The Failure of the Metaverse

The fact that the Metaverse failed should surprise no one. It was ugly, it was silly, and it had very little purpose. As this article from Business Insider aptly states, the Metaverse “promised to allow users to hang out awkwardly in a disorientating video-game-like world” and has now been completely abandoned by everyone, “It was three years old.”

But who wouldn’t want to hang out here with our your legless colleagues?

The Insider article goes on to say that the Metaverse, as a concept, was a descendant of 1982’s Tron and the 2003 video game Second Life and while that’s not wrong, per se, it’s not doing the whole idea of a virtual universe any amount of justice. Although it is right in that it did look like a game from 2003, mixed with a heavy dose of the Miiverse from Nintendo. All with the wonderful joy of…NFT galleries.

The idea of a virtual reality that people spend most of their time living and working in isn’t new, it’s been a hallmark of science fiction and cyberpunk books, games and movies for most of the 20th and 21st Century. From William Gibson’s Neuromancer to The Matrix, from Hackers to Ready Player One, the idea of a virtual universe to live in has fascinated us for a long time and been something we’ve desired. Whether that’s because we want to escape the real world – a lot of these universes have a dystopian element where the online world becomes a haven especially compared to the outside world – or because it’s simply easier to do things online (as we’re all finding in reality), the idea of an immersive online life has been something we’ve been striving for in one way or another.

We just didn’t strive for it to look like this.

It isn’t farfetched to think – as Zuckerberg did – that something like the Metaverse would be “the future of the internet” or that it could “contribute $760bn to the US GDP by 2035″. The timing and technology was just off. There’s no way, with where the tech is now, that the 2035 estimated date was ever going to be accurate. The Metaverse, in the form it launched in, couldn’t surpass a Zoom meeting. Why look at ugly, blocky versions of our family, friends and coworkers in a world that looks like a bad video game, when we could just hop on our webcams? We could share screens if we need to do presentations, etc. The world wasn’t immersive enough. It didn’t feel like it added anything. And, on top of that, you had to buy an expensive VR headset to be able to participate, which not a lot of people did nor had the inclination to do.

I don’t think Zuckerberg was dumb for wanted to try to make the virtual world real. A recently published and well-reviewed book by Grace Chan, Every Version of You, even adds to the canon of stories exploring a future with a fully immersive virtual world, this time called Gaia. We’re clearly still interested in the idea of an online world where we live, work, frolic and thrive with our fellow humans, the only limitations to such a world being the edges of human creativity. The problem is, I think Zuck was dumb to try and make it the standard operating procedure of existence now. The tech is nowhere near good enough. VR headsets still make a lot of people nauseous. You can’t touch, feel, taste or experience the virtual world. All you could really hear in it were your friend’s microphones and some preloaded sound effects. It was just a stale environment that you could pop into but not inhabit.

It’s unlikely that tech companies will ever stop trying to make something like Gaia or Tron or the Metaverse happen. That’s a road we’re bound to go down as technology improves. We just have to stop trying to sell it before it’s ready. The earliest adopters of the Metaverse were companies like Walmart and Disney, trying to get in there to sell you something. They were selling real estate in the Metaverse for goodness sake. Like NFTs, it was all a quick cash grab and bound to fail because the tech isn’t there yet. You can’t buy real estate or shop in a virtual Walmart in a universe that looks like a video game from 2003, one you can’t really do anything in.

The next iteration – whenever it comes – might be better. Maybe it’ll even last longer than three years. But it probably still won’t be right, either. It’ll just be another fad – like 3D movies and VR video games before it – until our tools catch up with our ambitions.

Zay gezunt.

Notes from Post-Production

I work in post-production in television – mostly editing and edit assisting – and here are some things that I think it’s important for the people who work alongside folks in this industry to know.

• if you are a producer, I am begging you to take a short course on how the editing software of choice on the TV show you’re working on functions. It’s embarrassing that at this stage there are still so many of you who do not know what the terminology is for the programs in question. Still so many of you who cannot export or import your settings. Too many of you who don’t understand the process of ingesting footage.
  
• if you are a production manager, please know that your job is much more than simply making spreadsheets and timetables. There’s a lot of things you’re supposed to be doing that are not meant to be palmed off to me, the edit assistant, just because you’ve only been taught how to delegate. Contacting close captioning agencies? Your job. Dealing with the transcribers and/or transcribing software? Your job. Dealing with archive pricing and budgeting? Your job. There’s plenty of examples, and lots of assists won’t say anything and will just do it, but it’s not right. They’re already overloaded with requests from producers and editors.
  
• stop telling the assist that your request is urgent. Unless it needs to be out the door in an export in ten minutes, it’s not urgent. Let me let you in on a little secret: every single request we get is marked as urgent by whoever issued it. It’s not possible for them all to be deathly urgent! Odds are pretty good your request can wait up to and including a number of hours. You might feel inconvenienced, but that’s better than slamming an already overloaded assist and forcing them into a choice between cancelling an important export or transcode, and simply letting their request pile grow ever-larger.
  
• get better at scheduling. I know every single show has its delays and issues, however most shows don’t seem to have buffer weeks built into the schedule. This is a problem! We need to stop under-cutting ourselves and creating more realistic timelines for how long shows are going to take to make, without creating crunch for everyone. It’s only TV! We’re not saving lives. No one needs to be endlessly stressed by contract after contract of crunch just because Channel X wants their mini-documentary series about truckers in rehab to be delivered a few weeks earlier.

I’m sure there’s plenty more, but these are the ones that are currently stuck in my craw.

Zey gezunt.

An Open Letter to “End Remote Work” Bosses

Why do you hate us?

Why do you actively want to make the lives of your employees worse?

You’re trying to make these decisions – decisions that will cause people to leave your company – without understanding the actual motivations of the people who work for you.

We don’t want to work from home because we’re “lazy” or “entitled”, it’s because our lives are made better by its possibility. Being forced into a dystopian open-plan office space – no matter how cool or hip you think it is – doesn’t make anyone feel good. And if the reason you want to force people to be there is because you “have to be there”; no you don’t! You can also work from home. No one will judge you.

The commute alone is uncompensated time where we are actively wasting some of our precious time on Earth travelling to a job where they clearly don’t care about us. That time would be better used in sleep or eating or meditating or logging onto your remote machine earlier! Some people enjoy the commute – turn it into reading time or drawing time or answering emails time – and that’s fine! Let them go into work. Just don’t force the rest of us.

Some people travel over an hour and a half one way – that’s three hours per day – to get to work. So, what time exactly do they have for themselves? And their partners? And their children? And their friends? Wasting that three hours a day is soul-crushing because it need not be wasted.

Our internet connections are good now. Remote work is entirely possible for many jobs 24/7. For a great number of us, there is no reason to ever see the inside of an office barring the off chance that something is physically required to be done. And even then, if it’s something as simple as plugging in a hard drive or restarting a computer, then someone who’s already there can do that for us. It takes no time.

You talk about how “office culture” is so important. To you, maybe, but not to us. We’d rather a place with zero office culture that permitted work from home than a place with incredible culture that forced us to commute to an office each day. Hands down, any time.

And by the way? Most of those meetings you seem to love? They can be emails. Or a phone call. They’re often completely pointless for about 90% of the people in attendance. If you want to tell us what’s going on so badly, email us. If you want to find out what’s happening, email us, or even call us.

The joke about most Millennials being to anxious to handle phone calls? Yeah, remote working changed that for many of us. I’ve spent more time talking to some of my coworkers since working from home than I did when I was in the office because phone calls get people chatty.

So, dear capitalists who want to badly to oversee your drones at desks because [reasons], I tell you; stop it. You are actively making your workers hate and resent you by forcing them into non-remote positions. We’ll just leave.

Zey gezunt.

“The Midnight Club” Represents Everything Wrong With the “Flanaverse”

The Haunting of Hill House. The Haunting of Bly Manor. Midnight Mass. The Midnight Club. What do all these shows have in common? They’re all part of a shared universe – the so-called “Flanaverse” – named after the the shows’ creator, Mike Flanagan. The “Flanaverse” collection of shows are an anthology of apparently interconnected limited series on Netflix. The universes re-uses a lot of the same actors in between them – similar to Ryan Murphy’s anthology series American Horror Story – including Zach Gilford, Rahul Kohli, Henry Thomas, Kate Siegel, Victoria Pedretti, and Samantha Sloyan.

Flanagan hit it big with his first outing, The Haunting of Hill House, and with good reason; the script was tight, the direction was great, and the horror was front-and-centre. The fact that it was based on the work of the excellent Shirley Jackson – if you like horror and haven’t read her, you must – did a lot of favours to the series.

The second series, Bly Manor, continued the trend, although began to hit some bumpy roads. Based on the work of Henry James, it had some pretty great episodes – the most notable ones being direct by Yolande Ramke – but the writing tended to falter as it was more cobbled together from the bibliography of Henry James, rather than any one particular story. It had elements of gothic horror and romance, which is a fine combo, but the writing occasionally meandered into too much monologuing and what I like to call “contrived drama”, which is drama that feels unnatural to the story and only creates conflict to push along a struggling episode.

Midnight Mass started very strong with some great episodes, supported by solid ideas. It was also Flanagan’s first foray into wholly original material. It also really showcased the standout performance of Hamish Linklater as Father Paul Hill. But while it started strong, it really fizzled in the latter half of it’s 7 episode run, giving into what felt like Flanagan’s worst instincts to make the show about two characters monologuing at each other in slow, zooming shots. The monologues felt endless, and often repeated the same ideas over and over and, just when you felt they were finished, there were another three or four lines to go. It really broke the pace of what, ostensibly, was building up to a huge and chaotic finale.

The Midnight Club appears to mostly be made up of the aforementioned bad instincts. Based on the books of Christopher Pike, Flanagan is returning to working from existing source material. I want to say upfront that this show has some excellent performances, notably Samantha Sloyan as Shasta, Sauriyan Sapkota as Amesh, and Ruth Codd as Anya. It felt like these folks specifically did an amazing job with what amounted to pretty poor dialogue all round and would have – and did – sounded bad coming from an actor making safer or less interesting choices. I also felt that Adia – who played Cheri – developed well over the series, where she initially wasn’t given much to work with, but had more to do and say nearer the end.

Unfortunately, that’s more or less where my praise stops. Similar to my critique of Assassin’s Creed, The Midnight Club‘s “stories within the story” are much better than the overarching blanket story. The story of the series revolves around a group of terminally ill teens who all live in a palliative care home together, like a really grim sleepover, until they die. These people, rather than living with their families, live in an old house seemingly run by a single doctor (Heather Lagenkamp), a single nurse (Zach Gilford), and an unseen night nurse. Oh, and a very intense janitor/groundskeeper who loves quotes and pillows (Robert Longstreet). These kids gather every midnight in the library to tell each other stories – which vary in genre from horror to sci-fi to noir – in order to pass the time. They call this activity The Midnight Club (duh). The house they’re staying in is also ostensibly haunted, and there’s some cult stuff, too.

The dialogue is, in a word, bad. Exchanges between characters last too long and generally seem to be repetitious. It felt like the writers couldn’t decided on a single version of a line and instead chose to include every version they’d written of that line in a misunderstanding of the idea in songwriting that “repetition breeds legitimacy”. This isn’t to say that there weren’t some genuinely good lines, there were! And they were often delivered with gusto. But most of the actors had trouble delivering what amounted to bad lines with any sense of sincerity.

Another big issue is not knowing when to wrap up a story. This is an overly American problem (gotta squeeze every dollar out of your property!) and often means that a good portion of any series can feel like filler. The issue here, as I later found out with some savvy Googling, is that unlike literally everything else in the “Flanaverse”, this particular series is not a limited series. The intent is to go for multiple seasons. This was extremely confusing as, when I reached episode 10 – the finale – I was expecting the show to wrap itself up, but instead there were not only a slew of unanswered questions, but it essentially ended on a cliffhanger (sort of). It doesn’t feel like a show that needs multiple seasons, and it stands out as being one of the worst in this shared universe, despite the strength of the actors and of some of the “stories within a story”.

All in all, it feels like Flanagan hit it big with one series and has been trying to recreate that success ever since, with less and less restraint from the people around him. Obviously, this isn’t ideal for a lot of creatives, especially when their instincts lend themselves to repetitious dialogue, monologues and contrived drama.

Zey gezunt.

Everything I Don’t Understand About Game Design After Playing All of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla

I’m going to preface this by saying that I’m not a die-hard Assassin’s Creed fan, nor a hater. I was pretty neutral about them before going into this. My prior experience with the series was playing through the first one – fine, but repetitive – and some fond memories of playing through Black Flag with a friend of mine.

After finishing Elden Ring I had a big, sprawling, game-shaped hole in my life and I needed something new. After going in for a year of the top tier Playstation Plus – or whatever it is they call it now – I decided to download Valhalla and give it a go. What follows are some thoughts about the game, yes, but also about game design in general. This will contain spoilers for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.

1. Padding the Game

This is less from a content perspective and more from a gameplay perspective. What made me angry was not the infinite number of little things you can do, like the map full of glowing blue side quests and white and gold collectibles, that seems like traditional fair for the open world, RPG-light genre.

Each glowing dot and symbol is something to do, either side quest or collectible. And this isn’t even the whole map.

No, what irked me was the slowing down of gameplay for padding purposes. Whenever you have to follow someone to a location – which you have to do a lot – you can never go full speed, only ever at the base speed. I’m sure this is done for dialogue timing purposes but, that just means you need better editing. There are whole segments of gameplay – not a lot, but enough – where your lead character, Eivor, is forced to walk at a snail’s pace either around town or down corridors. I am literally begging game designers to stop this.

2. Fast Travelling

There’s a lot of things Elden Ring got right, and the fast travel sites of grace was one of them. But other games learned this sort of thing, too. The Far Cry series has fast travel locations for each town you discover or visit. So why doesn’t Assassin’s Creed do that? This relates to my previous entry – padding! If there’s a limited number of fast travel locations, and where you have to go – EVEN IF YOU’VE DISCOVERED THE AREA – is a ways away, you have to ride your horse there.

Now, I understand that open world games have lots of open world travel; that is, to an extent, the appeal. The developers want you to discover the world and all it has to offer. But I already know what it has to offer because it’s all marked on my map for me already (once I “synchronize” with the bird symbol locations). After that, if I have to go to a specific town for a mission, either let me fast travel to the town, ask me if I want to ride there, or have an option to have me be teleported there so I can skip the what amounts to hours of pointless horse riding.

I feel like at least 30% of my playthrough was just this view.

3. The Meta-Story

Okay, so this is actually a specific complaint (note?) about this game, and I think all of the last several Assassin’s Creed games.

So, for those of you unaware, the AC games have a “play within a play” style of storytelling. You play most of the game as the titular assassin from whichever historical era it is that you’re currently murdering your way through. Occasionally, though, you are reminded that that person is actually being controlled by a modern-day person in a high-tech VR machine, called an Animus, in order to connect with someone through their shared DNA (I think?). And sometimes, you play a small snippet from that person’s perspective.

Mostly you’re the person on the right, but sometimes the person on the left.

The issue with this storytelling device is that, due to its piecemeal nature – one scene at the start, the occasional in-universe side-quest, and one sequence at the end – you never really get enough exposure to the modern meta-story to care about it.

The meta-story is continuous across the games, so unless you’ve paid attention or read a primer, you have pretty much no idea what’s going on. Yes, Valhalla is the 12th game in the main continuity (holy shit), but it’s technically the 23rd game if you count the spin-offs (oh my god). The next one, Mirage, is set to be released in 2023. So, what I’m saying is, obviously there’s a lot of lore to these games and it’s hard to fit them in what amounts to a couple of cut-scenes and some bare-bones gameplay sequences.

My suggestion? Inter-cut them better. It’s kind of jarring when, as we reach the end-game sequences with Eivor, we are removed into the “real world” to have some stuff with Layla that continues that storyline, only to need to re-enter the Animus to finish the story we just played for upwards of 90 hours. Either drop the meta-story completely – which it seems they are doing from future releases, sort of – or have more sequences where you play as the modern character. The whole point of the story in these games is to get information to help their current plight. So, why not do some Eivor stuff, then bring us out into the modern day to do some Uncharted-type shenanigans, then – in order to get the next clue – re-enter the Animus for more viking battle.

As it stands, I have no real idea as to why Eivor’s storyline in full was important to the meta-story. Like, at all. It was a fun story to play – one of things I will hand to this game is the writing and voice-acting were both quite good – but why did I do any of that stuff? Just so reach the big ending thing? It feels like a lot of padding just to get there.

4. If Your Games are Famous for One Thing, Make That One Thing Good and Easy to Do

Again, this is a pretty specific Assassin’s Creed gripe, but it can absolutely be widely applied to games as a whole. The AC games are, in general, pretty famous for one main thing: parkour. You can climb up, on and over pretty much anything.

Lots of this.

My issue was that, seemingly at random, I would encounter parts of walls that were unclimbable. There didn’t seem to be a reason for it, Eivor would just be unable to go any further. And when it was obvious that I had to jump or climb from one notch to the next, it would take lots of forcing to get the character to do the right thing. It was infuriating to have the climb stop and then, even though I could see where I was supposed to jump to, Eivor just…didn’t move.

This goes double for climbing a ledge into a room, or trying to drop down. The climb over a ledge (through a window, say) is the same button as climb, but more than half the time Eivor would vault over the window and keep climbing the building, rather than look into the window and climb through it. And dropping down (rather than climbing down) would only work a small percentage of the time and I don’t know why!

Overall, it’s nice that I could climb pretty much any surface with relative ease, but if the way it’s programmed has me screaming, “NO! PLEASE! I’M BEGGING YOU JUST CLIMB INSIDE! GO UP, UP!” more than once a play session, then maybe you’re doing it wrong.

5. Post-Game Content and Story Tie-ins

I have no issue with post-game content. I recognize that in open world games, the allure for a lot of people is finishing the main story and then spending however many hours completing all the extra quests and collectibles and possible multiplayer. No issues there.

My issue with this game specifically, and with the broader games of its style, is having a huge story mission suddenly be available…after I’ve finished the game?

So, the story of this game (ignoring meta-story) is two-fold; 1) set up your new settlement in England and collect alliances from the neighbouring shires around you to increase your strong and influence; and 2) kill the members of the Order (the villains) who have power here.

Now, for the most part, these two threads intersect. But, not always. You can go around killing non-story-relevant members of the Order at your leisure, if you can follow the clues and figure out who they are. I very much liked this part of the game.

Finding and murdering all these people was quite satisfying, even if their lore-heavy last words meant nothing to me.

All of them, as you can see, lead to the topmost figure on the tree; the leader of the Order in this area. So you’d think that, by game’s end, you’d find out who that is, who that is will be story-relevant, and murdering them becomes priority for you and your new band of allies across England. Except no. Despite your many run-ins with dastardly kings – lookin’ at you, Aelfred – who thwart your wants and needs across the various shires, you do not end the game by finding out that he’s head of the Order and murdering him. In fact, when you finish the main story, the head of the Order can be completely undiscovered. That seems weird.

But on top of that, when you reach post-game, a whole other area of England opens up as a questline. Why? By this time I’ve played for almost 100 hours and I am feeling done because the game already feels endless, and not in a “wow, I love how much of this game there is” way. Doesn’t it seem story relevant to get an alliance in this area before the post-game and then use that strategic alliance to fight the head of the Order? Apparently not, according to these writers.

Fuck you, Hamtunscire. Your secrets will remain so, I’m too tired.

Anyway, I deleted the game as soon as I finished it. I think I’m done with Assassin’s Creed games, as I believe I have seen all they have to offer.

Zey gezunt.

The Insidious Nature of Contemporary Customer Service – Part 2

I realize I never updated this and left you all (haha, nobody reads this, who am I kidding?) hanging on part 1! Thusly, you were never filled in, imaginary reader, about the TPG/NBN drama that took place nigh on a few months ago now.

Earlier this year, folks may remember the fact that we had an almost endless onslaught of rain for something like 3 or 4 weeks. Well, for me, all of that began with a thunderstorm here in the Blue Mountains, during which my home (that is to say, my TV aerial) was struck by lightning. This was, I’m not afraid to say, one of the scariest things I’ve experienced, especially given my work-from-home office is directly below where the lightning struck. It caused the loudest explosion I’ve ever had the misfortune of being near – imagine sitting directly under a room in which a hand grenade went off – and I’m not ashamed to say I screamed. After checking my underwear for soilage, I noticed that all the lights were out, but the appliances – including my computer – were still on.

Turns out, the breakers in the electrical box did their job and nothing blew up. What was out was the internet. With no way of getting it back immediately, I was finished working for the day – luckily this was at 5:30pm on a Friday anyway – and I investigated with TPG what was going on.

I was greeted on their helpline with a recording that said that Penrith and surrounds – which, given my location, likely meant me – was experience huge internet outages due to the storm. The helpline person basically told me the same thing, although when they sent a test ping down my line they said it should be working. I told them it wasn’t and could they please raise an emergency ticket, due to my work-from-home internet necessities. They did so and told me that, if it was a line problem, then it would be an NBN Co. issue and not their own issue, but they’d send someone out ASAP to take a look.

I think it was the next day someone came out to take a look. They said that the modem looked fine, and that there should be a connection, so he’d check the curb. He said there looked to be an issue with the curb, although didn’t say what, and that because of the rain he couldn’t fix it, so he went away. No internet.

I waited a day and then called TPG back. I told them how things went and they said they’d send someone else. So, they did. This person replaced the modem, said it should work, and left. I then started hotspotting with my phone to work, and called TPG again. We went out and bought a Telstra Wireless Broadband dongle thing. TPG said they’d send a third NBN tech out. Finally, this one said, “Wait, why didn’t the others just…connect you a temporary line?”

“This was an option?”

“Yeah,” he said. “The issue is that the connection at the curb was blown by the lightning, but that’s been replaced. Because of water, I can’t run a line underground, but what I can do is run one overground through your garden and give you a temporary line until the weather clears and I can come replace it.”

“…please do that.”

So, he did. He said he’d then make a note on our report that the line needed to be fixed and replaced properly once the weather cleared.

Several weeks pass.

The weather’s been clear for a while, so I call TPG and tell them what the last tech said.

“This is an NBN problem,” the TPG man said. “So, we’ll raise another ticket. However, I have to tell you, if NBN decides that it isn’t their problem, they won’t come.”

“Excuse me?”

“NBN will do a report,” he said. “And if they think that it’s not their problem, they won’t fix it, and you’ll have to start the process again.”

“But–“

“Look, I know this is an NBN issue,” he tried to reassure me. “But I don’t have any extra power. Can you send me photos of the overground line that they need to fix? That’ll help.”

So, I did.

I tried calling NBN to get some more answers, but turns out their phone line is completely useless and leads nowhere. So, I tweeted about it.

Dear @NBN_Australia – what is the purpose of your phone line? It actually does nothing. It's just a series of robo-voice options that tell you "not our problem" before hanging up. Completely worthless.

— ((Herschel🌹)) (@jaklacroix) March 21, 2022

This was their response:

Hi there, our IVR is designed to refer customers to the best possible people to handle your enquiry. We would be more than happy to try to assist you here as best we can if you would like. Please let us know how we can help ^Dev

— nbn® Australia (@NBN_Australia) March 22, 2022

We ended up in a DM conversation that took place over several days and with a variety of different social media people. They told me that I had to go back to TPG. When I told them I had, and that I’d already raised a ticket, they kept telling me it wasn’t their problem, even though everyone all round knew that it was. Finally, after a series of infuriating messages where I reworded the same information six times, I was forwarded an email to send the exact same photos I’d sent to TPG to them.

More than a week later I got a call from a random number tell me that they – John – were my case manager and that they’d be handling my case from now on.

“So, what’s the issue?” he asked.

Exasperated, I explained myself for what must have been the hundredth time. He told me he’d look into it, as it looked like the technician had not, in fact, made a note in the file that said my line needed to be replaced. At least, not that he could find. I made it clear that I wanted no repercussions on this technician, as he was literally the only one of three techs to actually do anything of value. John said nothing would happen, and we hung up.

Radio silence for weeks.

I get an email from some random tech agency saying that they had been assigned my case:

Fun fact: no one had tried to call me or “reach me over the phone”. I replied to this email letting them know as such, but that access wouldn’t be an issue. I never heard from them again.

One day more than a week later, I looked out my office window and saw a technician truck sitting in it. I went outside to the curb and saw an NBN tech in the manhole doing the line replacement.

“Oh, hello,” he said, clearly startled by my presence. “Didn’t think anyone was home.”

“I am,” I said. “I work from home. Everything ok?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Easy fix. Don’t know what the problem was all about. Running the line through now, all nice and easy.”

Fifteen minutes later it was fixed. No more temporary line running through my front yard. Got a call from John and TPG the following week, both asking if they could close my tickets. I said yes.

I think my aerial is still fried, though, because we no longer get free-to-air TV.

Anyway, that’s all folks.

Zey gezunt.

The Insidious Nature of Contemporary Customer Service – Part 1

Welcome back to Jordan’s Complaint Corner. This week we’re talking about: customer service!

Man, do I hate customer service. Well, I hate bad customer service. Our world is rife with it. These days, it’s been designed down to it’s most bureaucratic and distilled form. Customer service, as an industry, is inherently necessary; if you provide a product or service, you need to provide a place where people can contact you regarding issues with that product or service. The problem with it, though, is the over-simplification-by-way-of-complexity design of these services.

I want to share two recent customer service issues that I’ve had, from two different companies. Well, three, sort of. You’ll see. This is part 1 and will only deal with a small portion of a larger story. Next post will be the longer, more detailed story.

Now, this first issue is quite minor. It was more the phrasing of the incident that got me thinking about how much I dislike the current state of the language used, as well as the manipulative way companies try to keep their hooks in you.

Recently, my house was hit by lightning. This lightening strike fried my internet connection (NBN) at the curb. This instigating event is the common ground between these two stories. Although the second story will engage with actually trying to get it fixed, this first one is to do with an attempt to negate the issue while it was being fixed.

Because our modem was broken and our connection to the curb was cut, we went out and purchased a mobile broadband dongle from Telstra. This gave us 400Gb of download on the 4G service for like $85. Not cheap, but not too expensive either, considering my work is mainly from home and I needed the internet to do it.

We have to buy a month of this, and we also have to sign up for a monthly recurring payment. This is one of the things that I hate. If I tell you I only want one month, don’t tell me it’s “more convenient” to do it this way or that it’s “easy to cancel”; let me pre-pay the month and then never deal with you again. So, having no choice, we sign up and bring the dongle home. It works, all’s well.

The time comes where the NBN connection is in a usable state and I want to cancel my subscription with Telstra. I tried to go into the branch where I bought it, but it was insanely busy and they tell me I can do it online. At first, we were told we had to come back, but now suddenly we can do it online. Okay. Fine. So I come home and log into the portal. It takes a while to find where exactly they keep the “Disconnect My Service” button, but I find it and click it.

They then do that thing that all companies do when you unsubscribe: tell us why! I shouldn’t have to, but fine, I click on “Other” because none of the others apply to me (things like deceased, changing providers, etc.). When I click “Other”, though, the “Okay” button changes to “Send us a Message”. It then closes the options window and opens up their online help chat.

Naturally, I close this and go back to the “Tell Us Why” menu. The only option that does not lead to “Send us a Message” is “Deceased”. All the other options make you go to the chat window. And there’s no way around it, you have to do this or you cannot proceed. So, once again I click on other and it opens the chat window. Already waiting is a perky message. The following are direct copy+pastes of the conversation that I had with Telstra.

Helpdesk: Thanks for messaging us. How we can [sic] help you today?

Me: I just want to cancel my plan and it keeps sending me to this messaging box.

Helpdesk: Hello, Jordan. I feel sorry that you want to disconnect your service. I hope we can still make it up with you. I can absolutely help you to disconnect the service, but I hope you don't mind me asking, is there any particular reason why you want to cancel?

I already hate this. I don’t care that they feel bad I’m disconnecting and they don’t need to make it up to me in any way. I just don’t need the service. So, I say that.

Me: I do not require the service any longer.

Helpdesk: My apologies for the time you waited to get this sorted, this is not the experience we want you to have. No worries, I will do the best of my ability to sort this out for you.

Me: Thank you, please disconnect the service.

So far I think, Well, this isn’t so bad. It’s annoying to have to do this but looks like it’ll get done right away. But then I get the following message.

Helpdesk: You are most welcome. You deserve the best! 🙂
Also, thank you so much for allowing me to help with this.

Your feedback is valuable to us.
I hope you don't get me wrong with my questions. I just want to make sure that disconnecting your service will be the best resolution.

What was the reason why you signed up for this service before?
Once the service has been disconnected, what is your back up plan?

Above emphasis is mine. I feel like this is really manipulative wording because it implies that I’ll be lost without my Telstra connection and that Telstra understands my needs better than I do, which they do not.

So, I tell them that.

Me: I don't particularly like this manipulative method of customer service. The best plan of action for me is to disconnect the service. Please disconnect the service. 

I’m not trying to be rude, but I also don’t want to spend any more time doing this than I have to. Most people are taking a few minutes from work to do this kind of thing and here I am having some philosophical conversation with someone who earns less than they probably should about what my telecommunications needs are.

Helpdesk: That totally makes sense. It seems like keeping your service is no longer beneficial for you and you've already made your decision. No worries, I understand and respect your decision.

I don’t care if you respect my decision! Just cancel my service! This has now taken more than half an hour of my life I can never claw back. The helpdesk person then tells me I might be charged if the billing cycle occurs during the 24hr period in which the cancellation can occur, and that I cannot recoup any money once it’s been processed.

Now, I can spare the money if that happens. It sucks and I don’t want to, but I can. But this idea of taking someone’s money for a month of service when they have no control over the cancellation is not only inane, but it can really hurt some people’s budgets. If you charge me for a month of service I cannot use, then I should be able to reclaim most or all of that money.

Next time we’ll talk about TPG (not the bad guys) and NBN Co (the bad guys).

Zey gezunt.

An Open Letter to JK Rowling

Dear Joanne,

Do you mind if I call you Joanne? I hope not.

Boy, life is quite a time at the minute, isn’t it?

You know, Joanne, you got me into reading. I was in grade five. The Prisoner of Azkaban had just been released, not that I was aware of it. See, I wasn’t much of a big reader back then. I wanted to be an actor and I was very focused on television. I’d started reading a little bit thanks to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. I devoured the first four of them – slow as I was at the time – until a friend of mine, my best friend at the time actually, suggested I read Harry Potter. He’d read the first three and thought I’d really enjoy them.

He lent them to me and, from the jump, I was hooked. I, too, I was an eleven year-old boy who felt misunderstood by those around him. I wanted to be whisked away to something better, more magical. The Boy Under the Stairs was my avatar in fiction, as I think you intended it to be for many such kids such as myself. I waited in line and pre-ordered every subsequent book. The Deathly Hallows was released when I was in the first year of university, so I really felt that I’d aged with Harry. You’d also aged the content of each book in such a way that it felt like the fiction grew up to accommodate us.

I was a bit of a hipster-type and was annoyed when Potter became a massive global sensation. It didn’t feel little and special anymore, but it was also cool to see so many people enjoying it as much as I did. But, most importantly, from that young age of reading your books, I discovered something very important about myself: I loved to tell stories, too. I wanted to be a writer. Still do. My first book came out last year – check it out, if you want, it’s pretty good – and I really do have you to thank in a big way.

Nowadays, though, the Harry Potter world feels less and less like home. Not because I’ve gotten so old I can’t appreciate it, and also not because of in-depth studies of plot holes, consequences and implications. All of that just kind of adds to it, for me. No, now it feels like a distant thing because of you, Joanne.

You have sullied the world you made.

You created this beautiful thing – a series about a boy with nothing who grew up trying to fit in and eventually learn to accept himself and those around him for who they were – and, in reality, you are nothing like that. You’re the exact opposite. I’m not going to cover some of the questionable characters you have in your books, others have done that better than I can. I mean the fact that, once you got to the top – one of the richest female authors of all time! – you immediately started stepping on the people below you. You signed onto the TERF way of thinking – like so many of your wealthy British peers, for some reason – sharing far and wide with your massive reach propaganda that harms the lives of trans people. You jumped at the chance to snipe at people for ‘virtue signalling’, despite the fact that your version of inclusivity regarding your works was pretty much done all post-release with Pottermore, or tweets of clarification.

Oooh look at you, one Jew in Ravenclaw with the most stereotypical last name imaginable. Well done. Fairly certain his name was said once, in one of the first two books during the sorting ceremony and he was never heard from again. And I’m sure fans from the LGBTQIA+ community won’t forget the fact that you only announced Dumbledore was gay after the books were all finished, so you didn’t have to run any of it past your publishers and risk sales. It’s not taking a stand for people if it’s not in the main text, Joanne, that’s just, well, virtue signalling.

It sucks, because your books meant – and really, still mean – a lot to me. But it’s hard to even think about re-reading them – something I did once a year for a while there – when all I’m going to feel is discomfort. I really want you to take a look at the things your saying and doing, the mean things your sharing, and take stock. You are hurting real world people for, what? Some misguided feeling that you’re right. But you’re not. You’re on the wrong side of history on this and there’s still a chance for you to admit that and try and do better. Be better.

Yours,

Jordan
A Very Sad Harry Potter Fan

The Absurd Drama of My New Fridge (That I Don’t Have)

I want to tell you a tale of corporate incompetence so profound that it will make your heart ache and your throat yearn to scream.

My wife and I moved into a new house recently. We love it here. It’s great. In the kitchen, like all kitchens, there is a space set aside for a fridge. We have a small temporary fridge there, but we want to treat ourselves to a larger fridge that fills the space fully and meets our needs.

Unfortunately, we both work full time and don’t have time to get to white goods places. Well my dad, bless him, has time he can take during the day to go and visit some stores and find us a good deal. I’ll be paying, but he’ll be buying.

Enter The Good Guys, Artarmon store.

My dad goes in and sees a great fridge – a Samsung fridge with French doors – and, making my wife very happy, it comes in black to match all our other appliances. Great, I say, get it. He buys the fridge, sets it up to have it delivered to us – and for them to take our old fridge away – and I send dad the money. I figure that’s the end of the story.

How naive I was.

This all happened on a Thursday, and the sales rep told dad that the fridge would be delivered on Friday. I work from home, so no worries. I hang out waiting for the fridge, until the hour starts to get late. I think to myself, Hang on, don’t these places usually send you a text to let you know when to expect them?

So, I get in touch with a friend of mine who works in the Good Guys warehouse. I ask him how I can track my order and he says he’ll look into it for me. Usually the process would be to call the store and quote your sales number – which is on the receipt – but he’s there and he’ll take a look. He calls me back a few minutes later. It’s around 17:30 now.

“Good news and bad news,” he says. “Your order was processed, but your fridge is still here in the warehouse.”

“Oh,” I say. “Did they just forget to load it onto the truck?”

“No,” he says. “They didn’t send the order to the courier company to deliver it, so they didn’t even know to come get it. I’ve just pushed it through with my manager, but it won’t be to you until tomorrow.”

“How annoying,” I say. “But that’s fine, I’ll be home all day tomorrow so no worries.”

I’m a little annoyed at how silly that is, but I’m outside in my garden and the weather is nice for the first time in three weeks, so I don’t really stew on it. I tell my wife later and she just laughs.

The next morning I wake up to a text from the Good Guys – sent at 1:17 am – that my fridge will arrive anywhere from 17:35 to 19:35 that evening. Great!

As that allocated time approaches, I get a call from the truck driver.

“Hey mate,” he says. “I’m on the way to you now. I’ll be round in about 5 minutes.”

“Great!” I say. “See you soon.”

My wife and I hastily unpack the fridge into cooler bags and green canvas bags. We unplug the old fridge and wheel it into a more convenient location. I then get another call from the driver.

“Hey mate,” he says, sounding more concerned this time. “Do you actually live on the highway or is there a side street?”

“On the highway,” I say, as my address is clearly marked as being on the main highway. “But there’s a pullover lane that people use to stop and park. There’s also a side street about 50m up that you can briefly park on.”

“Ah, no can do, mate,” he says. “It’s too dangerous. We’re in a 4 tonne truck. Can’t stop there.”

“What do you mean?” I ask. “Yes, you can. People stop there all the time. I rented a 4 tonne truck and moved here in one. We reverse parked it into the driveway.”

“Sorry mate,” he says. “I’m taking this back to the warehouse and they’ll have to send it up in a smaller van. Probably delivered tomorrow.”

“Oh,” I say. “Ok.”

I go back inside and tell my wife we need to set the old fridge back up and put everything back. She laughs in disbelief but it’s less jovial than before.

We hear nothing from The Good Guys the next day. I call them on Monday and leave a message asking them where my fridge is. I do not hear from them until the next day.

On Tuesday I wake up to a text message – also from 1:17am – that the fridge will be delivered that day! Anywhere from 16:30 – 18:30. Great! I also get a call back from The Good Guys. The lady on the phone informs me that, she’s very sorry, but they were supposed to load my fridge onto a smaller van, but they couldn’t because it needs to be standing for delivery and they sent it back out on the truck. The same kind of truck that couldn’t pull over on Saturday. She says she’ll put me in touch with the driver.

The driver calls, “Hey there, I’ll be delivering your fridge around 4pm. I looked at your house on Google Maps and I’m pretty sure it’ll be fine.”

“Okay,” I say. “See you soon.”

Half an hour before he arrives, he calls and lets me know to empty the fridge. I do, getting the old fridge ready for removal. I watch as he pulls the truck over – same size truck I used to move, that can very easily stop in front of our house – and the driver gets out.

“I don’t know what that last driver was talking about,” he says. “You could park a whole road train here.”

“That’s what I said,” I say.

“Show me to the old fridge, we’ll get that out first while my colleague unpacks your new one from the truck.”

So, we do that. I show him to the old fridge, he wheels it out on the trolley, no problems. Now, what happens when they deliver things like white goods is the drivers will unbox it at the curb before giving it to you so that you can look at the item and make sure it’s in good enough condition to accept delivery. Basically, if there’s scratches you don’t care about or dents you do.

“Hey mate,” he calls out, coming down the driveway. “I need to show you something.”

I follow him up the driveway.

“It’s damaged,” he says.

Now, I’m thinking a small dent, a scratch, who cares, I’ve had factory seconds before.

No. This is the entire bottom, back right corner of the fridge is caved in. As if it’s been dropped on it’s corner. The dent is where the power stuff and gas tubing is for the fridge to function. I take a photo of the damage and so do they.

“I wouldn’t advise accepting delivery of this item,” he says to me, matter of fact. “This is the third item we’ve had today that’s this damaged.”

He proceeds to show me the other damaged items, and then call his boss. The other driver tells me he doesn’t understand what’s happening at the warehouse. Neither do I. The first driver returns and I tell him I won’t take it, he says good, and then helps me re-install the old fridge.

“They’ll send out a new one,” he says. “Hopefully tomorrow or the next day. This was the easiest delivery we had all day and we couldn’t even complete it.”

I say thank you and send him on his way. I tell my dad and my wife about this. The disbelieving laughter is gone, replaced my frustrated gasps and whispers of, “what the fuck?”

I call The Good Guys the next day – Wednesday – and ask what happens now. When will I get my new fridge?

“Well,” the woman says. I do not recall her name, but for the purposes of this story will be Kiki, because she will appear again later. “There are no more of this fridge in stock. So you can either select another item to replace it or we can refund you.”

“Refund it,” I say. “I don’t have time to go and choose something else.”

I also don’t want to inconvenience dad again.

“I’m so sorry,” she says. “But I’ll need the card that made the purchase to come in.”

I tell her fine, I’ll send my dad in, but if he picks something else rather than refunding it, we want to do that. She says that’ll be fine. I call dad and tell him, and he goes in right away because he’s nearby. He sends me photos of new fridges, which are all fine – none in black though – and I tell him which one suits. Then he calls me.

“They have your other one in stock,” he says.

“What?”

“Yeah,” he says. “The sales person and the person at the cash just searched and it’s in stock. They don’t know why you were told otherwise. So I arranged for them to deliver your fridge on Friday.”

“Great,” I say. “This is all very stupid, but I’m glad it’s almost over.”

Thursday passes, no word from Good Guys. Friday arrives – the day I am writing this – and no text message informing me of a delivery window.

So, I call The Good Guys.

Kiki’s back on the phone. “Oh, it’s you! You are my valued customer, see how good my memory is?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Great. When is my fridge coming?”

I quote her the sales number.

“You gave me the wrong number,” she says. “Remember we spoke and I said this fridge is not in stock and to come in for a refund?”

“Yes,” I say. “Of course I remember. My dad went in later that day and they told him there was stock and that it would be delivered today.”

“This I don’t understand,” she says. “Because there is no stock, and there’s no new order, and the money is here waiting to be refunded.”

My blood rises and I feel something inside me snap.

“This is getting ridiculous now,” I say. “This is the fourth time I have to contact you guys to deal with this. You say it’s out, someone else says it’s in, we paid a bunch of money for this fridge and I just want what I paid for. It’s getting to the point where I never want to deal with your company again.”

“I’m sorry, but as I said in conversation to you last time, there is no stock and–“

“I know that’s what you said,” I cut her off. “So you’re saying that some random person lied to my dad and these fridges don’t exist?”

“Oh my,” she says. “I don’t know who has told him this. Can I have their name?”

“Neither I nor my dad would remember that, I’m afraid,” I say. “And he wasn’t issued a new receipt. I’m going to hang up now and call him because this has reached the point where I cannot understand what is happening and don’t want to deal with it anymore.”

We hang up. I call dad.

“What?” he says. “Two people told me it’s in stock. They looked it up in front of me.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” I say. “Either way, I need you to go in again. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

“I never want to deal with these people again.”

“No kidding,” he says. “Me neither.”

So he goes in. He calls me back some time later.

“You won’t believe this,” he says.

“What now?”

“I spoke to Kiki, the woman you spoke to,” he says. “And she’s telling me there’s no fridges and is about to process the refund when she gets a call. The call says the fridges are now in stock.”

“What?”

“Yeah. So I ask her if it can be delivered today, and she says no,” he laughs. “So I tell her to refund me because it’s clearly not meant to be. We’ll go somewhere else. She says I can pick something else, but I say no, just the refund. And, of course, the money won’t land in my account for seven days.”

“Of course.”

We laugh and hang up.

Thus ends this insane saga which has only one moral: if you can avoid it, don’t order something from the Good Guys that needs to be delivered. You will lose your will to live.

EDIT: We ended up going to Seconds World in Penrith on Sunday, and having a new fridge delivered on Wednesday morning with absolutely no issues. So, maybe use them if you need something.

Some TV Interview Tips

As some folk might be aware, I work in TV as an assistant/junior editor. I’ve worked in TV for over a decade, going from transcriber to production/camera assistant to data wrangler to my current position. I’ve seen a lot of unedited footage and I’ve cut a bunch of stories. Overall, I’d say with some authority what editors want and look for when they’re cutting, and what producers want from talent when they’re being interviewed.

I want to pass on a couple of things just in case any of you readers ever find yourselves being interviewed for television or film. Yes, the editors can cut around your answers, and make what we call “franken-grabs” – which is where we take words or phrases from one answer and slot it into another to smooth out what you were trying to say – but it’s easiest and best for all when you just give a good answer up top.

1. Don’t ramble. I know, being interviewed can be nerve-racking. You want to put your best foot forward. But the important part is to focus on exactly what you’ve been asked, and give a concise answer. Length is not what I’m talking about here, I mean the tendency to second guess what you’ve just said and to clarify it with some other addendum. Don’t do this. This can make answers long and winding, more often than not losing their original thread and making them much harder to cut around.
   
2. Don’t look at camera. Any time you look at the camera, the editor can’t use that shot. A lot of the time we can cover this with overlay/B-roll, but sometimes the flow of the answer might demand seeing you on camera for a particular moment and if you’re looking at camera, the edit can end up being sub-par by the editor’s standards.
   
3. Don’t reference the crew. There are extenuating circumstances to this – like, say, if you’re a zookeeper and an animal is interacting with the camera, which the editor might use for cuteness – but for the most part, referencing the crew at all means that that answer will be scrapped.
   
4. Don’t reference your past answers. Remove the phrases “As I said” and “Like I said before” from your vocabulary. It is highly likely that the editor isn’t using the answer you’re referencing, and generally they now have to cut around these annoying little phrases. We all do them! It’s a natural part of speech. But interviews are unnatural and we need to adapt accordingly.
   
5. Try not to repeat information. Unless the producer/interviewer has asked you to repeat an answer or clarify some information, try not to repeat information from a previous answer. This can lead to a lot of options for the editor which more often than not just get lost on the cutting room floor.

I’ll try to remember more and edit this article accordingly, but those are the big ones. It’s also important to remember that just because you were filming with the crew for sometimes several hours doesn’t mean the story being cut is that long, nor does it mean they even got everything they needed. Pick-ups might be necessary or B-roll might need to be shot. Be patient with the crew because it’s just as tiring for them. The wisdom is for every minute of footage used in an edit, there’s 100 minutes of unused footage. That’s slight exaggeration, obviously, but the point of it still stands.

Now go out there and give the best dang interviews of yer lives!

Zey gezunt.