A conspiracy of jumped-up arseholes

Not so long ago my partner wanted to contact someone at Google to ask them how to get incentives like AdWords packages. It was utterly impossible to do so.

When eventually, through a friend nothing to do with Google, she did get through to someone there and asked to be put through to the person whose name she had ferreted out, the reply was, “I am not at liberty to give you their telephone number.”

This is the arrogance of idiots, and it is depressingly commonplace.

We have spent days trying to move a server from Windows to Linux for the benefit of EADIM affiliates, a task that should take little more than pressing a few buttons and the odd key.

Every possible obstacle, no matter how petty, has been painstakingly placed in our path to stop us doing so.

I’ve said it God knows how many times: nothing fails like success.

And nothing in my lifetime has succeeded so fast and so utterly as the internet, or spawned so many inept oafs.

What has happened is that a few smart people got in on the ground floor and made millions or even billions, sometimes deservedly, often not.

Then they lost interest, and employed platoons of underlings – the sort who used to get jobs as counter clerks in post offices, though too often without the ability to read and write – to run things.

Such people are completely unaware that they are supposed to be offering a service – and the people above them are functionaries who have no clue either; they would do just as well in a large insurance firm or bank.

One problem – not just with the Internet, but generally – is that far too many people who succeed don’t realise how much of it was due to luck. Another is that the qualities it takes to build something are often useless when employing or managing large numbers of pretty average people in a big, fat organisation.

It happened with Microsoft. It’s obviously happening with Google. In fact yesterday my partner Al noted that Google are fast becoming as hated as Microsoft. Yahoo clearly lost the plot some years ago. Unless an unusual person with that rare, grounded sense of the real - like Jeff Bezos or Warren Buffet - stays on it always happens.

Mind you, I’m not saying I’d do any better. I’m clueless at pretty much anything beyond deciding where to go to lunch.

P. S. I was just about to stick this up when I saw this piece of emetic tripe from the Firefox welcome page: "Thanks for supporting Mozilla's mission of encouraging openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web!"

I can tell you, as sure as God made little apples, that a group of time-wasting, navel-gazing "executives" sat in a room debating that little piece of corporate hogwash, word by dreary word.

Lets face it, neither I nor any of your customers gives a flying fuck about your "mission" - which we all know is to make as much money as possible as fast as possible. I just want to get stuff done quickly on the web - a mission you totally failed to assist me in fifteen minutes ago when I wanted to edit this.