Nathan to the rescue

I need to add an appendix to my last post, as I am now at home and ON LINE. You’d have thought frustration levels couldn’t have risen from Monday, but there were a number of developments in our Virgin Media saga. 

1. On returning from the internet café I saw some neighbours who also use Virgin Media and learned that they were having no problems. Conclusion it was not an area problem. We passed the information on to VM.

2. I began to receive text messages:

“Virgin Media Outage Update – ID F…..532. We’re pleased to tell you this issue is now fixed. Best wishes, the Virgin Media Team.” Great news – except it still wasn’t. So I wrote a message saying, “No, it’s not. Please come and sort it out.” Only it refused to be sent. Presumably Virgin have a one-way only text number. 

3. On Monday evening and again early on Tuesday, we had phone messages from Bangladesh saying a technician would come and sort things out for us. Yippee! But 30 minutes and 60 minutes later we received more phone messages telling us the issue was now fixed. It wasn’t. And so I rang VM and told them. As Jane was out I couldn’t go through their standardised rigmarole of checking the router lights etc which Jane had done twice before. 

Somehow the chap in Bangladesh understood me sufficiently and in the end said that indeed a technician would come and help that morning. Well, Nathan (for he was the longed-for technician) arrived. He ran checks and changed the router. Still it was not working…. So he went to the local junction box and found that our line hadn’t been labelled and had a “noise blocker” on it. When and why it was put there is a mystery, but now at last we’re on line again. Phew! Nathan said we might receive a customer satisfaction survey. That was to do with his performance – not Virgin Media’s. If it were the latter, it would be way into negative scores. Nathan’s would be highly positive. Thanks, Nathan.

Automated falsehoods?

On Friday our internet went down. We’re with Virgin Media, which has served us well thus far. After a time we rang the help number and heard a message apologising for the break in service to our road’s post code, and as it was more complex than usual it would take longer but their engineers were hard at work on it.

The next day it still wasn’t working and so we rang again. The same message. We gave a mobile number for text updates. This morning three days after the original fault and after no texts we decided we wanted to hear something more than an automated message, and so we navigated through to a voice (possibly in India). The nice lady told us there was a local outage and it should be sorted by Friday… A good thing I’m not employed from home. Then Jane pointed out there’d been no engineers in the area. The troubleshooter then ran some diagnostic tests on our system. “Make sure all the plugs are in the sockets. What are the lights doing? Push the switch on the bottom. Etc etc.” Naturally we wondered about the “area outage.” Don’t worry, we were told, we would now be “escalated.” Jane hoped there'd be some rebate on our bill. I think she was told that there was a standard OffCom compensation of £8 per 24 hours - maybe Virgin Media will be paying us next month....

So I have come to our local internet café to catch up with emails – and to vent my frustration with what are apparently automated obfuscations – or possible lies. Perhaps when I get back, our home internet will be restored – some hope!

In defence of Dr Nikki Alexander and Dr Donald Tusk

As you may know, I’m an avid viewer of BBC Television’s Silent Witness. I’m always sad when a series comes to an end, as No 22 did on Tuesday. As ever, it was a contemporary storyline and it had an individual conundrum running through it. That was a crisis of trust in one of the team of forensic pathologists around whom the series revolves. Dr Nikki Alexander (played by Emilia Fox) is the scrupulous lead pathologist whose results are challenged in court in an appeal concerning the death of a policeman. Somehow the original evidence has been corrupted by an interested party. Here ends the plot spoiler.

The episodes end with Nikki as witness, as the individual responsible for sabotaging the forensic evidence appears in court. She is asked by the prosecuting barrister:

Dr Alexander, what are the consequences of the defendant’s actions on your work?

She replies:

“What’s the point of experts if nobody trusts them? What’s the point of evidence if it can so easily be contaminated? The whole integrity of what we strive to achieve could have been catastrophically undermined. What my colleagues and I seek to do is understand the cause and manner of a person’s death. But we don’t only deal with the dead; we deal with the living – the families, the judiciary, the coroner, the police, the public, the press. And they all have to trust us, and if there is a betrayal of that trust, there is a crime. The opposite of truth is not just a lie; the opposite of truth is chaos, chaos that is in danger of bringing down the institutions we depend on – to deliver justice.”

Thank you, Dr Alexander.

During the referendum campaign, The Daily Telegraph reported on 10^th June 2016:

“I think people in this country,” declared Vote Leave’s Michael Gove, “have had enough of experts.” His fellow Brexiteers were quick to back him up. “There is only one expert that matters,” said Labour MP Gisela Stuart, also of Vote Leave, “and that’s you, the voter.” Nigel Farage, the leader of Ukip, suggested that many independent experts were actually in the pay of the Government or the EU. This concerted undermining of experts was a major tactic of the Leave Campaign. Warnings of the complexity and potential consequences of exiting from real experts were poo-pooed, and who can forget the nonsense of the red bus? "The opposite of truth is not just a lie; the opposite of truth is chaos, chaos that is in danger of bringing down the institutions we depend on…" And we are now reaping the whirlwind.

Which explains Donald Tusk, the European Council President’s comments: “I have been wondering what the special place in hell looks like for those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan to deliver it safely.” And I guess it also explains the intemperate response of leading Brexiteers to his musings. Commons leader, Andrea Leadsom, who campaigned for Britain's exit from the EU, said Mr Tusk should apologise for his "disgraceful" and "spiteful" comments.

No doubt some of the Brexiteers realise that Donald Tusk might have been thinking about Dante’s Inferno (of which Wikipedia gives a useful summary for those who don’t want to read the whole allegory). “In the poem, Hell is depicted as nine concentric circles of torment located within the Earth; it is the ‘realm ... of those who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites or violence, or by perverting their human intellect to fraud or malice against their fellowmen’.”

Each circle is reserved for increasingly bad people. The bullseye at the bottom is reserved for the epitome of evil, the Devil. Two circles out from there is the eighth, the Circle of Fraud, which is subdivided into ten evil “ditches”, the Malebolge. Writing in the 1950s Dorothy L. Sayers described this as, "the image of the City in corruption: the progressive disintegration of every social relationship, personal and public. Sexuality, ecclesiastical and civil office, language, ownership, counsel, authority, psychic influence, and material interdependence – all the media of the community's interchange are perverted and falsified".

In the penultimate ditch Dante sees the “Sowers of Discord: In the Ninth Bolgia, the Sowers of Discord are hacked and mutilated for all eternity by a large demon wielding a bloody sword; their bodies are divided as, in life, their sin was to tear apart what God had intended to be united; these are the sinners who are 'ready to rip up the whole fabric of society to gratify a sectional egotism'. The souls must drag their ruined bodies around the ditch, their wounds healing in the course of the circuit, only to have the demon tear them apart anew.”

 

I don’t imagine at all that Donald Tusk sees the EU as God-given, merely as a proven instrument of peace and prosperity for Europe. Neither do I have reason to suppose his wondering went as far as consigning “those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan to deliver it safely” to the ninth ditch of the eighth circle of hell. But I wonder whether the cap fits.

Of course I am not so naïve as to suggest that the promoters of Brexit were the first or only perverters and falsifiers of all the media of the community's interchange. It was certainly one of their weapons, but we have seen it in such monsters as Cambridge Analytica, we have seen it in the political life of the USA, and in the widespread use of targeted disinformation used to justify military and economic interventions designed to destabilise societies. In this, patently, the internet is a pervasively powerful instrument, with the potential to cause more damage than an atom bomb. However, it is clear that the Brexit-movement has had the effect of magnifying unrest in many of whom we used to call our European friends, and who remain our European neighbours. Some Eurosceptics no doubt rejoice at witnessing the opening of Pandora’s box and anticipate Europe’s disintegration with glee.

“The opposite of truth is not just a lie; the opposite of truth is chaos, chaos that is in danger of bringing down the institutions we depend on…” We are now discovering that Dr Alexander was right. And “the living”, who are the next generation, are the ones who will have the task of bringing back truth, and rescuing order from the chaos.

Back to blogics

I have to say it's been lovely having an enforced break from the internet! Jane and I have had an all-too-short holiday in a remote corner of south-east Devon - no internet and fairly dubious mobile reception. For those of us without sufficient self-discipline to impose a break from the media on ourselves, this sort of desert-island retreat should be made compulsory!

(By the way, last week's Desert Island Discs was one of those peaches which come along occasionally. The castaway was the actor, Martin Sheen (Jed Bartlett of The West Wing), whose own life-story is as gripping as the series. You can listen on podcast or here: Martin Sheen castaway.)

Where was I? Well, this time a week ago we were on the way back from my favourite place of worship, in Exmouth. I've only been there twice of course, and I know that there isn't a perfect church anywhere. However Christ Church in North Street for me scratches where it itches.... It's utterly unpretentious, but its people are serious about worship and discipleship. And they're very welcoming, family-friendly and unintimidating. We first met Katie and Tom and Nicky last year at New Wine, and have got to know other church members since. I reckon one mark of a healthy Christian family is where you feel at home when you step inside. This is like that.

Anyway there's too much to say about the action-packed week for this post. So it will have to keep to another time.