Standing at the Crossroads...

We do indeed live in ridiculous and frankly scary times. A time when Croydon police are investigating a 'potential crime' over Crystal Palace fans displaying an anti-Saudi flag at a recent match with Newcastle over the latter's takeover by a Saudi Arabian-led consortium. That it depicted what everyone actually knows to be a true picture of Saudi Arabia seems not to count for much with the authorities. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was branded a "... a psychopath..." by a former Saudi security official, Saad Jabri. Uncorroborated though the statement was, I think evidence enough is out there, not least Saudi funding of terrorist organisations: anyway, I personally know enough people who have worked out there who will attest to the unpleasant nature of the regime and its ruling family.

A time when NHS employees are being actively 'gaslighted' by not just their managers, but by other employees who are in thrall to and primed by those managers: as I've said before, this is endemic in the world of work as a whole; a standard 'divide & rule' tactic, isolating individuals from the cohort and manipulating performance metrics to 'convince' the individual that they are below par and potentially subject to censure via disciplinary action. The corporate strategy is to install ill-qualified managers with few actual skills and fewer scruples to follow cascaded instructions from the tier above (und so weiter) without question; facts subordinate to reality in service of God-knows-what: it ain't in the service of the public, that's for damned sure.

A time when one's energy supplier goes bust for being a total shower that couldn't run a lemonade stall at a garden fête, to be replaced by the company that bought them out; but they themselves then proceed to fail to inform one that this changeover has happened. One's finding out about it in the press is not customer communication, people! To then find practically illiterate 'letters' arriving on one's doormat, issuing veiled threats about arrears and a lack of payment arrangements (on an account that has neither been agreed to nor formally activated!) when the previous energy company had hitherto failed abjectly to either install a properly-functioning 'smart-meter' or collect data from it or issue any proper billing whatsoever at any point, is frankly an insult; indicative of the shoddy attitude most 'businesspeople' at a corporate level exhibit towards their lifeblood: their customers. Appalling.

It would all be laughable, were it not so tragic. Customer service, common sense and basic human understanding used to be the values that underpinned most of our lives - I still remember having a job where I looked forward to the day, rather than face the dread of not knowing where the next unwarranted censure would come from or for whatever 'reason'. Keeping people simultaneously satisfied and cowed is the way our current system functions: '1984' meets 'A Brave New World' at the Crossroads for a date with the Devil. I believe I'm sinking down...