More Corporate Bullshit

I don't want to hear about CSR, which supposedly stands for Corporate Social Responsibility.

I don't want to hear about responsibility to shareholders either because they rarely assume responsibility for the failings of the company they've bought into.

And don't tell me about companies that go bankrupt or which get ripped off by the board of directors shareholders have voted in.

What I do want to hear about are companies which take seriously their responsibilities towards their customers and clients.

For the past 10 years, from shortly after Suharto's abdication, I have been an Indosat client.

For the past three days I have been unable to access those emails sent to my Indosat address whether through my Outlook Express or through the Indosat webmail page.

The message I get is this: Could not connect to the specified mail server. Please check your account settings.

I haven't changed my user name or password in the past ten years, so wtf is going on?

I managed to get through to a nice Mr. Yoko in customer service who verified who I am and went off to check something he already knew about. Yes there are mail server problems at their end which won't be fixed until Friday! And this applies to nearly all Indosat email clients.

In terms of important documents and pay claims, I use a different account, and basically all I expect to be hidden in the Indosat's bit of hyperspace are a few Yahoo group messages, a few links from DJ and half a dozen spam messages from Nigeria. So maybe I'm not going to suffer too much. However ....

I use the Indosat STMP to send messages. Of the ten phone numbers provided for my dial up connection, just one is semi-reliable. Just one.

Mr. Yoko could not offer me solace on this one and I almost felt sorry for him as mine was but one more in the litany of complaints he's receiving this week.

But 'almost' is the operative word.
...............................

I was interested to learn last Friday that not only did Indosat's profits rise by 45% in 2007 "due to an increase in revenue" last year, but in the first half of this year total assets, net income and basic earnings per share all rose by 20+%. (Net income was Rp.1,055,819 million = c.$120 million 'profit'.)

So will we Indosat clients receive a deduction in our service fees on a par with the gains made at our expense?

Will we f**k.

Oh, and Indosat's CSR programme is a competition, the Indosat Wirelss (sic) Innovation Contest (IWIC) 2008. This is all about getting users, especially junior high school students, to waste more time playing with Indosat gadgets.

Don't these folk know that there's a life to be had out in the real world?
 

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¶ 3:00 pm