The Surgery

In arguably the biggest money-wasting venture since Telstra launched a presence in Second Life, Australia’s incumbent telco is now active on the social networking site and micro-blogging service Twitter.

I can’t think of a better way to get tech-savvy customers off-side than to spam a Twitter channel with automated replies, like this:

Got a BigPond® query?! Ask about BigPond® via this link http://tinyurl.com/5ufhvf & a BigPond consultant will email you back.

…or like this…

BigPond® would like to chat about the concerns u have. Click http://tinyurl.com/5ufhvf & a BigPond consultant will email u back.

Telstra, you are not hip, cool, trendy, or in any way appealing to the masses, by using hipster l33t-sp34k SMS language like “u” instead of “you”, ampersands instead of “and” or adding ® after your registered trademark.

Don’t get me wrong, this could be an extremely useful service if it was staffed by competent CSRs that gave personal, real-time replies to customer enquiries.  People would follow Twitter BigPond and might even learn a thing or two from useful replies.  By way of comparison, the Telstra Online Assistance service is useful because you are chatting to real live CSRs. In my experience they usually point you in the right direction in a timely fashion.

But automated twits that point every enquiry towards a web form or email address?  In the immortal words of John McEnroe, “You cannot be serious?!”

Also, can someone explain to me why there are 50 people following this channel?!?!  Ye Gods!!  Get a life!!

Actually, get a First Life first.  Avoid this one at all costs.

I’m home.

After 5 weeks, 5 countries, and more than 40,000 km in aeroplanes, cars, trains, buses and boats, I’m finally back where I started.

The world’s an amazing place, there’s no doubt about it.

The world’s also a very big place. You don’t realise just how big, or how amazing, until you travel non-stop for 30 hours from one side of the world to the other; the same distance that it takes an email, an instant message or a Facebook notification to travel in less than a second.

We flew from Melbourne to Sydney, then to Singapore, London, attended a family wedding in England, flew to Northern Ireland, drove through the Republic of Ireland, flew to Scotland, then Denmark, back to England and finally home.

I’d been to most of these places before, but some cultural differences that I really noticed this time were:

• In England, no-one has a laundry;
• The rest of the world still uses copper coins and denominations below 5 cents;
• Australia has a lot to learn when it comes to public transport;
• Dr Ron has an accent; and
• “Local knowledge” is everything!

Now I need a holiday to recover from my holiday. I guess that’s what work is for. I’m back into it, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, Monday morning.

Catch you all on Tech Talk tomorrow night. More soon.