Three-Part Invection

Three rants for the price of one. Don’t say you never get a bargain at this dot-com.

1. Don’t Switch

As any whinging expat will tell you, there are plenty of annoying things about Britain, just like anywhere else. But I’m not going to tell you and the nice people at the Home Office about those today. No, I’m here to celebrate one of the good things, like conkers, and Red Leicester, and Saturday mail deliveries. Something which is about to be lost, like so many fine British traditions before it. I’m talking about Switch.

Granted, the trade name for a system of electronic funds transfer using debit cards isn’t quite as venerable as roast swan at high table in Oxford, but it’s one of those small details of UK life which native Britons may not appreciate, unless they’ve travelled a lot—specifically, to the Antipodes.

We don’t have Switch in Australia and New Zealand, you see. We have (and it pains me to write this) EFTPOS.

EFTPOS, or eftpos as it’s fashionably styled, stands for Electronic Funds Transfer (Point of Sale), or, more accurately, Extremely Fucked Trademarked Phrase, Only Shorter. This hideous concoction, surely the worst acronym ever devised, was thrust on hapless Aussies and Kiwis sometime in the 1980s, ushering in two decades of having to say out-loud one of the most unnatural neologisms ever to collide with the English language. I have vague memories of a marketing campaign telling us how to pronounce it, but don’t have the relevant literature to hand, and am strangely unmoved to locate it. It probably said something like “Just say ‘bereft of possibilities’ and leave out berofibilities.”

Given the number of permutations available from those six letters, let alone an extra letter or two, it’s efting ridiculous that they couldn’t come up with something better. Why not Sales POint Funds Transfer Electronically, or SPOFTE? Electrical FUnds Point-to-point Transfer—E-FUPT? FUNds Electronistic Sales POint Transfer—FUN-E-SPOT? Anything, anything except eftpos.

It’s not like this is a low-profile acronym, either. You see it at every sales point where funds are transferred electronically, obviously, which these days includes everything from Target to tuck shops. When I last visited New Zealand in 1998, the logo was the word itself written in lower-case 1980s computer script in black and yellow—two colours which always promise a high-class shopping experience (cf. Black and Gold in Australia, Morrison’s in the UK). In Australia, the logo is a brown tablet shape with a white lower-case e, which coincidentally appeared all over the country just before those other tablets stamped with e. New Zealand, clearly not wanting to be left behind, has since changed its logo to an orange tablet with embossed e. Now with chewable vitamin C.

I eftpos; he is eftpossing; you eftpossed. As you’d expect of an acronym describing an everyday method of payment, eftpos has entered the language, as both verb and noun. Now that plastic has all but killed off cheque accounts, we can expect to see even more of it: the cheque is in the eftpost.

But it didn’t have to be that way. We could have had Switch.

It’s so marvellously simple, it’s a miracle it got through the relevant committee. “It’s all about switching money from your account to the retailer’s... so how about... electronic-funds-transfer-point-of-sale!” “Streuth, Wayne, that’s beaut.” “Hang on, how about ‘Switch’?” “I dunno, Nige, you reckon the punters’ll go for it?”

For once, good old English common-sense shone through. (I assume it was somebody English. If it had been named up this end of Britain it would have been something like “Thrift”, short for “Get your thieving Sassenach hands offa mah money”.) Even the logo is better: a stylised S formed out of two interlocking curves, perfectly suggesting the rapid exchange of dosh. Whenever I look at my bank card I have reason to be thankful. Thank you, kindly benefactors of the British financial sector.

But not for much longer. Currently, every bus-stop in Edinburgh is plastered with photoshopped penguins (what is it with those eyes?) announcing that “Switch is changing its name to Maestro”.

Thanks a lot, Mastercard marketroids. Oh yes, very clever: “maestro” is almost an anagram of “master”; it’s all about conducting funds from one account to another; and gosh, isn’t it so much nicer than that awfully common-sounding word “switch”. What you’ve failed to grasp in your globalectic seizure of rebranding is that Switch already has a perfectly good name, and that Britons never, never, never shall rename. UK comedians still make jokes about Marathons, and they turned into Snickers(es) fourteen years ago. And as for renaming the pound to the euro—well, only a hopeless romantic would even dream of that.

I might forgive you, though, if you’re planning to extend your campaign to the southern hemisphere. Or, if you’d like a really high-class, esoteric-sounding name—perhaps as a swap, say, for one slightly shop-soiled “Switch”—well, have I got an acronym for you.

2. Szechuan Spam

Spam. We all hate it, unless it’s the Spiced Ham luncheon meat made by Hormel; and actually, I’m not too keen on that stuff either. When it comes to the electronic variety, we’d all like to dispatch it to the Great Pork Offal Processing Plant in the sky. (Although if there is a pork offal processing plant in the sky, floating around like some bacon-powered Hindenburg, then a few emails will be the least of our worries.)

Still, if you can’t beat ’em, ridicule ’em, that’s what I almost say. And ridicule spammers I have, as part of a net-wide movement of grass-roots resistance, posting everything from desktop pictures to collections of potential baby names.

But those happy days are numbered, my friends, because I have seen the future of spam, and it’s bleedin’ incomprehensible.

I can’t pin down the exact turning point, but it was sometime in the last few months. There I was, happily collecting names for the disappointing sequel, noting the differences between my speedysnail.com spam (Nigerian scammers, Viagra sellers, US mortgage brokers) and Hotmail spam (pornographers), tempted by offers of “Inexpenive domain registration,fungus”, and wondering how a spam addressed to “rory_evans” ended up in my Hotmail account when computerized systems usually chuck a “Does Not Compute” over a single misplaced letter, when everything changed. My Hotmail junk box went from overflowing to a slow trickle, while the speedysnail account started drowning in a sea of strange characters. I don’t mean strange characters like Unionize P. Embalms or the ones in V1@GRA; I mean the strange characters you see when you don’t have the Chinese character set installed.

Maybe it all goes back to this 2001 spam oddity: my first Korean spam, lovingly preserved in electronic amber. Maybe my email address was smuggled across the border into North Korea and bartered with the Chinese for a sack of bark flour. Maybe it’s being held captive in Shanghai as we speak, subjected to a barrage of cheap Cialis knock-offs by electronic triads straight out of The Diamond Age. I don’t know, because I can’t read Mandarin, not even with the Mac OS X language pack.

Am I alone in this? I know there were some high-profile prosecutions of US spammers recently, which explains the disappearance of my ol’ pals Mr Big, Mr Extremely Large, Mr Great, Mr Supreme, Mrs Swinger and Ms Rutten; but none of my other net-savvy friends have noticed a surge in indecipherable spam. Am I the canary in the coalmine? Does no-one else wake up every morning to this?

On the upside, it does make my Junk mailbox easier to scan for false positives (of which there aren’t that many, praise be to Michael Tsai’s SpamSieve). But now, instead of an amusing collection of increasingly desperate pitches written in En/gl1s'h, it looks like the stream of characters Neo saw at the end of The Matrix. The fun is gone. Welcome to the dystopic future of spam, where the pitiful electric whispers of your friends are drowned out by a billion sales pitches from the fastest-growing economy on earth.

3. Reflections on the Events of 9 October 2004.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK.

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