We're all running around like Kermit, arms waving with the Microsoft Outlook down.  And if we're finding it a bit disconcerting with Outlook crashing, I can't even imagine what it would have been like for the kids sitting their year 12 English exam yesterday. Exams are fairly stressful and this is, for some of them, the end of the year and the end of their school lives and so every post is a winning post and they're putting their all into it, and all of a sudden the system crashes. All that work you've done just disappears, vanishes into the ether.  

A number of students were interviewed by the media after the crash and one poor student from Carmel College had written more than 1,400 words in her first essay when the computer froze and all the work was gone. That is that's not good. That is completely and utterly unacceptable. Up to 40,000 students were affected. Some were so discombobulated they couldn't continue with the exam. Others were just fed up and flustered and, you know, they've lost time and they're trying to make it up. Students can apply for derived grades, grades that are based on the work submitted throughout the year if they feel their performance was affected by the outage. And NZQA say they've identified the cause and are taking steps to prevent it happening again as Christian Hawkesby told Mike Hosking this morning. 

"Look, I just want to first emphasize that we are sorry for the disruption that happened to the English school level 2 exams yesterday and want to recognize that it's a really stressful time for students and their parents. We identified an issue during the exam. We worked with our vendor to identify it and resolve it as quickly as we could. The system is back up and running and stable and we had exams through yesterday afternoon. We've worked with the provider and we are testing the system. It is stable. We can do further testing ahead of next week. There are no exams today. We have the largest exam left is next Tuesday and so we're preparing for that. We're also putting contingency in place such that there is paper copies available for that exam to give comfort to students for a situation where there is a contingency.”  

How much comfort would you take from that? I mean it's way too long. You probably switched off as I did after about the first 20 seconds. What a meaningless load of word salad. And could we just dispense with the apologies? Could all the CEOs ignore the media training they've spent a fortune on and just dispense with the apologies? As far as I'm concerned they mean nothing. Absolutely nothing. Because we have heard so many apologies from so many CEOs over so many issues and it's just so much hot air. One can assume, let's all take it as read, that your audience know you didn't mean to. It's just incompetence yet again on your part. And I'm talking to all CEOs here – all the CEOs. I've heard the apologies. It's just a waste of 90 seconds which could be spent explaining to people what went wrong clearly and concisely, not in that word salad, and how they're going to fix it – if the contingency plan is having a Gestetner working overtime to produce duplicate copies of the exam papers, dear Lord.  

Listening to that, I still don't have a clue what the problem was and how they intend to fix it. And listening to that, if I was a parent who had a student about to sit a big exam, I have no confidence that it will last the distance. They've had all year to prepare for this. They know how many students are going to be sitting each exam. This is not an unknowable. This isn't a "well, who would have thought? 40,000 students sitting NCEA level 2 English exam. Where did that come from?" It's just indicative of the level of incompetence across so many government departments. Honestly, when I retire I am going to make it my life's work, for as long as I have breath in my body, to undo all the media training that people have spent a fortune on, government departments have spent taxpayer money on, making these people incomprehensible and strip it right back to words we can all understand. Hiding behind words has become terribly fashionable, either through bumfy meaningless emails full of corporate speak that say nothing or these kind of interviews.  

What did you gain from listening to that? Christian Hawkesby should go back and do Level 2 English and perhaps learn how to speak clearly and concisely. It's not just him, he's the last one in a very long line of people who don't who don't speak clearly, who don't speak plainly, who don't spell out what happened. It's so refreshing when we hear it that we rejoice. Every time we get someone who speaks clearly on this show and tells it like it is, people like Mark Mitchell, we get so many texts going "oh my god, isn't it great to hear somebody speak clearly?" That should be the norm. After listening to that do you have any idea what went wrong? Do you have any confidence that there's going to be no more glitches, whatever it was that went wrong?  

For those of you with young people in your lives, what options do you believe are fair for those who've been affected? I think those who want to should resit. If you've just written 1,400 words, 1,200 words, 1,000 words and they've all gone, you know, that is disconcerting, discombobulating and you're not you're not giving your best self, are you? And yes, there are students who work steadily and constantly throughout the year and they'll be fine from their derived grades. But there are those who pull it out their jacksy at the last minute and produce a stupendous result and probably let that be a lesson to them that you need to work steadily and constantly, but we're not all made the same. Some people save their best for their exams. So I think they should be able to sit it again if they want to. And I swear to goodness, I think anybody who can't concisely say what went wrong in one sentence and what they are doing to ensure it doesn't happen again should lose their job. Simple rule for life.