ATT/T-Mobile Chases Off Yet One More Customer, Only This One Has Thousands Of Readers

Karl Denninger pulled the plug on his ATT/T-Mobile accounts, and details why in his latest post.

While running TV spots touting the joys of their brave new alliance, once again our friends at T go about their daily business of crewing customers to the wall. It's who they are, it's what they do. They will, sooner or later, go down the crapper, because they have obligations awaiting them that can't possibly be met. That's where the taxpayer comes in, to provide the safety net. But, that's another story for later.

Meanwhile, they alienated a customer whose opinions matter a lot, to a lot of people.

Does anyone at a place like T ever sit down and do the math that says:

'OK, we may make a few hundred bucks on this quarter's earnings, but we've pissed off a long-time customer in the process. What will that cost, since he'll never ever come back? His children and family will never be our customers for the next twenty years or so. He and his friends all go church, PTA, golf course, pub, and compare notes with one another. Our credibility gets dinged with, say, fifty potential customers every time we screw one over. Does this make sense for our business?'

OS drives a vintage 2000 Dodge pickup around his county--trash to dump, plants for the garden, golf clubs, etc. It's really been reliable, and even fun to tool around in. However, every one of those trucks around here from that same vintage were sent out of the factory with paint jobs that completely, utterly, failed. They look atrocious. And don't get OS started about the dealership, and the assholes at Mercedes-Benz credit who raped the family on the financing...OS now faces a decision in the next year--put some bucks into fixing up the old Dodge, or buy an F-150 or Toyota.

Notice what's not on that list of choices?

With a business culture like this, do we wonder why we struggle as an economy?

The Prisoner Who Broke Into Auschwitz

Denis Avey, one of the original Desert Rats of WWII, is an extraordinary man. After being wounded and captured, he was shipped to a POW camp near Auschwitz in Poland, and set to work in the Farben factory. There he befriended one of the Jewish prisoners. He determined to break into the camp, and document as much as he could for posterity.

His story is harrowing, a literal trip into Perdition.

As we passed beneath the Arbeit Macht Frei [work makes you free] sign, everyone stood up straight and tried to look as healthy as they could. There was an SS officer there, weeding out the weaklings for the gas. Overhead was a gallows, which had a corpse hanging from it, as a deterrent. An orchestra was playing Wagner to accompany our march. It was chilling.

And that was just the walk into the camp!

At 91, his story is finally being verified and told. It took two years for him to convalesce after he returned home from the war, and by 1947, no one in England wanted to hear the stories anymore.
So, he had to live with them by himself. 

This blog, in general, is about the culture--what makes it healthy or poisonous, and how that eventually plays itself out in the economic and political life of the country. OldSouth sits in the 'Amen Pew' when someone like Muggeridge reminds us that the abandonment of Christendom and its virtues will lead to the return of a Dark Age. Tolkien and Lewis hammer the same theme, each in their own way.

It is easy to sit back and say 'Those nasty, nasty Nazis, weren't they just awful!' It is much more sobering to reflect that the same culture that brought us Luther, Gutenburg, Telemann, Mendelssohn, Goethe, Beethoven, Schubert, Schiller, and Brahms later brought us Adolf Hitler. He was enthusiastically embraced by a culture that had already decided that that inheritance just didn't matter that much anymore. They were looking for a leader would restore the nation's pride, its economy, and make the trains run on time. Ethical details didn't much matter anymore.

The old story of Esau selling his birthright for a 'mess of pottage', e.g. a bowl of lentil soup, comes chillingly to mind.

Luckily, in the 1940's, there still remained an England, America, Canada, Australia, and a few others.

But what if we allow it to happen here, in America?

Lech Walesa visited a few weeks ago to ask just that question, and was ignored. Muggeridge made it his life's work after the mid 60's. Solzhenitsyn warned us of it in the 1970's, and was ridiculed--'it could never happen here'.

Are we so sure?