Boing Boing: Orange Mobile's robotic adherence to idiotic rules

Grok Headline matches for Boing Boing: Orange Mobile's robotic adherence to idiotic rules

Orange Mobile's robotic adherence to
idiotic rules

Orange Mobile's robotic adherence to
idiotic rules 05/13/2004 12:18 PM
Yesterday was a momentous occasion: it was the day I received my first UK bank statement, and was therefore able to do my bit to consummate England's national love affair with the utility bill. I mean, seriously: this is a country where you can walk into a shop to get a mobile phone or an ID card and say, "I have in this hand a fistful of credit cards and in this hand, a pristine Canadian passport," and have the clerk sniff and say, "I'm sorry sir, but without a gas bill, we simply won't be able to help you" (when I went to Citibank with the details of my Citibank US and Citibank Canada accounts, I was told to come back with a FedExed note from my boss attesting to my address, because of the "know your customer" rules -- apparently, an original signature on letterhead confers a depth of knowledge that mere years-long in-house financial records can't convey).

Yesterday was the day I hied myself off to the Tottenham Court Road to go shopping for a mobile phone. I knew exactly what I wanted: a Sony-Ericsson P900 with the O2 75 plan, which gets me 1000 minutes and several texts for only two or three times what comparable service would cost in the US (English mobile phones are very feature-rich, come with lovely high-speed data service, and cost so much to use that it's hard to believe that there's really anyone using the advanced features -- not at £4 a megabyte!).

The man in the Carphone Warehouse gave me the hookup, set up my account, called their credit department, and told me I'd have to pay a £150 deposit to go a-roaming in Europe. This is steep, but I can hack it. I gave him the nod, and then he passed me the contract to sign and went off to get my new phone. That's when he discovered that he'd run right out of P900s. I walked the length of the Tottenham Court Road strip and couldn't locate a P900 (or, indeed any phone with more than 12 buttons) for love or money.

But eventually, my luck changed. An Orange store staffed with friendly and knowledgeable clerks had P900s in stock and they were happy to take my money. We went through the signup rigamarole again -- took hours -- and then they called it in.

No dice. All of Orange's account sign-up computers were down. I went away and came back, but the computers were still down. The clerk confided that this happened a lot to Orange's overtaxed billing computers. I thought that it was a little weird that I was about to trust this company with my telephony when they couldn't even manage the IT necessary to reliably sign up a new customer, but shrug, they had the phone and I needed it, and besides, they'd match O2's rates for me. They sent me away and asked me to return the next day.

It was a waste of time.

I came back today, and after an hour more of hemming and hawing, this is what transpired: Orange would give me a phone with e £75 deposit, but I would have to wait 90 days before I'd be allowed to roam with the phone. I pointed out that I travelled two or three weeks out of every month, and this would render this (very expensive) phone very useless to me. I asked to speak to a supervisor. No dice. I offered to leave the same deposit I'd been asked for at O2. Even fewer than no dice -- "We don't know who you are, we can't give you roaming." I offered a bigger deposit. I offered to show the (enormous, promptly paid) cellular bills from my last year with Nextel. The deed to my condo in Toronto. The letter of reference from Yale. The Wired masthead. My US credit-report.

A waste of time.

It's the rules, they said. And please stop asking to speak to the credit department: they're not "customer-facing" and they're getting annoyed. You're annoying them.

Right, I thought, I'll call the press-relations department. I spoke to them at length -- flatteringly enough, they'd heard of me. So, what's the problem, I asked. Well, we can't do this because it's too risky to extend roaming to someone with no credit. I have credit. And it's what everyone does. Not O2. But you could ring up big bills with our roaming partners and stick us with them. I could call Tokyo and leave the phone off the hook for 24h without leaving England's shores and rack up just as big a liability for you..

At the end of the day, it came to this: These are our rules. We will stick to them. We will not make exceptions to them. We will hug them to our bosom beyond any kind of rationality or reason.

I am such a goddamned telephone junkie. I'm no Joi Ito with his $3,500 GPRS bills, but I've been spending $200 or $300 on cellular telephone damned near every month since 1992. I am every mobile carrier's dream. Any rational carrier would jump at my business.

But Orange isn't rational. It doesn't have a business plan, it has a bunch of superstitions to which it rigidly hews regardless of circumstance -- the media person I was speaking to reported that she'd spoken to their head of customer care, who wouldn't budge; this intransigence goes right to the top.

So Orange has lost my business, and to hell with them. As soon as O2 gets some P900s in stock, I'll gladly give them the 150 quid and get signed up and running.

And I think I've figured out why the Orange shop is the only place in town with any phones in stock: they make life so miserable for anyone who tries to buy one that you'd have to be flat-out desperate to take one off their hands.

"Boing Boing: Boing Boing add Technorati
support"

"Boing Boing: Boing Boing add Technorati
support" 04/14/2004 09:03 AM

Boing Boing: Boing Boing add Technorati
support

Boing Boing: Boing Boing add Technorati
support 04/13/2004 09:09 PM
Boing Boing add Technorati support .. showcasing it .. new feature .. just that

boingboing.net/2004/04/12/boing_boing_add_tech.html
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Mynah bird "boing boing boing" clip

Mynah bird "boing boing boing" clip 04/10/2004 10:16 AM
Ian Brown found this weird clip of a mynah bird saying "boing boing boing." 17K WAV Link (Thanks, Ian!)

Boing Boing audio interview with Mind
Hacks editor Matt Webb

Boing Boing audio interview with Mind
Hacks editor Matt Webb 12/22/2004 01:30 AM
Mark Frauenfelder: I'm starting to get interested in podcasting, so I interviewed Matt Webb, the co-editor of the new book, Mind Hacks, just published by O'Reilly. It's 25 minutes long, and I even created a cheesy Garageband theme song for what I hope is the first of many interviews.

Note: Matt wrote me with the following info -- "This is the McGu rk video I was talking about. Just proving that I'm nothing without my notes, I incorrectly remembered the McGurk sounds! It's a visual 'ga' and an aural 'ba' that combine to the perception of 'da.' No 'va' at all (that's a variation on the experiment)."

The Mind Hack's weblog is here.

Link to BitTorrent file of my interview with Matt Webb.

Link to BitTorrent stats. (Thanks, Chuck!)

Boing Boing: Transparent screen
illusion: set laptop's wallpaper to a
photo of the wall behind it

Boing Boing: Transparent screen
illusion: set laptop's wallpaper to a
photo of the wall behind it 03/24/2005 08:43 AM
Transparent screen illusion: set laptop's wallpaper to a photo of the wall behind it .. via boingboing

boingboing.net/2005/03/23/transparent_screen_i.html
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Boing Boing: Shirky: stupid (c) laws
block me from publishing own work online

Boing Boing: Shirky: stupid (c) laws
block me from publishing own work online 04/01/2005 05:23 PM
Clay Shirky rants about the absurd US copyright laws that are preventing him from copying his own media .. Clay Shirky tried to use some crippled software to rip a DVD, and it didn't work .. Boing Boing

boingboing.net/2005/03/31/shirky_stupid_c_laws.html
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Boing Boing: Join Friends of the
Creative Archive and help the Beeb put
EVERYTHING online

Boing Boing: Join Friends of the
Creative Archive and help the Beeb put
EVERYTHING online 06/03/2004 06:37 AM
Join Friends of the Creative Archive and help the Beeb put EVERYTHING online .. Boing Boing

boingboing.net/2004/06/02/join_friends_of_the_.html
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Boing Boing: Bill Gates: Free Culture
advocates = Commies

Boing Boing: Bill Gates: Free Culture
advocates = Commies 01/06/2005 02:39 PM
yesterday's Boing Boing post .. posts more of Gates' quote, .. BoingBoing link

boingboing.net/2005/01/05/bill_gates_free_cult.html
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Boing Boing: Game developers' amazing
rants on the state of the industry

Boing Boing: Game developers' amazing
rants on the state of the industry 03/14/2005 04:51 PM
boingboinged .. BoingBoing

boingboing.net/2005/03/11/game_developers_amaz.html
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Boing Boing: David Byrne launches
internet radio station

Boing Boing: David Byrne launches
internet radio station 03/30/2005 03:51 AM
David Byrne launches internet radio station .. boing boing

boingboing.net/2005/03/28/david_byrne_launches.html
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Boing Boing: Coded messages on US govt
timeserver's nonstandard port

Boing Boing: Coded messages on US govt
timeserver's nonstandard port 04/06/2005 05:01 AM
Coded messages on US govt timeserver's nonstandard port

boingboing.net/2005/04/04/coded_messages_on_us.html
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Boing Boing: Guestbl0gger Russ Kick's
MemoryHole -- banned in Iraq?

Boing Boing: Guestbl0gger Russ Kick's
MemoryHole -- banned in Iraq? 06/03/2004 09:03 AM
Guestblogger Russ Kick's MemoryHole -- banned in Iraq? .. banned by the military

boingboing.net/2004/06/02/guestblogger_russ_ki.html
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Boing Boing reports that US military may
be blocking access to news sites

Boing Boing reports that US military may
be blocking access to news sites 06/02/2004 07:52 PM

Xeni @ Boing Boing

More on blocked sites for .mil websurfers

Following up on this BoingBoing post about rumors that access to TheMemoryHole is being blocked on military computers in Iraq...

[John continues:]If the request was denied due to the Content Filter configuration is a sentence fragment, but with The content category reported is Gen. News. and If you feel this site was blocked in error, please contact the Help Desk the meaning is clear enough. For whatever reason, "General News" is not fit for our troops. I've been meaning to send her a list of links and ask her if she'd be willing to try to access them (Newsweek? New York Times? Common Dreams? Freerepublic.com [a conservative site]? townhall.com [another conservative site]?) I'm also curious what other kinds of sites she can't visit (geek news? music news? yahoo? wikipedia?) and whether she's prohibited from visiting these sites at work because she's /at work/, or if she's encouraged not to pursue the news in general.

Zaku, can you or anyone in the military in Iraq corroborate this or look into this?

Boing Boing: Sims-style
anti-teen-pregnancy ad from Belgium

Boing Boing: Sims-style
anti-teen-pregnancy ad from Belgium 03/25/2005 06:36 AM
Sims-style anti-teen-pregnancy ad from Belgium

boingboing.net/2005/03/23/simsstyle_antiteenpr.html
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Boing Boing: Camera phones in Iraq;
digicams and truth in wartime

Boing Boing: Camera phones in Iraq;
digicams and truth in wartime 05/26/2004 04:36 AM
boingboingis talking about .. Xeni @ Boing Boing .. BoingBoing

boingboing.net/2004/05/23/camera_phones_in_ira.html
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Boing Boing: Hersh: children raped at
Abu Ghraib, Pentagon has videos

Boing Boing: Hersh: children raped at
Abu Ghraib, Pentagon has videos 07/16/2004 11:53 AM
Hersh: children raped at Abu Ghraib, US government has videos .. the enemy is a lot closer to home .. he's been speaking

boingboing.net/2004/07/15/hersh_children_raped.html
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Boing Boing: RNC-NYC: Update on arrest
of Joshua Kinberg, Bikes Against Bush

Boing Boing: RNC-NYC: Update on arrest
of Joshua Kinberg, Bikes Against Bush 08/31/2004 09:40 AM
RNC-NYC: Update on arrest of Joshua Kinberg, Bikes Against Bush .. was arrested

boingboing.net/2004/08/30/rncnyc_update_on_arr.html
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Boing Boing: Bugmenot.com returns,
spokesbugperson says some news sites
trying to block it

Boing Boing: Bugmenot.com returns,
spokesbugperson says some news sites
trying to block it 08/23/2004 12:49 AM
Bugmenot.com returns, spokesbugperson says some news sites trying to block it .. "They'll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands" .. Boing Boing

boingboing.net/2004/08/20/bugmenotcom_returns_.html
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Boing Boing: EFF wins Grokster! Software
doesn't have to be easy for Hollywood to
wiretap!

Boing Boing: EFF wins Grokster! Software
doesn't have to be easy for Hollywood to
wiretap! 08/19/2004 09:01 PM
Boing Boing: EFF wins Grokster! Software doesn't have to be easy for Hollywood to wiretap! .. decision in the Grokster case .. this is good news .. historic decison .. BoingBoing

boingboing.net/2004/08/19/eff_wins_grokster_so.html
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Boing Boing: Plagiarism-seeking IMmer
pranked and exposed -- UPDATED

Boing Boing: Plagiarism-seeking IMmer
pranked and exposed -- UPDATED 04/01/2005 06:41 AM
Plagiarism-seeking IMmer pranked and exposed -- UPDATED .. according to BoingBoing, it's a hoax .. Boing Boing initially cried hoax

boingboing.net/2005/03/29/plagiarismseeking_im.html
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Boing Boing: Food Porn -- Burger King
Subservient Chicken

Boing Boing: Food Porn -- Burger King
Subservient Chicken 04/09/2004 04:08 PM
Food Porn -- Burger King Subservient Chicken .. Xeni @ BoingBoing points out .. boing boing description .. BoingBoing .. via

boingboing.net/2004/04/08/food_porn_burger_kin.html
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Boing Boing: Tiny, witty pixellated
avatars: storTroopers are back

Boing Boing: Tiny, witty pixellated
avatars: storTroopers are back 04/11/2005 03:50 AM
Tiny, witty pixellated avatars: storTroopers are back

boingboing.net/2005/04/10/tiny_witty_pixellate.html
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Boing Boing: Train sign: Touching wires
= death + fine

Boing Boing: Train sign: Touching wires
= death + fine 04/01/2005 01:41 AM
Train sign: Touching wires = death + fine .. Don’t touch those wires! .. BoingBoing

boingboing.net/2005/03/30/train_sign_touching_.html
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Boing Boing: Calvin and Hobbes slipcased
complete collection coming

Boing Boing: Calvin and Hobbes slipcased
complete collection coming 09/20/2004 10:10 AM
BoingBoing

boingboing.net/2004/09/19/calvin_and_hobbes_sl.html
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Boing Boing: D&D book reader on
ferry hassled by security morons

Boing Boing: D&D book reader on
ferry hassled by security morons 08/13/2004 09:20 AM
US Homeland Security dweeb confiscates roleplaying manual .. D&D book reader on ferry hassled by security morons .. An entry on BoingBoing .. dangerous

boingboing.net/2004/08/11/dd_book_reader_on_fe.html
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Boing Boing: Bush's plan to dose
Americans with expensive antipsychotics

Boing Boing: Bush's plan to dose
Americans with expensive antipsychotics 06/19/2004 04:40 AM
Bush's plan to dose Americans with expensive antipsychotics .. SOMA

boingboing.net/2004/06/18/bushs_plan_to_dose_a.html
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Boing Boing: Tsunami update: Microsoft
responds, bl0ggers organize, video
torrents

Boing Boing: Tsunami update: Microsoft
responds, bl0ggers organize, video
torrents 01/02/2005 12:46 AM
BoingBoing for their link as well

boingboing.net/2004/12/30/tsunami_update_micro.html
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Boing Boing: Tigger boning Tickle Me
Elmo: Smart toys acting dumb

Boing Boing: Tigger boning Tickle Me
Elmo: Smart toys acting dumb 03/27/2005 08:04 AM
Boing Boing: Tigger boning Tickle Me Elmo: Smart toys acting dumb

boingboing.net/2005/03/25/tigger_boning_tickle.html
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Boing Boing: Thousands of Afghani POWs
brutally executed, CBC alleges US
military complicity

Boing Boing: Thousands of Afghani POWs
brutally executed, CBC alleges US
military complicity 05/06/2004 04:44 AM
Thousands of Afghani POWs brutally executed, CBC alleges US military complicity .. war-crimes committed against Afghani prisoners .. Quote .. via

boingboing.net/2004/05/05/thousands_of_afghani.html
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Boing Boing: Reality-TV human baby
giveaway, pissed-off Uri Geller claims
trademark breach

Boing Boing: Reality-TV human baby
giveaway, pissed-off Uri Geller claims
trademark breach 04/30/2004 07:37 AM
Your daily dose of What the Fuck? .. Boing Boing .. BoingBoing

boingboing.net/2004/04/29/realitytv_human_baby.html
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Boing Boing: German newspaper
iPod/torture mashup

Boing Boing: German newspaper
iPod/torture mashup 05/10/2004 03:03 AM
German newspaper iPod/torture mashup .. boingboing

boingboing.net/2004/05/09/german_newspaper_ipo.html
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Boing Boing: Craigslist for-rent ads
scraped and placed on Google Maps

Boing Boing: Craigslist for-rent ads
scraped and placed on Google Maps 04/10/2005 08:06 AM
Craigslist for-rent ads scraped and placed on Google Maps .. [boingboing] .. Boing Boing .. BoingBoing

boingboing.net/2005/04/09/craigslist_forrent_a.html
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Boing Boing: Star Wars/Office Space
mashup

Boing Boing: Star Wars/Office Space
mashup 06/26/2004 01:35 AM
Boing Boing: Star Wars/Office Space mashup .. points us to

boingboing.net/2004/06/25/star_warsoffice_spac.html
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Boing Boing: Intl MPAA/RIAA to ISPs: cut
your own throats

Boing Boing: Intl MPAA/RIAA to ISPs: cut
your own throats 04/09/2005 05:16 AM
Intl MPAA/RIAA to ISPs: cut your own throats .. Run a ISP here is how to go Bankrupt! .. BoingBoing

boingboing.net/2005/04/07/intl_mpaariaa_to_isp.html
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Boing Boing: US torturers made
screensavers out of atrocity photos

Boing Boing: US torturers made
screensavers out of atrocity photos 05/08/2004 08:05 PM
oing boing, .. boingboing

boingboing.net/2004/05/07/us_torturers_made_sc.html
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Boing Boing: Finally, a bovine rectal
palpation simulator

Boing Boing: Finally, a bovine rectal
palpation simulator 04/06/2005 03:17 AM
Finally, a bovine rectal palpation simulator .. pour tre connu

boingboing.net/2005/04/04/finally_a_bovine_rec.html
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Market share for Firefox equals or tops
IE on Boing Boing

Market share for Firefox equals or tops
IE on Boing Boing 03/14/2005 05:05 PM
If it hasn't been done already, somebody should create a page of links showing Firefox share for key web sites. It would show it catching up to and passing IE across a variety of sites popular with the "digitally aware". Will it cross the chasm to the mass market?...

Boing Boing: UK cinema copyright
warnings: a call to action

Boing Boing: UK cinema copyright
warnings: a call to action 05/16/2004 02:18 AM
Of course he nearly fell asleep during the film itself .. cory doctorow erzhlt von seinem letzten kinobesuch .. UK cinema copyright warnings: a call to action .. we take pictures .. bOING bOING

boingboing.net/2004/05/15/uk_cinema_copyright_.html
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Grok Description matches for Boing Boing: Orange Mobile's robotic adherence to idiotic rules
GrokA matches for Boing Boing: Orange Mobile's robotic adherence to idiotic rules

Boing Boing: Orange Mobile's robotic adherence to idiotic rules

The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry: