Hermetic Fellowship : November Rant

The Hermetic Fellowship Website has been up and running without interruption at the same URL for six years...until last weekend.

Let us tell you a story; it’s probably all too familiar (with a slightly different cast of characters) to many of you. When we started the Hermetic Fellowship Website back in 1995, we selected a local Internet Service Provider, in an attempt to be good citizens of our local community and, because, honestly, we don’t like supporting giant corporations nearly as much as local businesses that provide local jobs, whose owners are actual people who live in your city, and who care about the community. You know, “Think globally, act locally.” Well, our ISP was a little too good at their job, and one of those corporate ISP scavengers called OneMain.com, whose raison d’etre was the gobbling up of local ISPs, getting fat while contributing nothing of any remote value to the world, gobbled up Teleport about a year ago. I don't think this made much difference to you, the users of the site, but our customer service became minimal, impersonal, and incompetent, and the nice local people who worked at Teleport (except for the owners, whom I presume became mildly wealthy by selling out their customers and employees) were fired—it's a much more painful and true term than the falsely gentle “laid off” or the people-are-just-spare-parts corporate “downsized.”

We thought about it, and decided to leave the HF Website at the OneMain-absorbed shell of Teleport because we did not want to disrupt the links and bookmarks so many of you have kindly made to the Hermetic Fellowship Website over the years.

A little time went by, and OneMain succeeded in finally fattening itself up by eating enough small local ISPs to make itself irresistable to a larger shark. Of course, the difference with corporate sharks is they pay large sums of money to smaller fish when they eat them; so EarthLink, one of the biggest sharks in the ocean, gobbled up OneMain, which had gobbled up Teleport (and I presume EarthLink made the owners of OneMain wealthy for selling out their employees and unwillingly-acquired customers).

Well, EarthLink apparently made the Teleport access numbers promptly available to their customers, so that our FTP access to maintain the site was more or less unavailable except at 3 o’clock in the morning, and our customer service became even more remote and useless, but we we still left the HF Website at the now twice-cannibalized shell of Teleport because, again, we felt it was very important not to disrupt the links and bookmarks so many of you have made to the Hermetic Fellowship Website over the years, or to damage the credibility we have worked to accumulate over the years as innumerable sites have come and gone, or changed URL addresses repeatedly.

Then, this week, the webmaster of the Hermetic Fellowship Website returned from a trip out of town and discovered that the website had been offline for several days. He hurriedly checked his e-mail for an explanation, but there was none. He telephoned EarthLink customer service, and was granted the privilege of being on hold for more than 15 minutes before a customer service rep took his call. The rep did not know what the problem was, and put him on hold for (I am not exaggerating) another quarter hour, when an entirely different service rep took the call, the first rep having apparently forgotten the matter entirely. This new service rep said that the database he needed to access to find the problem was offline, and asked the webmaster to phone customer service again the next day, and start the whole dance again. The webmaster asked to speak to a supervisor. The supervisor, after some research, said that EarthLink had only bought the customer base of Teleport, not its servers, and that they had just changed all the Teleport customers to new servers and THROWN AWAY the data of the hundreds of websites on Teleport. We hapless users would simply have to re-upload the (in the case of the HF Website) hundreds of files to the new server. Oops, sorry for the inconvenience; after all, it’s just an unannounced interruption of service to those who use your website, and a few dozen hours of unpaid work to get the website back to the condition it was in last week, before you were fully integrated into the happy EarthLink family of satisfied customers.

If you are old enough, do you remember Lily Tomlin’s operator sketches on Laugh-In in the days before Ma Bell was broken up? “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the Phone Company.”

Well, since we have already—against our will, and through no discernible fault of our own—been forced by EarthLink’s unbelievable lack of corporate integrity, customer service, or technical competence—to interrupt your access to the Website, and since we have—against our will, and through no fault of our own—to go through the somewhat overwhelming task of re-building the entire website on a new server anyway, we are going to take this opportunity to flee EarthLink as though it were—for example—some soulless, inhuman corporate entity designed to have no regard for anything except its own endless consumption of smaller, better companies and larger, unmerited profits.

Corporations: all the vices of human beings, none of the virtues.

What, me disgusted by arrogant megacorporate excess? Does it show?

Honestly, sometimes a rant really does help, sort of Rolfing the Astral Body :-).