Category: learning curve

Dear Scam Victim

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Solace at last, in the shape of an email from Juliet Joel.

For a bit of background on this story, all you have to do is to remember back to when I was a victim from Scam?
No?
Me neither.

But supposing I had been defrauded, it would all be fine because remittance officer Juliet Joel (you may remember her from SYPNIC BANK BENIN PLC. SCAM COMPENSATION OFFICE DEPARTMENT WORLD BANK/UNITED NATIONS) is here to help:

Screenshot

At first, I was worried that this might also be some sort of scam, but I was immediately reassured by the good names of SYPNIC BANK BENIN PLC. and WORLD BANK/UNITED NATIONS being included therein. After all, it’s highly unlikely that good, proud organisations such as these would be tangled up in any sort of naughtiness. Amiright?

Seems, as they say, legit.

And if there really is $1,500,000.00 USD (One Million Five Hundred Thousand Dollars Only) available and I have been listed/approved for this payment as one of the scammed victims to be paid this amount, then why would I say no? Why would anyone say no? After all, that’s a healthy R21,532,650.00 ZAR (Twenty One Million Five Hundred Thirty Two Thousand Six Hundred Fifty Rand Only) in JZ’s Monopoly money.

I’m already halfway through filling the not ever so taxing form (most difficult bit by miles being the very short field for my address) for further verifications and scan copy of my passport. After all, without them having this information, how can I expect to be fed with further modalities?

It’s a question I know we’ve all asked.

Yep, when it comes to helping Juliet Joel out so that she can help me out, I am there in the manner of an rather keen ursine.

 

I don’t mind telling you that I have a very, VERY good feeling about this.

Where Eagles Dare

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A funny thing happened while I was writing up the Constantia Wine Route post yesterday.

The preamble follows.
Firstly, I wanted to link back to the last Constantia Wine Route post I did. Standard practice there. I had a quick read through it as well.

And then secondly, for some reason (alcohol + lack of an introduction + no name badge + my age (whatevs) + [one last excuse here]) I couldn’t recall the name of the guy who served us at Eagles’ Nest. UCT student, doing Business Science and Commerce, passion for wine, third season working there, favourite Eagles’ Nest wine: Viognier, top knot, possible beard. Nice chap. Nameless.
So I went to the Eagle’s Nest website, clicked on ABOUT and selected PEOPLE BEHIND OUR WINES. Maybe they had a ‘meet and greet our front room staff’ thing. They didn’t.

What they did have was the Executive Director, the Winemaker, the Farm Manager etc etc.
And they had this too:

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That’s Kaylee Stewart. She’s the Brand Manager: Tasting Room, Sales & Marketing (Western Cape).
Says her blurb:

Kaylee joined the Eagles’ Nest team at the end of 2011 to build on her families involvement. Since, she has enthusiastically taken up the role of managing the tasting room, local Cape Town trade and fulfilling certain public relation and marketing roles.

(Families [sic] involvement being her Dad is the Executive Director)
But what would “fulfilling certain public relation and marketing roles” actually entail, though? And how would one prove oneself capable of handling such a taxing role?

Might it include putting promotional comments about Eagles’ Nest on blog posts about the Constantia Wine Route, even when the said blog posts don’t mention Eagles’ Nest?

I doubt it.

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What are the chances that someone called Kaylee Stewart thought that a wine farm run by Peter Stewart was the best of all the wine farms in the Constantia Valley? It’s almost too coincidental to not be the same Kaylee Stewart that now fulfils certain public relation and marketing roles.
And yet, it’s obviously not the same Kaylee Stewart because surely she would have mentioned that she took her family members down from England “because Dad is the Executive Director there”. And she would just have given her Pops a call and asked when the Shiraz was coming out, no? None of this “mid May if I am not mistaken” nonsense.

Right.

And yet, even if it were the same Kaylee Stewart (which it isn’t), then there’s nothing illegal about what she did. Rather disingenuous, ethically iffy, sure, but that’s about it.
If it had have been the same Kaylee Stewart (which it wasn’t) she would have known that if she had ‘come out’ as being connected to the Eagles’ Nest estate, readers would obviously have taken everything positive she said about the place with a pinch of salt. And so if it was her (and we’re all aware that it wasn’t) she would have simply omitted any reference to the fact that it was her family’s business anyway. Clever lady.
(It’s worth noting that according to the website, the real Kaylee Stewart wasn’t working for the vineyard when the comment was posted.)

For me, it raises an interesting point with regard to bloggers recommending products. We wouldn’t have believed what the real Kaylee Stewart had said if we’d known about her family’s business, and yet people still read blog posts for which the blogger has been paid or has received free accommodation/food/services or goods and they lap up the positive reviews. It works for the blogger, because they get money and/or free stuff, and it works for the company involved because they get the positive review and the increase in sales. We can all name several (or more) local blogs that do this.

People aren’t going to believe everything that they read, though, are they? Except obviously yes, enough of them do, because otherwise it would all stop. Personally, I can’t understand it. It’s actually fairly depressing that no-one seems to think any deeper than the actual words they are reading when there’s a paid-for review. Most of the time there’s absolutely no disclosure by the blogger anyway, so I guess you’d never know.

These days, when I get asked to do reviews on stuff, I make it clear from the outset that if it’s not very good, I will write that it’s not very good. And suddenly there are very few takers. Maybe because they don’t have the confidence in the product, but more likely that they know that they can get the next blogger they call to write something nice – however poor the actual experience – by just giving them some money or make up or a helicopter trip or a phone or whatever.

Whatever happened to integrity, hey?

Outrageous

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It’s all the outrage these days to be outraged about things. It’s driven by social media, and fuelled by the websites of the local tabloids and the brain-dead, act-first-don’t-think-later people who populate those places. It seems that people are almost going looking for things to become upset by, a sort of Münchhausen’s Syndrome for the modern generation. And the things that people are getting outraged by are getting smaller, pettier and ever more difficult to predict.

We had this over a misread price label, we had outrage over the outrage over the reaction (or lack of reaction) to the Paris attacks, we’ve had people trying (but not really succeeding) to light outrage fires, and we’re going to have outrage over something else today. Probably.

But I got thinking (foolishly) about the stuff that we haven’t had outrage over yet. Stuff that, given the current climate for instant up-in-arms-ism, you’d have thought would have set the masses off.

  • The carbon footprint of the light aircraft that flies over Cape Town during rush hour, and over Newlands during rugby and cricket matches, towing a big advertising banner behind it.
  • The company that it advertises on the big advertising banner it tows behind it 90% of the time, which is a lap-dancing club.
  • People wasting water. As the so-called “water crisis” bites harder in SA, why has no-one come up with the #watershaming hashtag yet? When we had no electricity, people were quick to point out those being wasteful. With water shortages in 4 (is it 5?) provinces already, why has the same not happened with water?
  • The police vans that push their way through the traffic on the M3 each morning, taking inmates from Pollsmoor prison to court.
  • iTunes. All of it.

And that’s just for starters.

I’m both surprised and irritated that these things haven’t been considered adequate fodder for widespread outrage. Not least because I’d like to see something done about iTunes.

Superbugs

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While the events of the past few days may make the apocalypse seem to be coming via other means, I still feel that climate change and the terrorists won’t knock us off quickly enough for us to avoid death by the scourge of antibiotic resistance.

Here’s a Cape Talk interview with the WHO’s Dr Marc Sprenger on the pisspoor Kieno Kammies show this morning.

But it seems that a lot of people simply don’t understand what antibiotic resistance and superbugs are. Research has shown that there are two main categories of misunderstanding here. Both are bad, but you can completely understand the confusion of the 20% of people who have simply misheard the word and believe that it’s actually a “Superb Hug”. That wouldn’t be bad at all. It would be… well… superb. And a hug. Everyone loves hugs. Especially superb ones.

That’s not going to kill you.

The other 80% of those who don’t get what antibiotic resistance is, think that it’s the patient who becomes resistant to the antibiotic:

The researchers asked them about it and got blank faces in response. When probed—and here’s the bit that really shocked me—almost everyone assumed that it’s the person who becomes resistant to antibiotics, not the microbes. You take enough of something, they reasoned, and your body gets used to it and builds up a tolerance. It’s such an intuitive idea that even after they read simple descriptions that explained how bacteria become resistant, they reverted to the resistant-patient idea.

I hope his probe was properly sterilised between interviews.
The implication of this misconception is:

…a pretty serious one, because some people reasoned that if they don’t finish their courses, they’re less likely to become “resistant.” Ironically, that decision could increase the odds of developing an actual drug-resistant infection by leaving a pool of surviving microbes that have experienced and withstood the antibiotics.

Even the term “Superbugs” was described as misleading. Oh dear. I’ve buggered up the title of my post. Properly.

The issues here seem to be much greater than merely the apparent apathy over the dangers of antibiotic resistance, or, as we’re now suggested to describe it: “drug-resistant infection”.

If you change the noun to infections or germs, and make resistant the adjective, you make a huge difference to people’s ability to work out what’s going on. It’s opened my eyes to how much more research we need to be doing on public-health communication.

The problem is that people don’t even understand the concept of what they supposed to be apathetic about. And if we’re ever going to get them to be apathetic about it (and don’t worry, yes, this is merely the first step of my master plan), then we, as microbiologists and healthcare professionals, need to remedy that.

Even though, soon, we’re not going to be able to remedy anything else.

Mog’s Christmas Calamity

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Just as readers in the UK (and there are several, or more) may not have been aware of Zebra & Giraffe’s new single, which I shared yesterday, so readers in SA (yes, I haz them too) might miss the Sainsbury’s Xmas ad if I don’t share it on here. So, here we go:

Aww. What a wonderful story. And what a lucky cat.

The John Lewis Man on the Moon ad which I shared last week has come in for a lot of criticism via the social media mob (see how zeitgeist I am?), namely because it set out to highlight the plight of elderly people who might be lonely at Christmas time, but it didn’t come for free. In fact, apparently allegedly, it cost £7 million to make: cue angry people telling us that the money would have been better donated to charities helping elderly people to be less lonely this Christmas. And maybe it would, but that’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works. That money belongs to John Lewis, and – maybe you need to take a seat before I reveal this next fact, folks – they can do whatever the fuck they like with it. It’s not their responsibility to make sure that old people aren’t lonely this Christmas. It’s not specifically anyone’s responsibility, (which is basically the root of the whole problem). But people in glass houses etc: What were you doing about it before the mildly creepy Man on the Moon made you realise that some elderly people might be lonely this Christmas? What are you doing about it now?

Hmm. Exactly.

I now await, with some anticipation, those same individuals going after Sainsbury’s, whining that they could have spent their advertising budget on buying smoke alarms for apparently otherwise fairly well-off households in middle England. Or that the Ad Wizard should have saved his travel budget and not rented that casino, instead providing a Slovenian dancing girl and a bottle of budget brandy to everyone in Struisbaai, or some equally random SA village. (Obviously, while I disagree with the reasoning behind this argument, I’d actually love to see the results were it actually to be done) (as opposed to the smoke alarm thing, which would be dull.)

Whatever. I tire of this constant requirement to find fault with anything and everything.

Why can’t we just enjoy these ads for what they are: Mog’s Christmas Calamity for being a wholly implausible but eventually rather endearing story of community spirit at Christmas time, and Man on the Moon for being a rather dodgy looking, apparently undead pensioner spying on a young girl with a hugely powerful optical device?