I’ve been here in the beautiful Delta region of Botswana for three days. The second day here at our lodge, they took my bp (usually 145/100) as part of the procedure for allowing me to use the gym. In the previous 24 hours, I had been dumped into a snake-infested river swollen by a deluge, encountered a large and aggressive baboon which threw stuff at me, been charged by an elephant, and sat in a Jeep ten feet from a large male lion bellowing its head off. My bp after all this was 119/90.

This is what I love about safaris.

That afternoon, I tried to log on to my wordpress-hosted website to post something. Only now, 18 hours later, am I doing this. I’ve achieved it by sheer fluke, endless users forums and – at last – by typing in randomly guessed address syntax combos. This took me to someone else’s admin panel, so I signed in my own details and the ghost in the machine took me to The Slog. Last night they took my bp again. It was 153/110. I don’t want to think about what it is now.

This is what I hate about the internet.

The address to sign in if you’re a wordpress blogging client is yoursite name.wordpress.com/wp-admin. It’s really incredibly easy once you know. But in the wordpress 0nline documentation, it doesn’t tell you anywhere what that address syntax is. Use the site search-engine and type in ‘log in to my site admin panel’, and it takes you to the admin panel blurb. In which there is not a word about the sign-in syntax.

Users have been trying to tell WordPress this since at least April 2007, when the first poor unfortunate threaded ‘Hi I’m new to wordpress and I’ve been searching now for four hours to try and find….’ etc etc. This entry was followed by five other inmates with long grey beards saying they too had been trying to sign in since 1341. The end of the thread contains this gem from inside the silo:

‘Of course it’s easy to find. You simply haven’t read the online manual.’

After this is the phrase ‘Comments to this forum are now closed’.

That’s pretty execrable English, but more to the point these responses sum up ISPs perfectly:

1. Confuse and omit the customer. 2. Be rude to all customers. 3. Hide before they get rude back.

At one point around 2009, a blogger seems to have started a site called mypremium.wordpress – a name which for some reason they accepted – whose sole purpose was to explain just how important it was to recruit and train The People’s Internet Army for the Destruction of WordPress Silo Nerds. They closed him down for TOS violations pretty quickly.

My point here is the same one I’ve been making – with endless variations on one theme – since starting with Microsoft Frontpage in 2004: why on earth does the ISP sector only ever give responsible customer feedback jobs to Rain Man and his partner Rocking Insult Person?

But my concern about the question went a long way beyond personal frustration years ago: it’s now primarily about the good health of the industry.

Imagine giving the after-sales service task on Amstrad TV sets to Alan Sugar. Now imagine Alan Sugar was not only impolitely crass, but also severely autistic. That is the formula for the online ‘Help’ we get from phonecos, site hosts, software suppliers, email services – and a host of other oufits who survive in business purely because everyone in the whole world wants what they’ve got.

When talking about this madness, I get the same feeling exactly as I do when yet another authority figure tells us all about the huge contribution made to the economy by investment banks….without ever supplying further details beyond ‘huge contribution’. I just want to attach a multi-purpose Thing to one end of the web and write ‘Ask them to show how they’ve grown businesses and created jobs. Look at their company reports for source of business data. Request a full rundown on who benefits, in the long term, from derivatives marketing’.

 But just, as a species, we seem to have lost all flair for elegant simplicity, so too we appear to have lost interest in changing the dysfunctional behaviour of big business.

Which is why – for another eight days of low-bp bliss – I am now going back to the relative sanity of bull rhinos, crocs, furry spiders the size of your hand, and hippos spraying excrement on our safari tent. You see, there are no walls here against which to bang your head: we left those behind at the last major airport passenger security system.