Aotearoa Weekly Kōrero 21/3/2025

Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!

This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.

It’s for talking about anything that might not justify a full post. For example:

Something interesting that happened to you
Something humourous that happened to you
Something frustrating that happened to you
A quick question
A request for recommendations
Pictures of your pet
A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like an elephant
Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)

So how’s it going?

28 comments

Why isn't this country more upset at what this government is doing?
I am baffled that we as a nation will just stand by and watch the Trumpification of New Zealand.
I have always been convinced that NZ is a much more conservative country than the image it tries to project, a much more racist and corrupt country than it pretends to be and nothing has brought that into sharper focus than the rule of Winston Peter and David Seymour.
- I saw a video from Q&A with Jack Tame, he was interviewing american right winger dickhead James Linsey and the comments were so blackpilling. It was like 90% support for James Linsey.
  
  Yup. We are so fucked and nobody seems to realize it.

I wonder if we should consolidate the communities into only the main NZ community since the NZ lemmy community is so small. We probably all want to see whats happening in the country and arent at the point where we are being bombarded by town specific news.
- By viewing the Local feed you can see all posts across the instance, and posts are almost always posted in the main NZ or NZ Politics communities, each of which are reasonably active.
  What's the outcome we would be aiming for by doing this?
  
  The outcome is to make communities look less dead. In my view its better to have an active nz community than all the posts split between 4 communities.

I mentioned a few months ago about getting a new mattress, well we finally did it last week. Ended up getting the extra firm Ecosa mattress on sale and it's SO firm and great. Almost feels like sleeping on the floor. It's definitely helping my lower back pains and feels a lot better when I wake up in the morning.
The hunt is still on for a larger car/seven seater.
- It's great you found just what you wanted!

I have been on hold for more than an hour because the Internet is out. It’s always like this no matter who I call. I had an issue with Sky recently and the same thing. Does anybody in this country offer decent customer service?
- Realistically? Not really. If you make it too easy to call people stop using the online channels that are cheaper to provide.
  However, I'd say someone like Spark may be a good option. I believe they have callbacks so you call and push whatever number and then they call you back when you get to the front of the queue. They are also better resourced to handle the calls, and I'm assuming share their call centre with the subsidiaries (skinny, bigpipe, I think there are others). Spark itself can be a bit expensive but the subsideries are cheaper and might do ok on service. I don't think any major player will have "great" service, though, and many little ones don't have a phone number at all.
  Keep in mind that unless it's just you with the issue, any outage covering an area is going to cause a big spike to the call centre and queue times will increase.
  
  The problem is that if your internet is out you aren't going to use their web site. Also their web sites are useless by and large. Even the chat feature has super long wait times. I once tried to use the chat with sky and I would wait fifteen minutes for somebody to start a chat and it would instantly crash and stop responding.
- Do they have an outage page you can check on your phone? I've worked at a couple of ISPs, often they're already well aware of the issues and are working to fix them.
  
  They have a link, it goes to chorus, chorus doesn't have an outage listed in my area. After more than an hour on hold I talk to somebody who says there is an outage in my area affecting hundreds of people.
  Go figure.

How's my day going? Well I toasted a hot cross bun, took it out of the toaster and put it on the hot cross bun bag, and the plastic bag melted to my hot cross bun so thoroughly that I just have to throw it away. That's how my day is going 🫠
- Oof. Hope you have more hot cross buns!
  
  I cooked two more just to even it out 😅

28 comments