I can sympathise with Christina Lim's plight and also agree with her that the online 'digital" format launched by our local newspapers was done with no pre-planned contingency measures for trouble-shooting. Plainly speaking and realistically, in our country, what is?

I just had an agonising time with Astro on the exchange of their so-called 'smart cards'. I had called them through the toll number and a digital recording kept robotically asking me to press 'one', press 'two' etc and at the end of the recording it says, 'There are 30 phone calls ahead of you'.

I called the courier service and I had to hear the same format over and over again. There was no human response.

Everybody had jumped onto the digital bandwagon for anything less than that will be considered primitive. Ironically, regardless of this push for the ICT age, our managers have little thought for foreseeable IT hitches or problems like the one Christina faces.

Companies provide emergency telephone numbers that we either cannot reach or if we do have no human responses. Webpages are missing, ATMs that don't slip out ringgit notes, LRTs that get stuck in tunnels, office lifts hanging between floors, digitalised traffic lights that don't govern traffic flow, digital cameras that don't register snatch thieves ... use your imagination for more examples.

I suspect our country has some 'taboos' linked to the digital concept. I suggest Lim should terminate her online subscription immediately which might send a 'non-digital' message to the owners and hopefully prompt them into some human action.