Y Safle

Virginia Tech LogoI have been wondering whether I should write anything about the tragedy at Virginia Tech. On the one hand, anything I say may sound like a crass attempt to join in a collective public grief - a response to the event simply because everyone else is responding.

On the other hand, I have relatives in Blacksburg (something I mentioned just the other day), and I have visited Tech - I even had an informal interview once for a post graduate position there. So what can I say to express my genuine concern and point readers here to something that they could do, and something they could take from this tragedy.

It turns out I don’t need to say anything, because The Family Room says it better than I could anyway.

There is a campaign afoot to make Wales the first fairtrade country. Fair trade products ensure that producers of the product are given a fair price for their product, rather than all of the profit being taken by middle men. It is a great scheme, although it is easily abused by middle men who also charge a premium on the product!

But we buy fair trade whenever we have the option. Despite these abuses of the scheme, and the fact that sometimes the administration of the scheme is not 100% perfect, it is simply more just that we ensure that producers in poorer nations are not exploited by a drive to lower prices in countries that can afford to pay a fraction more.

Here is a lint to the web site for the “Make Wales a Fair Trade Country” campaign. The campaign has a lot of support, including in the Welsh Assembly.

However, they could probably have chosen a better domain for a campaign about wales. The domain they are using is gwe.nu. Now .nu is the top level domain ID for the island of Niue. A little to the east of Tonga, this island is just about as far away from Wales that you can get!

The BBC carries an article about call centres returning to the UK. It seems that there has been a consumer backlash against outsourced support centres, with a mere 4% of those surveyed having had a positive experience of one of these.

Quite right too. I have cancelled all my contracts with BT over their abysmal customer service, exacerbated by hours on a call begging that a fault be escalated with them (and not with Microsoft as they stupidly suggested I do - see my letter to BT here for the gruesome details). These call centre staff are on a script, which perhaps works fine when the problem you have is something the script resolves. They are like Microsoft help. Sometimes it does help, but usually you go through trying suggestion after suggestion until you get “Microsoft help was unable to resolve this problem”.

And then, if you are lucky, they will finally escalate your fault. But don’t hold your breath - my experience is that they unstead just forget about you, and when you phone again, the cycle starts over again.

It is not just BT. Wanadoo, Tiscali, and various other companies have put me through this kind of telephone tennis. But we fool ourselves if we think the problem is resolved simply by bringing call centres back to the UK.

The problem is the whole concept of outsourced support and centres. Whether they are in Bombay or Birmingham makes little difference. If the call centre is not in a position to actually resolve your problem then they are just in the way.

Pipex Homecall has UK based customer support, but a look at Their gripe sites shows that people are not enamoured with their customer support either. The company seems to have a policy of deliberately preventing customers from speaking with people who can make real decisions, and the response is stories of people standing in the rain to get a mobile signal whilst they beg, scream and cry for the company to send an engineer to fix their fault!

So I am not holding my breath for great improvements in customer service. My best tip is to patronise smaller comapnies, where customers are important to the service providers. Small is beautiful, so they say.

There is a new search engine around that offers a human guide to help you with your search. The company is betting that revenue from the advertisements on the site will pay for these guides… I’m not convinced, but it must be worth a look.

Take a look at the ChaCha site. If you have a difficult search to make (and you are frustrated with all those Wikipedia links that keep obscuring the good stuff), then ChaCha may be the search engine for you.

For other stuff about search engines, look at my Really Useful Search Engines post.

It is trendy these days to wear fashion accessories with the letters WWJD written on them. The letters stand for “What Would Jesus Do”?

This question is a pertinent one. In any situation, we should ask, what would Jesus believe was the correct course of action? If we follow him, then we need to know what he would do, so that we too can do it.

But I would like to add some extra letters: DWRHAC - “Do we really have a clue”? Have we any idea what Jesus would do about the illegal and immoral detention of people in Guantanamo bay? Do we know what Christ would say about going to war to secure oil supplies in Iraq? Do we know what his view would be on the destruction of our environment? Do we know what he would say about mortgage debt? Social security? Health care? People using the asylum system to escape economic deprivation? The EU and U.S. trade rules and dumping of food that keep Africa poor so that we can stay rich?

How do we know what Jesus would say on an issue? Only by studying the message of the Bible and studying the situation. Even then there is often room for doubt, which is why Christians can disagree. We have the Holy Spirit as our guide and the Bible to teach us, but what would Jesus do about Guantanamo bay (where no doubt the prisoners are being tortured too)? I have no idea.

But one thing I know - he would not do nothing. It was not within him to turn his back on injustice, and that is the Christ I would follow.

Happy Christmas (English) Nadolig Llawen (Cymraeg/Welsh) Nadelik Lawen (Kernewek/Cornish and also Breton) Nollaig chridheil (Ghàidhlig/Gaelic) Glæd Cristes mæsse (Old English)

Bon nadal (Catalan) Polit nadal (Occitan) Geseende Kerfees (Afrikaans) Gledhilig jol (Faeroese) Kilisimasi Fiefia (Tongan)

Okay, you get the idea.

Wishing you a deeper knowledge of Him this Cristes mæsse.

We read yesterday:

BT hit by cheap offers in race to grab broadband customers. It seems that BT are upset that people offering free and cheap broadband are taking their market share, but I would suggest that if there is a problem with BT broadband numbers then the reasons might have more to do with the fact that this is a communications company that is entirely unable to communicate with its customers.

I sent this letter to BT 3 times and never once got so much as an acknowledgment of receipt from them. The letter itself was about their failure to communicate!

I predict more headlines like this one in the future.

Eminent scientists have had enough of political lobbyists trying to misrepresent the overwelming scientific consensus that man made emissions are causing global climate change. Fed up with media reporting (especially in the U.S.) that seems to think balance involves giving as much air time to pseudo scientific lobbyists as to the consensus they oppose, the Royal Society has taken the extraordinary and unprecedented step of writing a letter to Exxon who have been funding such groups:

Britain’s leading scientists have challenged the US oil company ExxonMobil to stop funding groups that attempt to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change. In an unprecedented step, the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific academy, has written to the oil giant to demand that the company withdraws support for dozens of groups that have “misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence”. The scientists also strongly criticise the company’s public statements on global warming, which they describe as “inaccurate and misleading”.

The Guardian - 20/9/06

There are shades of tobacco industry manipulation of science and attempts over many years to disrupt the scientific consensus over the dangers of tobacco.

The difference here is that whereas tobacco only kills the user (and those in frequent close proximity to the users), global warming could potentially wipe out billions - mostly those who have not benefited in any way from the generation of the emissions.

Let’s hope that Exxon listens (for once).