'm sick and tired of paying top dollar for a truly, *truly* crap service. Thumbs down to you Discovery Health. To use a Sefricanism – your non-service is that of slapgatte.

Obama gets swatted by PETA

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have done very good work over many years. Now they're in grave danger of giving even cosmetics-free, earnest-looking, earringed, pony-tailed bunny-huggers a bad name. They've taken President Barack Obama to task for (successfully - good for him!) swatting a fly during an interview with CNBC at the White House. The idiots are sending the Prez a 'humane' bug catcher (true) so he can in future (me being facetious) tell the interviewing anchor person to hold while he humanely traps said fly and then (their words) 'releases it outside'. I think this would embarrass even a Buddhist. And just when did a disease-carrying house fly become an 'animal'? Someone's clearly flunked entomology 101. If you needed any further evidence of incipient planet-wide insanity, look no further. Dear grief! Read the online story here or click on the article below to open in a new window.

Posted by Clive Simpkins

Noses-in-the-trough British Parliamentarians

It's easy (even though often for good reason) to get the idea that only African politicians are regularly involved in scams at the taxpayer's expense. But if you've been following the mind boggling tackiness of the scandal rocking the British Parliament, it makes our politicos look like amateurs in the fraudulent arts. Local SA media other than the Mail and Guardian seem only now to have woken up to the scale of the hullabaloo. Sky News TV (read here) have been on their cases from moment one.

Apart from regularly claiming concessions and rebates on 'second homes' (in one instance found to be a caravan), this jolly lot even have in their midst one Sir Peter Viggers, who claimed 1700 Quid for a floating island in his duck pond. (The man and the offending island pictured alongside). Read the story here. When busted he said the ducks didn't even 'like the island'. A new spin on mitigating circumstances?

In case you start contrasting their decisions to 'step down' with our politicos who continue to enjoy (a la the Travelgate scam artists) promotions to head of portfolio commmittees and the like - the Brits are only 'doing the honourable thing' because Tory Leader (for his party) David Cameron, has told them to do so or be fired.

As for our new SA Transport Minister S'bu Ndebele? No, he didn't do the honourable thing. He only offered to give the car'n cows combo back when the DA (ambulance chasers that they are) and the public squealed like stuck pigs. The man's story changed several times. If he had to go ask Jacob Zuma whether he should hand the vehicle back it tells us something's wrong with his own moral compass.

In the UK, members of the House of Lords were selling patronage just a few months ago. For hundreds of thousands of English Pounds. In their case, there's no mechanism for removing the greedy old sods from their hereditary peerages, or their seat. That's something that needs revisiting in short order in the UK. American Politicians (read here) haven't (even recently) done very well either.

The upshot of it all is that if you are (as politicians regretfully are) attracted to a position for reasons of power, status and money alone, your ingoing motive ensures your corrupt end. Welcome to the world inhabited by the guardians of our future. Not very nice people. But the voters put them there.

UPDATE 28th May 2009. Read here. Some more snouts barred from the trough. ;-)

Network Solutions continue their quintessential stupidity

See update 9th September at end of this post:

Received today: 16:20 from the idiots at Network non-Solutions. I can't resist the pun. I'm going to do more than picket Mr. Joseph…

 

Dear CLIVE,

Our records indicate that you recently contacted Network Solutions customer service and were assigned ticket number 1-359609832. We recently closed this ticket on 7-Sep-08 and would like love to get your feedback on how we answered your inquiry.

Network Solutions is fully committed to improving the service we provide to you. As part of our ongoing dedication to quality customer support, we are conducting a Customer Service Survey.

We want to know what you think! Your opinion is extremely valuable to us. The survey will take approximately 5-10 minutes to complete, and your input will provide us with insights into how we can improve our service to best meet your needs. The information from this survey will be reviewed and acted upon at every level of our company.

To access the survey, simply click here.

You may also access the survey by clicking on the link below. If the link is not highlighted, simply copy and paste the link into your web browser. http://www.insightexpress.com/s/Cust141771?&SR=1-359609832&CD=SELECT_DRIVER&date=7-Sep-08

Thank you for your business, and thank you for your feedback.

Sincerely,
Joseph Pickett
Vice President, Customer Service
Network Solutions
[email protected]

You have been randomly selected to participate in this brief online survey. Your responses are completely confidential, you will not be further contacted or solicited as a result of participating in this survey, and the information you provide in the survey will never be sold to a third party. 

There is a God. One Gerard Rosso, marvellous chap that he is, contacted me at 02:00 US time - yes, that hour of the morning, to say he'd sort this conundrum when he got into his office, his morning at 08:30. Good as his word, he was on the phone to me at 15:30 SA time today and did indeed get it sorted out.

Isn't it amazing the difference that one person can make when they take ownership and behave as if it's their own business? Gerry Rosso should be treasured by Network Solutions. People like him are an endangered species. It wasn't even his portfolio... Thank you, Sir! You're a credit to courtesy and customer care.

Network Solutions are a royal pain in the butt!

Onion of the week award goes to the intractable and obtuse Network Solutions, who happen to hold my domain name of clivesimpkins.com for me. I've been trying for over a month to migrate this to another service provider in South Africa, I discover:
1) If you want to register something with Network Solutions, they're on to it like a packet of crackers. Every one of their links is about you buying some service or facility from them- but absolutely zilch about being able to terminate with them.
2) So,if you want to LEAVE Network Solutions, they make it functionally impossible to contact them. Whether this is intentional or not, I don't know. But they've certainly ensured I'll never do business with them again.

The Network Solutions website is chronically impossible to get through to. Here's what you get all the time - literally. 'Gateway timeout'. But you also get a slew of automated and off-message e-mails in response to yours. Or instructions to phone them in the USA. Why would I want to do that for Pete's sake? I thought their business was on the Internet, not via the local Telecoms utility.

The Network Solutions website is also shockingly user-unfriendly, so although you should theoretically be able to 'divorce' them in cyberspace, they make sure you can't.

I've now managed to track down an obscure mail address for Network Solutions to which I've sent a blistering rant of a mail about their appalling customer dis-service. I sincerely hope it ruins someone at NS's day. They sure as heck deserve it. I now feel ever so slightly better.

I also have one more major reason than just George W. Bush for which to hold some Americans in total contempt. Unless you wish, consciously,to shorten your life expectancy, don't ever register a domain name with Network Solutions. Go wherever else you wish, but not, not, not, with Network Solutions.

The only worse service I've encountered on the web is from mweb. But then we all know that....

Whose life did you touch today?

I had a surreal conversation yesterday. Got caught at the same table as a 'Karate mom' with two pre-teens who attend private schools. She's a business professional, as is her husband.The kids have just spent a vacation week on a 'spirituality program' - something the mother says is 'very important' to her.

In the next few sentences though, she expressed her anger. Her domestic worker (been with her for years and years and 'is like a mother to me', quote unquote) had brought (without prior consultation) her one young daughter back to spend a little time in the domestic Kaia on the rich-bitch's property. The rage was all about, 'Does she realise it's another mouth for me to feed?' I looked at her intently, waiting for her to burst out laughing at her own joke. But it wasn't a joke. Here she is, with kids in expensive extramural pursuits, private schools, regular (according to her) overseas holidays, and the food consumption of one little African kid is resented. It beggars belief.

I said to her, 'You're a Hindu woman, aren't you?' Yes. I went on 'In your religion you're taught to feed the stranger because the stranger might be God.' She knew that. I said, 'Then maybe you'd better start looking at things differently.' You're right, she said. Dunno how much of the conversation will stick.

Just for the record, news articles in this last week indicate that more than half of South African children go to bed at night without enough food, or no food at all, in their tummies. What are you doing about it?

Tito's Tummy Tantrum

The way to handle your obesity is to do something about it. There's a limit to what pin or even chalk-stripe suits can do to create the illusion of a svelte girth. If you haven't got the sense-control and self-discipline to do something about your self-indulgent tongue and taste buds, then at least don't turn yourself into a figure of ridicule - a la our Governor of the Reserve Bank, Tito Mboweni (pictured).

He appears, from all accounts, to have developed a paranoia about photographers snapping him while he mops sweat from his fevered brow. (Could we call it a 'fiscal melt-down' one wonders?) Somewhat reminiscent of Shakespeare's Falstaff, whom the Bard depicted as, 'larding the earth', en route. This latest little tantrum, including asking an event organiser to 'protect' him from a photographer, is nothing short of absurd.

The desperate irony is that the business pages of the Times this morning ran a pic of our camera-shy Gov, taken as a screen shot off - yes, you guessed it - a wide-screen TV. How evil is that? ;-) He's now halfway to being a Zapiro caricature of even his usual plump self.

Get thee to a dietician Tito! And go for counselling about your vanity.

Standard Bank generates biased info

Standard Bank produces a cutsie 'business' ezine/e-newsletter with punny subtitles (see visual below) built around a cup of espresso.

This is bad enough. But it also gets into providing info on generators reconstructed from an article in Farmer's Weekly. It incorrectly defines a generator (they don't all run on diesel, dear Standard Bank) and instead of 'warns' it has an early copy typo in the article reading 'wards' (see below). You'd think that a megalith like Standard would have someone able to do decent proof-reading in their comms.

Why my beef? 1) Inaccurate info. 2) If I were (and I'm not) a Standard Bank client involved in any shape or form with importing generators or allied equipment, I'd be pretty pissed at their giving one firm a punt of this nature. Conspiracy theorists might just wonder if there's a familial reason for it. 3) If this is seriously intended as a business-to-business communication, it's going to be ignored by a lot of time-pressured, impatient people who want a concise, useful and usable snapshot of info. Go revisit the strategy folks and ratchet it up from Comms 101.

Entertainment-Online running a scam

[See updates at end of post] There's a new disease in South Africa. It's scam-artists like Entertainment Online using the names of speakers and others in such a way as if they represent us. When they don't, and they don't have a mandate to, either. SA Entertainment Online are not known to me, have no authority to use my name and do not represent me. They probably also don't represent many of the other people showcased on their website.

Their rank amateurism and opportunism is breath-taking. Here's the spurious, ungrammatical and unethical crap they have on their website.

Jacques de Villers points out in his comment on this Blog, that the idiots at Entertainment-Online even feature dead artistes! Sheiza. Brenda Fassie being one of 'em. Yet they keep the search engines finding the people meta-tagged on their site. Brenda's psuedo-representation by these opportunistic bastards is also right at the top of a Google search for her. See below. All of this ticks me off no end. I even have a rolling disclaimer on my website stating that I am not represented by bureaus, agents or any other form of parasitic life. These people just have no scruple.

UPDATE 1th March '08: You've just gotta love these people! They promise a real quick turn-around time getting back to you. But clearly not in response to complaints or protests!

UPDATE 12th March '08: Cowardly bastards don't have the cahunas or the manners to get in touch (they don't take phone calls remember?), but they must have removed the meta-tagging, as their crappy site no longer lists me. This bears taking as a complaint to the Consumer Ombud. It's the equivalent of the now illegal 'negative marketing'. i.e. You don't respond and you find your insurance premium has increased because of an add-on you didn't want, but which you didn't decline. Those days are gone. These Entertainment-Online amateur opportunists need to know that.