Well, as several Sloggers predicted (including old chum Gerard in Dublin), I seem to have jumped out of the frying pan and into full-on Hell by moving from Orange to SFR. This is the state of play since SFR sent me SMSs saying my line was activated (it isn’t) and the Net box has been delivered (it hasn’t).
- I went to the Espace Client (every home should have one) and it timed out 4 times out of 5, which is timing out with no time-outs for good behaviour, and thus entirely apt).
- Once there, I looked at all the ways available to contact SFR. The Sun headline is that they do exist, up to but not including one. All replies to SMS are ignored, and all the emails from SFR are marked No Reply. When I tried to “follow my order” it said the page wasn’t operational.
- The local SFR shop is registered at Google as open 9.30-7.00 Monday to Saturday. No calls are answered after 6 pm, and no calls were answered at all on Monday or Tuesday.
- As is my wont in such matters, I went to Twitter and plastered this on their Assistance page:
SFR’s brand advertising line is “Always at your side”. This is something of a hostage to fortune, especially if you are serially incompetent at the same time as promisorily incontinent.
As my girlfriend says at such times, “It is necessary to be philosophical”. She particularly liked ‘Empty Response’. I remained amused, but lost my sense of humour Tuesday afternoon when I pitched up at the shop to see the shutters closed, and a notice saying “Exceptional closure” on the door.
Meanwhile, this desperate promise was made to me on Twitter yesterday afternoon:
The rough translation is “I’m putting you in touch with the dedicated service. An advisor will get back to you during the day to take on your request. All the best etc”.
It turned out to be an empty promise to match the website’s empty response: unless of course one imagines that the “service” is dedicated to running the client round in circles – which I’m almost certain is very close to the truth.
I’m now about to ring the bank and ask them to stop the payment.
The case continues under the less than watchful eye of President Macron, who as we know has declared that La France is En Marche! If this is France en marche, I’d hate to deal with France en stationnement.
Just under 83 million people were born in the last twelve months, and sadly none of them to Lily Allen. This means there are 7.5 billion of us, although Kim Jong Un keeps me hopeful that his intention to lower the number as soon as possible is honourable. Personally I think he’s pretty full of shit, but not as shit-replete as those super-optimists out there who keep telling me that the global population is at last “under control”.
It all depends on what you mean by control. In the last 12 years, almost one billion new people have come among us, if you’ll pardon the expression – and that’s an increase of 13%. In just over a decade. To add one billion after 1804 took 123 years. Since 1804, all up, we Earthling peeps have multiplied 7.5 times. So please don’t talk to me about control.
Only the rate of increase is falling, and it’s only been happening since 1973. So many people were on strike picket-duty that year, very few men ever saw their wives, another deprivation for which I wholeheartedly blame Arthur Scargill. Furthermore, the fall is such that the moving annual rate of decrease in 2017 v 2016 was a piddling 0.02%. We are still very much on track to hit the forecast of just under 10 billion by 2050.
Now, the naysayers keep telling me that there’s enough food, air and oxygen to maintain 20 billion, but that’s not my concern. My concern is the correlation between wealth concentration, abject poverty, starvation, and control of the poorest billion: some 40+% of the growth will come from eight 3rd world countries – India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Indonesia and Uganda.
By ‘control’ here, I don’t mean physically penning them in…although it may well come to that. I mean direct intervention to keep reproduction down (with all the meandering moral maze that entails) wipe out government corruption, and get the gdp up in a way that brings benefits beyond the fat 3%.
When the financial meteor hits, all bets on migration are off. We are all being idiotically blind to this, and we are all going to pay for it in the end.
I think it might be wise for me, from here on, to just ignore the Trump White House and focus on something more relevant. Something, you know, like the bid by treacle-knitting enthusiasts to make their chosen pursuit an Olympic sport at some point in the medium-term future.
Trump CoS General Kelly fired Scaramucci yesterday. 48 hours beforehand, I had posted as follows:
Well, we came, we saw, we pondered. I have no idea where it’s going next, but I offer two observations still in concert with previous commentary here. First, that’s Donald for you – always likely to take aim at the enemy and amputate his foot; and second, I’m sure this kind of bollocks has always gone on in the White House, but this time the liberal media are reporting every minute of it – thanks to 24/7 leaking.
And finally, A Utah man accused of killing his wife onboard a cruise ship in Alaska made a brief appearance in the Anchorage federal Court two days ago. He is alleged to have told police officers that he threw his wife overboard “because she wouldn’t stop laughing at him”.
I’m not entirely sure how to report this one, because there’s too much we don’t know about why his reaction was a tad extreme. First up, even under US divorce law, paying alimony to a piss-taking wife is infinitely better than a walk to the electric chair. Secondly, maybe he was a standup and just very funny…in which case, his action is even more inexplicable. Third, if she was prone to poke fun at him (yet also happy to accept his largesse in taking her on a cruise) perhaps there is a case for crime passionelle. But finally, when a bloke goes to the purser looking frantic and says his wife has gone missing, why would anyone assume foul play? And in that context, why did he confess to murder?
It’s all a bit Raskolnikov and Crime & Punishment to my mind. Perhaps, in the end, the miscreant decided it was a matter of wife and death.
And possibly, I included this snippet just to annoy the feminazis.
The Slog 