Increasingly, it’s not only government that treats people with contempt but business as well. This is a sure sign of corruption at least at a psychological level, given that the priorities of business are increasingly purely profit motivated rather than service motivated with the expectation of reasonable profit in mind. That means they have the cart well before the horse. News organizations, telcos, power companies, fuel companies and game companies and even food companies are treating the average consumer as if they don’t matter.

No doubt we all experience these things and it can be difficult to gauge exactly how widespread the problem is but the frequency of our own experience can tell us a lot so I’ll give you a brief rundown on my own recent experiences.

My Telstra mobile stopped working last week and I soon found that my neighbour’s had stopped working too. After a day or so out, I did their search for outages in my area and according to that, there were none. I couldn’t call them so I was left with the online option, which is a chatbot that can lead to a real person but it wasn’t easy to find or use. After at least an hour of fiddling around I got onto a real person and they told me there were no outages in my area. After at least an hour on the chat, I convinced them that it wasn’t a problem with my phone. Another three hours later, after numerous reports back from me about what was happening on my end, they got it working. Yes, there was a fault with the Adaminaby tower. So, I expressed my disappointment that their own lack of knowledge about the state of their own equipment had cost me five hours of my time and at least several days without service. They offered me a $30 recharge, which I refused. I made a complaint and after more time on the phone this lovely foreign lady, to the music of her cock crowing in the background no doubt somewhere in the Philippines, refused to give me 6 months of recharge worth $150.

I went to the Telecommunications Ombudsman website and spent half an hour filing a complaint only to have it lost due to a system error. Yes, always draft your text in a word file that you copy into the form! Two days later they wanted more information when they already had said information and would close the case if I did not respond.

So yes, Telstra wants us to do their work for them at a rate of around $5 per hour with no compensation for the actual unplanned outage.

News organizations next. I won’t say anything about the pretentious woke service the ABC offer now, wasting their listeners’ time with their self-promoting ads and outright lies about vaccines and the like. I won’t talk about their ignorance of the really interesting news, their virtual illiteracy and the frequent technical glitches and time off air. The real news of the moment is that Fox News allegedly sacked Tucker Carlson because Pfizer didn’t like what he was saying. Need I say more? We’re having our news controlled by pharmaceutical companies some of whom have lied to the public over the safety of vaccines and deleted people from clinical trials if they had any bad reactions to them?

While misinformation is being spread by our traditional news outlets, the government is pouring a couple of million a year into funding their online anti-misinformation and disinformation office but you can be sure they won’t be policing the legacy media.

With all the problems hanging around our necks, it’s no wonder that some of us want to chill out a bit and get into a bit of game playing online. Personally, I push back the cloud by motor racing online in multiplayer mode. For years there was only really Gran Tourismo, which had some really strange handling characteristics and still does but then along came things like Forza and Grid, which had much improved handling dynamics or physics.

Grid was a great — a revolution in simulated driving but then Electronic Arts bought out Code Masters who made Grid and the new game was so buggy and annoying that it was barely playable. They deleted the race leader boards so no one knew who the top dogs were anymore, they introduced a totally stupid penalty system and a system of upgrading the power on the cars that took weeks to go through. Then, even when you had upgrades, if the pathetic servers dumped you out of the race, which they very often did, you came back in with a car that was no longer upgraded so that you had no chance at all of winning! Also, the game often lies to people about what happens on the racetrack, crashing you into someone on their screen when nothing like that happened on yours. It looks like these people are deliberately trying to annoy the people who play their games and promotes distrust between people, if not drive them crazy. Trouble is, there’s no other racing game with decent handling dynamics so despite all that, the enthusiast wants to keep playing it.

On top of that, the much vaunted long awaited Playstation 5 had hardly any new games to take advantage of the supposedly revolutionary new technology and it was unreliable. The controller batteries were weak and the directional controls prone to sudden stalls or errors, at least with Grid. The main unit seemed reliable but then after a couple of years, the blue ray drive failed on mine and reputedly they’re integral with the mother board and can’t be replaced! Who would do that? Apparently this is a common problem and Sony realizes they’ve tripped up on this because it’s said that the new Pro version will have a plug in external blue ray drive. But really, were they thinking of the consumer when they built a machine with a critical component that couldn’t practically be replaced?

The list goes on, as you all know, and what I’ve talked about today are probably the least of our worries but I just wanted to point out the worrying trend that industry, business and even small businesses like restaurants and cafes seem to be forgetting they owe their existence and wealth to their customers. They need to relearn the old adage that ‘the customer is always right’.

Just to finish on, when I was living on the south coast, someone bought the local pizza shop, which had been good, and soon the pizzas deteriorated. The cheese didn’t taste right and if there’s one thing you need to get right on pizza’s it’s the cheese. I talked to the owner and they admitted that they were using a mozzarella cheddar blend. I asked them to go back to pure mozzarella and they got really shirty. They told me that they knew what people liked and would not change. They didn’t and within three months, they had gone broke.

Similar thing happened recently with a local Thai restaurant and a Vietnamese cafe who were clearly not interested in the opinion or the health of their customers. They might not go broke but they certainly have lost business. It’s all usually pretty obvious but somehow people get hung up on their own take on things.