The Two Faces of the Internet
The Internet can be a wonderful thing. I’m constantly amazed by the doors it opens all over the world. I regularly shop in the US without having to leave home. Ummmm perhaps I should keep that quiet in case Customs and Excise see it.
I talk to people all over the world and I now have very good friends that I’ll probably never meet, but heck, you never know. I’m able to contact people and companies for info that I would never have known existed before the Internet became available to the unwashed masses.
Lives have been saved as people are able to access details of new medical procedures offered outside of their own country. Criminals have been caught when carelessly going about their craft in front of a web cam and a vigilant viewer has phoned up a distant Police Force to give them the cam address.
I can contact people at any hour of the day or night. Some of them I can even tell whether they’re awake or not. Of course the downside to that is, they can return the favour.
Other downsides? Mountains of spam. I get at least 200 items in junk mail every day in each of my mail accounts. I’m accused of having small male appendages that I need to enlarge, I’m offered the most amazing deals on designer sunglasses and the number of lotteries I’ve won beggars belief.
I can spend vast amounts of cash on complete dross that I would never have known existed. I can waste hours talking to complete strangers on the other side of the world about total rubbish and marvel at the complete lack of honesty and morals of some people we inhabit this planet with.
None of this would be possible without a massive communication infrastructure. We can hardly move these days for roads being dug up to lay yet another pile of cables. In India, they have a different solution to the problem as evidenced in the following pictures that arrived in my mail box this morning.
Just remember, the next time you need technical support and you dial the help line, that’s where it goes.
Joyce responds:
Posted: May 10th, 2008 at 10:05 pm →
That explains why I get some highly intelligent individual responding in a foreign accent (totally mystified but trying to remain sounding intelligent) as I spell Kyle over and over again…….no, it is in Scotland…….spell Kyle again? OK……Karachi yankee lima….no, no, no not Karachi in India - look, it’s ok really, I am quite happy not to have BT broadband…………..
Jaybee responds:
Posted: May 11th, 2008 at 1:56 am →
LOL. In the IT industry you get used to it. A large computer company who shall remain nameless, (but my other half used to work for them) outsourced their support to India. The staff were given a list of English names and told to choose one so that when the Western customers phoned up it would make them feel more at home. Unfortunately, the list didn’t distinguish between male and female names so my other half was somewhat perturbed when a deep male voice answered the call and announced his name was Shirley!
I’m just getting sick to death of talking to people whose English is so bad that I can’t understand a single word they say. There’s only so many times you can ask them to repeat it. Last week, one company called up and I couldn’t even get the company name, despite asking 4 times.