IamCraig.com Rotating Header Image

The impossibility of “debating” with right-wing zealots … or zealots of any kind

May 21st, 2026
by Craig.
No comments yet

I’m a little depressed today. In the “old days” — I don’t even know when that was, but it was before today, before donald trump came to office — I used to have friends whose political opinions I didn’t know. I might have a general idea that Bob was a bit of a conservative and Jane leaned towards being a liberal (or vice versa) — both starting with lower-case letters you’ll note — but I didn’t know who they voted for. And it didn’t matter; Bob and Jane and I got along, laughed at each other’s jokes, partied, drank and had dinners together, liked each other’s kids, and dealt with the foibles of the day’s government, all of the things that people who like each other do together.

That seems to have changed overnight. Well, I suppose not really overnight if it can be traced back to donald trump’s presidency in 2016 (a decade ago), but it’s one of those things that you can seemingly trace back to a particular event. Maybe it goes back even farther than that to the dawn of the Internet in the late 1960s (or the dawn on the commercial Internet in the late 80’s or 90’s), or maybe to the dawn of Twitter twenty years ago, or maybe the establishment of Speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park in London in the 19th century. Those (except for the latter) were perhaps seminal moments when the vast, unwashed public suddenly gained access to a medium where they could do exactly what I’m doing now, spout(ing) their/my opinion(s).

That’s why the crazy guy you knew when you were a kid — who everybody could avoid because you all knew where his (or her) house was — now has a Twitter account and a few million “followers”, and he and they are considered a legitimate force despite the fact that they’re all just as crazy as that one guy down the street was years ago! And now, any of your friends with just slightly weak minds who are susceptible to crazy ideas because they don’t have the mental capacity think about them critically, feel emboldened enough to come out of the woodwork because, apparently, their crazy idea is shared by many others crazy people as well! I don’t blame them, because if that applied to me I’d feel empowered too, and less ashamed that, despite even our relatively small numbers, people were paying attention to us.

(As I write this, it is a nice day outside and a woman walks past my house wearing socks on her hands and a big hat. This has been happening for a few days now.)

So what does this have to do with The Donald? Why drag him into this mess? Am I not just proving that I blame everything on donald trump, even things that can’t reasonably be connected to him? Isn’t that just a little bit crazy? Maybe everyone should avoid my house too! I suffer from “good old days-ism” just as much as anybody, and I’ve only been around for about six decades, but people older than me (say, ten decades) can probably remember a time just like what I’m referring to, from which we can conclude this has happened before. So even though the dawn of donald trump is the one event of the four possibilities I’ve presented that I associate with what is happening now, I have other reasons.

I have (or had) two long-time friends who, it turns out, are supporters of donald trump. No problem; as I said earlier, I can be friends with people of different political stripes. I already complained about them (I took a break from the news) — without identifying them, of course — and disengaged from discussing politics with them. Discussions with my gay Irish friend ended on 12 November 2024 with his declaration, “Not my biggest positive statement [about how he was happy with the US’s new VP], just a bonus 😋”, and neither of us have so much as enquired about the weather in the other’s part of the world since.

On Friday, 15 November, my MAGA Canadian friend (who now lives in Texas, but grew up in Alberta) was in town and we had breakfast. When we met years ago I had no idea and didn’t need to have any idea she had conservative leanings; I have since learned that about her, but, as is usually the case, it had no bearing on our relationship until recently. Against my better judgement, I brought up politics … probably to point out that trump’s war on Iran that he declared “won” a few days later was still on and choking the world after almost three months. As was to be expected, she disagreed, and quickly pointed out that the price of gas/petrol was apparently as high under Biden as it is now under trump. (Feel free to fact-check that, but I’ve never seen prices as high as they are now in Bellingham, Washington.) Then she brought up how Fauci was a demon who created COVID, how schools are usurping parental authority, and sent me links to “support” those conclusions. However, she’s confused between “testimony” and “evidence”.

In the first case she sent me a link to an hour-and-a-half Youtube video of James Erdman III (apparently a CIA whistleblower) testifying before a Congressional hearing “alleg[ing] [a] COVID-19 coverup”. I replied, “I’m not going to watch over an hour and a half of some guy being grilled by the senate. If you have a link to a neutral website where they summarise his testimony I’ll read that.” Allegations are a dime-a-dozen, but talking about them doesn’t actually turn them into proven facts — which are much harder to come by, for obvious reasons. I explained the difference to her between “testimony” and “evidence”, and said that I was not interested in testimony, just proven evidence, if you’ll excuse my redundancy. She didn’t come up with any, or even an explanation for how the courts running a child’s life are better than a school district. I told her that what she believed in were considered to be conspiracy theories by 99% of the population. She again disagreed, and then took the opportunity to make the extraordinary claim that, “The news in Canada is so biased and censored” … ignoring the fact that I’ve lived on three continents and get my news from multiple sources in multiple countries, all of which I have sought out on the basis that they perform good journalism, which means they report facts regardless of whether their audience agrees with them or not.

Her claim that Canadian news is censored is bullshit, and comes from the fact that all she watches is Fox News, all day every day, who (when or if they even mention Canada) tell her to believe Canada censors the news. And she grew up here!

I know it’s only a sample of exactly two, but at this point I’m convinced that anybody who disagrees with my point of view, which is two MAGA supporters, are sensitive flowers who cannot and do not know how to support their points of view with fact-based arguments. While I agree with some of their conservative points of view, I definitely disagree with most of them, especially that donald trump isn’t a bad president and a is danger to world peace.

Convince me I’m wrong, but back up your allegations with evidence, not just your testimony/assertion. Comments are below.

Right-wing conspiracy.

Right-wing conspiracy

Right-wing conspiracy.

Right-wing conspiracy

Right-wing conspiracy.

Right-wing conspiracy

Right-wing conspiracy

Right-wing conspiracy.

Right-wing conspiracy

Right-wing conspiracy.

Right-wing conspiracy.

Right-wing conspiracy

Right-wing conspiracy.

Right-wing conspiracy

Right-wing conspiracy.

Right-wing conspiracy

Right-wing conspiracy.

Right-wing conspiracy

Right-wing conspiracy.

Right-wing conspiracy

Right-wing conspiracy.

Right-wing conspiracy

Posted in: Opinion.
Tagged: · · · · · · · · · ·

It’s just hilarious …

May 20th, 2026
by Craig.
No comments yet

… that JD Vance can stand up in front of the world and claim, “We’re not in a forever war,” three months into American’s supposed three-day war on Iran! This is why MAGA Americans continue to believe that the war is over, because all they watch is Fox News, which dutifully parrots any utterance by the trump regime and Dear Leader trump! As long as the regime in Iran is in power and the Strait of Hormuz, an “international waterway”, is blocked, controlled or managed by Iran, the war is still on and trump is losing!

So sad, too bad, you should have thought it through.

Posted in: Opinion.
Tagged: · · · · · ·

The Brits need to make up their minds

May 13th, 2026
by Craig.
No comments yet

It’s almost as if the Brits have adopted the American electoral system.

They haven’t officially, of course, but I’ve never seen the consternation that has overtaken the country now, in 2026, after their local elections. Not living in the UK I have to admit that I am not intimately familiar with their overall system; for example, in Canada our party system doesn’t carry across levels of government. Here in BC, our provincial “Liberal” party (since renamed “BC United” and not even having a website any more) is right wing, and not even associated with the federal Liberal Party of Canada. And on the municipal level, parties are formed — as near as I can tell — based on local issues, and they come and go at the drop of a hat. One might know that Joe Blow is a “liberal” or a “conservative” based on his (or her) political positions or who supports them, or even their having previously represented a particular party at some time in the past, but on the municipal level they don’t run under one national banner or another. On the other hand, in the UK they do.

So I can see that if one party or another loses a lot of seats, that (of course) reflects badly on the party itself, at all levels. Which makes me wonder why parties at the national level associate themselves with municipal parties of dog catchers, etc., which make me wonder about the wisdom of such a system. I don’t pretend to be a political scientist, and I don’t even play one on TV, but there must be a historical reason for such a system that I missed while I was passed out in class. (The topic didn’t interest me when I was a kid.)

Anyway, I see little of Starmer except when he’s being a decent international leader on the TV news (that’s infinitely more than I can say about trump!), so it’s a little surprising for me. It’s particularly surprising since the Conservative Party just went through six (!) leaders since 2016, and the Labour Party should have used that as an example of how not to run a party. However, the Brits seem determined to play musical leaders, no matter which party we’re talking about.

Should I then support Reform UK (kinda the successor to UKIP), who have apparently been major beneficiaries of the largesse of the UK public? Not really. Nigel Farage has been a leader in search of a party, which is no different than a party in search of a leader. And really, the voting public can’t complain if they are so fickle that they toss out party leaders as quickly as the calendar turns. If they don’t have the patience to let a prime minister serve out his four- or five-year term, they don’t deserve to have a prime minster for his/her full term. If Farage ever makes it into the prime minister’s post, one wonders if the British public will let him last. That said, even without being prime minister, he’s fucked Britain by bringing about Brexit!

A relative in Scotland claims that Starmer “is not popular as [he is] very woke”. But if he is “very woke”, are not Labour supporters also “very woke”? And would they not continue to support a “very woke” prime minister? This is the whole problem with that very word; what, exactly, is “woke”? I’ll save that question for another day, but I will say that there is a happy medium on the “woke” scale, it’s just that users of the word seem to assume that there isn’t; you’re “woke”, or your thought process is pure.

Posted in: Opinion.
Tagged: · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

We’ve all be bombed back to the Stone Ages by trump

May 10th, 2026
by Craig.
No comments yet

I had given up on giving donald trump free air time. You just can’t keep up with all of his outrages. One minute he’s killing American citizens who disagree with him, exercising their Second Amendment right to “keep and bear Arms”, and the next minute he’s telling the Iranians that they had better behave, according to his un-stated rules, and not execute their citizens. (Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!) Of course we all know now what his implied threat was, as his gunboats steamed towards the Iranian coast. But he was all 100% bluster, because he already knew that he was going to take action against Iran, but he only had enough balls to bomb them; the lily-livered American government doesn’t have the cajones to put boots on the ground, and really put their money where their mouths are.

And so today the Iranian citizens — the blameless men, women and children in the street — are all worse off, getting “bombed back to the Stone Ages”, while trump boasts that he has effected “regime change” because he (and the Israelis) has killed some of their leaders, while the regime — “the organisation that is the governing authority of a political unit” — is still well in place keeping the populace down.

First of all, let me state that, of all the people I don’t want in possession of nuclear weapons, it’s an autocratic, theocratic (of any religion!) regime, so good on you donald trump for finally doing something about it. But for the last 47 years, people have been doing something about it! Just because you have a different idea of what should be done, doesn’t mean your idea is better. As could have been expected and probably was expected by people who have been closer to and more involved in this situation than you have been over the last half century, America is back in a completely foreseeable position, and the Iranians don’t really care. They spent a decade at war with Iraq and know what it means to have their entire society neck-deep in war. Been there, done that. You, on the other hand, haven’t been neck-deep in war for 80 years (you were born after World War II), and even then you (America) showed up late after the Europeans had been doing all the heavy lifting for a few years. That’s why some of us can’t believe you’re complaining about Europe not wanting anything to do with your war/tantrum after only a couple of months, when you didn’t even have the courtesy to consult them or your Middle-East allies.

But trump can’t think past five minutes from now. He goes on about the fact that he’s “the first American president” to put his money (although he doesn’t have any) where his mouth is and actually do something, by pulling out his guns and sending the boys and girls (barely adults) of the American military as cannon fodder to their deaths. Except, that’s not quite true because, as I said, the lily livers in the American government (foremost among them tough-talking Pete Hegseth) didn’t send anyone into the fray of battle, as they eventually did in World Wars I and II; they just sent a few airmen in their air-conditioned cockpits to press a few switches to drop a few bombs. Granted, he’s been successful so far, with “only” 15 American combatants killed, and 538 wounded. Congratulations! There’s “only” 15 lives been lost; I’m sure those families don’t mind you killing their loved ones, not to mention the thousands you’ve killed in Iran, Lebanon and elsewhere.

This little “excursion” — which sounds a lot like putin’s “special military operation” — has been going on since February, over two months now. I go back again to my statement that trump can’t think five minutes into the future (he has the attention span of a gnat); the consideration that he can’t think five minutes ahead, never mind two months, might be why no American president has ever decided to use military force on Iran! Imagine that! Here we are, two months in, and we’re two months into one of America’s notorious quagmires (after he swore off foreign wars), and donald trump has, effectively, bombed all of us back from the Space Age to the Stone Age. Although I’ve been thinking about this post since at least January — to use myself as an example of being affected by trump’s short-sightedness, despite the fact that I am nowhere near Iran and not (thankfully) an American citizen — I was just forced to cancel a short trip to Ireland for a school reunion. I’m pretty bummed about it, because they only happen once a decade, but I don’t want to be stuck in Ireland for an indefinite period of time, which has a chance of happening if you take as long to resolve the Iran war as your country took to skedaddle from Afghanistan. (That’d be two decades, for those of you who had forgotten.)

There’s so much to cover here, but I’ll try and summarise to some extent, in sort of chronological order:

  1. NATO: It’s so obvious to all of us that attended history classes, that you were out back smoking with the boys while you were supposed to be in class with us. NATO is a ***DEFENSIVE*** alliance; they are not there to do your bidding whenever you feel like attacking someone you don’t like! There is no obligation on the part of any NATO member to join in on one of your unilateral American operations (which the Iranians have called “adventurism”), especially when you haven’t even had the courtesy to talk to them about it in advance! They didn’t “fail” your dumbass test! They didn’t even know about your test any more than someone watching the news already did! Claiming after the fact that it was a test that they failed miserably is the most asinine and juvenile statement ever made by a so-called “world leader”.
  2. Also for those of us who have at least perused a few of the pages (and even pictures) is history books can see the startling similarity between the Communist “Red Scare” (led by the American Joseph McCarthy) and today’s Islamophobia (led by donald trump), the “least racist person in the world”. There is not an Islamist behind every tree or under every bed.
  3. Enough with the “card” analogies. Yes, you can hold as many Uno cards as you want; nobody wants to play with you.
  4. We’re not impressed with how many agreements you tore up to get yourself into a worse situation than you were in before you started bombing Iran. I mean, really, that statement tells us more than anything. A couple of months ago the Strait of Hormuz was open, and now it is closed, and you have no workable plan to reverse that situation … because, as I said before, you can’t think five minutes ahead.

The only good I can see coming from this situation is that all the poor people in America, that you allegedly love so much, are not going to be happy with $6-a-gallon gas when it comes time to vote in your midterm elections.

Posted in: Opinion.
Tagged: · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

We have a majority government in Canada

Apr 14th, 2026
by Craig.
Comments are off for this post

As you know if you’ve read me for a while, I’m a big fan of minority governments (i.e., hung parliaments). In the so-called democracy in which we live, it’s about the only check on a government’s power that we have in between elections. I know it hasn’t worked well for all countries at all times — I am reminded of the Italians in the 1970s and what a joke they appeared to be to us uneducated youngsters at the time — but they are not universally and undeniably bad at all times.

Here in North America — currently about 4.5% of the World’s population — we’re subject to the hegemony of two national parties, the Liberals and Conservatives in Canada, and the Democrats and the Republicans in the US. Yes, here in Canada we’re “treated” to a third “major” party (the NDP [New Democratic Party]) that lost official party status in the 2025 general federal election because they couldn’t elect enough MPs to maintain what they had. But in the US, that bastion of democracy, “third” parties are a joke and never amount to anything; at least here in Canada, the “third party” (the NDP) has actually had enough support to have become the “second party”, the Official Opposition. There is now even a fourth party, the Bloc Québécois, who run candidates in only one province, and I feel should be barred from election for that very reason.

However, I wasn’t happy about the Liberals getting a minority government last year (2025), because we needed to fight back against trump, and I felt that the only federal Canadian politician with enough gravitas and experience (and balls) to do that well, was the (then) new leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, Mark Carney. As a former Conservative voter, it pains me to say that Pierre Poilievre is an absolute joke and shouldn’t even be allowed within 100 metres of the prime minister’s office. Even moreso, now that four of his MPs have crossed the floor to the Liberal Party!

But now that we’ve just had three by-elections — which were all swept by the Liberal party, now that Canadians have had a good chance to test-drive Mark Carney as our Prime Minister and seen what a joke and embarassment Pierre Poilievre has been — the Liberal Party of Canada now has a majority government. Thank god! I don’t feel that governing parties — probably especially the Liberals — should feel they have the right to run roughshod over the Opposition, but in this case, today, dealing with the piece of shit trump, the Government of Canada needs the freedom of a majority government to have the ability to get the damn work done to put trump and the Americans in their place.

So congratulations to Mark Carney and the Liberal Party of Canada! MCGA!

Posted in: Opinion.
Tagged: · · · · · · · ·

Teksavvy, update 3

Feb 22nd, 2026
by Craig.
Comments are off for this post

I haven’t updated this topic because I’ve been busy, wonder of all wonders, but also because my ire is now focussed on my television, made by Samsung. It’s amazes me how far back in time we’ve progressed as time has worn on. But I’m saving up my annoyance to write a specific post about that. For example, we’ve progressed so far now that you can no longer turn the TV off, and turn it back on again a few seconds or a minute or a day later, and have the TV come on displaying the exact same channel that was playing when you turned it off. No, you have to fuck around pressing all of the seven fucking buttons on the remote control to navigate back to where you were, along with all the spinning circles that display while you’re waiting. Along with boycotting all Samsung telephones, I will now never again buy any sort of Samsung electronic device.

Progress!

Speaking of the seven buttons, you might notice that that the number is less than ten, which is the minimum number of buttons for a remote that has ten digits … you know, 0 through 9. So no, even though I know that the channel I usually want to watch is 206, I have no way of typing in “206” and thereby going straight to my preferred channel. Mind-numbingly stupid.

But let’s ignore that for a moment, as I have been doing for about two months now.

Now my problem is with Tek Savvy. They’re down. (This was written offline earlier.) Below is a screenshot of their Network Status page. (Taken when I was connected through my phone.) You will notice the following:

  • The outage map shows no outages. I’ve zoomed in on the Vancouver area (where I am, obviously), but there are also no outages in the slightly larger Toronto area either, which is the default display for the map. In the past, on any given day, there have been multiple outages in the Toronto area, most of them minor or being notices of network maintenance. And the page didn’t ask for my permission to geolocate my browser.
  • Note that the “live chat” is not live, it’s dead.
  • Note the “hours of operation” for “technical support”: 24/7. Umm, it’s quarter past now where I am, and according to my very careful calculations, that’s within operating hours. So obviously the claim that technical support is available 24/7 is 100% bullshit.
Tek Savvy, Network Status page, 2026-02-21

Tek Savvy, Network Status page, 2026-02-21.

It’s not as if this is the first time that they’ve been down. I haven’t kept track of how often they’ve been down, and to be honest it isn’t often, but it’s been more than Shaw/Rogers were down at my last place, and their being down affects everything in the household, most obviously the Internet and TV.

So I’m still pissed off at switching to Tek Savvy, although I’m 100% glad I switched from Rogers. I’ll probably update this topic at least one more time, probably to bring it to a conclusion, although that won’t include my planned review of my crappy Samsung TV.

Posted in: IT, Opinion, Review.
Tagged: · · · ·

Thank god Pierre Poilievre is not our prime minister!

Jan 21st, 2026
by Craig.
Comments are off for this post

After watching Mark Carney’s speech yesterday in Davos, I am so thankful that PP is not our prime minister! There is no way he has the intellectual capacity to play on the world’s big stage with the big boys he’d have to deal with. Not a hope in hell! He’d just embarrass us and himself, and we’d be the 51st state by the weekend, or a weekend sometime last year.

Posted in: Opinion.
Tagged: · · · ·

Kudos to Ikea

Jan 11th, 2026
by Craig.
Comments are off for this post

I don’t usually have much nice to say about big companies, but a guy at Ikea Richmond went out of his way to help this dumbass last night, so I’m giving him (and indirectly Ikea) a shout-out today.

Unfortunately I’ve already deleted the message I sent to Ikea through their feedback form, so I’m going to have to wing it.

I did three normal, straightforward returns, because I’d bought four items with the same function, and I ended up returning three of them unopened. I bought (and returned) the Brogrund shower caddy (didn’t want to mess with drilling into tile), and the Krokfjorden and Blecksjon hanging shower caddies (because they get in the way of my shower head). I kept the cheapest of the lot, the $9.99 Tisken shower caddy; I’m dubious about the suckers they use to stick it on the wall, but millions can’t be wrong, right? (Wait, did you see who won the last US election?!) I haven’t installed it yet, but if the suckers don’t work properly, you can expect another blog post!

Enhet, Ikea laundry hamper.

Enhet, Ikea laundry hamper

Anyway, I also brought in a half-assembled Enhet laundry hamper. I had managed to misinterpret the instructions, and I tried to put a leg into the wrong hole, and it wouldn’t come out. I sheepishly handed it over to Roman — oh, did I mention the guy’s name is Roman? — and asked him if he had a magic “undo machine” in the back. I said I wasn’t hopeful, but he took it to a colleague in the back who apparently did have a magic undo machine, and he returned a few minutes later with the successfully removed leg! My technique, which was to try and use a pair of pliers to hold onto the leg while I tried to pull it out, wasn’t sufficient. So that saved me the $79 of buying a new one.

Since I was expecting to have to return it, I’d brought all the pieces, so I said I would assemble it there in case I ran into more problems. Believe it or not, I did! While looking for a washer, I lost it. I don’t mean I lost my shit, as one does when one is assembling Ikea furniture, but it bounced into a black hole. So I, again sheepishly, went back to Roman and asked him if he had a washer. Away he goes into Never Never Land in “the back”, and again, a few minutes later, he comes out with two washers. I offered to pay for them, but he refused payment. (I know that Ikea doesn’t charge for miscellaneous spare parts, but I only saw that policy on their website later.) So I managed to finish assembling the Enhet, returned one of the washers, and got Roman’s name.

I wrote to Ikea that Roman was an asset to their company, among other good things. At the end of the day I knew he was just doing his job, but so many people can’t even do that much, and he did it well and without making me feel like I was the dumbass that I was.

Updated, 2026-01-11: Added image of the Enhet laundry hamper, from the Ikea website.

Posted in: Opinion, Updated posts.
Tagged: ·

Canada and metric

Jan 5th, 2026
by Craig.
Comments are off for this post

I see that now, in 2026, about half a century after Canada officially (but halfheartedly) went metric, the CEOs of big companies are whining about how America is being mean to them, and they now (did I mention that it’s 2026?!) want “free cash from the Canadian government” to do something they were supposed to do half a century ago because their biggest customer is (and was) the troglodytes in the US! If that isn’t a textbook case of corporate welfare, I don’t know what is.

And it’s not just lumber companies; I just had an experience trying to order a piece of glass with measurements in millimetres, and the guy taking my order had to stop me to get out his calculator to convert my millimetres to inches! And he didn’t sound like he was over about 23! (And then they cut the wrong size anyway!)

(If you want to know how serious screwing up a metric/imperial conversion can get, read about the “Gimli Glider“!)

Next time somebody complains about tax rates in Canada, someone should point out to the complainer that they’re high because of corporate welfare cheats.

Posted in: Opinion.
Tagged: · · · ·

Teksavvy, update 2

Dec 24th, 2025
by Craig.
Comments are off for this post

I was busy yesterday (Tuesday), so I’m late.

I woke up in the morning (again, Tuesday) to find the downstream light on my modem still flashing, which meant my Internet access was still not working. I rebooted the machine, no change.

Then I left because I had stuff to do.

I came back after 13:00, no change in the modem status. I again rebooted it, just to see if that would help. No go.

So, using my lightning fast (that’s a joke) Troublesome Mobile connection, I entered chat with a Tek-non-Savvy person. I have to admit the wait is not too long, but it ironically starts with, “We hate that you are having service issues”, and provides a link to basic troubleshooting. Nice, if it helps, which it doesn’t, because my problem isn’t basic.

The customer service person says my service has been activated, so I need to try another cable outlet. I ask her, “What if it works, but it’s not in the room where our TV will be?” I had attached it to the cable outlet (they’re using Rogers, sadly) in the living room near where the previous owners had a TV mounted on the wall. When I attached it to another outlet and I rebooted the modem, it eventually connected. Great! So I do finally have Internet access!

Oh, but wait.

Me: “OK, now it is [online]. But a wifi connection to the TV is not as good as an RJ-45 connection. Why do we not have connectivity on the one outlet where we want it?”

Her: “We have no control over which outlet the vendor activates for the modem, unfortunately.” (I’m starting to see a scam here.)

Her: “I can make some changes in the modem to improve the wifi. What would you like your network name and password to be?” Huh?

After being disconnected and reconnecting: “Why can we not get service at the cable outlet by our future TV?”

Her: “We have no control over which cable outlet the vendor activates for the modem. If you want to relocate the active jack, there is a fee to dispatch a technician. I can make a change in the modem that will help improve your wifi. What would you like your wifi network name and password to be?”

Me: “That hilarious. So you cripple a new modem? I will consult with the person bringing us our new TV on the 28th, but this might be a very short subscription. Would you rather charge us the fee, or have our subscription?”

Her: “It’s not crippling the modem. Band steering is enabled in the modem by default. Disabling it separates the two wifi networks so you can better manage your devices.”

(I looked up “band steering” on Wikipedia: “Some enterprise-grade APs [access points, I believe] use band steering to send 802.11n clients to the 5 GHz band, leaving the 2.4 GHz band for legacy clients. Band steering works by responding only to 5 GHz association requests and not the 2.4 GHz requests from dual-band clients.” Duck.ai says, “The main difference between 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz WiFi is that 5 GHz offers faster speeds but has a shorter range, while 2.4 GHz provides a longer range but slower speeds. Additionally, 2.4 GHz is more prone to interference from other devices, making 5 GHz a better choice for high-bandwidth activities in less crowded environments.” So despite the conventional wisdom that a “hard” connection (network cable) is better than a “soft” connection like wifi, she’s suggesting that I put my modem in another room (rather then right next to the TV) and connect to the modem over wifi. I don’t think so. The building is wood, but there is obviously a wall between the room with the modem and the room with the TV. By connecting the TV to the modem over wifi we’re jeopardising the quality of what the TV plays back. I have almost no experience in this area (TVs), so I have no idea what the degradation will look like; will it look like snow on a 1950’s TV, or what?)

More importantly, the “scam” I’m seeing here is that when we’ve set up Shaw (and then Rogers) cable TV and Internet in new abodes in the past, all cable outlets have been activated; we had a “main” TV in the lounge and a small TV in the bedroom. So if only one of the three outlets we have now was activated, why? Why this one instead of the one by the TV? Why this one instead of the one in the bedroom? And why hold us hostage if their random pick of outlet was wrong and we want to activate a different outlet? Why do they have to send a well-paid technician out? They can do most (if not all) things remotely, so their “claim” that they need to send someone in person sounds bogus to me, especially as what’s probably really happening is that a switch is being flipped back in the central office and the person they send just has to look busy on our premises for a few minutes.

This sounds like it’s worth bringing to the attention of the CRTC, quite frankly. This is either a scam on the part of the established players, or a reseller (TekSavvy) is rolling over. Either way, I don’t think this is playing within the spirit of the rules.

I’ll finish the conversation with Tek-non-Savvy:

Her: “The vendor charges us a fee to dispatch their techs, we have to pass this fee onto the customer.”

Me: “But why are you only activating *one* *random* outlet?”

Her: “That’s the way the vendor does it. Rogers. They own the lines”.

Her: “They complete the activation”.

Me: “I understand how the system works, but when we used to be with Rogers they activated all outlets in the suite.”

Me: “That’s how we believe it was with the previous owners.”

Her: “We have no control over this, unfortunately”.

Me: “Wow, not impressed. I will have to reconsider this whole palaver.”

Me: “I guess that’s it then.”

Her: “Have a good evening”.

Yup, TekSavvy: “We’re different. In a good way.” Depends; do you consider it good to subject your new customers to more fees rather than just providing the service and taking your fee every month? It certainly seems that this technician doesn’t give a shit and wants their mark-up on the Rogers technician’s time rather than my monthly revenue. That’s the most egregious short-term thinking I’ve ever come across.

I will have to consider my options when the Geek Squad guys show up with the new TV. But as I said above, it looks like this whole TekSavvy palaver has been a waste of time and money, so it’s fake competition.

Posted in: IT, Opinion, Review.
Tagged: · · · · · · · · · ·

← Earlier Posts