My War with Vodafone - CNN Highlights

Dear friends,

as you may have seen a couple of posts ago, Vodafone has begun hostilities. Today, in an act of unprovoked aggression they actually cut my line off.

I have responded by writing them a letter that includes the phrases "explosive diarrhoea" and "projectile vomiting". I know it's all a bit technical but I was trying to impress upon them their level of customer satisfaction as experienced by yours truly.

Sadly, despite my wishes to the contrary, I am not too hopeful that we will resolve this amicably.

In political terms they basically cut the power lines to my small indipendent country * and ended all diplomatic contact with our senate. And ejected all our embassy staff from their large and militarily powerful state*.

Continuing with the analogy, we reverted back to our wind turbines' ability to maintain us self-sufficient and we retaliated by sending them a diplomatic package of 17 tons of human excrement deposited directly at their seat of parliament. We thoughtfully also sent along many independent media journalists to chronicle the event (that would be you guys) and billed them for the whole event given we see it as a cross-cultural teaching programme for their minister of foreign policy. This first lesson was entitled "What your customer service foreign policy looks and smells like to your customers neighbouring states".

We have also given them 24 hours to reconnect us or else we will consider their actions an act of war against us.

Watch this space people. It's about to become interesting.

Oh. Please feel free to send your friends here and their friends too. I am almost sure within 24 hours they will not have re-connected me. At which point I shall post here the verbatim communications I send them. I promise you it will be entertaining.

Disgruntled Vodafone or ex-Vodafone customers/employees/victims are most welcome. And if there's enough of you out there let's go ahead and make it a class action suit.

* These images are from a very cool anime cartoon called Nausicaa. I highly recommend it. It's one of probably my top 20 films ever. Nausicaa's little country, The Valley of the Wind is set upon by power hungry megalomaniacs with no concept of natural processes. That sounds kind of boring but it isn't. There's lots of cool stuff in this story. Giant insects, aerial combat, ethics, heroics, weird creatures an amazing ecosystem, a sense of wonder and of course the inevitable: death and love. Similarly this war with Vodafone may seem like so much boring-ass paperwork and a futile attempt by one deranged individual to fight what is really de facto corporate extortion. But I am going to make it sooooo much more than that. And I plan to enjoy the process. My outraged sense of justice and Martian pride may force me to take action considered a waste of time and at least mildly deranged by most humans, but there's no reason I have to do it without taking any pleasure in it. Besides. It's one lone Martian against a huge behemoth of brutality and incompetence. How can I resist.