And here’s wishing you a happy and prosperous New Year durlin’! Or as they say in CB and Trucker land “Sevens and Eights”! My new year did not start off too flash. In accordance with my yearly ritual of getting stuck into the booze during the holiday season to get the coming year’s drinking out of the way as early as possible, (I’m convinced that it will work once I have worked out the exact amounts required for each year which could take up to another five years at least) I was away with the ‘spirits’ of the Season when someone stole my cell phone from my shop.
I thought I had just put it somewhere so safe I couldn’t even remember where it was until a few days later when I rang my cell phone and was told by the Go Mobile recording that the number was engaged. I asked the helpful lady at 121 to bar all outgoing and incoming calls to my phone and got a printout of all the calls made from it from the SamoaTel Customer Service Help desk. The only call to a SamoaTel landline was to a number that belonged to a family I knew. The rest were to Digicel cell phone numbers. I called the 800-Digi number and a lady I spoke with said that I could obtain a list of the people who these numbers belonged to if I came in to their office at Vaimea with my SamoaTel printout. Not so said another smiling employee at the Vaimea office, who said that they only released such information to the Police. Company policy.
When I found out that one of the numbers whoever stole my telephone called belonged to a family I knew, I immediately discarded any thoughts of getting the Police involved. I rang the family and explained what had happened and how I would just like to get my phone back if they knew who had it. They promised to help find my phone but after a couple more days with no luck, I went to Digicel for the names of their customers only to be told to go to the Police. Of the thirty or forty calls made from my phone in the first two hours on the printout, they were all made to only five numbers. I thought that if I had these people’s names, I could go see them and find out if they could help identify the person who had called them using my phone. Can they all lie to protect this person? Absolutely! Will they all lie to protect this person? The Police have a way of getting people to cooperate with them in such matters. But I do not want the Police involved. I just want my phone back and I am sure that I will if I had these people’s names!
This is just another in the many cases involving the System, the Law and the Ava Fatafata process chasing their respective tails in a bureaucratic round-about with too many Give Way signs. After a dizzying paper chase and frustrating options from Automated Call Distribution robots, everyone Gives Way and nothing gets done!
But if SamoaTel had no problem giving me a printout with the numbers called from my phone after it was stolen, why did Digicel have a problem with giving me their names? I don’t think Go Mobile is that desperate for customers that they would be going around with a list of Digicel users trying to pressure them into making The Switch, do you? Of course O’Brien’s mob would say that Go Mobile is and would but Go Mobile says that they have been connecting up to 400 new customers every week since launching last year and I believe Junior! That is a very healthy 19 – 20k client base with Digicel probably claiming two to three times more customers. Which babies haven’t got a cell phone yet? But all these figures are not going to solve my problem and get me my phone back. I could probably print the five numbers in this column and ask their owners to call me but that would be too easy. Imagine how devastating and crippling such a huge blow to the ego that would be if nobody called because none of these five people read this column though? But what the heck, here they are; 771-8129; 775-8242; 776-4146; 773-2277 and 774-5695. It should be quite easy for them to remember the guy who called on Boxing Day to say that he now had a ‘new’ Sony Ericsson Z530i cell phone they got for Christmas! I just want the phone back, no questions asked. I have some very important photos of my children in it.
But enough of my crappy start to the New Year. According to the owner of our other mobile telephone network, to be successful in business this year, you must go with, and not against, change. Something for the anti-RHD campaign members to think about. I don’t think he got into details like first identifying the proposed change as a ‘good’ one before going with it as opposed to ‘bad’ ones which you stay as far away from as possible, but in his type of business, any government proposed change is ‘good’ unless it is by the PNG telecommunications people giving his red army hell with their mobile telephone network interconnection plans. You mustn’t bite the hand that is holding the cell phone!
And my pick for the job of Manu Samoa Coach? Zita. It is a pity that she did not apply. Rugby is undergoing some huge changes not just on the field but in the male dominated board rooms as well and like every other institution we men have built over the years to be our exclusive domain, the MDG’s are going to rip them open with equal opportunity advocates of all sexes determined to push the last remnants of non-quiche eating real men to join our Police force. No room for pregnant women and other womanly pursuits with our guys! That wasn’t a wet attempt at a pun there with the much publicized senior police officer’s alleged uninvited and unwanted sexual advances with some female officers. Honest!
Some people may argue that changes are coming too fast for our people to handle. I think they are not coming fast enough. It is almost half way through January already and other than the sad passing away of a hero of mine in Sir Edmund Hillary, it is ‘same old same old’! Have a nice one folks!
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