Fish And Superfish

I don't know if you've seen the broohaha, but there has been an almighty spat between members of the security industry and PC manufacturer Lenovo, which has perhaps unwisely been loading its consumer PCs with nasty little adware add-on Superfish Virtual Discovery.

Superfish behaves very badly indeed and basically renders any system it's installed on very vulnerable indeed to attack because of the way it uses security certificates to insert its own ad results into users' browsers. Many have questioned quite why Lenovo would be stupid enough to sell its users down the river for what can be only a miniscule contribution to revenue. This article on cnet is probably the most reasoned in tone - as you get up the security value chain, the screams and howls get impressively loud.

Anyway, I removed Superfish using the removal tool Lenovo was so achingly late to bring to bear on a problem it clearly had thought it could bland PR its way out of.

And this was the result. Which made me laugh a lot. We fixed the problem we gave you and now there never was a problem to start with. I'm glad I used Norton first to detect that, yes, I did have a problem. And pretending it's gone away, Lenovo, won't make it go away.

This dialogue box, to me, reads like the result of a battle between engineering and PR...

If you have a Lenovo PC made since last August, not a Thinkpad, but one of the consumer brands like Yoga, you might want to nip over here and run this here doohickey...

HSBC IVR SNAFU

(Photo credit: lipjin)

HSBC has, in a moment of rare brilliance, broken its IVR. Not that it was ever an IVR to write home about in the first place, but now they've really cemented things and ensured it doesn't let you do telephone banking.

The one thing you'd want a telephone banking system to do, really. But then my expectations are probably set too high. Maybe I should expect my phone banking system to be set up to let me craunch a marmoset or perhaps provide me with philosophical inspiration. Because it sure as hell can't perform a transaction.

IVR is, in case you're interested, Interactive Voice Recognition. It's the phone system where.robotic.voices.tell.you.to.press.1.to.be.annoyed OR PRESS two.to.be.really.annoyed. It doesn't really have to be about voice, it can be keypad response. I'll never forget Rick Dees' highly amusing breast self examination hotline IVR gag: "Welcome to the Rick Dees breast self-examination hotline. Press one. Now press the other one."

Anyway, if you want to transfer money between accounts and you have multiple accounts (I do. There isn't enough room in one account to hold all the money I have, see?), you are now presented with a list of accounts to debit. Let us assume I want to transfer from my number two account to my number one account.

Foryour HSBC.UAE.Advance.Account.0...2...0...1...1..TWO...press ONE. For.other.accounts.press.two.

So you press two.

Foryour HSBC.UAE.current.account. ZERO....too...ZERO...WUN...ONE...2 press ONE.

So you press one.

Please.select.the.account.to.credit. Foryour HSBC.UAE.Savings.account.. 0..2...0...0...FIVE...0. Press ONE.

And that's it. You can't actually choose the account to credit and the account to debit. It's broken. Bust. Kaput. Borked. Non-functional. Usefully challenged. Without point. Eff all use.

So, heart heavy, you call the call centre. 

"Hello. Your IVR is broken."

"I'm sorry sir, I didn't understand you. Did you want to have your car washed, top up your credit card or craunch a marmoset?"

"No, I just want to tell someone at the bank that the new IVR is functionally broken. It won't let me transfer between accounts." I nearly say it's pining for the fjords but remember in time that you never, ever try to make a joke with the HSBC call centre or F16 strikes are called down on your house.

"I know the new IVR is complex sir and hard to understand and I appreciate your difficulty. Can I do the transfer for you?"

"But you're just reciting a script you've been given because of the high volume of complaints you're getting and that doesn't alter the fact or escalate the information to someone who could act on it that the IVR is actually functionally non-functional. Ineffective. Not fit for purpose."

"Yes. Umm. No. Is there anything else I can do for you today?"

They're taping the call. I hang up because I know what I want to say won't read well in the court transcript of my verbal abuse case.

I hate them. With a passion.

But then you know that...

Kinder's 'Next Face' Gender Bender

That's not a girl - it's a boy with some badly Photoshopped hair extensions. What an odd thing to do to a chocolate packet! What an odd thing to do, indeed, to a child. If they're going to take those kinds of liberties, would you want your child to be the 'next face of Kinder chocolate'?

I'd never have noticed but for The Niece From Heaven and a visit to the Mirdif City Centre shopping mall, where we discovered a promo display in the central court being staged by Kinder. There were chocolate themed things to climb on and play with and TNFH was immediately drawn in, being something of a Kinder fangirl.

There was a photographer with a studio portrait flash setup - the promo was themed 'Do you want your kid to be the next face of Kinder chocolate?' - and he was listlessly snapping children, surrounded by screaming kids clambering on plastic chocolate shapes. We stood off, laughing cruelly at him and imagining the office all picking on Elie and volunteering him for the Kinder promo job.

Once your child has been snapped by Elie, you're sent to the collection point to pick up your very own Kinder chocolate box with your kid's face on it. A put-upon individual takes the snap from Elie and Photoshops it onto a packet background. He does this, incidentally, very badly. This is then printed out, guillotined, folded and glued to make a paper packet wrapper which is then handed to you. TNFH's face had been squished to fit - for some reason rather than scaled - so we eventually came away with a grainy, fat faced version of her on a light card wrapper. Her mum, who had braved the jostling queue of proud mums and dads and their little princes and princesses, looked like she had been hit by a hurricane. Apparently the enter your kid for the competition mechanism wasn't working, so the picture didn't matter anyway.

It was only the fact the display featured packets with a small boy in a blue shirt on it that made me pause when TNFH's chocolate stash was raided a couple of nights later. Lo and behold, on the packet was a small girl in a blue shirt.

The promo made much of Kinder's premise that more milk than chocolate is what made Kinder a good thing - "plus milk minus cocoa" is the line. My interest in Kinder much aroused by the photoshoppery, I took a look at the ingredients. Because plus milk means it's good for your child, right?

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dearie me.

Milk chocolate (40%) (Sugar, milk powder, cocoa butter, cocoa mass, emulsifiers: lecithin (soy), flavouring: vanillin), sugar, skimmed milk powder, vegetable fat (palm), anhydrous milkfat, emulsifiers: lecithin (soy), flavouring: vanillin, total milk constituents 33% total cocoa solids 13%, solids in milk chocolate: cocoa 32%, milk fat free 17%, milk fat 6%

Palm oil. Lovely. Plus milk minus cocoa plus cheap, egregious saturated fat...

ADNOC Mixes Up Diesel And Petrol. Woopsie.

إلى العين وعودة (Photo credit: Abdulla Al Muhairi)

Some companies will do anything to get behind a trending topic these days, which means we're all confronted with the awful spectacle of Mike and Bob down the local hardware shop doing their really amazing and totally funny version of the Harlem Shake. Two weeks too late. Do click on that link, BTW. It's worth it...

But ADNOC (Abu Dhabi National Distribution Company) has gone for it in a big way. Clearly stunned by the amount of coverage the recent horsemeat in beef scandal has created (let alone donkey in South Africa and then pork in Waitrose Essentials meatballs and poo bacteria in Ikea's cakes), they've tried to get in on the act.

They've been filling petrol engined cars with diesel. This, as any fule kno, breaks them. Apparently someone filled the wrong reservoir at Al Ain's Al Yaher petrol station, resulting in the pump attendants blithely filling fifteen cars with the black stuff instead of the green stuff. You can only imagine they just kept going until the line of broken cars tailed back and blocked the forecourt so much they had to stop...

Abu Dhabi paper The National is a great deal more terse on the story than Gulf News, which rather appears to revel in it. ADNOC has offered to repair the damaged cars and pay for care hire in the meantime, which is fair enough I suppose. The station's been closed, presumably as they empty and clean the affected tank and pump.

Mind you, it's getting harder and harder to get the right thing in the right thing around here these days, isn't it? I think I might start slipping copies of Olives in Beirut covers and see if I can't drum up some coverage myself...

The Emirates ID Card Confusion Continues

clarity matters"" (Photo credit: atinirdosh)

EIDA, the Emirates ID Authority, has established a remarkable track record of communication since its very inception. Many's the time I have posted about this deadline and that requirement being countered by that requirement and this deadline. Nothing has ever been terribly clear since the get go, if you don't mind me saying so.

And it remains oblique, opaque, obtuse and generally obfuscated. Today we have two reports in our newspapers. Well, news media - as one, Emirates 24x7, is not technically a paper anymore, having sublimed and become a being of pure energy.

Gulf News, then, is first to punch its grateful subscribers' eyeballs with a typically hard-hitting headline:

Millions of expat employees in UAE to save ID card costs biennially

The story, linked here for your viewing pleasure, is quite unequivocal:

"Millions of expatriate employees in the country can save the cost of over Dh200 for ID card renewal every two years, thanks to a new move by the Emirates Identity Authority (Emirates ID). Sponsors have to bear the costs of national ID cards of their expatriate employees, according to a top official."

And so on. It's quite clear, no beating around the bush. Our sponsors have to pay for our ID cards and take responsibility for the same - presumably extending to late renewal penalties (not cleared up in the story, but we can wait for clarity. God knows, we've waited since 2008.)

But what's this, in Emirates 24x7?

Rule to let sponsors bear expats' ID card cost under study: Eida

Hang on a cotton-pickin' moment there. 'Under study' doesn't mean 'new move', now does it? Emirates 24x7 goes on to add awful clarity to the assertion that this is no done deal but a 'move under the anvil' as Gulf News would have itself put it.

“We are considering the proposal to make it mandatory for sponsors to pay for the ID cards of their employee, but it has not been finalised. It is currently left for the companies to decide whether they want to pay the cost,” an Eida spokesperson told Emirates 24/7. No timeframe was, however, given on when the directive would be issued.

So has Gulf News jumped the gun, or Emirates 24x7 simply got it wrong? Or has EIDA told two different reporters two different things? Or perhaps told them both the same thing in terms so confusing they've come away with two different stories entirely?

We await, with a feeling of remorseless, crushing deja vu, clarification.

Disable The Samsung Series 5 Ultra Touchpad

Chuck Norris EX2 01 (Photo credit: (vhmh))

You CAN disable the touchpad on a Samsung Series 5 Ultra notebook computer.

One of the least endearing aspects of my recent technology shift from a dead Lenovo T61 and Windows 7 to a sleek Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook and Windows 8 has been the lack of documentation. Remember documentation? When things came with user manuals?

Ah, no. These days we have the Internet and so we don't need those nasty, papery manual things. You just go to our Internet-based resource centre and we'll answer any questions you might have.

What if it's something I don't know? I can't ask about what I don't know can I? And you're not actually telling me. You're just expecting me to sift through a wodge of data, rather than structure and present useful information to me.

That's okay, you can go to our user forums and see the answers our socially enabled peer group conversation community present to you. They're really committed and useful guys.

And what if I just want someone from Samsung to tell me how to do something? You know, someone who actually knows something about the product?

Simple! Talk to one of our trained customer support executives using email or our online chat facility!

Great. That's precisely what I did, because the otherwise very lovely Samsung Series 5 Ultra comes with the world's biggest touchpad and it doesn't have an off switch or appear to have a driver with that functionality. Which is mad, right? All laptops have drivers for their touchpads that allow them to be disabled, surely. And, yes, in the main they do. Except for this machine, with its aircraft-carrier sized, guaranteed to be touched at all times, touchpad. It's huge. I've found flies playing cricket on it. This, let us be abundantly clear, is the Chuck Norris of touchpads. You don't touch it - it touches you.

Samsung's support operative came back in response to my email, confirming my worst fears. "You can't disable the touchpad on a Samsung Series 5 Ultra."

Which had me consigned to typing tweets six times as each attempt saw a feather-touch of the ball of my thumb select all and then my next key press replace the text. Cursors would appear in random places around the screen, replacing and deleting lumps of text and objects before I realised it'd gone again. My language, never particularly temperate, has become decidedly nautical.

I evolved an insane typing technique, like a digital tai-chi movement, The Crane Over The Keyboard. Repetitive Strain Injury loomed on the horizon as I picked my way over the huge expanse of the Monster Touchpad From Hell. Sure enough, every couple of minutes, a brush on that vast, hyper-sensitive surface would bring on-screen mayhem.

It's so unfair. This machine is the dog's, seriously. It's sleek and titanium-shelled, as light as a feather and slimmer than a supermodel with amoebic dysentery. It is in every way perfect. Apart from Chuck The Touchpad.

I took to tweeting at @SamsungGulf, but that was about as much use as nailing cats to a hovercraft. They're too busy using Twitter on relentless promotional broadcast mode to actually talk to anyone who isn't giving them some sycophantic, pandering guff they can retweet. (This, to Samsung, is presumably 'engagement')

It's one of the worst Twitter accounts I've seen in a long while. Absolutely zero back from them. Just a constant tide of 'Tell us your favorite way of inserting a Galaxy SIII'...

And then a conversation with Sheheryar at @LaptopsinUAE about something completely different turned to the S5. I'd decided to break the warranty and have him crack the case and neuter Chuck by yanking the connector. And he came up with the idea of hitting Fn F5. Because that is how you disable the touchpad on a Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook.

So here's a big, fat THANK YOU to Sheheryar, for doing what Samsung's support droid and their useless Twitter account should have done. For knowing his way around laptops and being able to help someone who just wants to get on with using a functional tool. I didn't have to retype a single word of this post and that feels oh, so good.

Chuck is dead.

Sharjah's Speed Radar Shooting Spree

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sharjah police have an unusual case on their hands at the moment - someone's going around shooting out the traffic radars that the UAE's traffic cops are all so inordinately fond of.

While there is much debate about the efficacy of fixed radars in other parts of the world, for instance in the UK, the UAE has festooned its roads with a remarkable number of these snappy little devices, Dubai alone aiming, apparently, at a radar every two kilometres. That's quite a lot of radar and they can be expensive for those not used to cruise control. A colleague of mine with a particularly heavy right foot has paid out fines totalling Dhs 23,000 (About $6,300 to you) in the past, although thankfully she's now got that habit down to a more manageable Dhs 2,000.

There's been a 9% drop in the year on year fatality rate on Dubai's roads, although the accident rate has actually increased by 7% - something the anti-radar lobby would doubtless seize upon like ravening wolves - or Wordpress users finding your Blogger blog has been deleted.

But one chap has come up with his own argument, and it's a compelling one. It's getting expensive for Sharjah's finest, too - so far a total of fourteen radars have been shot along the Mileiha/Madam highway according to a story in Gulf News over the weekend, the latest such incident being last Wednesday. The story carries a pithy quote from Sharjah police:

“We are collecting evidence from the spot and will soon nab the person who committed the crime. We will find out what motivated him to commit such a crime.” He goes on to add, “The person responsible for shooting the radar will be arrested soon. “He will be punished according to the UAE law.”

This has been going on for some time, in fact. The first  11 of the Dhs 250,000 ($68,500) devices were shot out early in November, with Gulf News reporting on the incident on the 12th of that month. That story carried a particularly pithy quote from Sharjah police, who said:

“We are collecting evidence from the spot and will soon nab the person who committed the crime. We will find out what motivated him to commit such a crime.” He goes on to add, “The person responsible for shooting the radar will be arrested soon. “He will be punished according to the UAE law.”

As if not satisfied with his very expensive shooting spree (he's knocked up quite a tab by now), the vandal struck again in December, taking out a further two radars on the same stretch of road. Sharjah police commented pithily to Gulf News at the time, saying:

“We are collecting evidence from the spot and will soon nab the person who committed the crime. We will find out what motivated him to commit such a crime.” He goes on to add, “The person responsible for shooting the radar will be arrested soon. “He will be punished according to the UAE law.”

More cut and paste journalism, then - merely recycling the same old quote every time. At least it's not copied from a blog or another paper this time. But it's still reprehensible and shoddy not least because it misrepresents Sharjah police's reaction to the updated story.

Golly, but it's beginning to feel like Private Eye around here...

Gulf News: Cut And Paste Journalism

English: Close-up image of TN panel display, Dell Mini 9, Magnification - 300 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Back in October last year, I asked if journalism had perhaps jumped the shark, with a post that compared a Gulf News story on Google's Nexus 7 announcement with some well-known online sources, showing clearly that key elements of the GN story, under a local byline, were cut and paste from web-based sources.

This is not a good thing. The P word, plagiarism, is whispered in decent news rooms because it is considered, quite rightly, to be one of the most egregious forms of deceit in journalism. It's lazy, it misleads readers and it speaks to a lack of professionalism that would, anywhere else in the world, be profoundly unacceptable.

Gulf News' response to the charge was to quietly rewrite the online version of the story to remove the more obvious cut and paste segments and give credit for the quotes the story filched from the New York Times.

This time around, in an article carrying the same byline, they have an even more elegant solution. Don't post the piece ("TVs for every room and budget" - a collection of 'buyer's guide' hints and tips for TV buyers that appears on page E4 of the newspaper's technology supplement) online at all.

It's a compelling lesson on how to write a product buyer's guide feature in the Internet age. Google the topic, pick a few sites that already post buyers' guides, summarise and/or just rephrase what they have to say and there you have it, Robert's your father's brother, one buyers' guide.

Just for good measure, barely even bother rewording some of the more technical stuff. Just slap it into the CMS, bish bash bosh. It's not going online anyway and nobody's going to bother checking to see if you just blagged the copy, are they?


Gulf News
"Since plasma pixels can be almost completely turned off on screen, they are capable of producing really dark blacks which helps improve picture quality."

Digital Trends' TV Buyers' Guide
"Since plasma pixels can be almost completely turned off during dark scenes or portions of the image, they are capable of deeper black levels compared to LCD TVs."

Gulf News
"In passive screens, two images are displayed simultaneously; like in a movie theatre, while polarised glasses filter the correct image to each eye to produce a 3D effect."

Digital Trends TV Buyers' Guide
"...passive 3D is very similar to what you would experience in a movie theater: Two images are displayed simultaneously on the screen, while polarized glasses properly filter the correct image to each eye, producing a 3D effect. "

Gulf News
"In active displays, the glasses use battery-powered LCD lenses to alternately block each eye in sync with the television, alternately showing right- and left-eye images, to create the 3D effect."

Digital Trends' TV Buyers' Guide
"Active 3D glasses use battery-powered LCD lenses to alternately block each eye in sync with a TV alternately showing right- and left-eye images, creating a 3D effect."

Gulf News
"Plasmas use an emissive display technology (self lighting pixels) which means there's no motion lag or lighting inconsistencies and this results in smoother, more accurate motion and better picture detail."

Digital Trends' TV Buyers' Guide
"Plasmas use an emissive display technology (i.e. self-lighting pixels) and color phosphors, which means there’s no motion lag or lighting inconsistencies, unlike their LCD counterparts. The results are smoother, more accurate motion; deeper, more consistent black levels; and better picture detail.

Sharjah Water Disruption - A Lesson In Communication?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Many, many years ago I was on a business trip to Austria when some loon or another decided to dump a dhow-load of dead cows into the Gulf off Sharjah. The resulting flotsam got caught up in the intake of Sharjah's main desalination plant, causing a shutdown and an Emirate-wide water shortage.

I arrived back clutching a couple of bottles of nice German sekt to find our water tanks draining fast. Soon enough, we'd run dry. Three increasingly dirty days later I decided enough was enough and popped to our local 'cold store' where I bought several cases of Masafi. These filled the bath quite nicely, thank you, and we popped a bottle of cold sekt and enjoyed a little taste of the life everyone at home believes for some reason we live every day - we bathed in spring water and drank champagne.

I'd better get the bubbly in, because it's all apparently set to happen again. Khaleej Times broke the story three days ago (Gulf News ran it as a NIB today) - from next week (November 28th to be precise), Sharjah's main desalination plant at Al Layyah will undergo maintenance with six days of 'disruption' to the water supply. Interestingly, the GN story refers to a message  circulated to residents by SEWA (The Sharjah Electricity and Water Authority), which is news to me. It also refers to the 'Al Liya desalination plant', which is one of those problems we face with place names here - the Al Layyah plant, Sharjah's central power station and desalination plant, is located in the Al Layyah area, near Sharjah port. It's also the main centre for bottling Sharjah's Zulal branded water (although there's a new plant in Dhaid which bottles groundwater, thereby confusing anyone who wonders if Zulal is desalinated water or spring water. It's actually both, it would seem!).

Al Layyah is one of (as far as I can find out) four desalination plants in Sharjah - there are also plants in Khor Fakkan, Kalba and Hamriya. The GN piece refers to disruption in "Al Khan, Al Majaz, the Corniche, Khalid Lagoon and other areas", which is typically - and infuriatingly, obtuse. What are those 'other areas'? If last time is anything to go by, pretty much all of Sharjah. Why didn't the papers think to question the announcement and get better quality information into our hands? This type of question is the route to madness, of course. The answer is 'because'.

Of course, the best thing to do is go to SEWA's website which will have all the information concerned consumers will need, won't it? No, of course it won't. It'll have a piece on how SEWA has, apparently, briefed Credit Suisse on its future expansion plans. While I am pleased for both Credit Suisse and SEWA, it's not the information I'm after. The delightfully 1990s retro feel website contains absolutely no reference to the 'planned disruption' at all, in fact.

So all we know is there is to be  'planned disruption', that supply will not be cut off but that we are being urged to stockpile water while we can. Oh, and that "after the completion of the work, water supply would be better than before."

We are all mushrooms.

Update - I didn't think of this at the time of this post, but Sarah did. Of all the times in the year to pick for this 'scheduled disruption', they've picked National Day weekend, a holiday weekend when load on the system is going to go through the roof. Nice...

The Death In Advertising

Image via Wikipedia

For some reason, the people at Dubai-based document imaging company Xeratek think using the sound of an ECG flatlining followed by someone wailing 'Nooo' in their advertising is a smart idea. I'm probably over-reacting here, but I really, really take exception to having the sound of someone's death forced on me during my morning drive to work.

I have moaned before about the use of unpleasant sounds in radio ads, the National Bonds campaign used a woman suiciding, a couple arguing and so on. I've posted about the awfulness of radio ads in the past, too. Nobody's ever popped up to defend any specific ad or, indeed, the industry in general. Oh, now I tell a lie. Some blithering idiot from Kellog's ad agency tried astroturfing this post, resulting in this act of SEO-driven revenge.

Much of the awfulness is mired in agencies trying to use 'picture power' to make the ad stand out and help it get its point across. I can see them in my mind's eye, clustered around the client (a small, fat balding man in a suit, somewhat hapless looking and a little off-colour) urging him to take their advice and illustrate the product, make it come to life for the listener. This is what they call 'the creative'. Let's take a concept and put it into living sound in the most imaginative and attention-grabbing way, really disrupt the listener and then get our message across, they babble excitedly as Mr Klienman looks uncertainly at them (he's actually wondering if he remembered to feed the dog and if Pauline would notice again. Damn dog's her pride and joy, loves it more than me, he's thinking as he watches the people from the ad agency work themselves into an evangelistic frenzy. One of them has fallen on the floor and appears to be having some sort of seizure.)

I don't doubt that a calm, factual announcement wouldn't work as well as a colourful, illustrative and entertaining treatment. The trouble, I suspect, is that the advertisers so constantly fail to provide the latter. And then there's the issue of what concepts you actually pick to illustrate your company's products and services. Those concepts are associated, after all, with the brand you're promoting. So the sound of death, the ultimate worst fear of the human race, the cessation of our time on this planet, is perhaps not the smartest idea. Someone just died. Yay. Buy our product.

Hey, it's just a joke though, isn't it? I'm taking it all too seriously, it was just meant to get the ad running and bring a smile to people's faces, surely? I don't remember what the punchline is, though. I was too busy being unsettled by the sound of a death.

Klienman is looking doubtful as the exec on the floor starts to shout in a strange voice, semi-words that sound English but somehow don't make sense, like a Sigur Ros vocal. The account director whips out a pen and a sheet of paper and Klienman, remembering now that he hadn't put water out for the stupid mutt either, signs distractedly. His mobile rings and, sure enough, it's Pauline who's come back to the house and is shouting at him about mistreating the dog. Miserably, he watches the account director licking his lips and folding the paper into his pocket as the creative team help their spittle-flecked colleague up. They've won and the client agreed to the death concept. Kleinman watches them bundle excitedly through the door as he realises Pauline has just told him she's leaving him.

How To Upset Your Customers

Image via Wikipedia

I'm not sure I am aware of any organisation that is quite so skilled at ineptitude of the highest order as my bank, HSBC Middle East. As I have had reason to remark before, I cannot think of one aspect of personal banking that has not at some stage caused me problems, been mishandled or generally failed to deliver as promised. This is not generally considered to be a good thing.

You can search the blog for 'bank' if you want to steep yourself in the most recent five years of blthering idiocy, but it's been something like 18 years in total now since I first walked into the British Bank of the Middle East and admired the two gun-wielding bedouin guards at the door.

These days, I try and avoid going to the branch at all costs. It makes me physically angry even to walk in. (So please do take my remarks with a pinch of salt, I am not my usual calm and Zen-like self when it comes to issues related to banking.)

It's one reason why telephone and Internet banking has been such a Godsend. The vast majority of transactions can take place in a nice, automated phone call or browsing session. I actually only use phone banking because I can't remember all the passwords, PINs, forgettable questions etc. And even then, HSBC asks that you remember (and key in) your 10 digit personal banking number or your 12 digit bank account number, your date of birth, your six digit personal identity number and the average velocity of an African swallow.*

Now they've found a new way to get to me. They have started playing an advertisement for some financial service or another to their customers when they call up to use phone banking. The advert not only drones on in English, but is then repeated in Arabic. While.we.wait.

You can only imagine what kind of drooling nincompoop would have thought that interrupting customers using a service that's part of a service package they are paying for (and we pay plenty) and rendering them helpless to do anything other than wait out the interruption would be a good idea. It's frustrating, irritating and annoying. It clearly demonstrates the bank has nothing but disrespect for its customers, their time and their convenience. And it's clearly symptomatic of a failure to understand the nature and role of corporate communications at the most fundamental level.

Irritating and inconveniencing your customers is not smart marketing. It just shows your contempt for them.
 * Okay, so I made the last one up.

The Worst Radio Ads In The World

Image by bunky's pickle via Flickr

I'm not sure what made the marketing team over at the UAE's National Bonds corporation think people wanted to hear the sound of women committing suicide, couples arguing bitterly or men drowning but that's certainly what their new radio ads present to listeners. I may well be totally alone in this, but I find it unbelievably unpleasant and invariably turn the radio off when these ads come on. There are a number of other ads which trigger the same reaction in me. This is becoming increasingly a problem for my radio listening life, as I often forget to turn it back on again - and I generally enjoy listening to Brandy and Malcolm talk business and bicker on the radio during my drive to work.

I have railed against the awfulness of Dubai's radio advertising before. (for instance, take this example of egregious sexism from LG) I'm sure I will again. I am assured that it isn't an issue unique to Dubai, that radio ads all around the world are also completely pants, but I can't help but feel we're in a league of our own. Of course, in my own weekly forays to the studio, I can't switch the damn things off and have to sit, tied down to the squeaky high chair, and listen to them. One day I'm sure the mic will go live as I'm in the middle of one of my not infrequent 'I hate all radio advertising' rants at hapless co-host Desley.

So are we really being subjected to the worst radio advertising in the world today? Mark Makhoul over at Kuwaiti blog 2:48AM thinks he's got the world's worst eample, linked here. It's certainly special.

This one from a company called 'SuperScreen' in the UK is pretty dire, too. The last, triumphant call of 'free parking!' rounds it off nicely. Here's another contender, a radio ad that can only have been produced by a group of people incarcerated in a highly secure institution for the long term mentally challenged. This one (the one at the top of the search) is introduced by advertising commentator Dan O'Day, and features a burger and a sausage being burned to death. What's remarkable (and the reason I included a whole search for Kingsford Charcoal's advertising) is that it is by no means a standout moment of fail for the company's advertising - it's all utterly woeful. Take a look at the third one down and then the seventh if you really want to wallow in other people's total failure to communicate at any meaningful level beyond deep irritation.

This ad from the UK's Flintshire Motors takes it to a new level though. This is nothing less than the product of an incestuously conceived drooling nincompoop with a mental age of six who has been given a massive dose of LSD. I couldn't even finish listening to it. It's contagious - your draw drops and you start to shake your head and wail as the insanity infects you. It is undoubtedly the worst radio spot I could find on the Internet.

What worries me is it wouldn't stand out if you played it on radio here. None of the ads linked above would. They'd just sink slowly into the puddle of odiferous mediocrity with a viscid 'plop' and never be seen again.

Benihana - Dumb and Dumber

Image via WikipediaYou might recall the brouhaha around Benihana Kuwait, the restaurant that sued blogger Mark Makhoul for posting a mildly critical review of the restaurant. Mark, the man behind uber-popular Kuwaiti blog 2:48AM, defended himself in court and won the case.

Benihana Kuwait, a licensee of US based Benihana of Tokyo. (which has maintained an atrocious silence throughout), has appealed the Kuwaiti court's ruling and has won on appeal.

The whole sad incident has already created massive, global negative coverage online for Benihana. The story was picked up by bloggers in the Middle East as well as by a number of top global websites and media. Benihana, both franchisee and franchisor, could hardly have managed the whole sorry incident more cack-handedly. It's even recorded on the company's Wikipedia entry.

Mark's update post about the case is linked here. The court has awarded damages against Mark of KD1,000 - a pretty paltry sum, but an award nonetheless. He's going to take it to appeal because it's about more than KD 1,000, it's about consumers' right to hold and freely express an opinion and I must say in his shoes I'd do exactly the same thing.

What amazes me is how utterly, unbelievably stupid Benihana Kuwait is being in pursuing this tawdry case - and how idiotic Benihana of Tokyo is being by allowing these morons to drag its name through the mud like this.

World's Worst Web?

Back in the late nineties, I travelled to Beirut in the company of Microsoft's Middle East marketing manager to manage the opening of the company's office in Lebanon. The trip was the culmination of a long campaign I had been involved in to have an intellectual property protection law passed that would protect IP holders from the endemic piracy in the country. The campaign was kind of successful in that the law was, indeed, passed. The law was, of course, subsequently ignored by pretty much everybody, but that shouldn't really surprise anyone.

My marketing manager colleague was horrified* to see that there was a ledger on the visa desk, where issued visas were recorded manually. This despite the presence of a distinctly computery thing on the desk. Given MS was touting e-government pretty hard at the time, she seemed to find the presence of a totally manual, analogue thing in the middle of a process that everywhere else in the world had automated somewhat incongruous. That ledger is still there today, folks.

I mention this in the context of a few tasty finds by pal Bilal El Houri, following on from my amused post last year about old skool websites.His challenge was to find worse sites than these little beauties, all examples of quite how far down the e-government road the Lebanese government has travelled since back then. Clue: the answer is not very far, really.

This is the Lebanese Ministry of Telecommunications website.These are the people responsible for the Internet in Lebanon. Yeah, yeah, I know: it figures.

Here are some other beauties. Remember, these are NOT snapshots from Way Back Machine. This is Lebabon today.

The Ministry of Higher Education

The Ministry of Agriculture

The Directorate General of Emigrants
(Their English version is a howl, BTW)

The Ministry of Industry

Thanks, Bilal. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry...

BTW, all those years back, we visited the Prime Minister, Selim Hoss and the president, Emile Lahoud in the same day, with an MS exec in tow, a 'veep' if I remember right. The BBC correspondent in Beirut at the time, the wonderfully named Chris Hack, had an acid aside for that one: "Where else in the world would the president and the prime minister be rolled out to receive an effing commercial traveller?"...

* You should have seen her reaction to B018, mind...

PS: Dany Awad (@DanyAwad) adds to the charge sheet with this here link to the Electricite du Liban website! Class! And they keep coming in - this link to the brilliant National News Agency website from Amer Tabsh!

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Silence. The New Comment.

Image via WikipediaI know I've been going on about this, but it really is such a brilliant case study. The Great Sharjah Fuel Crisis continues, with ENOC and EPPCO stations shut down last Friday by Sharjah police after having failed to supply fuel to residents in Sharjah and the Northern Emirates for a month.

As I predicted a while ago, the story started to internationalise - this story in the UK's Daily Telegraph (kind enough to quote yours truly) talks of 'baffled' residents in this oil rich nation unable to buy fuel. Tellingly it ends with these words: "No one from either ENOC or the other main petrol company affected, Emarat, was available for comment."

Bloomberg filed an excellent piece today, linked here, which continues the trend of international interest in the story. Being a newswire, the Bloomberg piece has made it into a number of interntional newspapers and websites. Bloomberg's story, an in-depth analysis of the situation, makes an important link between the ENOC Group issue and Dubai's indebtedness and economic stability, as well as drawing some interesting conclusions regarding political stability. The story isn't going away, in short, and now it's arguably starting to affect Dubai's reputation in a broader sense. I would humbly suggest this would not have been the case if there had been an agreed and effectively implemented communications strategy to start with.

Tellingly, the Bloomberg story contains these words: "An ENOC spokesman declined to comment when contacted by Bloomberg. A Dubai government spokeswoman didn’t respond to an email requesting for comment, and an official in Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. public relations division didn’t answer calls to his office and mobile phone"

Gulf News filed today with a follow-up story on the issue, which talks about the Sharjah government's resolution in solving the issue. You'd almost think journalists were keeping the story alive to punish the silent spokespeople, wouldn't you?

Somehow tenacious GN hack Deena Kamel Yousef managed to get through to the man so many journalists have failed to buttonhole and so the GN story contains this timeless quote from ENOC's Silent Spokesperson: "I cannot give a statement now, don't ask me questions I cannot answer. I agree that we should be more transparent, I agree 150 per cent, but we have directives not to talk about this issue now."

Deliciously, Deena twists the knife: "Pressed for answers, he made casual comments on the weather to change the subject."

Tellingly, the GN story also points out that: "Enoc's silent spell lasted for about two weeks while the spokesperson was on holiday after the trouble started. Repeated attempts by Gulf News to contact the company were unanswered."

On holiday? You're kidding, right?

Is Silence Golden?

Image via WikipediaGulf News confirms what my eyes can see - EPPCO and ENOC stations in Sharjah have been sealed off today, shut down by the Sharjah government because the company failed to respond to the Sharjah Executive Council's (quite proper) concerns that a major supplier of petrol and diesel to people living here has simply failed to pump any of the stuff for something like a month now.

Worse, the company chose (as I have pointed out many times, with apologies for the repetition) to maintain a policy of stoicism - silence in response to the media and silence in response to the Sharjah government. The end result? They've been shut down and their brand is in tatters, reduced to a laughing stock.

The petrol company in a leading oil producing nation that couldn't actually supply petrol. That's pretty special, no?

As Bad As It Gets

It can't get much worse than this. The latest development in the UAE's petrol shortage saga is that the Executive Council of Sharjah, one of the seven Emirates that makes up the UAE, has demanded an end to the petrol shortages and a full explanation of what's behind them by the end of today from Enoc/Eppco.

It's a clear enough sign that the Executive Council doesn't buy the pump upgrade story, either. But then, did anyone?

How bad can it get for a company? When do you have to recognise that mendacity and silence won't wash any more - that you actually owe a duty to people? When a government is forced to call you to task publicly and demand answers from you? I guess that's about as bad as it gets.

As Matthias, son of Deuteronomy of Gath, tells us: "Worse? How could it be worse?"

'Misrata Devastation'

This is the front cover of today's Gulf News Paper Edition. You may notice that instead of the expected devastation captioned above, we have a bright yellow sticker advertising Nestlé bottled water. Only when removing the sticker can you see the front page headline picture.

I have railed against this before. I simply can't see how it makes sense for any of the three parties to the transaction. How can it make sense to Gulf News to sell its most valuable editorial real estate like this? Removing the sticker also removes the newsprint below, leaving the image degraded. The message is so far at odds with the content, it's almost ludicrous. This is where the second party to the transaction comes in - how does Nestlé Middle East or Nestlé's agency honestly think it effectively positions the company's brand to have it so strongly associated with negative headlines and editorial connotations?

I have spent years dealing with advertisers who want to promote their products only within the context of the best, most positive and relevant editorial environments, and yet here's Nestlé gladly occupying 'Misrata Devastation'! Are they mad? The irritation provoked by the daft placement of the message, let alone having to remove it, has had nothing but a negative connotation for the Nestlé brand for readers, as far as I can see.

As it happens, this particular example is, I would humbly submit, worse than usual. Do you really want your brand linked to the (appalling) devastation of Misrata? Or the terrifying and saddening events in Syria? But it's never going to be good - front pages are sold on the basis of negative news. When was the last time you saw a pregnant panda leading the news*? It's a no-brainer, surely. The front page is negative and the front page, if the editor has done his/her job, the news we really, really want to see. Not have stickered by inane advertising.

And now last, and I suspect least, we come to the third party to the transaction. The hapless reader/subscriber. In having to remove this silly sticker in order to view the front page of the newspaper, I have been presented with a momentary irritation. I could understand in these internet days of 'freemium' models if I had accepted a downgraded experience in return for a free product, but I didn't. I paid for Gulf News.

And yes, thank you, I do feel better now.

* A caveat to that point is provided by the newspaper that thinks a small boy getting his private parts stuck in his zip is a news story. Perhaps interestingly, the same reporter contributed, seven days earlier, "Emirati Bobbitised by Bangladeshi". It's just the way news breaks, folks. It's not an indication of any sort of fascination...

Dehumanising or Brilliant Advertising?

Image via WikipediaThere's an interesting image in today's soaraway Gulf News that isn't posted up on its website (well, I couldn't find it anyway). It's on page 36 at the bottom and it's captioned 'Moving Boards'. Under the headline is a night-time picture of four unhappy-looking people walking past a busy street café with big, flat digital advertising boards strapped to their backs. The first in line certainly looks as if the thing is weighing him down - his half-lidded eyes and listless demeanour don't speak of a man having fun. But then how many of us think our idea of fun is being made to parade around the streets with large digital advertising screens strapped to our backs?

I first saw this idea applied in Jordan a couple of years back and was appalled by it then. I though the sandwich board man was an image of recession, or a nutter proclaiming the end of the world is nigh. But to find people being used like this to tout advertising messages simply strikes me as abusive.

According to Gulf News' well thought-out caption, "The moving boards with its (sic) mobility, visibility  and human interaction has big potential to increase public awareness." What? Human interaction? Where's the interaction between the disinterested diners and the four shambling men being made to parade Etisalat's advertising messages around on their backs all night? They're not interacting, they're merely beasts of digital burden.

Or am I being a silly, mealy-mouthed, do-gooding, pinko commie liberal?

Bankers - A reprise

I think we might get into an iterative link loop here, as this excellent piece on the maladroit gibbering gumboils over at HSBC by the Kipp Report links back to this very self same blog. But hey, don't let that stop you nipping over and enjoying a rattling good read about other peoples' experiences with the bank that likes to say 'Ugh', or noting the large and growing number of Facebook likes etc etc.

I enjoyed doing this little blog search and reading the results. Their wee ears must have been burning over the years...

In related news, I have man-flu and so it's a miracle I've posted anything at all this week.