No one said it was going to be easy. Being back in Africa is wonderful and certainly has it’s pros like a great climate, exquisite scenery, incredible people and the likes, but God damn it’s difficult sometimes to just get the simplest things done.
I guess it’s all down to education and previous experience. What you learn along “the way” through life is vital for growth but that learning curve is usually steered by some controlling force or another. Many times it’s a business need that demands things done in a certain way, other times it’s the push of a consumer base that expects a certain level of professionalism and demands good service. This forces the service industry to strive for perfection or hand business over to your nearest competitor. This is why we like to think of ourselves in the 1st world as the leaders in customer service. The expectation of excellence. This is obviously not always the case but compare Europe or the USA to Africa and my God, we are comparing apples with pears. Here that just doesn’t quite work the same.
I can’t point fingers and tell people how it should be because it just works differently. There is the old saying out here, “T.I.A.” – This Is Africa. For a big part that is 100% correct and not always meant in a demeaning way. This IS Africa and things WILL happen differently. The local service providers have not had the past experience of pushy, high expectation customers. From time to time we will have a stand-off or show down expressing our demands and their response of what will happen. All you can do is keep up the pressure and hope that within your lifetime the level of service comes up to a standard that although not perfect, can be deemed acceptable. If you give in early you become part of the problem and then no one learns.
What brought all this on now is the fact that here I am, at 10:10am, writing this offline as our internet service provider decided that this morning, in the course of a production day, business hours, was the best time to run an upgrade on the system and bring down the entire region. I got the message last night, “We will be shutting down at 7:00am and will be down for exactly 30 minutes. You will be back online at 8:00am. Well we went down at 7:45am and are still not back online. I just got off the phone with them and the message I got was “I do not have the authority to tell you what the problem is you will just have to wait”.
If I had ever in my career as an IT professional just shut down all the communications for a scheduled outage during office hours I probably would have had my ass fired before I could have brought it back up again. That I think, is the basis of the frustration. The fact that I learnt another way. The way I see as the proper way!
The old Hoox would have boiling blood now. This new Hoox doesn’t give a rat’s ass. I’m learning to love this new Hoox!
Life is like a box of chocolates, only you get what you pay for!
Now I’m going to go outside and enjoy the wonderful African sun. Sometime I will have to explain my new mind set. It’s called “2 piles”. And I’m frikkin LOVING it!
