I’m always amazed at how Israelis can do so well raising money or selling stuff abroad with such poor English. Especially people, like angels who are trusting high-tech people with their money; angels are very picky when it comes to deciding with whom to invest money, and they make judgements based on all sorts of criteria that are more impression than fact (I got this from more than one angel).

So imagine my shock when an angel investor who has put money in a number of companies – ie he is a person of some means – makes a presentation in front of about 100 people, and in his slide show puts up a cute picture of a bear, with this caption:

“a vision without an action is mearly a dream”

Just looking at that sentence I can find five things wrong with it (“mearly” is the least of it!). This is a person who interfaces with lots of American and European investors, and you have to figure that if he could make such a mistake in a presentation he had to prepare for (he was invited, planned out his presentation, used PowerPoint to make the show, etc.), he’s probably making mistakes in spelling and grammar left and right!

Okay, maybe the guy was in a hurry. But what about the many websites I see by Israeli companies with atrocious English? Like this, from a website for a company that is a fairly large player in Israeli commercial VoIP (ie supplies equipment and services to many integrators):

Telephony and telephony related systems based on Voice over IP (Voip) technology had reached the stage in which it could be used in any business in order to reach maximum efficiency. . Voip based soft-switches as well as small office PBX’s are becoming to be the natural choice for businesses all over the world, supplying its owners with a vast variety of telephony functions without the burdening expenses and costs of the old ‘traditional’ analog phone systems.

Besides being boring, that text has several grammatical errors. It’s on their website, as part of their “window to the world.” And there are plenty of sites with much worse texts which are obviously translations of their Hebrew sites (some of them look like they ran the Hebrew through Google Translate and forgot to clean it up). If they’re not careful with the way they present themselves to the world, are they going to be careful with you, the customer?

In my Jpost article today, I talked about the alternatives to Israeli phone ex-monopoly Bezeq. While only Bezeq can still offer traditional PSTN phone service, a host of challengers have arisen to provide consumers with broadband-based home phone services, usually on a POP (pay one price, like at Great Adventure) basis. Until customers can connect to the internet at more than the current 8mb/s (most people here have 5mb/s or less), I wrote that transferring for your home phone service to the internet – which for various reasons is dicey enough in Israel (the infrastructure sometimes hems and haws) – might not be such a good idea, at least until Bezeq’s NGN fast data transfer infrastructure (reputed to provide up to 50mb/s capabilities) reaches your neighborhood. And the truth is, Bezeq’s prices and service aren’t all that terrible.

Now. Now they’re not so terrible. As one reader commented on the Jpost site, Bezeq’s prices and service aren’t so terrible now because the company has five competitors breathing down its neck, who are actually having an impact on its customer base. For me, with a network of five or six home computers that are always on and active, downloading, processing, or presenting and playing this or that, adding internet-based home phone service would be just another strain on the system (I’ve been down that road anyway, with both Skype – which usually behaves, but sometimes doesn’t – and a dedicated softphone, complete with VoIP box). But for  any folks who aren’t heavy web surfers, saving 50 or 100 shekels a month on their phone bills by switching away from Bezeq. Many are doing so. It makes lots of sense – and can be a very satisfying experience.

That’s because everybody has their “Bezeq story.” You can’t really blame them for the crappy service in the “old days,” before 1984, when the culprit was the government-controlled Ministry of Communications. But you can blame them for the crappy service after 1984, when the Ministry spun-off Bezeq into a separate – but still government-controlled – enterprise.

Even just a few years ago, on the eve of its becoming a private company, Bezeq was still mired in its old ways. Example: You have been able to pay your Bezeq bill by credit card anytime, day or night, over an automated system for nearly a decade. You call their service number (199), press some buttons, and input your credit card number using your keypad. The process is pretty efficient – now. Until about a year and a half or so ago, however, it was much easier to call during business hours and get a real person; that virtual cashier would go on and on for eons, making you repeat input, checking and rechecking things.

Perhaps they planned the system like that for uptight Israelis who expect to be given a hard time by the people they pay for services, but what should have been an easy input-based bill paying exercise turned out to require your full attention for as long as ten minutes! Note that this situation prevailed even during a substantial period when Bezeq was a private company. They’ve cleaned up the input manager now, and it now takes about three minutes to go through the process of changing things.

But that’s not my Bezeq story – instead, this is it: About seven years ago (2002) I was getting ready to leave with my wife and kids for a family trip to U.S. relatives. The flight was to leave quite early, I remember, and we were up long before dawn making last minute preparations. Then it hit me – I forgot to pay the phone bill, which was already overdue by a couple of days! But where was the bill? Already edging on towards late and trying to take care of a plethora of last minute details, I search and searched, but couldn’t find the bill.

When you call Bezeq from your home phone, the computer identifies your phone number and account  – and that feature was active in the 2002 version of the Bezeq online payment system. So no problem, right? You don’t really need a bill; call the automatic payment system, let it identify your account  via your phone number, let it tell you how much you owe, and pay.

That’s the way you would expect it to work – but not at Bezeq circa 2002. While the system could identify who you were, it couldn’t tell you how much you owed! You had to have the bill in front of you in order to input the full – exact, down to the agora – you were supposed to pay. What if you didn’t have the bill, or wanted to pay in advance? Could you, before, say, going out of town and having lost your bill, input a clearly inflated sum like NIS 500 (instead of the NIS 200 the bill usually was), and let them hold it for you on account?

You could try – as I did – and be told that the payment had been recorded in the system. And you would go on your merry way, confident that Mamale Bell was watching out for you. And you wouldn’t even realize you had a problem until you sauntered back home three weeks later and picked up the phone – and heard nothing!

Why nothing? Because Bezeq had cut off your service. And why had they cut off your service? Because you didn’t pay your bill. But Ms. Bezeq lady, you beg, I lost the bill and input much MORE than I owed, so you would get your money! It’s just not fair! To which the Bezeq lady would reply, in more or less words, “tough.” To get your service back, you had to pay your bill PLUS a cutoff fee, EVEN THOUGH your payment was seemingly accepted at the time of payment by the system!

And you, left holding the bag, seethe with rage. And you tell the Bezeq lady, “All right for you. But one day the government is going to allow competition, and on the first day they do, I am dumping you for anyone else that can offer home phone service, even if they charge more money than you!”

So much for dreams of sweet revenge. Nowadays, it would seem that the revolution is over, that Bezeq has joined the family of humanity and positive human relations. But people like us remember – and our day will come yet!