01 September 2010, Cervera de los Montes
I asked my wife to change me as the nominal client of our telecommunication contract with Telefonica - which just changed its brand name to Movistar - because that would be easier for my accountant – the broadband is used for my studio too.
This week, I received the first bill sent to Rikko Hakkinen. It’s not so bad thinking that my wife spelled my name to them on telephone and I’ve seen much more errors in the orthography of my name. The worst version has been Rikko Sannen on a group show invite. I think Rikko is even more common spelling than the correct Riiko.
Obviusly, I called to Movistar’s infamous 1004 to correct my name. The call center girl I talked to told that it’s easy but warned me that then we might loose all the special deals we’ve got (like the almost 200 Imagenio internet protocol television channels we just got for free for a year). She made clear the system is programmed this way and she is not able to overpass it or know exactly beforehand how it reacts to the changing the name of the client.
Are we living in a Matrix-like dystopia where the human beings are just devices in the service of computers? Maybe I'm ingenuous asking this and everybody else understood this long ago – and accepted it as the best of all possible worlds.





