March 23 2006

NEWS ITEM 100%

For those of you following us on a pre-launch basis, and those who read the Dominion Post here in New Zealand, you will have expected us to launch our site this week. And so did we. However last Monday when we went to the site, it wasn't there. As this was the day the story appeared in the paper this could not be seen as a good thing. So we contacted the American company who host it.

They have an on-line chat facility, which allows you to talk to sales staff or technical staff. We chose technical, for obvious reasons and asked where our site was. By the way, knowing what I now know, please never choose sales. Anyway upped popped a guy called Jim and he said hello. Then he said, what is your problem. We had just typed this in as our introductory question but we nevertheless typed in it again. We gave him the web address and after a couple of minutes he came back and said try it now. We did and it worked. I asked him what was wrong. Twenty-two minutes later I had no answer to this but I had another question for dear old Jim

My question was, "where is my real website", because the one I had now accessed had none of the many alterations we had made in the last month. All the final changes, the latest sponsors, the latest schools, were missing. Jim was a bit vague on this and suggested I re-upload all these files. Now fortunately, a few days before I had made copies of all the new pages so I duly copied them on to our site.

Imagine my surprise when I checked the site again and these were also the old pages. Back to technical on0line help and Jim was ready to "help" again. Only when I told him all of this he vanished. I tried again, still I got no answer.

Meanwhile my little brain began to think things through. Back in early February, funnily enough about a month ago, our hosting company lost the site again. This was apparently due to server problems and they gave us a new address to access our site. This we started using. All the changes we made were held here and we, and others, saw them when we typed in www.theoneworld.org.

But, last week sometime they replaces this new site with the one they had lost on the old server, probably it was a back-up operation and they wrongly overwrote our new site with the old one. During last week on different days at different times we contacted the on-line technical help line again. It was always Jim there and whenever he discovered it was us, he stopped talking.

It was no good giving a different name because we always had to give him the site address. But I had a wicked plan. I logged on to sales and asked the question. Guess who answered it. Yes, it was Jim. No apparently Jim is just a nickname everyone used to make it feel more personal. Once you know this it sure feels about as impersonal and deceitful as you can get.

So, we decided to have our site hosted on a New Zealand server instead. And now we can really say that we are 100% Pure New Zealand as opposed to 100% pure Jim. We will be putting the company on our sponsors' page very soon because they agreed to host it for nothing and we talked on the phone and they are not all called Jim either. So thanks to i-grin, who are actually based in Northland.

Oh, and for those who don't know me, I like to promote good companies and bad. Unfortunately I promote the good in the good ones and the bad in the others. Next week we will let you know which New Zealand companies didn't bother to reply when we asked them for help so watch this space, but, in the meantime, let's start with our American friends.

Big country, big is best, big is right and big would appear not to care too much about little. Say your helping and when it all goes wrong through your mistakes, forget it. Last week when I was desperate for help and no-one answered, I felt I was invading their personal space with a stupid reason for doing so and we all know how wrong invasions for stupid reasons can be, don't we Jim or (George or Dick or whatever you are all called)

So ACCUBURST and all the Jim's or Dick's who work there, thank you for your incompetence, your arrogance, your failure to admit to a mistake and your inability to help when we needed it. By the way you can check this out by popping to their site, click on support and go to the on-line chat, Bet you speak to Jim. And if you wish to sue me for any promotion I may have given, my name is Jim.