Greetings Editorial readers and others who have survived the apocalypse. Once again the world has failed to end and the front row seats that my parents purchased for me 41 years ago are still only good for watching the banal day-to-day goings on of my own existence. How I crave the opportunity for a little excitement!

Still, on the plus side, the fact that we have all survived Harold Camping’s doomsday prediction without a tsunami, earthquake or meteor hitting the Earth does mean that we get to spend at least one more month looking at communication issues (successful or otherwise) and determining what can be learned from them. So let’s start with Harold Camping himself. Who is this clown and why did so many people believe his demented ravings? What is his connection with the demented ravings of Tiger Airways Australian Managing Director, Crawford Rix and why has NASA been lying to us about what they really photographed on the planet Mars.

Look at that! Only two paragraphs in and conspiracy theorists everywhere are chomping at the bit. It’s the end of the world, the end of an Airline and the end of life on Mars as we know it… or is it?

Harold Camping – Evangelist and Two-Time Predictor of the End of the World

While few people expected the world to end, many went along for the laughable ride, oblivious to the background of the doomsday prognosticator Harold Camping. You see this wasn’t Harold’s first attempt at predicting the rapture – he had a crack at it in September 1994.

Harold Egbert Camping is 89 years old, and lives in Oakland, California (unless he was the only one beamed up) and rarely leaves his home, unless to go to his media station and his work as a Christian-radio broadcaster. He was born in Colorado, but has lived in Northern California for most of his life. He graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in civil engineering in 1942, and has a strong fondness for numbers.

In 1958 he and two others founded the non-profit ministry of Family Stations Inc. Family Radio was the Ministry’s Christian educational network and it expanded over the decades as it broadcast teachings, Bible readings and Christian music. When he was in his 40’s he began hosting his own Open Forum program during the weekends and it is this program which still continues to be broadcast on more than 140 stations in the U.S.A. that provides his major platform.

In 1970, Camping published the Biblical Calendar History, where he proclaimed that the creations of the world happened in 11,013 BC and Noah’s flood, 4990 BC and in 1988 Camping began to proclaim the world’s impending end during his radio program as well in his Bible class. He didn’t yet provide his own prediction but in 1992, he published his book 1994? where he predicted that the world would end, though he wasn’t certain about the year; he was only certain that it would happen sometime soon.

So in 1994, his followers gathered inside Alameda’s Veterans’ Memorial Building to wait for the return of Christ. People dressed themselves in their Sunday best and held their Bibles open faced towards heaven but nothing happened.

Camping said that was just a “preliminary study,” hence the question mark in the title of the book, and he spent the next decade completing that study. In 2002, he announced the end of the church age and claimed that God was no longer blessing and using local churches because of their apostasy and that believers should quit the church. Three years later, he published Time Has an End where he officially began proclaiming that he had recalculated the rapture date to be May 21, 2011.

According to his prediction, around 200 million people were to be raptured at 6 p.m. that day and the rest of us would suffer for five months until Oct. 21, making it the definitive date for complete world obliteration. Among his family members, only his wife of 68 years believed him and none of his six living children, 28 grandchildren and 38 great grandchildren believe in his theories. So why did anyone?

It’s probably best summed up by Keith Bauer, a tractor-trailer driver and Camping follower:

“I was hoping for it because I think heaven would be a lot better than this earth.”

And there it is. A complete nutcase is believed not because he produced a compelling argument or, as many might think, possessed some sort of compelling charisma but because so many people find their own lives so depressing that anything different must be better – even if it is the end of the world.

Now, nobody knows where Camping is, and he has yet to make a formal statement. Camping’s followers are left with dejection and puzzlement which, ironically, only reinforces the conditions that led them to that sad mental state in the first place. There will be another Camping, another prediction, another rapture that fails to materialise and the same people will be buying into it again and again.

And now another nutbar – Crawford Rix from Tiger Airlines

Crawford Rix is the Australian Managing Director of Tiger Airlines and, as such, if the world had ended on the 21st of May he would have far fewer problems than he does now. Tiger has to deal with an incredibly high number of complaints from consumers through state tribunals and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. This is because they suck – as evidenced by the fact that they were served with a ‘show cause’ notice by the Australian Civil Aviation Safety Authority which could have resulted in the airline losing it’s license to fly in Australia.

That means that in addition to providing woeful customer service the authorities are not even sure if Tiger are capable of keeping their planes in the air for a reasonable amount of time i.e. from take-off to landing! Fear not though because our Crawf’ is on to it and Tiger has designed a two-tiered system of handling customer complaints and issues. That’s right – he’s not fixing the problem but fixing the complaints handling process.

A snail-mail option is still available but people are being encouraged to use a new automated online question-and-answer system that Tiger says will take only a few minutes in most cases to lodge an issue for resolution.

If that isn’t enough to have the issue resolved, the airline says it now has customer service staff in its Singapore headquarters and its Australian base in Melbourne to deal with complaints.

“Effectively, we’re an online internet business, so it’s entirely logical that customers are able to interface in this way,” Crawford says.

“We’re trying to make it simple for the customer to do it themselves. We believe the vast majority of the questions and issues customers [have] will be able to be resolved through the interactive system.”

“What this is all about is being able to respond to the customer in a very cost-effective way and to handle queries much more quickly than we would have been able to in the past.”

There is nothing logical about this move from Tiger. They are doing nothing to fix the cause of the complaints and instead have decided that the best way to deal with your complaint about their inflexible, policy-driven impersonal service is to get you to deal with an inflexible, policy-driven impersonal system. The first time it breaks down will remind everyone of the ‘show cause’ notice from the Safety Authority. When did talking to a real person become the complaints handling method of last resort?

Mars and the NASA Conspiracy

What colour is Mars? It’s a simple enough question and if you answered with the simple enough answer of red you would be wrong. It’s brown. You think it’s red because you view it through the atmosphere of the earth making it appear red but in actual fact it is brown. We know this because NASA sent a mission to Mars to photograph its dusty surface and sent those photos back here to us on Earth. And what colour were the photos of Mars? Brown? No, you are not paying attention – they were red. Why? Because NASA doctored the photos to put a bit of a red tint in there and why would they do that? Because NASA want to send a manned mission to Mars and the romance of a trip to the mysterious red planet sells a lot better than sending a rocket to a brown rock.

Like Harold Camping and his followers sometimes symbolism matters more than reality.