Alec Hogg’s Inbox: Niemöller’s powerful message

Ted Harris brightened my day with this missive:

Rudyard Harrison’s question may have an answer in Carlo M. Cipolla’s book, ‘The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity’. His third law states, ‘A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses’

Karen from Cape Town echoed what many other BizNews community members have been opioning about:

I love reading these daily reader rants. Elna has a point! We all know about Zuma’s tight friendship with the Russians since the days of living there and training with his MK soldiers over there – and all the deals and kickbacks he tried to push through to benefit his Russian pals during his time in office. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but it’s unfortunately not beyond imagining that Zuma, Russia and David Mabuza may have been in cahoots in one way or another to execute some kind of grand plan of political upheaval over the past month. The Russians are known to interfere with foreign governments after all. And all may have had much to gain financially from a successful insurrection. Now one just hopes Russia’s famous cybercriminals were not involved in the Transnet attack.  

Ignatius Viljoen from Pretoria points out the blindingly obvious in this email that I received yesterday. Some financial services businesses don’t seem to have upgraded their call centre resources despite the obvious surge in demand through Covid. He writes….

SARS-Cov-2 and COVID have been with us for more than a year and a half. As a result of lockdowns, we all had to change our lives and how we do business and rely more on web-based services and call centres. Banks used COVID as a handy excuse to reduce retail services and save money, while other retailers implemented practical measures to continue face-two-face service delivery. One would think that the banks would increase call centre capacity to handle the increased call volumes. At least in the case of Standard Bank, it was not done.

I am writing this to you while waiting for more than 40 minutes for a consultant to answer my call because they are “currently experiencing high call volumes”.

The moment I press the send button is the moment I will change my bank.

PS. We need to start a list of the worst call-centre music: I vote for the Standard Bank noise.

PPS 45 minutes and cheers Standard Bank

And a fine way to end the week reading this email from David Melvill, a financial advisor who now specialises in gold and silver….

I love it that you quoted Niemöller. His message is so powerful. Most of our society is apathetic and we therefore need a reminder.

I know you were quoting it from memory, so it is tough. Just thought I would pass on the full quote, should you wish to quote it again.

Niemöller is perhaps best remembered for the quotation:

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Keep up the excellent work you are doing – I am deeply indebted to you.”

To receive BizNews founder Alec Hogg’s Daily Insider every weekday at 6am in your inbox click here. You can also sign up to the weekend’s BizNews Digest for a wrap of the best content BizNews has to offer, for a leisurely Saturday read.

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