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When I worked at Earthlink, we all got called into a super important meeting one day. Everyone, callcenter-wide, which was the unmistakable sign of something big. Some higher-up HR person spent 30 minutes explaining to us that the "Human Resources" department was to be referred to as "People Services." This change was explained to be for reasons of political correctness. The department was ONLY to be referred to by this name. Using the phrase "Human Resources" would no longer be tolerated for any reason. It was oddly threatening. Of course there was only one logical question to be asked here. "So does this mean we're afraid of offending the people at this company who aren't human?"... Somehow the HR lady didn't even understand the question. Later they downsized entire departments by raising their weekly minimum call-volume requirements to just above the levels the best people had been able to obtain on their best weeks. However they had been giving out awards for excellent performance all along, and oddly didn't make any changes to that program. The end result was that I lost my job for performing poorly for the past two weeks, while I had already earned a little plaque for outstanding performance during one of those same two weeks. Apple was another matter. Working in design, development, or any of those places might be great. Working in their tech support callcenter is not. Tech support has one goal above all others, and if you have one of the awful managers, one goal only. That goal is sales. If you call in to Apple for tech support on your Mac, the tech your are talking to has sales quotas to meet. My own supervisor made us write up a written report explaining exactly why we failed to make a sale on each call where we didn't sell anything. If they called just to ask how to empty the trash, we drat well better get them to buy something too, or else. When I started, that actually wasn't the case. If it had been, I wouldn't have taken the job. They started sneaking sales in slowly, and eventually snuck everything else out. Our weekly meetings were ONLY about sales, and bringing up technical questions was considered somewhat off-topic. We were exactly like the sales department, except we also had to fix computers, and we didn't get any commission. In the end I lost that job because I didn't meet sales quotas. The next company, an ISP/Communications company called O1, was... incredible is technically the right word here. It was a small company, yet the internal divisions were actively at war. We weren't allowed to even speak to the 'enemy' divisions. The recording on our phone message told people to visit our site, and then recited the wrong URL. I noticed this right away, and customers complained of it all the time. I mentioned it to my boss, but he explained that fixing it would have required speaking to another department, so I was never to mention it again. My actual yearly review involved being called into a room my my manager and supervisor, the manager proceeded to make beeping noises at me and told me I was a robot, and then they laughed until I walked out. They had to downsize a position. I was still (for some unknown reason) working hard and doing everything that needed to be done. The rest of the team sat around talking about their World of Warcraft guild all day and playing Adventure Quest. There were actually 4 supervisors in the department over 2 non-supervisors... In the end though, they had to pick me to lay off, mostly because the other possible choice was their guild's Shaman, and they needed him for raids. I promised myself then that if my only employment option in the future was ever to work in a callcenter doing tech support, I would do the honorable thing and kill myself instead. I absolutely loving mean that. I would rather die than work in a callcenter. I work for a printing company now. I'm currently the entire I.T. department, half of the data processing department, a third of the digital print division, and I think I'm also security. I run the security systems, anyway. I'm not in a callcenter though, so it's by far an improvement. We recently bought a smaller, failing company though, and they're causing issues. They seem to believe that they're in charge now for some reason, and seem to lack any semblance of organization or common sense. Today the account coordinator from the acquired company told me she needed me to do a task. Data entry... which we don't do. At all. At a client's request, she wants me to go through a series of trade-show catalogs and take down the contact info of every person or company on the West coast, apparently to make a list for them to send unsolicited junk-mail out to. This sounds shady to me, not sure if it's entirely legal even. She seemed to want me to hurry up and get it done by tomorrow. I did some quick math, and pointed out that it would take roughly 233 hours to complete this. So that's about 6 week IF I also ignored all of my other duties, a lot more if I didn't. Her answer was just to get it done right away. I talked to the actual owner about this one though, and he qualified it as "completely insane," so I think we are going to be having a talk with her tomorrow. Robot Hobo fucked around with this message at 09:24 on Apr 22, 2010 |
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Apr 22, 2010 09:08
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WarLocke posted:I read so many posts where this happens. Most of this occurred because they started outsourcing calls to India. At the time we were completely swamped with calls, and the higher-ups assured us that these overseas callcenters were only in addition to us, not in any way meant to replace us. Nobody was dumb enough to trust that statement, but what could we do either way? This led to several things. When the India callcenter came online, we were to act as their helpdesk. This was in the support-by-chat department that I had worked hard to get into. (to get off the phones) What this means is that if one of the techs in India ran into a problem, we had to talk them through the entire fix as if we were doing it. But with a second person and some language barrier issues in-between. All while still taking our minimum 3 customer chats at the very same time. (and taking only 3 at once was frowned upon heavily) These internal helpdesk support chats did not count for our call-taking stats, and were CONSTANT. You can guess what that did to our numbers, which in turn were used to explain to us how much better the India centers were performing compared to us. It was almost elegant in a way, like a ballet of corporate cruelty. Here's the real gold-standard of fuckery though. The primo corporate poo poo. People from my callcenter were offered the chance to volunteer to go to India for a while (6 weeks I think) to train the new techs there in-person. In many ways it sounded like a good deal. A free trip to a far-away land, some of your living expenses paid while there, and possibly most importantly it was implied heavily that doing something this big and important was a fast-track to promotions. (or at least much better job security) "I went to India for the company" should sound good on a performance review after all. The techs went to India, and all was well. For about the first third of the trip. Then they got their pink-slips. They were informed that their jobs at home had been downsized while they were away. So while this groups still had jobs for the duration of this trip, the moment they touched down in the USA again, they were out on the street. There was nobody to talk to about this, HR and any managers they had previously were on the other side of the planet now. On top of that, it's sure not easy to hand out resumes and go to job interviews when you're stuck 8000 miles away from home. ----- Earthlink also had the "Carnivore" incident. Back around 2000, the FBI had a new and controversial toy called Carnivore. It wasn't an especially complicated system. It was an NT workstation with packet-sniffing software on it, intended to be plugged directly into the mainframe of an ISP or large network, entirely to give the FBI an easy way to spy on people. There were huge arguements over the legality and constitutionality of such a program at the time. Earthlink took a stand. They told the FBI that Carnivore would not be allowed on their network, and that they would not help violate their customers' privacy. They even started basing all of their ad campaigns and corporate image around this concept of user privacy above all else. They positioned themselves as the shining white knight of the internet age. Technically, they did tell the FBI that they wouldn't allow Carnivore... anymore. The Carnivore system was installed quietly long before Earthlink took their stand. We techs were told about it, then shortly afterward it was made clear that this was an error, and we should not have been told anything. The instructions from then on were that if any customer asked us about monitoring or Carnivore specifically (it was in the news a lot at the time) that we were to tell them in no uncertain terms that no such system was in place. If we admitted that it was actually there, we would be fired on the spot. So our options were telling blatant lies or standing the unemployment line. What most people might not know about Carnivore is that it was poo poo. Besides the issues with ethics, morality, legality, it also had the disadvantage of just being terrible software running on extremely inadequate hardware. The only effect I could observe directly was that when it was on, our mail servers went from clean-sailing to multi-hour delays. So we had a month or two of calls through the roof because this packet sniffer couldn't sniff fast enough. According to some friends working server-side it was also based on older protocols than we were using (I didn't get a lot of detail on that bit) which meant every server it touched started taking severe performance hits and crashing over and over. So after a while, Earthlink did take a stand and tell the FBI to take a hike, but only because it was crippling their equipment and driving customers away in droves. (back to AOL, mostly) Since legally nobody was supposed to know about it in the first place, Earthlink could say they had never allowed the FBI in at all, and nobody was in a position to say otherwise. Earthlink got some great publicity out of it, telling everyone how they had stood up to the FBI even to protect their customers' sacred privacy, and it was all based on bald-faced lies. Robot Hobo fucked around with this message at 19:44 on Apr 22, 2010 |
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Apr 22, 2010 18:58
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Cheesus posted:Would it be an unfair guess that on top of this, the same people had to liason with in the callcenter could not/would not remember what you just explained to them and in many cases you ended up in an endless cycle of answering the same questions, over and over again? melon cat posted:Nice. Ever have them burst out in cackles while you're on the phone with a client, and when you ask them to keep it down they shoot you the dirty look? If we tried to ask them to keep it down because it became impossible to hear ANYTHING else, we got a dirty look and/or told to mind our own drat business.
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Apr 22, 2010 23:19
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KevinCow posted:I've had a corporate job for about a month now, and I have just one question for those of you who have been doing it for years: How have you not shot yourself yet? I can already feel it draining my soul away. "This is your life, Scott, answering phones to talk to assholes" "Scott, if you hate at least 9 hours of each day, why do you bother with any of them?" "Keep working hard Scott, I'm sure you'll be rewarded with... termination. Again." "You talk to a hundred people a day, and they all hate you without even knowing you..." "95% of everything you create will end up in someone's trash can as soon as they get it." But any particular game seems to only work for so long. Then you have to find another one. And another. My Steam account is solid proof of this theory.
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Apr 24, 2010 02:12
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Scurvy posted:Edit: it's 4:56pm and now he wants to have a meeting about starting a google adword campaign to generate traffic to HIS BLOG.
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Apr 26, 2010 23:13
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the posted:Just once I want to offer them something besides a generic response  "Hi, how are YOU?!" "Terribly awful." "I'm good, THANKS!" "Hi, how are YOU?!" "I ate a penguin." "I'm good, THANKS!" "Hi, how are YOU?!" "All hail Satan." "I'm good, THANKS!" "Hi, how are YOU?!" "Cantaloupe." "I'm good, THANKS!"At this point I recognize who is likely to try such small-talk and avoid them. Or occasionally I take off in a sprint just as I get to them, which is oddly never questioned... after all, whatever I'm doing must be important if I'm in such a hurry. KevinCow posted:This thread really isn't helping me relieve the feeling that the rest of my life is going to be a complete waste of time and energy. Robot Hobo fucked around with this message at 15:29 on Apr 27, 2010 |
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Apr 27, 2010 15:27
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"Oh god, help me. My life is an endless spiral of monotony and repition whose only savior is a bullet to the brain."
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Weiner Hog posted:But it does serve a purpose. I suppose you've never done it, eh? My brain just doesn't work that way. If there's a question, by brain wants to answer it. Which means while I technically know I should say "I'm ok", sometimes I falter and stop to think of a real answer. By the time I have one, the other person is either gone or staring at me funny thinking I'm trying to be a sarcastic jerk. Or I'll answer "How are you today?" with a cheerful sounding "You too!"... which goes completely unnoticed but makes me feel stupid just the same. I'm never on the other side of this. If I ask "How are you?", it's only going to be because I'm genuinely interested. Which, to be honest, is rare in most situations. Plus, I'm far more comfortable just paying attention and picking up contextual clues. (Her eyes are moving a bit fast, she's leaning slightly on one foot as if to take a step, her sentences are short... she's in a hurry. Best not to bother her) If there is something major, it'll either be apparent or they'll just tell me. If it's minor or personal, it's really none of my business.
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Apr 27, 2010 18:31
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KM Scorchio posted:Oh, and they came up on this while on a "Directors Retreat" on a private island they rented out somewhere for 5 days.  I demand to talk to your supervisor! Well, I would, but he's out of town right now. Then give me your manager. Also out of town. I am sorry. Fine, smartass, give me anyone in management. Sorry, I can't. They're all at this business conference. Every last one of them. You lying poo poo! They would never all leave at the same time, you expect me to believe your bullshit? I wouldn't expect you to believe it, but it is the truth.
Robot Hobo fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Apr 27, 2010 |
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Apr 27, 2010 19:58
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Sundae posted:If I worked my entire career here, as long as I lived, I would never reach the vacation-accrual granted to entry-level employees at our french sites. They start at 7 weeks, apparently, and our maximum after 30 years is 6 weeks. We start with 3 weeks and gain another week every decade. We don't get sick days though. None. At all. If we're out sick it either comes out of saved vacation time, or we don't get paid. I saved up all my vacation time my first year, so I could plan a real vacation for once. It was a good plan. Then I ended up getting the drat swine flu and was out for a week, which used up all of my saved vacation time plus left me with a couple days unpaid on top of that. That was in Spring. I managed to save up all of my vacation time from then on and had enough to take two whole paid days off for my Honeymoon in early November. Which put me back to zero, of course. The only times in the past decade that I've had longer than a four-day weekend off work were when I was unemployed. Which somehow feels like the opposite of being on vacation. I just checked my pay stub, I'm back up to 16.5 whole hours of vacation time saved up. That's two days and thirty minutes of pure vacation time, and it only took me around 6 months to save it up. Yee haw. USA! USA! US 
Robot Hobo fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Apr 28, 2010 |
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Apr 28, 2010 22:35
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Dead Cow posted:All this talk about vacation time reminded me to tell you all about how my friend got fired from his job... When I worked at Apple as a tech, in two years I went through four supervisors. Three good, and then as you would guess the last was the bad one. My Aunt, who was a pretty close part of the family, died. I asked for the day off to go to her funeral. I put in the request, my supervisor approved it, and I went. All was good. Nearly a month later I got called into a one-on-one with this supervisor. She pointed out now that bereavement leave only covered immediate family. I pointed out that the guidelines didn't actually state what the limit was regarding funeral leave. I had submitted it for her approval with all of this information very clearly stated, and she could have questioned or denied it at any time. I gave her all of the facts, and she chose to approve it. Her stance was that even though she reviewed and approved it herself, that didn't mean it was ok. I told her to just deduct it from my vacation time, or not pay me for the day. After all, no harm had been done. She refused, and RETROACTIVELY marked me down as a no-call/no-show for the day, because technically I had not come in or called on that day to explain why I wasn't there. This was an offense that they could fire you for on-the-spot, on the first offense. She didn't fire me then. She waited a month or two and then fired me over a combination of my poor attendance (spotless record before that) and not meeting my sales quotas. They were expressly forbidden from firing anyone over sales quotas, since we weren't actually supposed to have them on the goddamn tech support floor, but she used my poor attendance as a loophole, referring to my poor sales as "insubordination." (her explanation was that I didn't obey when she told me to sell more) Robot Hobo fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Apr 28, 2010 |
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Apr 28, 2010 23:55
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Umiapik posted:Do some people really only get 5 loving DAYS holiday a year in their full-time jobs?!? There are businesses in the USA that count their employee's annual leave in HOURS?!?!!!  Note the line for sick time accumulated this year. ...Notice how it doesn't exist? Yeah. That 5 days per year is ALSO my sick-time. I'm head of I.T. (ok, I'm the entire I.T. department) at a printing company of around 100 employees. I'm also one of two people who handle data processing, which is required before anything can be printed. There's any number of other things I'm responsible for on top of that. This is full time work, and often more. Last month I ended up working a 19 days in a row before I got a day off. So this isn't a part-time job flipping Big Macs.
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Apr 29, 2010 22:21
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Solkanar512 posted:For you non-US goons reading this, what would happen if your government decided to let employers simply fire people with no warning and no reason, and then try to prevent them from obtaining unemployment benefits?
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May 1, 2010 19:04
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Sundae posted:OFFICE SPEAK(c) of the Day! "Managers will be having face-offs with lower-tier colleagues on Tuesday and Wednesday to communicate to you what your path in the future company is, and whether you're a Go Forward employee or not." Corporate speak is the linguistic equivalent of a Lovecraftian lurking horror. Robot Hobo fucked around with this message at 23:25 on May 3, 2010 |
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May 3, 2010 23:23
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seakindliness posted:What usually happens to people who have medical emergencies and have no sick days to use? Do they not get paid for the days they had to take off? Are they let go? I can apply my vacation time to that so I get the money, but that means no vacation. That's what happened last year. I had been saving up all of my vacation time for nearly a year, and had a little over 30 hours saved up. Then I got the goddamn swine flu around March and was out for a week. I couldn't afford to just not get paid for that week, so there went all of my vacation time, plus an additional day or so of just not being paid. And NONE of this is guaranteed by any laws here. Companies have no legal requirement to give any time off at all. (well, unless I became pregnant... not bloody likely) They can, and will, explain that they give this 'generous' amount of vacation time out of the kindness of their hearts, and that you should be thankful for getting anything at all. Robot Hobo fucked around with this message at 08:43 on May 4, 2010 |
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May 4, 2010 08:33
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seakindliness posted:No, no, don't look at Canada, England, Australia or any of those other silly nations... Here's the mandatory minimums as of 2006.
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May 4, 2010 16:53
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2ndclasscitizen posted:gently caress, my old evals were our supervisors coming along with the checklist of stuff we should be able to do in order to our job. Quick 1/2hr chat, and a few drills running through it all to demonstrate what we can do. Done. I skipped that story in my earlier ramble because I figured nobody was going to believe it.
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May 4, 2010 17:14
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Solkanar512 posted:So can I ask those who are reading this and are against unions, why? I promise not to jump down your throat, flood you with data or generally be a dick. I just want to hear why. Terms: - Hospital chain agrees that it is not allowed to discriminate in hiring or advancement based on race or sex. (which was already the law, so this technically meant nothing at all to the bargain because they had to do it anyway) - ... that's it. And as a complete coincidence, all of the hospital employees representing the union at the bargaining table got an additional 5 weeks of vacation that year and a bonus. I hope the bonus was paid in silver pieces.
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May 4, 2010 17:57
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fosborb posted:Windows XP is the least of my problems. IE 6, Office 2002, and Lotus Notes 7. And that's not even touching the decades old proprietary admin systems.
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May 5, 2010 18:48
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Defghanistan posted:I am sitting at a users desk (Jane's in this example) working on the PC or something, and someone walks by and says "Hi Jane! You look different today!" followed by snickering as they think they've just made the funniest joke in history. Of course, this does cause issues sometimes anyway. We acquired another similar company a couple months back. It's been a goddamn nightmare. One of the people we picked up as part of that acquisition tried joking with me yesterday when yet another one of their systems caused a major problem.  "I bet you think 'Wow, everything just went to hell when those new people showed up!' Hahahah" "Yes." "... um" "Did you need something?"
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May 6, 2010 00:39
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GreatGreen posted:everybody knows that if you can operate something as hard as them computers, a fridge should be easy! All it has to do is make stuff cold, after all! A computer can do TONS of stuff and apparently you've got that down just fine. I have no idea what I'm doing half of the time, and I have made this fairly clear. I didn't go around saying I'm a technical genius and network admin pro, I was very honest about that. I didn't even study I.T. in school, and I have no significant technical certifications. But here I am. So I end up fixing any and all problems in a 150+ computer environment mostly by a combination of detective work, really quick studying online, and a fair amount of guessing. - Setting up and maintaining an Exchange server? Sure, ok. (I'd never even seen one before) - Reinstalling finicky, ancient, proprietary software for plate drivers? (Um... ok.) - Setting up and managing in-house web-servers? (What?... er... ok.) - Managing active directory for the entire company? (Active directory? I've HEARD of it, yes) - Troubleshooting and improving a roughly million-dollar digital color press system? (Are you crazy?) - Working on an automated online store? (How do those even work?) - Building webpages for clients. (... WHAT? With my experience of approximately none?) - Professional graphic design. (remember that Graphic design degree I explained that I never finished?) - Running and maintaining a full server room with 20+ servers... Somehow I've managed to actually do all of this. No loving idea how, to be perfectly honest.
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May 6, 2010 19:51
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RedMagus posted:Now you're got no job, no check coming in, no safety net except family... Robot Hobo fucked around with this message at 21:34 on May 6, 2010 |
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May 6, 2010 21:31
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At Earthlink we had a "Health Fair" one day. Really, it was just a few people from our health insurance provider there trying to talk us into going with the more expensive versions of the policy. To entice us into coming to this fair, they put out cookies, had balloons, hung up cheap decorations... and had management make attendance mandatory. There was also a free raffle to win fabulous prizes. (also mandatory) I won the raffle. The health insurance people gave me, as my prize: A big book of holistic & folk remedies. My professional health insurance company was giving me a book on how to cure any and all illnesses using folk medicine and old-wives' tales. I asked about this, looking for any hint of irony from them, but no. In fact, the insurance-shill I talked to said she personally loved that book and used it whenever she had any problems. Yep, that made me feel confident about my health benefits. Robot Hobo fucked around with this message at 00:21 on May 7, 2010 |
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May 7, 2010 00:14
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Cup of Hemlock posted:I'm sitting in the kitchen trying to zone out and one of my co-workers literally just danced while singing "Friday! Friday!" ... or maybe that's just me. Also, gently caress, why are we still using paper timecards? What the hell. Actually, I had to repair a business-critical 25mhz 486sx computer yesterday, so I'm not even going to bother asking that question.
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May 21, 2010 16:37
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