Wedding Night

Sabina England, or Deaf Brown Trash Punk as some will know her, is a colourful character at the best of times. I first met her on authonomy where her entrance, characteristically led by a greeting laced with the 'C' word, caused outrage amongst the serried ranks of tank-top wearing literary aspirants. Her book, 'Brown Trash' was a stunning read - fresh, challenging and with so much voice you'd want to cover your ears to block out its strident call. If you did, you'd get a taste of Sabina World, because she is (as you may have worked out from the above sobriquet) profoundly deaf.

Sabina's silent movies have been popping up on YouTube for a while now and have earned her a growing following. Her stageplays, never less than provocative, have been produced both in the US and UK and now she's gone and written, direct and produced a bigger budget film, 'The Wedding Night' - a much slicker piece that has so far been funded by donations raised by supporters. She's not quite there yet, the film's in the can (well, on the hard disk) but she needs more money to pay for the final edit. Take a look at the trailer:

 

I wanted to bring Sabina onto the radio show I co-host with Jessica Swann every Tuesday on Dubai Eye Radio, Dubai Today, but there's a slight glitch - being deaf is a slight impediment to doing phone interviews on the radio. So we did it by text instead:

What inspired the idea of ‘The Wedding Night’?
I was inspired to write "Wedding Night," which was originally a stage play. It is a very minimalist piece with just 2 actors in a hotel room. And I thought to myself, I can turn this into a film with a very low budget. It is heavy on drama, but very light on the budget. I wrote "Wedding Night" because it is a feminist response to the hypocrisy of sex and women's bodies in Indian-Pakistani culture and amongst Muslims. It is widely accepted for males to have had sexual experience and to have many female partners, yet if a woman dares to explore her sexuality and have sex with just 1 man, she is shunned and shamed by society. Also, I was inspired and disgusted by countless real-life stories I have heard about forced arranged marriages and the tragic consequences that come out of it.

Who are the actors? Are they trained?
The actors are Alpa Banker (actress) and Sanjiv Bajaj (actor). Alpa is a professional actress who lives in Los Angeles. She does theatre, commercials, modeling, and film. Sanjiv Bajaj is a doctor who graduated from Princeton University and founded an independent South Asian theatre company. They were both amazing in their roles.

What was the greatest challenge in conceiving, filming and directing this?
The greatest challenge to make the film happen was getting started in the first place. I didn't know who I was going to hire to shoot the film. I didn't have any money. I didn't have a goddamned clue how to go make this happen. But after consulting many Facebook friends who have worked in the film industry, I got some very good ideas and began raising funds through IndieGoGo. I also posted ads online seeking crew and actors. And soon, all these people were coming up to me and they wanted to work with me.

What’s your hope for it?
I don't have any hope for "Wedding Night." I just made the film because I've always wanted to be a filmmaker, it was always a dream of mine to write, direct and produce my own film and call my own shots. Well, I did it, and I'm glad.

Conflict runs through your work; you hit issues head on all the time and relish holding their little corpses up to show us. What was your one BIG target here, among all the little targets you’re hitting?
My big target in Wedding Night? It's just a big fuck you message to all these narrow-minded male chauvinists in our society. Misogynists, chauvinists, old-fashioned, sexist males and even sexist females, who believe that sex is a bad thing, these people who look down at women for even daring to speak out about sex and for having the courage to explore their sexualities. Sexual liberty is one of the most important rights for human beings, yet most people won't acknowledge that. "Wedding Night" is also a film that proudly shoves female aggression in your face. It's a film that says "hey, women have rights, too and we're not going to let you push us down."

It’s very slick, the trailer. How much did it cost and how did you raise it/convince people to take part in it?
The trailer didn't cost me any money. I just salvaged the film footage from the storage drive and then I created it on my laptop. But the real money will be pouring into post-production. It will cost me $4,000. Post Production includes: editing, colorization, sound synching, music, credits, and so on. When I first began to raise money for the film shoot, I used IndieGoGo and convinced a lot of people to donate to my film project. I raised over $1,000. I said that if you wanted to support a Deaf South Asian Muslim female filmmaker, this is your chance to help me. Hollywood is notoriously racist, sexist, and misogynistic. There are plenty of successful female filmmakers, yet they are ignored and shunned by the Hollywood studio system. Men are always favored over women. And then white men are always favored over non-white men and people of color. And then of course, most people cannot name a successful Deaf person working in Hollywood. So I said, if you're tired of the Hollywood studio system and you want to help someone make a film on her own, this is it. And that's how I got a lot of donations from the public.

Why would anyone in their right minds fund a revolutionary film-maker who’s made a habit of confronting taboos and prejudice so violently and graphically?
I have a little bit over $1,500 in donations for my Film Finishing Fund now, but I need more. If you can donate as little as $10 or $100, that would be great. If you're wondering why you should help me out, all I can say is this: if you go to the cinema and you complain about how mediocre, stupid and pathetic the female lead is, or if you read an article about Hollywood or Bollywood and you complain about the lack of successful female filmmakers being ignored, or if you complain about how film awards are always being handed out to men instead of women, then do something about it. Take out your wallet and give money to an aspiring female filmmaker. Encourage a Deaf person to become a filmmaker, artist, or writer and make their voices be heard. Encourage more filmmakers to make strong, interesting films about strong female leads instead of always creating bimbo, weak, pathetic female characters. Encourage young Muslims and South Asians to go out there and create a film, novel, play, or music that's not typical or cliched. Give me your money and I'll make more films with even better storylines that'll smash the mirror and shove it in people's faces.

The Internet has given you a voice and audience you otherwise wouldn't have, hasn't it?
I think in the Digital Age, in the age of youtube and Vimeo, in the age when crowd-sourced funding is becoming so common, we will face an even bigger change coming onto the filmmaking field. Today, you can create a webseries and put all the episodes online and people will watch. You can put your film online and people will watch. You can even get press attention from it, too. It's nice. More people are discovering that they don't need to get an agent or approach a film producer to get their scripts produced. You don't need to move to Los Angeles to be a filmmaker!! Who cares about Hollywood or Bollywood? Who cares about these irrelevant, pointless networking parties? You don't need an agent. You don't need famous friends. Write a script, set up an online fundraiser, ask people to donate money. I made a film on my own, and so can you. Hollywood is a place that needs to be destroyed. Hollywood keeps churning out pointless remakes and sequels. Hollywood keeps churning out the same, tired, sexist, racist, homophobic stereotypes. Hollywood is a white boys club where women and people of color are struggling to get into. Well, guess what? The studio system is rigid and it's time for Hollywood to collapse and crumble down.

Sabina's website is linked here or you can find her on Twitter: @jihadpunk77.

Talker

Image by notacrime via FlickrI'm doing quite a lot of conference speaking thingies this Autumn, so apologies in advance to anyone who suffers in one of those audiences. I'm particularly looking forward to the MediaME Conference in Amman on the 8th and 9th November, I'm genuinely pumped (but retained as a consultant by, so please take a pinch of salt) about the MENA ICT Forum taking place in Amman on the 10th and 11th October and I'm speaking on a panel thingy tomorrow at the Global Arab Business Meeting in Ras Al Khaimah.

There's more, but I've forgotten them. It's not arrogance, I've just got a brain the side of a dried pea.

I think tomorrow might be interesting. I'm a panellist on the topic of The Sustainable Corporation - "How the corporate sector may embrace socially responsible strategies" and I'm planning to set a cat or two among the pigeons. You see, I think the Middle East's corporate sector must embrace socially responsible strategies or die - but I'm not talking about giving a few thousand Dinars to some centre that's backed by an influential figure. Believe me, I have seen enough of 'ana mudhir' companies doling out cash to well supported causes (which they laughingly call 'CSR') to last me a lifetime, and railed against it every time I've encountered it (often to little effect). I'm not talking about that tomorrow. I'm talking about true social responsibility.

Try this on for size:

Be transparent.
Your ability to obfuscate and dissemble is being limited day by day because of the sharing and access that the Internet is driving. We know much more about you than you think - and we share a lot more opinion about you than you'd like. That movement of opinion, that tide of consumer-driven feedback is actually becoming increasingly important.

Be truthful
If there's a leak, you can not longer go out and say "there is no leak" and depend on a mendacious PR company and a compliant media. We're sharing the video of people sloshing around as you're pretending there is no problem (Sorry, 'issue'). When you need people to believe in your integrity, you'll find that you've already undermined it.

Be honest
Companies make profits. It's what they do. We don't believe for one second that your move to expand your operations is driven by a commitment to the market or a clear response to the needs of the community. It's about profitability and that's okay. But stop trying to dress up clearly commercial decisions as community commitment. And you can stop the greenwashing stuff right there, buddy. Oh, and one more thing. I'll buy a mobile network based on price and quality of service, bess. Your "giving back to the community" lip service is not a factor for me. If you were a true and active member of my community, now that's interesting. But you're not, you're just bankrolling stuff.

Be responsible
We all make mistakes (as the hedgehog said, climbing off the toilet brush). You can actually engage with communities, your customers, and explain why you made a decision (get a spine) or why you made a mistake and how you'll put it right. We expect no less.  When you don't do this, your customers with gather together and talk about what weasels you are.

Be led by your customers
Too many companies in the Middle East splosh 'customer-centric' in their brand values and then go on to treat customers like dirt. Take a close look at the telco sector and you'll see how those organisations have been punished by customers. God knows, I've taken diabolical glee in every piece of work I've done breaking a telco monopoly and you would not believe how low that fruit lay every time. You're a monopoly? Play nicely, because winds of change are abroad and they can change things a damn sight faster than you think.

Last but by no means least - be digital.
What do I get when I Google you? Do you know? TripAdvisor makes hoteliers sweat, but many other Middle East businesses are unaware of the flow of opinion - and are not searchable, responsive or digitally competent. Which is a shame, because an increasingly large number of your customers are. You can assert what you like about your company, it's products and brand. But you are no longer in control of the process of communication - your customers are talking on a wonderful scale. Your assertions are being tested by third parties with more reach than you have.

That's all I'll have time for - and believe me, my list is a sight longer than that. But I'm looking forward  to the reaction...

Sticker Scratcher

Image by touring_fishman via FlickrQuite properly, the UAE insists that products sold to consumers here are labelled in Arabic - the national language. However, once again, there is trouble in paradise. The Arabic labelling requirements are minimal – the product name, brand name, ingredients and product weight are all that appear to be mandated by the announcement made back in 2008 (which I posted about at the time). Although retailers whinged, the regulation is pretty light compared to elsewhere in the world and, I would argue, does little to help raising awareness among Arabic speaking consumers regarding the food they eat and what's in it.

Another requirement of that regulation is that the affixed Arabic label should NOT cover any of the original language text.

This stipulation is patently not being adhered to – retailers and distributors are constantly handling goods where the Arabic language label does indeed cover part of the original language text. Which is why I found myself the highly unwilling purchaser last night of a pot of Hampshire Sour Cream that did not come, as I had stupidly assumed, from the English county of Hampshire but was, in fact, a brand of American food conglomerate Kraft. The country of origin was covered by the Arabic sticker. I was mildly annoyed, as I consciously avoid using foods from US producers.

This got me going. Fossicking through the kitchen cupboard I found product after product where the Arabic sticker covered crucial information on the original product labels. I also found some products with no Arabic sticker at all – and a few, very few, where the sticker did not impact the original product information.

It’s a rich hodge-podge, a basic regulation that I would argue does not properly serve the Arabic speaking population with full food information and that has been implemented at best sloppily (and somewhat grudgingly, apparently, if you read my 2008 post linked above!) by the companies being asked to conform to a food safety and information requirement. It’s odd, when we can see legislation rolled out here that is no less than draconian, when this piece of regulation – affecting us all – remains implemented so very sloppily and to such a basic standard. It's been two years since the regulation came into force. It's not as if retailers need time to comply.

The reason, I would remind you, that we have such a thriving IT industry in Dubai is that it was here, uniquely, that IP legislation was not only enforced, but enforced on such a scale, with computers confiscated from offending companies and hauled away in flat back trucks, that companies like Microsoft felt able to come here and open up shop. Remember the ruling that walking on the grassy reservations or roundabouts would result in deportation? When Dubai really wants to enforce legislation, by golly it goes for it. But for some reason this one is being half-heartedly applied. So expats and the bi-lingual lose access to product information that bodies like the EU have decided we should really have a right to view. And Arabic-only speakers don’t get access to anything beyond the most basic information – information that wouldn’t satisfy any well-informed consumer let alone EU or US regulations.

The requirements and enforcement of the UAE food labelling regulation as it stands serves us all badly.

Spamless!

Image via Wikipedia
Anyone with a blog will tell you that the most annoying thing (apart from snarky anonymice) about the whole thing is comment spam. There's a special place in hell for comment spammers that involves extra unpleasantness and daily algebra lessons. They leave inane generic little comments, "I really enjoyed your post, keep up the good work, this is a very good blog I think" and links to their websites.

In one wonderful instance, a comment spammer was actually daft enough to leave his contact details on his WHOIS entry, with the consequences I delightedly reported in this here post. Revenge is indeed sweet.

I've been comment spammed a lot today by an Indian UPVC pipe making company. Grinding my teeth, I arrived at the blog with some scrubbies and a bottle of spam cleaner when I noticed that although I'd been getting the emails (I get a mail every time one of you peeps slips in a sneaky comment), I didn't actually have the spam in the comments. This was wonderful stuff - Google has actually implemented a spam filter and it has snapped up all that spam in a jiffy. It also sucked down Rootless' response to me on the high fructose corn syrup post, which I have now put back in its proper place.

Thank you Google. Now could you please work on finding a way to stop me getting everything (blogs, Google Maps etc) in Arabic by default? Although I respect Arabic, I don't read it - and assuming I do is just a bit dumb for a company as seriously clever as you are.

Information Overload

Image by Getty Images via @daylife
You could perhaps feel sorry for Dubai's RTA (Road and Transport Authority) faced as it is (and doubtless many other such authorities around the world) with having bought huge, wildly expensive traffic information screens that flash up bitty messages using LED technology. Given the relatively low resolution of the screens, they are only able to show a couple of lines of text - although they are bilingual, which is a good thing.


Someone at the RTA has the unenviable task of thinking up messages to post on the things and there have been signs recently of a certain tendency to surreal, Situationist-like sloganeering. The most recent, giving way yesterday and today to an Arabic only greeting for Sheikh Khalifa (who has just returned to the UAE following medical treatment), was 'SCHOOLS WITHOUT ACCIDENTS'.


That one's stayed with me. What could it mean?

Die Telco! Die!

Image via Wikipedia
Facebook has tossed its hat into the mobile handset ring according to TechCrunch today. The move is fascinating and adds a dimension to the whole new world emerging from the competition between companies who, five years ago, you would have never have thought of associating with the phone business - principally Apple and Google.

The idea of a phone that cuts out the old number dialling thing entirely and creates connections across a social media platform is a short leap ahead from the Google Voice stuff I was waffling about a few days ago, but it's a logical one. With the ability to make 'analogue' calls as well as Facebook to Facebook calls, the phone would logically use the same VoIP based technologies as MSN and Google are using to connect people directly today. The mobile Internet is about to get very hot indeed as 'telephones' transform into IP based devices that will support, potentially, voice and a huge range of other functionalities.

In that instance, you don't actually need a telco or its tottering infrastructure of switching exchanges - and you won't be paying circuit switched pricings anymore, just your flat rate monthly Internet access fee to your ISP.  Today's traditional telco is not a sustainable business model: telcos will have to downscale and slim up to a tremendous degree or will have to find a massive new, services based, business model to add to the diminishing revenues that their decreasing importance in an Internet-driven communications model will yield.

Or they could just keep blocking everything. That's another option, I guess...

But block or not, it is inevitable that telcos that don't transform fast will die.

Bread Head

Image via WikipediaI can't help it. I just have to post the ingredients of Subway's 9 Grain Wheat bread. You'd have thought it was wheat, water, nine grains and yeast, wouldn't you? Well, you're wrong. I know I'm an obsessive, but have a quick read and see if you want to put THIS in your mouth:

9-GRAIN WHEAT Enriched wheat flour (wheat flour, barley malt, niacin, iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), water, yeast, high fructose corn syrup, whole wheat flour, wheat gluten, contains 2% or less of the following: oat fiber, soybean oil, salt, wheat bran, rolled wheat, rye nuggets, dough conditioners (DATEM, sodium stearoyl lactylate), yeast nutrients (calcium sulfate, ammonium sulfate), degermed yellow corn meal, rolled oats, rye flakes, caramel color, triticale flakes, parboiled brown rice, refinery syrup, honey, barley flakes, flaxseed, millet, sorghum flour, azodiacarbonamide, natural flavor (maltodextrin, natural flavor, silicon dioxide, lactic acid). Contains wheat.
Let’s just take a look at that list, shall we?

Enriched wheat flour (wheat flour, barley malt, niacin, iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid). This is an interesting start. The addition of vitamins (niacin etc) to flour is typically mandated in the US, where processing gives a white, fine flour free of the wheat germ, which can limit shelf life. Presumably adding barley malt to the flour is the reason for the term ‘enriched’ being used, because the other ingredients are merely to replace the vitamins and elements lost during processing, typically to the heat of the rollers that pound the powder. By the way, there are a number of other chemicals and additives used in making processed flour, including good old fashioned bleach (or Clorox if you prefer).

Water, yeast
Good stuff – something natural!

High fructose corn syrup
See yesterday’s post. This is not good. It’s used in processed breads to increase shelf life as well as increase elasticity. ‘Real’ bread tends to be dry and crumbly, what we want is softer bread that hasn’t got all those nasty chewy bits and if we can make it sweeter too, well, why not?

Whole wheat flour
Good stuff! Real whole wheat flour – it’s only the fifth ingredient by weight after the sugar gloop, so there’s not a lot of it in this ‘9 grain wheat’ bread. But every little counts!

Wheat gluten
Used to add elasticity, it’s basically wheat that’s been washed in water.

Oat fiber, soybean oil, salt, wheat bran, rolled wheat, rye nuggets
93% of all US soybean crops are genetically modified. Just thought you ought to know that.

Dough conditioners (DATEM, sodium stearoyl lactylate)
DATEM? Oh yes, Diacetyl Tartaric (Acid) Ester of Monoglyceride to you. An enzyme used to make softer, more chewable bread. And while sodium stearoyl lactylate sounds scarier than DATEM, it’s a very common emulsifier found in most processed breads.

Yeast nutrients (calcium sulfate, ammonium sulfate)
You’ll know calcium sulfate better as gypsum, while aluminum ammonium sulfate is a firming agent. Not sure how they’re yeast nutrients, but I’m sure the chaps at Subway know best.

Degermed yellow corn meal, rolled oats, rye flakes
All unassuming ingredients.

Caramel color
Woah, there. Caramel colour? In a whole wheat bread? Surely it’d be brown enough from the huge amount of natural stone-ground whole wheat flour that… oh, okay. Point taken. They dye their bread brown.

Triticale flakes, parboiled brown rice, refinery syrup, honey, barley flakes, flaxseed, millet, sorghum flour
Triticale is a grain, but what’s brown rice doing in my bread? Some nice (cheap) refined syrup for sweetness and even a little honey, too…

Azodiacarbonamide
This stuff is nasty. It’s a permitted additive in the US but banned in Europe and using it in food will send you to jail for 15 years in Singapore. It’s primary use is in foaming plastic, but in breads it’s a flour bleaching and improving agent. In baking, its use produces biurea, which is a really unpleasant chemical.

Natural flavor (maltodextrin, natural flavor, silicon dioxide, lactic acid)
Maltodextrin is a powerful chemical sweetener (as if we didn’t already have HFCS, refined syrup and honey in this stuff!). And natural flavor simply is not natural – it’s an amazing piece of double-speak used to denote wholly artificial, chemical flavourings that are synthesized by ‘reverse engineering’ truly natural flavours. Only in America could you get away with calling a wholly artificial product ‘natural’. Silicon dioxide is an anti-caking agent, while lactic acid gives a sour flavor

Contains wheat.
Little enough of it, eh? I mean, given what else this stuff contains, it's almost a surprise!

And if that little lot didn't make you want to gag and send you of to bake your own bread, take a read of this!

A Corny Tale

Image via WikipediaHigh fructose corn syrup is one of a number of things in food that I avoid like the plague – I’m really no fan of any form of processed food and prefer to buy my ingredients raw, basic and ready to cook from scratch.

HFCS is a nasty, insidious ingredient in much processed food, particularly of American origin (over 55% of all sweetener in the USA, which means the average American consumes something over 60 pounds of the stuff a year) but also favoured by high volume food processors around the world. It’s basically the cheapest form of highly processed sweetener that’s not aspartame and the scientists behind processed food (many of whom, I suspect, would hesitate to eat their own creations) love it because shareholders love cheap and we all love sweet. We lurve da fat, we lurve da sweet.

HFCS is produced, oddly enough, from corn, typically Genetically Modified corn because of the vast production of GM corn in America and a range of subsidies that make this gloop cheaper than real sugar there. The corn is ground up to produce cornstarch. This is mixed with water to make a slurry treated with the addition of a number of enzymes including alpha-amylase (also used in bread improvers and detergents) and Xylose isomerase. Nice, eh?

With 58% of Americans citing a level of concern over the ingredient, thanks in no small part to a number of exposes, documentaries and public information efforts carried out over the Internet, it’s little wonder that the people that make this awful shite are feeling the pinch. In fact, demand for the instant fix sugar rush that many have blamed for America’s rise to becoming the earth’s Most Morbidly Obese Nation has dropped to the lowest level in twenty years. Which is no bad thing, really.

Now the American Corn Refiner’s Association, reacting to this drop in popularity, wants to give High Fructose Corn Syrup a quick image-buffing and rename it “Corn Sugar”. The idea is that the evil High Fructose Corn Syrup tag on the packaging that scares moms away gives way to nice, friendly ‘corn sugar’, because HFCS, says the ACRA, is just the same as sugar.

This isn’t the first time the Association has tried. Two years ago it launched a major PR initiative, “Changing the Conversation about High Fructose Corn Syrup” which aimed to characterize HFCS as a ‘natural’ product. Critics point out that a slurry of genetically modified cornstarch treated with enzyme infusions (themselves containing synthetic chemicals) is hardly natural. Sadly for the PR effort, the FDA agreed with the critics and a spokesperson said that HFCS should not be labeled ‘natural’.

You only need to go to the Association’s current corn sugar promoting website and see the pictures of happy families tucking into mountains of fruity goodness to know that there is a fundamentally evil force at work here. Click on the video and wander through fields of lovely corn with a slick, pretty actress, oh sorry, “A mother navigates through a maze of confusing information and learns whether it’s corn sugar or cane sugar, your body can’t tell the difference.”

Amusingly, someone's been trying to edit the Wikipedia entry for High Fructose Corn Syrup to introduce the 'Corn Sugar' name, but the Wikipolice are on top of it.

To my immense amusement, the sister website to the insidious SweetSurprise.com, cornsugar.com is blocked by Etisalat. I can only imagine it's something to do with corn dogging, but then second guessing Etisalat is a surefire trek down the road to flailing insanity.

But of course the argument’s not really about whether this awful, processed syrupy gloop is natural or not. And, perhaps surprisingly, it’s not about whether HFCS ‘short cuts’ the body’s satiety response and leads directly to obesity. It’s about the fact that the stuff is absolutely everywhere – particularly in sodas which are responsible, apparently, for some two thirds of its total consumption in the US. Some manufacturers, including Snapple, Coke and ketchup maker Hunts have removed it from their products, but HFCS is in drinks, bread (particularly processed brown breads. I mean, you really, really do not want to know what’s in Subway’s ‘wheat bread’, but I can tell you HFCS is the fourth largest component of the stuff), fruit mixes, lollies, cakes, biscuits, chocolates, crisps, soups, yoghurts and ice cream. In short, if it’s a processed food, it could well be delivering you a belt of gloop.

Thank God we at least have regulations that insist on products carrying a label with a full list of ingredients by weight, so it's there to see on the label. Whatever they call it.

BTW, other 'Yew, is that what's in my food?' related posts include this one on what's in Pringles and this one over at The Fat Expat on Palm Oil.

Nosy Parker

Image by José Antonio Galloso via Flickr
It was Sarah who found the list of benefits that came with our credit card. I had never really bothered, particularly given my policy of having as little to do with our bank as possible on the grounds that it's invariably bad for my health.

So when she announced that we could use our credit card to valet park for free in many of the city's shopping malls, I was not only surprised but delighted. We were to go to Mirdif City Centre in any case and so I could look forward to trying out this New Thing and 'availing my benefit'.

You might think I approached this with malign glee and the prospect of a snarky blog post in mind and if so you can award yourself a pat on the back and a banana daquiri because that's precisely what I was thinking. I could see it in my mind's eye - the uncomprehending, cow-like stare and the nervous laugh, the appalling delay while someone was telephoned to see if this was, in fact, the case. The sardonic laughter of the man who's not falling for some Brit's lame attempt to save twenty chips by trying to scam his way in.

When the man from ubiquitous valet parking company Valtrans looked at my proffered card, smiled and said, "Of course, sir!" I was flummoxed, flabbergasted and probably a little bamboozled as well. It worked like a dream and generally did what it said on the box.

So now I've got a new scheme in mind. I'm going to valet park everywhere. HSBC's paying for this and I'm going to bankrupt the bastards, Dhs20 at a time.

Heffalump

Image via Wikipedia
With all this talk last week of Google Voice and its blocking by the laughing gnomes at the UAE's Telecoms Regulatory Authority (TRA), I was reminded last night of quite how big is the heffalump in the Internet telephony room as we chatted happily over a video link to Ireland.

Both Microsoft Messenger and Google Chat support voice and video calling - both effectively forms of the dreaded VoIP that the TRA's gangs of Amish are so keen to protect us from. The video stuff isn't bad quality really, although you'd expect a great deal better with a 1 Meg DSL connection (cripes, we used to do video over a 128kbps ISDN link!) - particularly one that's quite as expensive as Etisalat's.

Back in the day, the road between Abu Dhabi and Dubai  used to be decorated with futuristic pictures of video telephones from Fujitsu, although I can never remember seeing one in reality (despite my former life as a telecoms journalist) - video calling never really seemed to take off. It was one of the applications that vendors used to waffle on about when they were selling the impossibly huge bandwidth of ISDN - in fact, it was also one of the applications that vendors waffled about when they were trying to sell us the impossibly huge bandwidth of 3G. There you go - if you've got way too much bandwidth, talk up the video angle!

Video calling got sort of tagged into messenger applications, but it's proving to be more and more popular - to the point now where Microsoft's Messenger actually looks for a cam when you're chatting and lets you know that the person you're talking to has a cam and offers to hook you up. It costs nothing, it's fun and it's usable - three critical factors in the fast adoption of a technology.

Messenger ships by default with pretty much every single computer out there and Google Chat is, of course, tied in quite nicely to Gmail. You start trying to block these babies, you're going to do even more damage to the technological capabilities and competitiveness of the nation - and there's already enough damage being done to the adoption, uptake and usage of a number of technologies and networks by the existing blocking policies. And just you wait until Google starts to tie this stuff into Earth, Translate et al.

Where Google Voice is interesting is that it supports PC to phone and vice versa, effectively turning Google into a telco, like Skype but with infinitely more reach. There's no reason why video calling over that connection shouldn't turn into an everyday occurence. There's also every reason to suppose that the world isn't going to leave this space to Google to play in alone - we are going to see more and more applications and services that offer this type of functionality and that integrate it into other functionalities.

This is an inflection point in technology, a tectonic shift. Continuing to protect moribund telcos working on circuit switched revenue models will not address the core problem - that they are being rendered increasingly uncompetitive by advances in technology that they are not encompassing - and that in today's networked world, an uncompetitive telecomms sector will increasingly create an uncompetitive nation.

Blocking VoIP services is short-term protectionism - other telcos in the region and wider world (for instance, take a look at the region's most competitive telco market, Jordan) have been able to transition to leaner, meaner entities and compete in a level playing field by leveraging VoIP technologies in their own operations - the consequent benefit to the consumer and, indeed, the economy is substantial.

It won't be long now before a voice call has no more value than an email. Sooner, rather than later, we are going to have to accept the fact that the UAE's telecoms sector, in its current model, is growing increasingly uncompetitive and unsustainable in the face of the advances taking place in the world around us.

UAE Blocks Google Voice

Image via WikipediaThere has been a great deal of concern and speculation this week regarding a possible move against Google by the UAE's telecom regulator, the TRA. Much of this concern has been triggered by appalling journalism which, for some reason, people have been taking seriously. It really is the biter bit - social media conversations driven by sloppy, lacklustre reporting from the very people that argue their continued existence is justified by their unique ability to provide us with 'context' and 'analysis'.

First of the block was Emirates Business 24x7 the former newspaper (ahem) that has been transformed, chrysalis-like into a beautiful Internet butterfly. Their story earlier this week, "Google to launch localised versions of VoIP in the Middle East" was nothing other than an awful example of a story that doesn't stand up its headline - the story itself contains the immortal comment from Google (the bit that was meant to justify the headline):

"The feature is not available in Mena. Google will be rolling out additional localised versions but we have nothing to announce at the moment."

You'll notice the one thing Google quite spefically does not say is that localised versions of its Google Voice VoIP service will be introduced to users in the MENA region. Cravenly, Emirates Business has since changed the headline on its website to read "Google to launch localised versions of VoIP", which is an entirely different story and, in fact, utterly lacking in any news value whatsoever.

This story has prompted speculation that Google would, indeed, launch this service. Given that Google Voice does pretty much what Skype does, this would of course induce the TRA to block the Google Voice site (Arabian Business, in an attention-seeking piece, carried some dire predictions from some 'analysts' to this effect), which is just what it has in fact done. Honest. Take a look here.

Given that Google's own site contained text to the effect (the text displayed if your IP is non-US) that you can't access this service which is only open to subscribers in the USA, blocking it did seem a tad redundant.

Presumably Google will be seeking to introduce the service legally to the many different jurisdictions around the world in which it is active. In many of these, this will involve seeking a telecommunications operator licence of one sort or another, working with a local telco or braving the country's regulator and any action (if, indeed, any) it chooses to take against unlicensed telecommunications services.

Poor old Google didn't say a word about bringing this to the UAE. But the UAE seems to have sent an unequivocal message to Google just in case it was thinking about it. And all, I suspect, because of a sloppy piece of journalism...

For what it's worth, as far as I can see, the move is unlikely to affect Gmail or any other part of Google's services unless Google starts to integrate the voice platform with other Google properties - which is something you could actually see makes a great deal of sense in the long run. Don't forget, bits of Google (Orkut) have long been blocked here without losing the rest (see also Yahoo!'s Flickr). So it's not time to hit the panic button quite yet... 

Meanwhile, I have to say I think the TRA is looking increasingly Canute-like...

Your Call Is Important To Us

Image via WikipediaGreeting the Caller
When answering the phone, say ‘Hello’. When the caller says ‘Hello’ back, keep saying hello until the caller becomes angry. Alternatively, give your name and ask in a bright, sparky voice, ‘Is there anything I can do for you today after you tell me your inside leg measurement?’

If you can, pronounce your name oddly so that the caller has to ask for it several times. Ideally, change your name to TikkiPikkapukka.

Time on Hold
If the caller has been on hold for a significant time, it is likely that he or she will have been forced to listen to distorted music, several advertisements for your organisation's brilliant customer service award track record and several repetitions of ‘Your call is important to us but we’re busy helping other customers.’ It is likely that the customer will be angry or at the least mildly irritated at this stage, so don’t forget to place them back on hold. Ideally, pick a line that doesn’t have music on hold but that does have a strange echo on it, something like an ultrasound recording played backwards or a slowed down recording of the Doppler effect from a pea being shot through a wind tunnel.

If the caller asks you to call them back, assure them that you will and forget to take their number.

Asking For Security Information
Make sure you always ask for the customer’s security information even if the call is a routine request for something like your branch opening hours. Be particularly sure to ask for this information if your call system has already asked the customer to key in his or her PIN number, unique caller number, Memorable Information and Call Repeating Access Password number in order to get put on hold for twenty minutes to talk to you.

If your call centre has initiated the call, don’t forget to fail to identify yourself properly and then go straight into asking a range of insane security questions. If the customer answers these, don’t forget to end the call with a warning about identity theft.

Putting the Caller on Hold
Never, ever tell the customer you are about to put them on hold. Just drop the line and leave them in limbo to stew for a while. Ideally, have a colleague pick up the line and insist on going through the whole process again. If you put a caller through this until every seat in the call centre has talked to him/her and have the recordings kept for training purposes to prove it, you could be eligible for a Callie – the global call centre awards. The link to the application form is here.

Keep the Caller Informed
If it is taking a huge amount of time to dig into the customer’s records or get a line to the department that has the answers, don’t forget to sigh a lot and make plentiful tapping noises on your keyboard. You can save the risk of RSI or chipped nail polish by making a recording of this sound on a cheap Dictaphone and just replaying it. Then ask the customer if he/she is there, say ‘Just one minute’ and transfer the line to the night service message. If your call centre is 24/7, transfer the call to the ‘Sorry, extension 43 is not available. Please leave a message.’ This should then route through to ‘This mailbox is full, please try later.’

Never Guess the Answer
 If you don’t know the answer to a customer’s question, don’t guess the answer, just lie. Say anything that comes into your head. Some good holding lines are: ‘That’s against our policies’, ‘My manager has said I can’t do that’, ‘The system is down’ and ‘That department has been disbanded.’ A great all-purpose lie is, ‘Yes, that’s finished now. The thing you want is in the post and will be with you within two working days.’

Always Keep the Promise to Call Back
When you are forced to promise to call the customer back, always ensure that there is, indeed, a subsequent call. Route the call request through to another department, security is always a good one, or a totally unrelated department in another continent is always good to place a call back to the customer.

How to Deal With an Angry Caller
If a caller becomes angry, repeat the thing that has made them angry in a slow voice. It is important at this stage to tell the customer that you are trying to help them. Continue speaking slowly and say ‘I’m sorry’ as frequently as normal grammatical usage will allow. A good phrase to use here is: ‘There is nothing you can do. It’s just the way things are.’

Passing the Caller On
 If the caller asks to speak with someone more senior, block this request at all costs in case it might get you into trouble. At first, always try telling them that the manager will just tell them the same thing. If they are insistent, you can point blank refuse, say that it’s not possible or put them on hold in the Doppler pea chamber.

Never End the Call if the Customer Wishes to Continue
 It is important never to hang up on a customer, even if they have been tried to the point of insanity and are having a major coronary incident. That is what the Doppler pea chamber is for. However, it is vitally important that you have the last word in every call, so don’t forget to ask ‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’ It is, of course vitally important to do this when you have been totally unable to help the customer. If you have been able to help the customer, you may need to apply for retraining.

Keeping Customers Happy
 If your employer wanted customers to be happy, they’d hardly outsource their most important relationships to a bunch of disempowered dunderheads in a room who don’t have the authority to crap without a triplicate form let alone actually do anything that a customer would actually want. The words Your Call is Important To Us are actually a sophisticated code that translates to ‘We don’t care about you’ and the more aware of this you are as a call centre operator, the better it will be for all of us.

Happy customers are a myth. They’re all whingeing time wasters and it’s your job to make sure they know they haven’t a hope in hell of getting anywhere. After all, if customers started to dictate what the company did, what kind of world would it be?

(The inspiration for this was colleague Alec Harden - @alecharden - who bowled into the office this morning screaming at Skywards. Skwards won, but then that's what call centres always do in the end, isn't it? So This article, "Ten Golden Rules for Call Centre Operators", subsequently had me in helpless stitches of hooting laughter and demanded parodying.)

Labour to let

Image via Wikipedia
Driving past the infamous Sonapour labour camp, you can only be struck by the To Let signs up on the accommodation blocks. A closer inspection reveals a large number of the blocks have gaps in the walls where window ACs should be. It's almost quiet on the roads around the camp in the mornings and evenings, where once clouds of dust would be thrown up by manic bus drivers taking shortcuts or slinging their loads of tired workers around the sandy parking spaces around the cluster of blocks that sits north of the big graveyard (the roadsigns used to read 'Labour Camp / Graveyard' until someone finally worked out that this was a form of irony) on the Emirates Road.

We're seeing the occasional 'labourers stranded' story in the local press still, although the worst of these recently, 700 labourers stranded with no money or resources after the Dubai-based construction company's chairman fled, relates to labourers in Sharjah's labour camp, not Sonapour.

A lot of the projects that still went ahead when the recession hit (or, to be more accurate, when Dubai stopped pushing its fingers in its ears and going lalalalala rather than accept a recession had hit) did so because they had gone too far to cancel - it simply made more sense to finish them than kill them off. Those projects are starting to be finished now and as each one does, it is likely that there will be precious little to replace it. So many of the construction workers who got a reprieve over the past couple of years are likely to get laid off and sent home.

That second wave of redundancies will see even more To Let signs up in Sonapour. Let's hope it doesn't lead to another wave of 'workers stranded' stories.

All Change For Authonomy

Image via Wikipedia
Warning - traffic destroying writing post follows...

One of the infamous, shadowy international writers group, the Grey Havens gang, alerted us to a blog post on Harper Collins' Authonomy site which heralds major changes to the site. The post recognises that Authonomy has major structural issues and appears to be a heads-up that changes will be made in the near future that will address these.

Authonomy is a peer-review site for writers to post samples of their work for others to read, criticise and, if they think it is of oustanding, publishable quality, to 'back' it. The most backed books each month are skimmed for a read by Harper Collins' editors. I have written much in the past about authonomy, if you're interested in all the background it's all collected at this here link. Probably the most controversial - and widely read and linked - post is this one, which led to this guest post on Eoin Purcell's blog, apparently so contentious that Eoin froze comments on it. I still think the post I did for Eoin best defines my view on authonomy at that time.

Just to be abundantly clear before I toss my hat once again into the ring of Authonomy debate - I am not sore that my book 'won' but didn't get published. I recognise, more now than ever before, that the book was funny and popular  but very, very badly written. I get that. However, I invested a lot of time, energy and thought into Authonomy and have gained much from my experiences with the site - both personally as a writer and professionally as someone who consults on communications - particularly in the digital/social space. (I have to add this caveat every time, depressingly, as the first response to anything I have to say about Authonomy is so frequently, 'that's just sour grapes cos you didn't get a contract', which isn't the case at all.)

At the time I left authonomy, I wrote:

We've never seen people - even the editors who review the books are anonymous. I'm sure HC thinks its being terribly funky and Web 2.0, but it's not. It's missed the first rule of these types of engagements with a community. Foster a community, be part of a community, engage with the community. HC hasn't, because it doesn't respect that community enough... Many people have had enough of being treated like the carvers in front of Gormenghast - even more so when it's become clear that the Groans don't want any of our carvings.

I liked the Gormenghast analogy so much I used it again in this post on the future of publishing, in which I pointed out that:

With all the energy of a group of kids in a huge playground, we invested a huge amount of time and effort on the site, vying to get to the top and using fair means and foul to do so. At the core of it, though, was a sincere belief in quality – the majority of users adhered to a principle that they’d only ‘back’ books that they would genuinely buy in a bookshop.

The changes that Harper Collins are making to authonomy will refocus the site, the company says, on that idea of rewarding quality rather than the messy cronyism, begging and whoring that has come to characterise the site. As Harper's blog post says:

In recent months, we'll admit that the site has been suffering from a kind of 'vote inflation' where support was given (or traded) very freely and as a result the rank of all books has been somewhat cheapened... We want the charts to mirror more accurately a community consensus, and for the feat of reaching an editor to be based on something other than months of superhuman networking effort. 

That's great, but I can only hope that my silly little voice (and others like me) got heard to some degree in the hallowed halls of Harper Collins: 


A site like that needs the active participation in the community of the organisation behind it. With sincerity that wins the trust of the community. You cannot run online communities, you have to be part of them. You have to accept the principle that you give up ownership in favour of participation. Putting up a patronising blog post every week or so from an editor, or the occasional forum intervention from an unnamed contributor in response to critical threads is not really what Web 2.0 is about, is it? Even the critiques on Authonomy are from unnamed editors. But then my argument is that it was never about critiques.

(that extract from my post on Eoin's blog)

Part of the problem has been, I am quite sure, 'old world thinking' - it's something we come across professionally pretty much every day these days - companies bring us in to consult on social media, digital and community programmes and want someone to provide the content and populate the profiles/communities for them because their own key staff are doing more important stuff, like talking to clients and partners - but the whole point about this stuff  is that it's not an ad campaign. You can't just book it and walk away from it, it's all about engagement and talking to people using new tools and a new degree of accessibility. Sure, it involves being exposed, taking some responsibility and actually engaging with customers and other stakeholders. But those concepts are core to this stuff, not peripheral. You need to be there yourself - just getting some developers or an agency to do it won't work. And running a community site with faceless camp guards policing it won't work either.

If the changes to Authonomy include Harper Collins' editors actually engaging in the site, being named members and helping authors, influencing debate, mentoring work they believe to be of merit, being kind to work that is fifth rate and telling authors, gently, that this is the case - wouldn't that be wonderful? If real world editors actually were part of the community, if books that rose to the top were taken, for instance, into a manuscript development program similar to the Hachette program that got my pal Phillipa Fioretti into print, wouldn't Authonomy very quickly become THE place for any aspiring author to go? Wouldn't it give Harper first dibs on pretty much every emerging talent in the world today?

Yes it would. 

The one thing Authonomy has ever lacked has been the active community participation of the people that created it. If that's about to change, it could be very big news indeed for publishing. And I would welcome it with open arms - it would become what I believed Authonomy was to start with - a vital, energising response from the publishing industry that embraced and leveraged the powerful democratisation of the Internet. 

Sunshine, you are my Sunshine

Image by higlu via Flickr
Went for a routine checkup recently as I mentioned the other day. One interesting result from this (apart from the news that I am going to live, apparently) was that I have vitamin D deficiency. It's not quite rickets, but the Doktor has given me some vitamin D bombs to bring me levels back up.
Why should I even bother sharing this mundane detail? Because it is apparently widespread here, so much so that health check-ups didn't used to include it as a routine test and now do. I watched others being prescribed the same supplement down at the pharmacy, so that gives us anecdotal evidence that a) there is a genuinely widespread incidence of vitamin D deficiency or, possibly b) there's a company making vitamin D supplements that pays whopping backhanders to doctors that prescribe them. Given the pills weren't hugely expensive, I'm going with a). And yes, I know I'm cynical.
Vitamin D is not, apparently, really a dietary thing. Your main source of the stuff is sunlight - it's synthesised by the skin in unfiltered sunlight and doctors recommend that you be exposed to something like 15 minutes' sunshine a day. Allowing that two minutes in the current heat and humidity would render you a gasping, sweaty heap, it's no surprise to find that we're none of us* getting enough sunlight and so many of us in the UAE and, presumably elsewhere in the GCC, have low vitamin D levels..
Low vitamin D levels won't cause you to break out in blotches or grow extra fingers, but it will over time affect the health of your bones and can lead to osteoporisis and other brittle/weak bone conditions later in life.
When was the last time you had yours checked?

* Apart from the labourers, of course, who are likely getting plenty of the stuff, although precious little else...