Blog — November, 2006

Uh-huh. So, arrived home today to find an (automated) phone message, left at 5:55 pm, from Bell Canada, threatening me with dire consequences if I did not call their (billing) number before 8 pm tonight.

You'd think that with downtown Toronto scheduled to be blanketed by free, high-speed wireless Internet access by ... well, two months ago, they might have some interest in retaining their existing subscribers, eh?

Anyway, I've heard good things about 295.ca, should the dial-up urge ever strike me again.

This is why/how I terminated my high-speed Internet account with Primus.ca back in June:

Hello,

I would like to cancel my Primus high-speed Internet account (Account Number: XXXXXXXXX), and return the speedtouch modem to you.

I am taking this course of action for the following reasons, particularly #6 below:

1. When I was initially setting up Primus high-speed Internet access, because the connection was on a machine running XP the setup instructions simply told me to call Customer Service, to have them walk me through a series of steps which I could easily have executed on my own had the instructions simply been written down. Companies which operate according to sensible policies set down by competent management would prefer to minimize, rather than necessitate, having customers call in for such tech support.

2. When I was later attempting to create a Primus DSL connection on a drive running Windows 2003 Server, I was informed by your CSR that you do not support that O/S for your consumer connectivity packages. No doubt that is in the fine print somewhere, eh?

3. The high-speed access was noticeably unreliable for the first year I had it. For the past six months, its reliability has been much better; except that it was absolutely dead from 11 am until after midnight on a recent Sunday. (I was able to dial up during the same period, so the problem was not with my phone line.)

4. I had VOIP with Primus for close to half a year in late 2005. The Internet access through that was unreliable to the point of being unusable. I finally just unplugged the VOIP; I had no choice.

5. When I had canceled the VOIP and arranged to return its gateway, it took nearly one month for the prepaid courier package to arrive for me to send that modem back to you. I finally phoned your Customer Service, only to be told that it took that long for the request to be processed by your system. Unbelievable. Suppose I had been vacating the address to which it was being sent? What then?

6. After having a recent pre-authorized payment for the high-speed account fail to go through on my credit card, when returning your CSR phone message about that I was informed that rather than scheduling (at that time) a re-try of that debit for several days in the future, when the credit card would be able to accept that charge, I should instead call back at that later time. If the CRM software you are using really cannot post-date such "manual" charges, instead being able to send them out only on the day on which they are entered by the CSR, that is truly amazing. I was also informed by your CSR that if the payment bounced again on this second try, there might be an additional charge to my account for that, according to the T&C's. In response, I informed him (twice) that, if such a charge were to appear on my statements, I would be canceling my service with Primus, as I have finally "had enough."

I just received my emailed billing from Primus today; it included a $25 NSF charge. I am therefore cancelling my high-speed Internet account with Primus.

Companies which operate according to sensible policies set by competent management do not need to hide behind the fine-print in their Terms and Conditions to excuse the fact that they are not providing anything resembling good service or a competitive product to their customers. (The problem is not with your CSRs; they are simply following foolish policies set by inept managers.) I will not personally have anything to do with Primus in the future for any of its technological offerings; nor will I be encouraging anyone else to waste their money on Primus, should the subject come up.

Thank You,

Geoffrey Falk

Fast-forward less than five months later, and this is why I won't be renewing my dial-up account with Sympatico:

Hi,

I have just received a letter informing me that the attempted charges to my credit card for my Sympatico Dial-Up Internet account (User ID XXXXXXXX, Account ID XXXXXXX) have not been going through, and that I am therefore at risk of having my account with you suspended.

Had I previously been reasonably apprised of that difficulty via a simple phone call or message to, for example, my sympatico.ca email account, I would have immediately taken appropriate steps to ensure that the payments cleared.

In any case, I have now verified that future charges to the credit card registered to that dial-up account will indeed go through as they should.

Finally, please ensure that the aforementioned dial-up account (opened on July 5, 2006) is not renewed beyond its initial 12-month contract period.

Sincerely,

Geoffrey Falk

Tried sending that missive to billing@sympatico.ca from a free email account, but just received an (auto)response (with the French version being given first, don't blame me, silly kniggets, one official language would be fine with me), informing me that since they didn't recognize that email address as belonging to any of their accounts ... I would need to toodle over to a web page where I could, supposedly, (re)enter my information and send it to them.

Clicked on the link, but it turned out that the gremlins there, in turn, regretted that they could not respond to Internet-related questions via email.

In the process of trying to find out where-the-holy-fuck to (re)send my email to, I discovered this blog posting, from three years ago, from someone who had similar experiences with the "customer service" at Sympatico as I have had. And this. And this. And this, too.

Finally managed to send the same email from my sympatico.ca email account, after logging in with some Microsoft Passport ID I'd forgotten I had.

Awaiting response.

• The Jethro Tull Christmas Album

• Brian Wilson, What I Really Want for Christmas

• Celtic Woman: A Christmas Celebration

• Loreena McKennitt, Winter Garden: Five Songs for the Season

Pay no attention when critics try to tell you that The Beach Boys' Christmas Album, or A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector, or even Sarah McLachlan's recent Wintersong are superior. They aren't ... unless you really are, in the words of Tull's Ian Anderson, "living in the [Christmas] past."

Wikipedia policy restricts bio pages to "Published authors, editors and photographers who received multiple independent reviews of or awards for their work." Alternatively, "The person has been the primary subject of multiple non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the person. This criterion includes published works in all forms, such as newspaper articles, magazine articles, books, scholarly papers, and television documentaries...."

Fine. Here's one review of STG, which I had "quietly" responded to in my blog of July 21, 2005. And here's another published, formal, attempted-scholarly review/response to my ideas, where I was indeed the "primary subject." That's two.

Two is "multiple," baby.

But wait, there's more: The article on STG in the P/I Newsletter would actually be a third. Not to mention many of the other non-trivial, independent mentions gathered here. And, even if my interview in the New York Times doesn't count, in this context, the other one with—as Kensho would say—"Cowan and friend," solicited by them, certainly does.

You ask for "multiple," I give you "shagadelic."

See, it's not that having "my own" page on Who-gives-a-fuck-ipedia really means all that much to me (though I do certainly appreciate the efforts of the person who started it, particularly since he used to be a fan of Kon Schwilber prior to my work in exposing that particular Bald Idiot for the dishonest and/or incompetent fool that he is). But there are principles involved here, one of which is that our world's cult followers cannot be allowed to "erase" the harshest critics of their heroes and most-cherished beliefs; and another of which is that, if you're going to go around, quite unsolicited, trying to "make the [Wiki] world a better place," you need to have done enough research to fucking get it right.

Right?

Um, and if that Wikipedia page does end up disappearing, against all justice, the source code for its current content is archived here.

Well, looks like some "seeker of Truth" has marked my Wikipedia bio page for deletion. Again.

If you care about having my debunking of our world's unapologetic spiritual frauds continue to "exist" in that context, please hop on over to the associated discussion page and comment there.

If it needs restating: Yes, I was and am a published author, even prior to writing STG and NE, having had my Science of the Soul endorsed enthusiastically by both (Wilber's close friend) Huston Smith and James Fadiman. SOS was published by Blue Dolphin, whose president, the royalty-cheque-not-sending-to-me-since-I-turned-skeptical Paul Clemens, has long been a member of the Board of Editors of The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology.

FYI, the strippingthegurus.com site has been averaging a steady 300 unique visitors per day (with more than 500 completed downloads of the STG PDF in October):

If the self-published (i.e., on his own "record label") music of l'il Stuart Davis merits a Wikipedia page, so does my work, much more so.

It is in your power to do something about that. As they say:

The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.

You know who said that? The real Einstein—one who would never have been so pathetically small as to attempt to dismiss the most devastating criticisms of his ideas (to the point where, in Wilber's case, there is really nothing left of his grossly dishonest and/or baldly incompetent attempts at "philosophy") as arising merely from "resentiment" on the part of others.

P.S. Just saw this reader-review of kw's latest book-length drivel, Integral Spirituality, on amazon.com:

I'll review this book in Wilber-speak:

Let's say that a holon has a capacity of permeability and let's call it the holon's Integral Volumeinostatic Capacitance or IVC, and that a holon's IVC unfolds or expresses across all Quadrants, Stages, States, Lines, Perspectives, Genders, and Channels and that a holon's percentage of realized IVC can be expressed on a scale of 100, then in the Upper Left Quadrant (ULQ) representing Wilber's (W) subjective view that Integral Spirituality (IS) approaches Genius (G); e.g. IVC(ULQ(W/IS))=99G, but in the Upper Right Quadrant (URQ) or external or objective perspective we can assert that IVC(URQ(W/IS))=100S, where S represents a brown-meme, malodorous substance characterized by fecalosticityness.

A "malodorous substance characterized by fecalosticityness"? Doesn't that actually describe Wilber's bullshit-based life's work pretty accurately?

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