Friday 17 March 2017

On Truth and the Down Time.

I had to call my ISP today and got a recorded announcement which said:

Due to unusually high call demand our wait time is currently approaching fifteen minutes.

I’ve heard the same recorded announcement every time I’ve called them for the past five years, and you know what that means. It means that the call demand they’re experiencing at the moment isn’t unusually high at all, it’s normal. The truth of the matter is that they have insufficient staff to answer the normal call demand any quicker than fifteen minutes.

Which means that the company is lying to me, and I don’t like that. And I’ve told them so, only the problem is that the person to whom I’m expressing my disquiet is not the person who’s telling me the lie. He’s some poor, hard working technician who’s doing his level best to be polite, friendly and helpful, and give every customer the time it takes to handle their problem effectively. The fault lies with the post-truth era in which we are living, which might be summarised as:

It’s perfectly acceptable in business, politics, the media, and pretty much all other areas involving public communication, to tell whatever lies best suit your nefarious purposes as long as you can be reasonably sure of getting away with it.

They get away with it.

*  *  *

I didn’t make a post last night – in fact I did hardly anything at all last night – because I was experiencing an unusually deep level of depression. I’m no stranger to depression, but that one perplexed even me. How on earth do you get to a state where you can’t face any sort of creative or practical activity, you can’t face listening to music, you can’t face the prospect of taking a shower, you can’t even face knowing anybody? You even have to force yourself to summon sufficient energy to go to bed. All you feel is a sense of mental suffocation from the weight of near-palpable darkness pushing in on you from all sides.

Interesting, isn’t it? I suppose there’s probably a pill for it, but I don’t do pills.

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