Out of time we cut "days" and "nights", "summers" and "winters". We say what each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts.

The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.

- William James

I have been in Linked in for nine years, having been user number 1400 or so out of 100 million. It is useful for keeping up to date with the people I know's changes of circumstance but little more.

I keep trying to get involved in the various Linkedin groups I am a member of but a few things drive me away.

The first is the interface which throws away nearly thirty years of experience with online forums and either doesn't do, or does badly, most of the basics of online discussions.

The second is the feeling that it is slipping into the Ecademy nightmare of desperate out of work consultants pouncing on corporate folks like piranhas seeing meat. Many otherwise interesting threads end up either spammy or "me too". 

Ironically the third thing that drives me away is the thing that I suspect makes it appealing to others. It is too safe and too corporate. It feels bland and lifeless. Despite having no great affection for Facebook I spend more time in there because at least the discussions are more free flowing and lively. 

Unlike Chris I am going to keep my account, and make the most of having a self updating address book, but it is a shame it never became more for me.  

"Is it unfair to characterise the IT industry as dodgy characters in cheap suits selling wish fulfilment to out of their depth executives?"

Sadly those guys have now moved on to package and sell social into the business world. People are being fleeced for over engineered, over priced and over sold bloatware. This is not in anyone's long term best interests.

Happiness is a newly mown lawn. And yet how hard it is to get started. I will do anything but get that mower out and have even been known to hope for rain on a day I have agreed to cut the grass.

But the quiet satisfaction of getting it done is so sweet. The slightly aching muscles, the smell of petrol and newly mown grass, the neat, alternating, light and dark lines drawing your eye down the centre of the garden. It feels good for a short while. I resolve to try harder next time.

But I know I won't ...

Things started going badly from from the beginning. When I moved to them in November  Orange got my login details mixed up with another customer. When I pointed this out I was told that they couldn't correct this simple bit of information and that I would have to start again with the ten day registration process. I said this was nonsense and to get around it I now have to log in under this other customer's login name.

They then failed to cancel my previous ISP causing double payments on my account for a couple of months which led me to two sets of call centre hell to sort out.

This more recent technical problem involved approximately 30 phone calls to Orange technical support who insisted on conducting about 8 line tests because that was part of their rigid system. They also replaced my modem, triggered a visit by a BT engineer and lost my landline as well for half a day. On top of this they closed the fault twice because we had triggered some time delay or particular response from some part of their check list. I would then have them announce that the fault had been resolved while I still had no broadband access!

The reason I am writing this post though is to comment about the over systematisation of everything. Each time I called the Orange operatives in the call centre in India they wanted to start from scratch with their script. Literally. If I am ever asked again if I am using a wired or wireless connection I will scream. Not only that but no one seemed to know anything about what had happened previously. There was no one apart from me seeing the whole picture. It was like being in my own Groundhog Day nightmare. It was all very frustrating.

No one really owned my problem. Not even the databases that stored my info owned the problem. And when the system didn't work no one was willing, or able, to step out of it and take responsibility for solving my problem. As I said in a pointless email exchange with a gatekeeper in the chief execs office their company was in a race to the bottom with other ISP's reducing costs to such an extent that their product was becoming unusable. I had little confidence that moving to another ISP would make a lot of difference as their whole industry is afflicted with the same corner cutting mentality. Feeling stuck in this disembodied, call centre hell is an unfortunately common experience these days with all sorts of services.

I got to the stage where I didn't care how much my service cost so long as it worked or at the very least I got looked after well when it didn't. In response to some advice from friends I have switched to Zen who cost more but who I understand still employ grown ups who can take responsibility for solving my problem and aren't hamstrung by a broken system. Here's hoping!

"It's today," squeaked Piglet.

"My favorite day," said Pooh.

ht Dina Mehta

This tweet from Mark W. Smith suggests taking the next step and giving journalists their own platform - at least for longer form pieces. I know all the arguments about the need to fund good investigative or foreign journalism but this might in the long term prove an interesting alternative.

I was lucky enough to meet Sergei years ago at the first Super Nova conference in Palo Alto just before their IPO. We were each allowed to ask him one question. My question was what he was going to do, being an American company with, at the time, most of its servers on American soil, when the US Government asked them to index some bits of the web better than others or in some other way tried to control their activities.

He didn't really have an answer but from his comments in The Guardian interview it would seem he has been trying harder to come up with some recently.

O reader! Had you in your mind

Such stores as silent thought can bring,

O, gentle reader! You would find

A tale in everything.

- William Wordsworth