Rabid reseller: Filter me this

Here at Rabid Reseller, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s continued promise to block the government’s proposal to filter out porn from the internet before it even leaves the ISP mightily heartens us.

Rabid has been so concerned about the amount of porn on the internet that we’ve been doing our own bit to alleviate the problem. The thrust of our strategy has been to download every bit of porn we can find, thus making it no longer available to anyone else.

But we’re fighting a losing battle, and it’s using up more hard disks than we can afford to accidentally lose in the stock take.

We’re also worried about the amount of smutty spam still being delivered daily to our inbox. Just this morning we got another 10 spams offering to sell us wonder drugs that will make our manhood more magnificent.

Admittedly, Rabid’s wife sent eight of those, and the other two came from his mother, but it isn’t the source that’s the issue here.

It’s the amount of time and money wasted swallowing these pathetic pills that taste remarkably like vitamins. Rabid’s doctor says they are placebos but we don’t see what difference it makes where they’re made.

Back to the problem of internet porn, we heard the government is claiming anyone who opposes its filter legislation is stopping them from protecting children. That’s a bit rich from the mob who gave every high school kid their own porn-gateway in the form of an easily jail-broken netbook.

But Rabid’s only real objection to ISPs doing the filtering is that it will knock the socks off our own PC-based content-filtering solution, which is a major source of revenue, as any reseller would know.

Oh, all right, that’s what it says on our business plan that we show the bank manager. But in reality Rabid knows only too well that punters get free filters with their PCs and then they make us install them for the same price or less.

The response from the ISPs has been nothing short of predictable. They’d like to avoid doing anything except collecting their monthly debits and Rabid is obviously envious because our own ISP-venture was such a miserable failure.

If we’d had to install content-filters we’d have crashed and burned even sooner than we did. You can’t muck about with people’s bandwidth without expecting some degradation of service and when you’re starting from a server farm built on traded-in PCs there’s even less margin for error. So we won’t be shedding any tears for the struggling ISPs. 

That leaves us hoping the Opposition succeeds in its push to promote personal filters being installed on every single PC. Anything that makes parents think their existing technology is inadequate helps us sell them what their children have been bleating about all year – a brand new drive-away-no-more-to-pay tablet PC. 

Although we stole that marketing campaign from the automobile industry, we’re finding that customers quickly understand the concept, and these days you need every advantage to close a sale.

Admittedly, a few of them get a bit uppity when we explain that the reason there’s no more to pay is that we made the battery charger optional – there’s no pleasing some people.

Gotta go! Customers waiting!