How many years will those lies and SPAM carry on for? There’s no “opt out”.

EVERAL years ago I wrote about the spamming I had been receiving about spy meters. I must have been nagged about it about 100 times already. It’s very time consuming at this rate and frequency. They even phone us sometimes to nag us about it.

By their own admission, more than a third of their clients do not want spy meters. So we’re not some tiny minority or a ‘fringe’.

Anyway, in recent days they kept spamming me some more and even a day after they told me it would stop they carried on as usual. See below.

E.ON Next wrote on 19/02/2024 15:20:
> Hi Roy Schestowitz,????
>
> Thank you for your email.
>
> I am Shameemah Your Energy Specialist that will be assisting you today.
>
> We have reviewed your account and due to what you have mentioned we have updated your email address on the account to the one you have provided us with [...].
>
> We have done a few health checks on the account and we can see that we do require up to date meter readings this is to avoid your readings being estimated and we need regular readings to bill your account accurately to that you won’t be under or over charged as this could lead to future debt onto your account and we do not want that.
>
> To avoid this I know the days can get busy and can forget we do see that you are eligible to have a free smart meter installed its not complicated basically like the normal meter, however with a smart meter we will be getting readings automatically without you have to send manual readings regularly, your account will be billed regularly and accurately, you will also receive a free in home display a monitor which you will be able to monitor your usage.
>
> Before I can book your appointment there are just a few questions I need you to answer so I can ensure the appointment is correct and the engineer has all the information they’re going to need on the day.

I already told you, REPEATEDLY, to stop spamming me about this.

You agreed but didn’t keep the promise.

You’re still doing this.

Please STOP.

Ross from E.ON Next wrote on 19/02/2024 18:42:
> Hello Roy.
>
> I will remove correspondence about this from your account.

Nonsense. The SPAM continues just less than 24 hours later.
I will relay to you the SPAM.

At this stage I might just terminate the contract with you and report the SPAM, or unsolicited mail.

Notice the date on this email

——– Forwarded Message ——–
Subject: smart meters
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2024 11:30:47 +0000
From: Shameemah from E.ON Next <shameemah.bowers@eon-next-cabac46b5ea2.intercom-mail.com>

Hi Roy Schestowitz,????

Thank you for your email.

I am Shameemah Your Energy Specialist that will be assisting you today.

We have reviewed your account and due to what you have mentioned we have updated your email address on the account to the one you have provided us with ….

[then pushing for spy meters again]

n yet another SPAM from E.ON Next (they keep spamming with mail, as in snail mail, plus phonecalls) they say a “whopping 64% of our customers have already upgraded [sic] to a smart meter”.

Really? A “whopping” less than 2 thirds? That’s far less than they had us believe.

‘Smart Meter’ are failing to be adopted after a decade of FUD and scare tactics.

Schismogenesis in Bill Gated-funded sites (those machines run Windows with back doors):

NEED to clarify upfront I do not believe the 2020 election in the United States was “stolen” and I do not support Donald Trump. He disgusts me.

The United States is still “using fraudulent voting machines” with back doors, a friend has reminded me. But the media giants aren’t talking about and “associating opposition to fraudulent voting technologies/products with crazies. Other crazies will defend fraudulent voting technologies/products for no other reason than those two crazies are opposed to them…”

Techrights did at least 2 “statements” on this issue [1, 2] just to clarify voting machines are no good regardless of news sites’ rhetoric.

Quit using opaque electronic voting machines and then lessen the likilohood of armed fanatics storming government buildings in an act of overt insurrection.

wrote about the misuse of technology to worsen customer service just less than a day ago and thought I’d expand in my personal blog, based on a personal story.

Just over a day ago I went to the local bank and then visited 2 more banks. I could not help but notice that the people facing public at the bank are young and inexperienced, maybe by intention. This makes them not only cheap to employ but also rather useless as advisors or whatever else you might need. It’s like talking to an intern, not even a clerk, or a person herding people into “apps”/self-checkout (the latter is a good analogy for what bank “apps” actually are).

I spoke to a friend about it and he told me it is the same at the one remaining bank office where he lives. He said “they probably get minimum wage, if that…”

Maybe part-time temporary hanging by a thread, obeying every request from just about anyone else in the branch.

Just for the record, Nationwide had a young and borderline rude ‘clerk’, who wasn’t even a clerk and was totally not helpful, probably even lying to prevent me talking to the supervisor (lying is bad, no matter what). At NatWest, however, they had like a 50-year old, who not only escorted me for advice at the cushy office but also phoned the number for me and let me have the room for myself (to talk to “Richard” over the telephone). I thanked her at the end. That was good service. In the past I ranted a lot about NatWest, but on that occasion the service was better. Having said that, they too try to send people to “apps” and “Web sites”…

I am neither young or old, so I can probably not be accused of ageism when I say older workers tend to be nicer, at least at banks; or as a friend put it, “probably the youngest are not just rude but full of rage and lash out or more commonly just plain mean…”

I said that when you are 20-25 and have no prospect of long-term career in the discipline, the desire to learn in depth the job – and its context – may diminish because there is something to be said about giving assurances to professionals and consistent specialities.

But this leads me to the main subject/purpose of this post, which is to rant about banks expecting people to carry around a mobile “phone” and then install (and in turn learn) proprietary “apps” instead of doing things over the counter. According to media in Zimbabwe, as per a report from the other day, banks there got rid of about 75% of their workers. Not only is this bad for employment; it also means that many services previously done by skilled people are no longer offered. The banks go through a process of “enshittification” for the purpose of “cost-savings” and we all – collectively – pay the price. Resist and don’t let them get away with it. Demand that they have staff you can speak to, not some “app” you can download if you carry around a spying device (you ought not).

don’t typically check Web statistics (I stopped checking for this site over a decade ago because it was a waste of time that did not help meaningfully improve anything, except ego or vanity), but this past week in Techrights 4 million requests (hits) were served over HTTP/S and since the start of this month almost 400,000 requests were served over Gemini. IPFS does about 40 GB of traffic per day, circulating Techrights content in a peer-to-peer fashion.

This coming December it will be one year since I resigned from my job (after nearly 12 years). The decision to leave likely came later than it ought to have come; I thought about it since 2018, but it finally happened last October when they were trying to force everyone to adopt a work mobile phone.

Techrights has grown not only on the Web. It is growing outside the Web and this is very important because this means the site’s relevance isn’t tried to the relevance of the Web itself.

Video download link | md5sum 31260807834863dcb60ccf64d9155b42
Sirius Failure to Pay Providers
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: The Sirius ‘Open Source’ CEO and other ‘management’ staff are to blame for major outages/downtimes clients were experiencing; while they were busy eating or pretending to be busy it was the technical staff taking 24/7 support calls and fighting to restore services (after management failed to pay bills, even repeatedly, in spite of repeated reminders)

THE video above covers a clear (slam-dunk) case of gross incompetence/negligence by managers at Sirius. We’ll be showing more examples later this month. From the clients’ perspective, such gross incompetence by Sirius management may merit a refund (failing to meet SLAs for sure) and would typically constitute gross misconduct — albeit only in a company that actually holds managers too accountable (they won’t hold themselves accountable and step down/resign upon failure; instead they say absurd things). Mr. “Art of the Deal” is no good role model unless we ran a truly scammy operation.

OME days ago I ranted about totally useless ‘apps’ and ‘Web sites’ that are falsely marketed as making things easier even though in practice they mostly offload/outsource all/most of the actual work to the clients. Their real purpose is to lessen expenses for private companies that formerly had actual staff, offering actual service (of course those useless ‘apps’ and ‘Web sites’ also lead to a severe unemployment problems).

Today people are ‘meant’ to study how to do all their banking (different interface for each bank), how to process and package their groceries (different machines and different programs in each chain of stores). The list goes on and on. Apparently many people are self-taught ‘masters’ of how to manage water bills and power bills ‘online’ or with ‘apps’. This means no trail of paper either. Is that a plus?

I don’t mean to blow a bubble here. I’m far from the first person to complain (or even rant about this repeatedly). The world is becoming a more difficult place. Technology was meant to simplify life, to make life easier through automation. So how did we end up having to ‘learn’ (self-train) a lot more? This is not progress.

Case of point: I want to move my pension away from some awful provider. I have no online account and don’t wish to create one. I paid into this particular pension for 5 years. In the ‘old’ days (say, 1990s) I’d probably phone some number and it would get done by a specialist. Today, it’s almost impossible to even find a contact form on a site; they suggest creating a Web site “account” (as a person with a pension there I already have an account!) or downloading some “app”. Sorry, not everyone complicates or worsens one’s life with so-called ‘smart’ ‘phones’. Some of us have better ways of getting things done. After several days of them not responding to a complaint of mine I once again told them (in a faceless, voiceless Webform): “Please e-mail me or phone me to arrange this.”

Time will tell if they even bother. If bad service persists, maybe I’ll name the company. It’s pushing my patience (a week already).