Safely Ignored

After attempting for almost two weeks to get through to the Australian Taxation Office's main phone line, I completed a 2-minute automated process and had the dubious satisfaction of being told that "future request letters can be safely ignored".

Which got me thinking about extending that metaphor to humans. So without further ado, allow me to present my list of People who can be Safely Ignored:

• Search Engine Optimization "experts" - Let's be honest, by "Search Engine" you mean Google, and if you use said search engine to search for improve google pagerank you'll get Google's OWN ADVICE. Now use the money you saved on an SEO expert to make your content worth looking at.


• Excel-holics - People who insist on copying the up-to-date data from a web page in order to have a local copy that will get stale, just so they can be in their familiar rows-and-columns walled garden. It's madness, and we all know the typical error rates in hacked-together spreadsheets ...


• iPhone Bandwagoneers - The "Jesus Phone" as it's known over at The Register is a competent and capable smartphone. That's all. On several occasions I have been amused by a flustered hipster desperately asking "does someone have an iPhone I can borrow?" - meaning "I need to go to a website (but I'm scared to be seen using a non-Apple product)". Sad.


• Microsoft - They've jumped the software shark. With nothing worthwhile on the desktop since Windows XP and a mobile OS that manages to make high end hardware perform like a low-end $29 outright phone from the post office.