If you're old and you know it, clap your hands

When I was young I never understood why my Dad would write letters to The Age newspaper to express his opinions. Why bother? What difference does it make? While I am still too lazy to write an actual letter, I have in recent times found myself writing complaint emails when I get bad service. And just recently even Bananas has also joined the crusade which got me to thinking how much we've changed since the little man arrived.

The incident mentioned above relates to trying to order e-tags for Eastlink from their website. This was probably one of the most painful experiences I have endured online. Trying to go back to change details (when you realise that having two accounts using the same email address as a login is fraught with danger but exists as an option on the website) kills the whole process. The alternative choice of login is an allocated account number (which appears as a mandatory field even though it isn't allocated until after you've registered). Use not the "validate address" function for it makes things go pear shaped pretty quickly. In all cases you must being again I could go on (and anyone who knows me will realise the truth of that statement) but at the end of the day it was pretty clear that they had either hired the world's most unbelievably incompetent Business Analyst to design the website or they simply didn't care. I chose to believe the latter as I think that laziness is a more forgivable sin than stupidity. Subsequently I decided that if they didn't care, it wasn't worth me wasting my time on an email (that, and given the quantity of expletives I was likely to employ I'm quite sure my complaint email would go straight into the trash anyway). This is when Bananas took up the challenge - "I'm a BA - I would want to know if it were me". Thus brought about Bananas' first complaint "letter".

So what is it about being old (it's a relative term but we both still have fond memories of being 21 and thinking thirty-somethings were ancient) and Australian that compels us to write letters/emails? I have seen the term "kidult" bandied about a bit recently and I've always thought it applied fairly accurately to us. I still play computer games and avoid wearing anything that needs ironing while Bananas has the self control of an eight year old. On the other hand we are starting to care a whole lot more about where the world is heading because we have genetic material that needs to exist here. So we are going to make the world a better place a little at a time, starting with badly cobbled together websites. So if you're a monopoly company with a moron-designed website we are forced to use - watch out, because if it isn't up to scratch we're going to write a letter!!!