Recent Comments:
Honda nav system offers weather, user-submitted POI deets {Engadget}
Oct 17th 2006 1:27PM Because 1+TB drives don't exist yet and aren't going to be rugged enough to survive in a car environment anyway.
Day 10 of Engadget Mobile's 30 days of cellphone giveaways {Engadget Mobile}
Feb 23rd 2006 1:54AM One T-Mo MDA please, with sprinkles.
Or the Cingular 8125 if it's unlocked.
Day 4 of Engadget Mobile's 30 days of cellphone giveaways {Engadget Mobile}
Feb 16th 2006 9:47PM One in three thousand. Better than yesterday.
C'mon baby, daddy needs a new phone!
Day 2 of Engadget Mobile's 30 days of cellphone giveaways {Engadget Mobile}
Feb 15th 2006 12:55AM I could definitely use one of those. All I have now is a 2-year-old Nokia 3300 that's very quickly going south on me.
Sprint employee refuses to divulge kidnapped baby's GPS info {Engadget}
Jan 12th 2006 6:43PM
There's plenty of blame to go around.
First, I've worked in phone tech support (I'm out now, thank God) and I can tell you that front-line customer service / technical support is about the worst job you can get besides flipping burgers. Average employee retention period is less than a year. In fact, when I interviewed with the last place, they wanted a one-year commitment as part of the interview process. Also, training is usually abysmal, too short (Often as little as 1-2 weeks) and not nearly informative enough. The first month out of training, new techs/CSRs almost always have to be re-trained, and it usually takes three to twelve months before a trainee is proficient enough to not have to put every (other) caller on hold while they go ask someone higher up.
Many companies like it that way. If they can't shuffle their customer support off to another company to cut costs, who will in turn outsource it to India or Guatemala because they get paid by the phone call and can pay people $5 a day, the company will hire at about $7.50-9.00 an hour and doing so will get them people who don't know squat but need a job and don't want to go home every night reeking of McFries.
Second, supervisors are nearly non-existent in most front-line call centers. They're schmoozing their boss's boss in an attempt to climb the corporate ladder; they're stuck in endless meetings because they received no training when "promoted" to supervisor; or they're screwing off because they did their time as a phone jockey and now have "more important" things to do. In some places it's so bad that second-level techs (Who are the same as first-level techs except they get stuck in a "resource" queue or resource pod in addition to taking inbound calls) are instructed to state that THEY ARE supervisors and that there's no one above them to whom the customer can speak.
In "good" companies, they have a queue specifically setup to handle law-enforcement calls, but often the techs are not told about it until they go to "resource" with their first call. It still boggles my mind how they can't seem to devote 5 minutes during a 1-2 week training course to saying: "If someone calls up claiming to be a law-enforcement officer, dispatcher, etc. transfer them to queue 5555 (Or whatever)." Often the company will also have a direct-inbound number for law enforcement to call, so they can bypass the hold on the front-line queue.
Finally, I have a son and my sister has two children. At no time have I EVER left my son in an unattended car, let alone with the engine running. My son is my pride and joy, and my job as a father is first and foremost to protect and nurture him. I always require that he hold my or his mother's hand when crossing a street or parking lot; I always keep an eye on him in a store, ANY store. Five seconds is all a kidnapper needs to take a child. I NEVER leave him alone in the car. It's part and parcel with being a parent. My sister loads her children into the car simultaneously for similar reasons.
And really, it was the older child that needed to be in the car in the first place (to go to school), so there wasn't a reason to load the baby until the older child was at least buckling up (And any child who is old enough to go to school--even pre-school--is old enough to know how to at least partially strap themselves into their car seat).
Switched On: The Year of the Switch {Engadget}
Dec 21st 2005 5:16PM What? Oh come on. Are all of you too ADD to remember the Apple Switch commercials?
