HOLIDAY IN HADES? -- Or, more about life in nether world from Our Man in Hades --

Who says things never change in Hades?

To remain competitive with "high-performance" earth-bound products and "excellent" customer service ratings in Paradise, underworld Inferno (affectionately known as "the abyss"), has spruced things up a bit to satisfy growing demands of well-heeled travellers.

A review of HOT press releases, (those emanating from "Hades Office of Tourism"), indicates that major continuous improvement initiatives are now underway.

Big changes are taking place following a comprehensive 360-degree, year-long audit of "Devil-May-Care" brand products and co-branded "Hot-To-Trot" service offerings.

Visitors (from Purgatory) and permanent residents (of Pandemonium) will be pleased to learn that following improvements are being made to make their stay more worry-free and enjoyable.

-- The Department of Highways has announced that it plans to provide better signage warning prospective visitors that, "The Road to Hades is paved with good intentions but due to budgetary cutbacks, visitors are asked to fill in any potholes they come across with their own brand of excuses".

-- The Ministry of Justice has indicated that it intends to remedy lack of peace, order and good government by appointing a Devil's Advocate Support Counsellor for victims of heavenly hopes and delightful dreams who may have slid between many cracks, nooks or crannies commonly found in Hades.

-- The Hades Public Service Commission has announced that it will henceforth abolish inflammatory words like "damnation" from public policy manuals as it has been shown to reduce productivity of bureaucrats and mandarins alike.

-- Pandemonium Hotels & Suites, having read their customer-response cards, are now pleased to launch a "bed of nails" weekend spa special designed to attract a new niche market -- hard-to-please, mud-in-your-eye, pain-in-the-butt clientele.

A few weeks ago I received an email from my ISP company. For those who don't know what that is, it's a company which hosts websites. This particular organisation is very large and very well known. I'll call it 'Wahoo!' The email was to effect that due to an error on their part, Wahoo! had not been billing me for last six months. Since fault was theirs they were going to cut their losses and not charge me.

Very civilized of them to write off back-payments like that, I thought, and then I forgot about it for a week in my usual efficient manner. After all, we were only talking about a few dollars a month. A week after first bland and kindly email another one came. No more Mr Nice Guy. This one announced that Wahoo! intended to delete my site in three days, and would I like to back up my files? Ok, I thought, no problem. I should have backed up my files some time ago; this would teach me a lesson.

It was only when I sat down to begin saving my pages that I realized I didn't know how to do it! I called in a friend who was attending an evening class in computer maintenance, and he couldn't do it either. I should explain here that I started my website two years ago and there were now 112 pages on it. Some of these were link pages and some contained only one image (enlargements of smaller images), but still - a lot of pages.

Having begun in complete ignorance I'd like to think that now I'm almost an expert in designing web pages, or at least my own pages, although I'm not sure I would have started at all if I'd known how much work was involved. On other hand I'm not so good on basic, ordinary computer operations, as I was finding out.