If you are the kind of person that judges a book (and he who’s reading) by its cover, well, you might have a hard time doing so in Japan. Japanese people read a lot while commuting in subways and trains (that is if they are not playing with a PSP, fiddling with the mobile phone or listening to their iPods using HUGE headphones). I do a lot of people-watching and I noticed that most of them have the book’s cover protected by either paper, cloth or even leather. In the  first case, when paper is used, it is almost always provided and folded by the bookshop where it was bought. In this way they offer the service of protecting the book cover and the reader’s privacy. As a counterpart they obtain brand visibility,  because the shop’s logo or some other easily recognizable sign is printed on that paper.

I’m not sure whether the egg or the chicken came first and that is the shop wanting to make a subtle branding campaign or the book user wanting to hide what she’s reading (be it hard philosophy or dirty hentai manga). The point is that you can hardly tell what someone is reading on the metro but you can accurately state where it was acquired.

Simple, huh?

I’m not famous for my love towards Italian services, in particular mobile phone services and specifically TIM (Telecom Italia Mobile).

Since mid February 2008 I’ve been trying to take my mobile number out from the company I used to work before (with their consent, as this was my first Italian mobile and I have it since 2001, long before I worked with them). It was very simple to add a “consumer” number to a business contract, but now it seems almost impossible to become consumer again. Several faxes (I guess that now more than 30 pages have been printed, hand filled and faxed), calls (at least 10 to the TIM guy that follows the company’s account, at least other 5 to their business call center) and emails have been unsuccessfully exchanged.

They gave contradictory indications, the wrong forms a couple of times (and now that I probably sent the right one, they are asking for a formal fax where I cancel all the previous forms) and they even blamed me for sending the wrong stuff.

I’m talking of what should be a routine procedure. Why do I have to spend so much energy and keep paying for this service? Why can’t I fill online the right form, print it, sign it and… sigh… yes, fax it (it has something to do with the law) and just have the situation solved? I would save a lot of time, they would save a lot of money on the transaction (yeah, maybe they are making more money retaining me against my will) and I would surely be recommending the service to some friend (for a commodity as mobile service, this details are important).

Please, why make stuff complicated when it could be so SIMPLE?
… and as soon as I’ll be consumer again, I WILL CHANGE to another company, that’s a fact!