Monthly Archives: November 2011

Phone fiasco #3

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Our home phone disconnection saga continues. It’s been 16 days since our phone was disconnected in error and there’s still no end in sight. I discovered last night that now our voicemail has been disconnected, so that people ringing our number no longer get the voice message I put on explaining the situation, but now just get a “This number has been disconnected” message.

My initial private prognostication 16 days ago when this saga began was that it would take a month to sort out. Today I’m feeling like I will be lucky if its sorted by Christmas time.I’m not at all surprised that the Telecommunication Industry Ombudsman received 197,000 complaints last financial year.

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Acronym vs Initialism

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Thanks to the National Interest on ABC radio on Friday I learnt the difference between an acronym and an initialism – an acronym is a set of initials that gets pronounced as if it were a word (e.g. AIDS) whereas an initialism is,well just a bunch of initials (e.g. ACTU)

I also got a minor chuckle when Peter Mares the host, described Senator Sue Boyce as having sat on a standing committee. What a rebel!

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Opposition

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A pithy example this morning on the news of why NSW Labor is in opposition. In reply to a question about the Laman St Figs issue, NSW opposition leader John Robertson blamed it all on local state Liberal MP being “missing in action”. A pithy example of a consistent strategy of:

  1. ignore any of the actual facts of the case
  2. avoid uttering any opinion at all on the actual issue
  3. blame somebody else (who isn’t even relevant to the issue – the Laman St figs fiasco is a local council issue, not a state Govt issue.

Please can we have a better opposition in NSW?

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Phone fiasco #2

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We still have no home phone. The saga continues. Looks like it will be at least a couple more weeks before its reconnected.1 And then we’ll probably lose internet access at that point, probably for another few more weeks.2

Competition in the telecommunications sector may make for lower prices, but service, reliability, ease of use – they’re all out the window.

Update:
1It was another two weeks.
2We were without internet for 10 days.

My predictions on loss of service turned out to be pretty accurate.

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