Some X-Factor fans couldn't cast their votes last night
Much of the United Kingdom came to a halt last night with when wicked television presenter, Dermot O’Leary uttered the buttock-freezing line, “And the winner is…..” as the wide angle camera zoomed slowly into a lone stage featuring finalists Leon and Rhydian awaiting their fate.
Prior to that, tons and tons of Rhydian fans had been doing what I spent most of the week doing — getting a busy signal. They were calling to cast their X-Factor vote; I was calling to get the password for my Fasthosts account (It arrived, finally, in the post).
A subset of Rhydian fans are apoplectic. They were getting busy signals when they were calling.
Our nations youngsters are intolerant of technical failure, an issue that the telecommunications companies involved would do well to remember.
These fans were past being annoyed. They didn’t hang up and say to themselves, ‘Ah well, it’s busy…’ — they collectively burned themselves into a fury, that, within minutes of Rhydian not winning, they were urging each other to email mainstream news outlets touting foul-play.
One such news outlet, The London Telegraph, attuned to the connected generation, picked up the story — as have many others.
It’s fascinating that what was obviously some degree of technical failure, somewhere in the telecoms chain, is immediately cast as foul-play by the young fans of X-Factor. What else could it be? A busy signal. Of course not. A telecoms company asleep at the wheel on Saturday night? Of course not. This generation simply does not accept that their landline telecoms services are infallible. Their expectation is such that they should always be connected wherever and whenever they call, especially to a competition as large as X-Factor.
Obviously 999 emergency services will have stayed up and available during the show along with other ‘carrier grade’ critical services. I’m pretty confident of that. What’s fascinating to behold is that whilst you’ve got the telecoms operators moving heaven and earth to make sure that their traditional services all stay operational, the allowed their consumer landline service to X-Factor to degrade-to-busy — wherever it was in the chain from the house to operator to aggregator to X-Factor technical supplier.
The busy signal in this context is an advertisement for apathy. Those busy signals might as well have been replaced with a recorded message thus:
The number your are calling is busy. Your telecoms operator doesn’t care and couldn’t be arsed to take a whopping percentage of your voting revenue at this time. Please f*ck right off and maybe make a few calls outside your minutes plan or something. It’s the weekend. We don’t care. Our Network Operations Centre ain’t bothered and is too busy watching X-Factor to be arsed about provisioning extra service to take money from you. Later.
What idiot telecoms CEO is allowed to go home at 5pm on Friday night without MAKING SURE that every call to X-Factor gets through? It AIN’T DIFFICULT. It’s stupidly easy money, too. All you do is play a recorded ‘thank you’ and whack 35p per minute to the caller’s bill.
Every call should be answered.
But we’ll leave that issue there, now, I think.
Here’s the story from the Telegraph:
Link: X Factor fans complain over phone-in votes – Telegraph
Fans of Welsh baritone Rhydian Roberts claim he was robbed of the X Factor crown last night because the talent show’s voting lines were constantly engaged.
The ITV1 programme’s message board and Rhydian Roberts fansites have today been inundated with complaints from fans claiming they could not get through to register their vote.
