Babble Fish

How do you feel when you bought a ticket to watch a Star Trek movie (after watching all the prequels) and you sit in the cinema realising that you are watching Star Wars? Maybe this analogy is not good enough… Ok. Let me put it this way… You’re a James Bond fan, you’ve watched all the Bond movies for the past 50 years. How do you feel when you bought a ticket to see the latest actions of Double O Seven and you sit in the cinema realising that you are watching Double 0 Nine? This is how I felt when I watched the following:

The world is not lacking bad things to report… Internet freedom in Malaysia is being threaten again. Netizens! Come join the movement against those bozos who don’t know how to deal with new challenges brought by new technologies. Internet has been around for decades, if they still don’t know how to live with it they should become exhibit A in the Museum of Modern Communication Technology.
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Are you freaking kidding me? The app developer must really fortunate to have idiots paying for the fortune telling app…

Dear Customer Support,

I was touring Japan during Chinese New Year holidays this year and happy that I bought the GH1 there to record my memories. The camera performs well till now, but both of the strap lugs had detached from the body by themselves within 3 months after the purchase. This is clearly a manufacturer defect.

I was away from Malaysia after that incident and was using the camera without the strap (very inconvenient) till I came back a few days ago. I took it to the Shah Alam service center today only to find out that I need to pay more than RM300 to fix something which is not caused by my own neglect. Even checking it will cost me RM50.

I am extremely disappointed with this outcome. It just shows that customers are not the core of the after sales service of Panasonic because the customer care representative just brushed me off saying that she can’t do anything to help me because I bought the camera in Japan. I was told that the warranty is not valid in Malaysia. I just have to pay.

I need to fix the camera anyway because I just can’t walking around with camera with an obvious defect (which does not serve well for Panasonic branding too) in my trips. The RM300++ charges for fixing two camera strap lugs just made a dent into my confidence in Panasonic. I am pretty sure that my next camera purchase will highly probably not be a Panasonic camera.

For your information I am also posting this email to the Internet as well just in case it is being brushed off.

Thank you very much for your attention.

I still vividly remember my first trip to Sarawak with my friends a few years ago. Our destination was a long house community deep in the forest. So we took plane to Bintulu. From there, we were on a 2-hour boat ride, followed by a ride over the hills on the 4-wheel-drive and another round of boat ride to reach that remote neighbourhood.

The sad thing about the trip was hectares of land were being deprived of it’s natural green covers even before we touched down at the Bintulu airport. The scenery on the way to the longhouse were more or less the same, barren land which is orange in colour. So the long house was not that deep in the forest after all, it was actually deep inside the vast deforested land. Forestry in Malaysia, like many other countries, is about money. Valuable timber to be harvested at all cost. Seriously lacking the attention to the other two dimensions: the environment and the people depending on the forest for livelihood.

I first heard about the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) a few years ago. Responsible management of forests on the planet is what they are preaching through a certification system that is recognised internationally to make sure companies, organisations and community dealing with the forests are using the forests without harming them. You may get more details from FSC’s web site.

From what I know, the FSC processes in Malaysia have not been smooth because there are no compromise between the companies who would like to harvest the timber, environmentalist who would like preserve the environment, and the people (mostly the indigenous people) depending on the forest for livelihood. To make things worst, there are hardly any political will to solve the issues. Conflicts appear often because the economics of the timber industry always out weight the environmental and social impacts of deforestation. I always wonder if the balance can be achieved at all?