Sloganeers

Image by Rev. Xanatos Satanicos Bombasticos (ClintJCL) via FlickrI have always been fascinated by the Situationists, the revolutionary crypto-anarchic collective that sloganeered their way through the Paris student revolution of the late 1960s. My personal favourite is "Art is dead: do not consume its corpse." Now that's a slogan!

The Situationists were to have a seminal influence on the punk movement around which a deal of my adolescence was constructed. They were, as eny fule no, just dead cool.

There's a tremendous power to slogans, a way of condensing and simplifying thoughts that can become catchy, even thought-provoking. The wonderful world of advertising obviously became a very early adopter, two that I'll probably never shake (because they've been drummed into me through massive repetition), 'A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play' and, more recently, 'Al Futtaim Motors, we care and it shows'.

Do they? Does it? Doubt it, but the slogan's etched on what passes for my brain, for what it's worth...


BMW's advertisement on Dubai's Sheikh Zayed Road has a slogan. Oh yes. "Joy leads; others prosper" the advertisement thunders - like Situationist slogans, often deliberately provocative and wilfully obtuse, the advertisement attracts attention by its seeming simple meaning. Unlike the Situationists, it's actually not very clever.

It actually means absolutely nothing whatsoever. It's just mindless drivel constructed by mediocre intellects, an unwelcome flashback to the constant blare of 'Dare to Dream' dross that characterised the Dubai Property Boom (see yesterday's post). Does it intend to characterise Joy as the ownership of a BMW? I'd rather prosper, thanks. Or perhaps it's saying that other cars are Joy and BMW owners are prosperous. Perhaps someone called Joy has bought a BMW? But then who's prospering? The guy that sold it to her made commission, I suppose...

Yeah, I know I should drive past and ignore it. But it's like a grocer's apostrophe. It niggles...

Shiny Maintenance

Image via Wikipedia
"I've met some other people with Shinies and they're not happy either."
"Take no notice. They're just trouble makers and whingers. Stand for your individuality, that's what we say. In fact, it was one of our advertising slogans."
"You mean along with 'Dare to Dream', 'Live Life Lavishly' and 'Sequestrate Your Passions'?"
"Yeah, all that too."
"Well, fact of the matter is we want to form an association. What's so funny?"
"Ohh, wow, forgive me. Sorry, hang on a second. Just. Need. To. Regain. Control."
"I'm not joking, you know, so you can stop that laughing right now."
"Sorry, sorry. Just something caught in my throat. An association? You've got no right."
"Yes we do, under the Strata Law."
"Oh, that old hokum. Forget it, it'll never happen. Why do you want an association anyway? Far better to deal with us direct. I could do you a special discount, you know. As long as you don't tell the others."
"Discount? You've just put up the maintenance charges by over 100%! I never even knew when I bought my Shiny that I'd have to pay you through the nose - and whatever you arbitrarily decide to charge me, at that. Now the recession's cut down on revenue from new buildings, you're just gouging us to make up for it!"
"Hold it right there, hot-shot. You bought a Shiny from us fair and square and signed a contract to boot, so don't go saying we didn't tell you this or we didn't tell you that."
"You didn't tell us that when you said freehold it really meant youarefruct."
"Usufruct."
"Whatever. You didn't tell us that you were going to set what colour we had to paint our flats, what TV channels we could watch or what phone provider we had to have. And you didn't tell us you were going to charge us so much for maintentance, either. There's plenty more you didn't tell us, too. How about-"
":Look, is this going anywhere? You're constantly complaining about your Shiny, but there it is, good as new. And Shiny, too!"
"It's not Shiny anymore. Not since you painted it that Dubai Beige colour."
"Alright, alright. You can have your association, okay? Now can you just leave my office?"
"When?"
"As soon as possible. We'll start working on the paperwork right away."
"Really?"
"Really. Trust us. We won't let you down. Just leave your passport and we'll take care of things."
"Wow! Thanks!"
"Don't mention it."

(More info on today's GN story here!)

Groundhog Day

It's like groundhog day around here. The film, not the event.

The Central Bank has extended the deadline indefinitely for the implementation of the new Image Cheque Clearing System (ICCS), following problems implementing the system on January 1st 2011.

Meanwhile in unrelated news, the collective fat-headed nincompoopery that is my bank, HSBC, has once again seen fit to dishonour my rent cheque to my landlord. Which is precisely what they did in January last year.

On January 6th last year, I posted about both of these events. It's linked here. I pointed out the many problems people would face trying to present old cheques that lacked the security features mandated by the UAE Central Bank's implementation of the new automated cheque clearing system. I also pointed out what a communications disaster the whole thing had been. Of course there was little attempt to communicate the whole thing clearly and effectively and so, precisely a year later, the system has been once again delayed, withdrawn temporarily as everyone tries to work out how to go about honouring old cheques past the deadline set for them to be honoured.

The ICCS was first started as  project in 2005. Now, five years later, it still hasn't been implemented. Last year's confusion led to more delays and a new deadline (the original 'new cheques only' deadline was 1/1/2010) which has now been extended once again purely because nobody invested in effective communications.

Meanwhile, HSBC is saying, as it did last year, that my cheque has been dishonoured because of my signature. Last year I went to see the morons and we sat together and agreed that their scanner had squashed my signature, which is naturally some 5cm high. We rescanned my signature (I had, first, to try and copy the squashed signature, my 'old' signature before they'd scan my 'new' signature. Honest.) and then their scanner squashed my signature to look like the 'old' signature. In order to do this, of course, they required my passport copy - and wouldn't accept my National ID Card as proof of ID.

My signature is,  believe me, highly distinctive. I have been paying rent to my landlord for some ten years now. I write only two cheques every year - one to him, one to the post office. You'd have thought my bank could check the history or even telephone me before deciding to dishonour my cheque for tens of thousands of dirhams (obviously it would be an important transaction to me), but you'd think wrong. You'd assume some level of applied intelligence, care or (gasp!) initiative. And they are all sorely lacking. My bank has managed to make a mess of absolutely every aspect of banking, from issuing cards to making transfers, from providing a reliable, sensible and usable telephone and Internet banking service to honouring cheques. I am left dumbfounded as to how the hell they make money, but can only assume that totally ignoring the needs of your customers is the key to success.

You may want to suggest I find another bank. I am open to suggestions.

Karama Karma

Image via WikipediaHaving visitors over for the festive season meant an inevitable trip to Dubai's Karama district which, together with Satwa, remains one of the few wholly 'organic' communities in this city of zones and gated developments. It's a fantastic place to wander around, two long buildings either side of the road packed with shops selling, in the main, clothes, bags and watches. You'll never see so many shifty looking geezers in your life, a constant wash of voices jabbering:

"Here! Here! Genuine fakes!"

"Come and see! We have a secret room!"

"Gucci bags! Gucci bags!"

"Watches? You want watches? Rolex?"

"This way, please, this way. We have Dolce and Gabbana, Versace, all good price."

Karama has long been the home of the fake trade, the place to go if you want to wear big name brands for knock-down prices. I was amazed that, clampdown after crackdown, it's still not only there, but thriving in the open. There are phases to IP protection campaigns that recognise the trade starts in the open, reverts to being 'under the counter' and then, as the crackdowns really bite, in a third place. Karama's out there in the open, under the counter AND in a third place, which is pretty comprehensive!

My other surprise was that the goods on sale represented knockoffs of brands that are very much available in the malls - big players in Karama right now include Ed Hardy, Mulberry, Louboutin and Bulgari. I had always thought that Karama post-crackdown only dealt in brands that had no recourse to local authority because they're not represented in the region. Think again, then...

My third surprise was the quality of the fakes. I 'm not even sure they are 'fakes' in the true sense of the word, because the factories making these things across China are, these days, likely the self-same factories making the real thing.

Cloudbusting

Image by ♥Melu♥Rogi♥ via FlickrFor some reason this reminded me of this!

Etisalat Plans - Mickey Mouse?

Image via WikipediaThe HTC Desire is a cool device, I have to tell you. It does many things brilliantly, some very well and even manages to be a mildly functional telephone. Based on Google's Android operating system, it's almost scarily integrated into Google services, but it does a lot of cool stuff and is pretty intuitive.

I've spent a week or so now getting used to it - after over 20 years of loyalty to Nokia, I finally snapped and followed Symbian Guru by throwing my N86 against the wall. There have been inevitable frustrations in the transition process, but they're mostly harmless. Google's habit of defaulting everything to Arabic for anyone located in the Arab World can be a bit of a shock - and I really do not need an uninstallable azan reminder. But all in all, I'm glad I made the change. Well, I was until Etisalat sent me a message telling me they have blocked my mobile Internet access as I had exceeded the upper limit on my plan.

My plan? What plan? I just have mobile Internet. It was called 'Mubashir' because nobody knew what 3G was ("I don't understand what 3G is!" "No problem, take this! It's called Mubashir!" "What is it?" "3G"). Nobody ever told me they'd introduced things called plans.

Mine apparently gives me 10 Meg of downloads for a fixed monthly fee. And then it charges me. A wicked amount. Enough for me to have racked up Dhs1,200 worth of phone bill in 2-3 days of using an Android phone. Because if you're using your wireless network to download apps and you walk out of the wireless zone, it defaults to Etisalat and their Mickey Mouse packages. And, unlike my creaky old Symbian handset,  this mobile is always online, checking, updating and RSSing like a little Googledemon.

You'd have thought Etisalat would send you a text when you got to the 10Mb mark, wouldn't you? But that would be far too sensible. They'd rather bill their unsuspecting, arguably duped, customers for the lesson.

So don't do what I did, people. When you throw that Symbian mobile against the wall and storm off to get a funky Android phone, change your mobile data plan. You can get a 1Gb package for Dhs145 per month or 5GB for 295 per month. They also offer "unlimited" data for a whopping Dhs395 per month. Unlimited is sort of like freehold, by the way: by unlimited, Etisalat actually means a 'fair usage' 10Gb maximum. Out of plan extras cost 50 fils per meg, which is a bit less than the Dhs15 per meg they charge on the default 10Mb package. Yes, you heard right. Dhs15 (a tad over $4) per megabit.

Plans from 10Mb - 1Gb are categorised as 'mobile Internet' by Etisalat, while 1GB-10GB are 'mobile broadband' and come with a USB modem. Because nobody would want to use a mobile for downloading lots of data, would they? Positively archaic thinking from the telco that likes to say 'ugh'...

Hmm. I wonder what the view from Du is like these days?


PS: Happy New Year, folks!

Chaos Theory

Image by Ingy The Wingy via FlickrThe chaos in Europe's skies is continuing quite nicely, with irate passengers all asking the same question we asked under the ash cloud: why on earth aren't the airlines communicating with us? All we want is information and perhaps even access to rebooking facilities.

Having given up on Virgin Atlantic, whose failure to communicate extended to a Twitter account that tells you it can't do anything and directs you back to the call centre (and a GSA in Dubai that is as much use as a chocolate welding mask), we rebooked the inlaws onto Etihad (at almost twice the price, I have to say. Airlines, slow to help passengers rebook or endorse their tickets to another airline were nevertheless quick enough to ramp up their pre-Chrismas rates). The flight left just in time to be under the snow as it wended its merry way West from shamed Heathrow. They travelled to the airport down motoroways whitened with packed snow, getting to Dublin in perfect time to watch the airport close.

However, Etihad's handling of the situation was entirely a different story. They were met by meal vouches and, shortly after, a no-nonsense staffer who told them precisely what was going to happen. They were bussed to a hotel and put up awaiting the departure of the flight this morning following Dublin re-opening at 8am.

That's all it take, folks. A little respect for the customer and a little sensible decision making and communication. We all understand flights are delayed and cancelled - what's making everyone so riled up is being treated like mushrooms.

It seems to me that airlines can do some very simple things to ameliorate this type of incident:

1) Cut websites over to dedicated informational sites right away.

2) Suspend new ticket sales immediately, at least for the immediate future (say, 5 days).

3) Operate sensible Twitter accounts (Twitter has really come into its own through this whole incident, most major airports have accounts and airlines have started directing customers to Twitter too. As a real-time informational tool, it can hardly be bettered. But it's a TWO way street, people).

4) Open up rebooking facilities online to passengers. Build a rules based system for rebooking and, where necessary, endorsing tickets across to other airlines. This facility could be built on a 'dark site' basis, and brought into play only when there is major disruption. If your call centre people can deal with this screens, I think we can - don't you?

5) Now you've got the majority of people off your call centre's backs, you can dedicate it to handling the exceptional requirements of people in trouble, not just the everyday business of rebooking and finding out what's going on.

It seems so simple to me. Am I missing something? Or are the airlines?

Anyway, with the (fingers crossed) anticipated arrival of our belated guests and a million things to do before Christmas, it might go a little quiet around here so you'll just have to amuse yourselves...

Snow Joke

Image by nickwheeleroz via FlickrHaving been caught out by that Icelandic volcano thing in the summer (Tikkipikkapukka or whatever it's called), I thought that European airports and  airlines would at least have benefited from the very real learnings of the communications disaster surrounding the eruption disruption. Reviewing the way their communications, call centre and media teams performed, airlines must surely have concluded they had a massive customer service disaster on their hands and, in fact, were lucky not to have been called to give answer of themselves in the circumstances. So when this disruption hit, they'd be better prepared...

More fool me.

It's chaos out there today. With the in-laws and baby girl due out here tomorrow, we've spent a good hunk of today trying to work out what on earth's going on - and trying to find anyone who'll speak or in any other way be of any assistance whatsoever.

The biggest lesson, for me, from Eyeapickledpickle was that airlines had to have better contingency plans for large scale disruption - that information flow is an absolute must - the tools available to us today, specifically online, mean that one to one and one to many communication can be supported with interactivity, intelligence and information flow - all you have to do is respect your customers enough to enable it. Twitter was invaluable during the whole Eyjafjallajökull incident - accounts like @eurocontrol (European ATC) kept the information flowing from the horse's mouth. But it wouldn't be difficult to build re-booking tools, better online enquiry and requesting tools and even better 'dark sites' - websites set up to kick in right when trouble looms and provide instant information and responses. Virgin's site wasn't bad today, but its call centre was utterly inadequate to the task. It's not as if they couldn't have seen trouble coming, either. There were forecasts, people. As for Aer Lingus, words fail me.


It seems a little mad to have people looking at screens on the 'phone talking to customers when those customers could be looking at those screens themselves. Many of the world's airlines have shown us that the customer can actually be trusted (monkeys though they are) to actually make a booking by themselves (something that travel agents traditionally believed us to be incapable of), so why not let us make re-bookings or endorse tickets for cancelled flights onto alternative carriers?


But then again, maybe we'll just opt for ignoring them all, putting up some sympathy-inducing text on the 'dark' site about how hard it is for call centre staff to get into work in this weather (not that we had a plan or anything, you understand) and just hope the negative feedback blows over in a while.

There has to be a better way - and there is. The Internet. WE could do the work that the call centre guys are doing. Why do we still have to endure  the bottleneck?

The Emirates National Identity Card. A fiasco.

Image by dawn m. armfield via FlickrI've been moaning about the Emirates National Identity Card fiasco since early in  November 2008 - and I have by no means been alone - many august online voices (including SeaBee and Monsignor Goat) have been reeling around in awe at the ever changing cycles of misinformation that have clouded every aspect of the rollout of the UAE's national ID card scheme.

I suspect many of us viewed yesterday's pronouncements similarly - in fact, I voiced my glee on the Dubai Today show yesterday when I prophesied a round of the clarifications that SeaBee loves so well. Quite what has to be clarified isn't yet clear, because the lack of clarity in the things to be clarified is obscuring quite what could be clearer.

UAE newspaper 7Days, which has slowly but surely been regaining its tabloid swagger following the concerted campaign to eradicate it a while ago, today does what no other newspaper has dared to do. It listened to reader complaints and decided to actually investigate how people are meant to be making an application for a national ID card before the supposed December 31st deadline. Yes, you can pick yourself up from the floor now. It did journalism.

What was the result? The paper's Nichola Jones called all of the 30 typing centres listed on the EIDA website in Dubai to find out if she could start the application process. Only nine of these were working numbers - and of these, only three answered and only one actually confirmed they were accepting applications. None of the typing centres in Abu Dhabi answered the phone. This is perhaps understandable - one of the Dubai typing centres had explained to the paper they weren't taking applications as they were working through a backlog of over 1,000 forms.

Ten calls to the EIDA 'emergency hotline' weren't answered, confirming what the paper had heard from readers - it's chaos out there. Here's Nichola's story, Identity Crisis On The Cards?

Vague threats are being bandied about regarding fines - enough to prompt colleagues yesterday to start talking about applying for the card (I've had one since September 2009, although have not once managed to use it for anything useful like, for instance, identifying myself) and I told them to do what I did - download the amusingly titled application application. (You may recall, the application application was a PC application that let you fill out an application so that you can apply for an appointment to make an application. The application application didn't let you make an appointment for an application: you still had to apply for an application appointment even if you had an application filled using the application application.).

Except you can't. There is no longer an application application. It has expired.So you can only go to one of these mythical typing centres. It's worth noting that 7Days doesn't actually tell us which typing centre was open, contactable and claiming to be able to process applications. That'll be because the 7Days team are all down there today.

So what happens on the 31st December? Are people without an ID card application registered going to blow up? We can only wait for some clarification.

With all my twenty four years' in Middle East media and communications, I can tell you that in my professional opinion the introduction of the national ID card system in the UAE has been a case study in botched and muddled communications that has confused, and quite possibly squandered, millions. Some of the amazing backstory is in these posts from the past.


I am only amazed that over two years later, it is still going on.

(And now, with thanks to Mita, The Inevitable Clarification)

Joke

Image via WikipediaWhen was the last time you were told a joke? Ages ago, right? You get texted jokes or emailed jokes, but we seem to have given up actually telling them.

And even when someone tells you a joke, it usually comes in the form, "Someone mailed me this great joke the other day. There's a bishop, an actress and two watermelons, right?"

The other thing is people forward really, really bad jokes with an invariable, "I never usually forward these things, but..."

Which is precisely what I'm doing now. I'm forwarding a joke I got by email (from pal Derek as it 'appens). but it did make me laugh:

Michael O’Leary, Chief Executive of 'Ryanair', walks into a busy Dublin pub. "I'll have a pint o' Guinness," he tells the barman.
"Sure," says the barman. "That'll be a Euro."
O'Leary can't believe it. "Christ almighty, but that'll explain how busy this place is! A Euro for a pint!"
He hands over the Euro with glee. The barman waits.
"What?" says O'Leary.
"Will ye be wantin' a glass wit dat?"