Over the past month, if you are a regular reader you’ll have noticed that I have been writing how unreliable the Cox Communications internet connection has been [and as I wrote that sentence, the Internet connection went down again]. My wife phoned up Cox numerous times and promises they had made have not be kept. For example; they promised a credit to our account for the poor service which never appeared on our statement [and last night they promised to credit us a month of service; let’s see if that happens?]. We were without TV and Internet for almost a day, and their fix was to daisy chain a cable from the 21 building to the 18 building in our apartment complex, which is fine as a temporary fix but it’s been like that for almost a month now. That cable was laid across the grass and side-walks [pavement for the my British friends] and their cable boxes on the outside of the buildings are broken and the connectors are literally exposed to the elements just laying on the grass. Apart from anything else; it’s a health and safety issue as it’s a trip hazard and as it runs across the grass, it’s likely to get cut or damaged when the grass is cut. I have uploaded a YouTube video to show the shoddy workmanship that seems to be rife among Cox engineers. And I am not finished yet; their customer service sucks big time; you call them up time and time again and seemingly they don’t log the calls in their ticketing system, claiming we have only called ONCE which isn’t the case; we’ve called half a dozen times in the past four weeks. Work orders have been marked as complete when nothing has been done and the problem still exists. I don’t call them as I despise that sort of treatment of customer issues and I will end up cancelling and using my cell phone to connect to the Internet as quite often I have to connect via the phone like I am right now to be able to complete my daily tasks on the Internet!
Too little, too late Mr. Blatter. FIFA president Sep Blatter has apologised to England and Mexico for mistakes made because goal line technology was not used in this World Cup, promising to look into using the technology in future tournaments. Call me sceptical but I am not convinced it will happen, it’s a statement to quell the current discontent with FIFA given the recent events. Not that it would have saved England or Mexico; especially England who even if the goal stood; I believe would have lost the game as Germany were the much better team and the English had been poor all tournament. Some people will say that if it went to 2 – 2 England could have pulled it back to 3 – 2 but I find very little evidence of that. Don’t get me wrong, I would have loved to see England come back to beat Germany 3 – 2 but the bottom line is England were not good enough. Other issues in the World Cup that have been unfair; the USA’s two goals that were disallowed; TV replays showed that there was nothing wrong with those goals. I have to say that the standard of officiating in this World Cup has been exceptionally bad, FIFA need to look at their standards for officiating big events like the World Cup for future tournaments as thusfar; the referees have been poor on the whole! The English Football Association also needs to take a long hard look at itself; the Premiership specifically, the national team manager has a relatively small amount of players to pick from in the top flight as there are so many foreign players in the league. I believe that the FA should limit the amount of foreign players allowed to play in a Premiership game; maybe a maximum of five? and start bringing players through grass roots football; setting up a national academy of football for schoolboy ages and upwards. Unless changes happen; England can kiss goodbye to any hope of claiming a major tournament win; this dismal World Cup proved that!