Clive Simpkins

mweb stuffs up server migration - big time!

[See new updates below] mweb Business,in its wisdom, decided to migrate a whole bunch of websites to a new server. In the process they 'lost' the pointer to my website, so when you try go to www.imbizo.com, you get this:

Trying to reach mweb business technical support is proving more difficult than getting an interview with the Pope. As I write this, I'm sitting on speaker-phone (thank God) in my office, being interminably regaled by a boring voice telling me all about mweb business and its (in their own opinion), bloody marvellous services. Including inviting me to go visit their website while I'm on hold, to see what they have on offer. Is that supposed to take my mind off the irritation of waiting forever to be helped, because they're (you guessed it), 'experiencing higher than usual call volumes". For which read: We're skimping on staff, so you can just wait.

Finally get answered, can't help, then get put through to Thate, who also can't help me. He promises to put the right person on the line, disappears and I'm back to the messages and awful musak. This time I'm told that my patience is appreciated. That helps. I immediately feel a whole lot better. Man, I could write a whole lot more Blogs if I called mweb Business more frequently!

Clearly, someone didn't fully think through the migration detail and like Microsoft, the customer is being used to de-bug the system. Not acceptable.

UPDATE: Gave up waiting after half an hour. Have called Koos Bekker, the Naspers CEO's PA. She's given me the number for Rudi Jansen who heads up mweb Business. Neither he nor his PA, Liesl, are available. I've left a message. I'll keep you posted. A luta continua!

UPDATE 2: Liesl has called back and is referring the issue to the GM of mweb Business JHB region. Why does it always take this sort of freakin' Cecil B de Mille production to get an issue sorted in South Africa I wonder? I'll update you as the saga progresses.

UPDATE 3: Hours and hours later and the site is still MIA - Missing In Action. mweb Business' lack of professionalism is reaching a new low. Still waitin' people...

UPDATE 4: No notification or communication from anyone at mweb Business. I looked for my site (18:20) and a whole freakin' day later, it's back. What abysmal dis-service.  Biiiiiig vote of no-confidence in mweb Business.

UPDATE 5: 26th February. Weeks after the cursed 'migration' by these unremittingly uncaring people at mweb Business, there's still no cache of my website, and I can't access visitor stats. In typical large corporate South African fashion, mweb Business appears not to give a tinker's cuss about the perceived 'small' customer. I bet they're jumping like hell with the larger corporate accounts, though....

UPDATE 6: 28th February. Wow! Just because you write about mweb Business' crappy service they suddenly wake up. Got a call today from customer service executive Genevieve Mattheus. Apologising for my experience. I told her nary a person from the upper echelons of mweb Business had bothered to get back to report on what they heck they were doing. Got all the usual 'that's unacceptable' noises from her. Sick-making. Why don't they just get off their lazy butts and do some client-service training? Yuck! The mweb Business ad caption is 'Achieve the extraordinary.' They've managed that alright. Just at the wrong end of the bloody service continuum.

UPDATE 7: 29th Feb '08. Guess what? Today we have statistics back, but in mweb Business' benighted incompetence, they've lost all previous stats. That's kinda unhelpful I'd say. I think they should be nominated for the Ignoble Awards this year for unprecedented incompetence and a don't give a shit attitude to clients.

UPDATE 8: 4th March '08. Got a call from mweb's Mario yesterday. To tell me he's the techie involved in re-constructing my stats from 'inception in 2006'. I pointed out that in fact mweb have hosted my site since January 2000! Every time they call they dig an even bigger hole. If the inertia factor and accompanying (guaranteed) screw-ups were not such a factor, I'd change ISPs now. As I said before....

UPDATE 9: 6th March '08. Three pointers - all to my one website. Now mweb business have contrived to ensure that if we make changes to my website, their caches aren't cleared or updated, or their mirror servers simply don't pick up the changes. Is there no end to the incompetence that these people can hatch?

If you value your sanity and your business,

DON'T USE THESE PEOPLE AS YOUR INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER (ISP).

Huh?

OK. Other than sneaking up the slipway at a yacht marina, in full scuba gear, to give the folk there a once-off fright, what on earth would anyone want with an underwater car? One in which you have to wear scuba gear, as it happens. Isn't this technology and time wasted on ludicrous frivolity? Or was it just to satisfy scientific ego, one wonders? You may have seen the TV 'launch' of it.....Dear God....

SAA shows how NOT to respond to a complaint

Sitting in my PE guesthouse getting my ducks in a row for a coaching program tomorrow. So no scanner. But here's the text of a letter in the Feb edition of SAA's Sawubona inflight magazine. I'll drop the original article in when I'm back next week.

Now (11th Feb '08) added below the text version.

From the complainant..
"This is getting too much. Every time I travel to Lusaka the lunch served is horrible. On 17 November last year on SA63 from Lusaka the lunch was shamefully ridiculous. Something called couscous? With cold ham and a tomato, and a bread roll that was not fresh (very hard). First of all, half the people did not know what couscous is (very foreign to Southern African meals). Why not just give passengers a sandwich if SAA cannot afford to give us decent meals?

"This is my second complaint about meals on this route; should one revert to the press to get some response? I am tempted to take this to the media in both Zambia and South Africa.

"No one has bothered to respond to my fist complaint. One wonders if the food served is deliberate because the route is an African one? Food for thought!"
- Agnes Phiri

Here's the SAA reply:
"Our menu on this route changes every week to offer variety. Our caterer has put measures in place to address all quality issues. Couscous is a staple food throughout North Africa and part of the cuisine in neighbouring African countries and elsewhere. One of its attractions is that, unlike pasta or leavened bread, it is a light and elegant grain food. As the leading carrier on the continent, our African routes are our stars and we would like to thank our customers travelling on these routes and assure them that we greatly appreciate and value their continued custom."

So SAA's embedded message was, "Hey Philistine! You don't know what couscous is? Tough. Right, now that's out of the way, let's do a little plug to our loyal and uncomplaining customers who DO like our couscous."

If this wasn't so tragic, it would be funny. I thought SAA PR was truly crap in the days of Felicia Mabuza-Unsubtle, but this is an Ig-Nobel award-winning response. If Agnes Phiri thinks she has it bad, she should try being a vegetarian on this same airline. I swear they've done more damage to my digestive tract than any other single element in my long life.
imbizo.com

Citizen Newspaper Classifieds an outrage

The Citizen newspaper has long [whether by design or default] positioned itself as a bastion of morality and preservation of the norms and mores of the conservative. If you check out the readers letters, you'll understand that they're written in the main, by God-fearing (literally), narrow-minded, social, ethnic and religious bigots. Yet this newspaper has carried and continues to carry, appalling ads in their classifieds section.

I don't give a fig for the penis-enlargement, get your lover back in two hours, hex your boss-type stuff, of which there is an absolute raft. But in the face of the exposé on the appalling back-street abortion clinics in the media a short while back, the Citizen continues to run ads for these ghastly establishments.

Surely, as a media owner, you have a moral and ethical responsibility to vet the content of the ads you run? Or is it all about the money? Reducing you to being, what is called in the industry, a 'media-slut'?

Zumanomics 101 and the Econojive

Please read the first two paragraphs and then scroll down...

In a seminal interview during the Polokwane Era, Jacob Zuma said something like, "I know nothing about economics, except the economics of Nkandla (his home village in rural KwaZulu-Natal). In Nkandla economics, if you see a man starving, you give him food to eat." Fair enough. But if by your own admission, you know sweet fanny adams about economics, Jacob dear, why didn't you just sit at the WEF junket in Davos and listen? You almost made it.

Reporters indicated that you were avoiding talk on matters pertaining to filthy lucre. Hopefully not just because Schabir wasn't there to advise you. Now you go blabbing to their local varsity and put yourself in the league of liars with the 'blame the unexpected growth' cop-out, alongside your nemesis Little-Foot Mbeki and She Who Replaced You, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. Sigh. Ever hear the adage, 'Silence is golden'?

No doubt Msholozi will just use his unique Econojive to shimmy his way around any future economic tight spots.
Imbizo.com

Smart Alec Erwin's foot in his mouth yet again!

I've just heard the infamous 'Koeberg bolt' in-the-brain Minister, smart- Alec Erwin quoted on radio as saying that the present power outages 'Won't affect the economy'. Can he then explain the headline in the Media24 extract below?

In the time of George Bush Senior, (that's Dubya's daddy) the term 'Voodoo Economics' was flung around. Erwin is proving himself to be even more incomprehensibly stoopid and incompetent than I thought possible. What was he smoking on his holiday? His socks? 

Just as well Jacob Zuma and cohorts have gotten rid of him from the ANC NEC. Now get rid of this jackass of a Minister - period!

As a part of his retirement golden handshake, sponsor a course in simple economics while you're about it, Msholozi....
Imbizo.com

Eskom's communications failure

Update 21st Jan '08. Go read the vintage Jon Qwelane column on the topic.

We're all into the foretaste of the powerless hell to come for the next decade. Courtesy of Thabo Mbeki's inability or unwillingness to listen when Eskom told his government that major forward planning, capex and construction was needed to meet the evolving power demand of South Africa.

The growth targets set by government cannot and will not be achieved without a regular supply of electricity. The lack of productivity, vehicle and generator fuel-wastage and overall national disruption being caused by the power cuts must be astronomical. Not to mention the carbon-footprint knock-on of the added congestion.

One tiny accounting firm of my acquaintance costs their losses at R 50 000 per hour when the power goes down. They simply can't afford at this point, the money required for a generator to keep their building going. I'm told that really big generators and the re-wiring required, can cost hundreds of millions of rands in, for example, a shopping mall.

My IT man lent me a generator last year when we sat for several days without power due to the aging JHB cable infrastructure. It gave us power, but the cost in fuel was breath-taking and the noise was fit to raise the dead. So even assuming that you have the money for a generator, what are your neighbours going to say about the resulting commotion?

Eskom (OK, it's NOT their fault that we sit with this situation) need to get their comms jacked up. One of their executives was explaining on radio that if you go to their website you can check when there'll be power outages in your area. [Gizmo in picture on left]. However, not quite true, for one simple reason. The head of City Power (I call them Johannesburg Disconnect) said that they sometimes have just thirty seconds in which to make a decision to shut down power to a particular area, before the whole grid goes down, if they don't.

So NOBODY knows when a squillion of us are going to put on our airconditioners or kettles all at the same time. Capish? But the Eskom website falls particularly flat on its pixels because:
1) There's a schedule for Monday, Wednesday and Friday cuts.
2) There's another schedule for the other days.
3) There's a stage 1, Stage 2 and Stage 3 consumption pattern on which the cuts depend. I'm terrible at math, but that's too many permutations, not including the uncontrollable variable of us switching on power-hungry appliances all at the same time - which nobody can predict. And although we know we householders are only responsible for about 6% of the total power demand, we're picking up the tab for heavy industry's guzzling of the increasingly scarce resource. So, the Eskom site is practically useless as a prediction mechanism.

Yesterday, for example, I spent my entire day caught in the most horrendous traffic jams courtesy of power cuts. You now have to leave hours before a meeting and sit in a coffee shop working on your notebook computer in order to be in the 'hood' of your next assignment. Crazy.

I may also now have to alter the Terms and Conditions of my consulting, to include a power-cut related disclaimer. I was working in Centurion earlier this week, doing media skills coaching. My thought was: 'What if the power goes down in the middle of our interview sessions? The camera can continue running on batteries, but nothing else will and we won't be able to do playbacks. Whose problem is that? Assume that this happens several times a month and the expectation is that I 'make-good' the disrupted session, I could land up doing more 'make-ups' (no no longer chargeable) than original work.' It's a scenario from Hades.

The terrifying thought is that each year, as urbanisation (just take Cosmo City as one example) accelerates and office complexes proliferate and infrastructural demand grows, the paucity of electrical power is going to have an increasingly negative knock-on effect. I believe this is something that should be declared a national emergency. Even the Public Protector, Lawrence Mushwana is now demanding some clarity. Go read The Times article on the topic.

When l lived and worked in the USA, there were bus-size generators brought into specific areas to provide power when there were problems. These are so big they can feed power back into the national grid. Why doesn't government consider an interim measure like that? And in the meantime, Eskom or JHB Disconnect, how about SMSs to notify us of impending outages or the duration thereof? In our modern world of comms, that shouldn't be too difficult or costly.
Clive Simpkins

Pervez Musharraf suffering from foot-in-mouth disease

Talk about insensitivity and poorly-crafted utterances. This, from Pervez Musharraf, must take the cake. True? Possibly. Appropriate to say? No. Inflammatory? Very.

"For standing up outside the car, I think it was she [the late Benazir Bhutto, slain Pakistani Opposition party leader] to blame alone. Nobody else. Responsibility is hers," he told CBS television in a broadcast on Sunday, in a partial transcript of the interview.

United States permits electric shock treatment for wayward kids

If you needed any proof beyond the consistent idiocy of George W. Bush, that the USA has totally lost the plot, this is it. Go read the New York Times article on the topic. I checked the date quickly, in case it was April the 1st. It isn't. It's Christmas day. They should change the lyrics from 'God Bless America' to 'God save America.'

Someone in their notoriously litigious society should take this up as a Human Rights or Constitutional issue. Shades of Belsen-Buchenwald or Auschwitz here.

N3 - highway to Hell

I had occasion - albeit a rare one - to drive to Durban a week ago. I expected that the N3 tollroad would be a breeze. It was the opposite. The excessive number of construction/repair projects on the route going down, had me asking myself why I didn't count 'em.

I came back the day my fairy godmother clearly had a bad-hair day. The Van Reenen's Pass was closed the entire day because two trucks had an altercation. My IT guru phoned me bright'n early to alert me and I drove the old route from Estcourt via the Sterkfontein Dam and Oliviershoek Pass. Beautiful from a scenic perspective, but with pot-holes designed to swallow buses, and of course, we were down to 40 k.p.h. because all the mega-trucks had been routed on to it. No shoulder, narrow road, one lane, and no possibility of overtaking. Even the Shongololos could cross the road in safety!

I did count the number of major construction projects reducing the N3 to one lane in my particular direction on the way back. Ten of them. That excluded whatever was between Estcourt and Harrismith, where I was finally able to rejoin the freeway. The black comedy continued there as well, as there was a major construction project going on at the entrance to Harrismith and you went through yet another ghastly deviation just to get through the town.

All this speaks to one simple fact: Road construction/repair planning of any sort has gone out of the window. There were no lane marker lines for kilometer after kilometre and most crucial of all - no cats-eyes in high mist areas. The blurry pic (taken at 120 k.p.h.) was of one of the few warnings about no road markings. So the accident rate this year will be courtesy of Jeff Radebe, the Minister of Road Chaos and his shambolic Transport department. Why on earth could all this work not have been done to ensure clear, construction-free roads for the major year-end holiday season? Lord alone knows...

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