On Tuesday 11th of March I moved homes 2 or 3 streets away from my old property. You’d think such a short move would mean no problems in the process of moving. You’d be wrong.The week before we moved we contacted the normal companies to notify them of the move; gas, water, electricity. satellite television, internet, phone etc. The one company with a rotten reputation when it comes to customer service is our satellite television provider Foxtel. They are known for having scrappy customer service and late or even absent installers. In under a week from our phone call an installer came and installed two IQ boxes which are quite complicated to install (due to the required installtion of two phone outlets for the boxes and a two way cable system) and a new satellite dish.
A courteous operator and installer later we had satellite on, all in under a week! However DSL internet was a totally different story. Our ISP and Phone Company is Primus (operates as iPrimus for the DSL). A large Telephony company in Australia.
We called the same time as we did the other companies, we were told the day we moved in (the Friday) the phone would be on. Well it wasn’t - not until the following Tuesday due to the Labour Day holiday. We then were told the internet would take 5 working days, so instead of being from the Friday it was starting from that Tuesday. 5 days later - no net. We called, after waiting on hold we got onto a foreign operator who for the life of us we could not understand a word she said. She attempted to assist us and told us it would be delayed.
More calls preceded this original call, including ones involving rude operators, ones you cannot understand and ones with no idea. We continued to try and get the problems resolved and it came to ahead a few weeks later when we finally got a answer “The phone line is not yours”. Apparently according to them the previous tenant had not yet disconnected the line and the Exchange could not transfer the DSL until we “owned” the line (despite our phone number being the one working at the property - figure that one out). So we had to wait until the 25th of March - that’s right three weeks after we were supposed to get DSL connected.
For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.