Etisalat's Annual Broadband Satisfaction Survey

No doubt you lucky lucky beoble who live in the UAE and are hostages of Etisalat will have been invited to do their annual 'Hostage Satisfaction Survey'. And you've probably thought 'I can't be bothered - the questions are always phrased so that whatever you say makes it look like you actually like Etisalat'. That's what I thought, but then I had a look at it and I have to say it's better than previous years; your options are no longer limited to a range of 'quite good' through to 'excellent', they now have a ten-point scale that goes from 'terrible' to 'outstanding' or words to that effect. And there are free-text boxes dotted around where you can write an essay telling them how great or how crap you think they are.

I was a bit stumped on the satisfaction rating for the proxy though: the question is 'How IMPORTANT the following network and other related aspects for an Internet service are to you?...Internet Filtering/ Content Blocking (feature by which the ISP blocks certain websites)' and the answer options go from 'not important at all' to 'extremely important' - it's very hard to answer that when what you want to say is '99% of censorship is immoral and a contravention of basic human rights so please go burn your damned proxy'.

And it was interesting to see a number of questions asking about the possibility that you may be thinking of switching to an alternative supplier.

Etisalat - this survey is a brave but hopelessly belated attempt at pretending that you give a damn what your hostages think. But you already know that you've lost the vast majority of your hostage base even before the new operator starts operations. You have acted as smug and callous monopolists for as long as I have lived in this country. You have bled us dry.