Slashdot Mirror
ISP's Slapping Techs For Lending A Hand
Mike writes "Broadband Reports is running a story about how several large ISP's have reprimanded, even fired techs who offer support in BBR's forums in their free time. BellSouth is the latest ISP to forbid any official tech support representation. Instead of sculpting PR guidelines for techs to follow, they're
scaring them into submission."
I worked for a dial up ISP, I did techsupport, I would aways go way out for the customer and I would help fix all the problems they were having with out service. ALot of times I got offers to go to their house and fix their computer, but I always told them I couldnt. But I also Build and fixed computers on the side and I recommended this ISP to alot of people. So one time on the phone I was talking to someone I build a computer for and I guess the manager heard me talking about the computer I built for them over the phone, and word got to the owner and I was fired. They also got mad at me for telling people they needed a new HARDWARE based modem. I had alot of calls that people complained about disconnections and slow connection rates. SO I would recommened them to buy a USR hardware based modem, for some reason the ISP I worked for didnt like this so I would always get in trouble. Im glad I dont work for that company any more, they were more into making a profit then helping their customers.
Oh well..
keanmarine.com
Companies just want customers to go through the traditionial support lines in order to provide statistics about problems. If everyone uses BBR's forums, then the company doesn't have statistics about problems with it's modems, then it doesn't know to issues patches or not.
Seems common sense to me...
Must have been a slow news day. I love it when people report on an ongoing trend as if it is "New" all of a sudden. What is their next news flash? That moisture, when it falls from the sky in the form of rain, tends to get things wet?
I worked for a dial-up ISP for several years. In 1999 they closed our forums so that the techs could not answer questions that way. The only way after that to get tech support was to call us or to send an E-mail. No public forums allowed. At the time it was justified by saying that we were only following an industry trend.
What this article should have pointed out is that the shutting of access to a help forum has more to do with the disinegration of the item being supported. You only restrict access if their is a problem. This is a bigger indicator that the broadband networks are overloaded and are starting to self destruct more than it is a new indicator of customer service. Look for some major system failures in the next year (like anyone with any industry knowledge didn't already know that).
Papa Legba come and open the gate
I can sort of understand this. From my skimming of the article, it looks like the employees were offering their time in an official capacity while off hours. This is somewhat of a no-no, because then the employees are presenting themselves as representatives of their employer, during a time which they are not at work. This could potentially cause all sorts of problems for the company, since the employees won't be working within the offical support model framework that the company uses. (eg: Solution for X is Y, etc.)
This is akin to an employee offering up advice to people on the street corner, off hours, saying that it's the offical position of his employer. It would introduce all sorts of legal headaches if something gets broken, someone gets misinformed, etc.
I fail to see anything in this article that says that employees cannot offer tech support off hours, it just says that they can't do it and say it's the stance of their employer, as indicated by "As of December 31, BellSouth employees will not be allowed to lend a hand in any official capacity." So what's to keep someone from helping out without saying it's their company's line? Nothing.
I've spent alot of time participating in TiVo forums. Glad that TiVo is a little more farsighted in this area. There are quite a few TiVo employees on the TiVo boards, and the always are able to provide the best information.
I can't imagine this... I've been a technician for about a year and a half. I think I got the job *because* I helped people in my spare time. I know for a fact my employer went to google groups and did a search on my name ... They must have put something really potentially damaging (to the business) in their posts?
FLR
By a tech support company in Toronto the second day on the job. The company itself was chin deep in the Snow White virus. The people there were clueless outside of their tiny domain of expertise.
I described the letter promoting it to some people working there so they'd know what to avoid, trying to help you see, and this girl went to management and they fired me.
When the word got back to the agency that sent me there THEY fired me. Twice in one day, a personal best.
I'm not making this up.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
I think another part of the problem here is that legal business contracts exist (outsourcing) for various types of 'support'. For example, the tech person at an ISP is basically there to assist with ISP related issues. Operating system issues are a HUGE industry and are genereally contracted to other companies, through the vendor of the operating system. That's where the potential liability issue comes into play. Unfortunately for most consumers, the contracts include service level agreements which restrict the amount of time a tech should spend on any given issue, the end result being that techs feel pressured to get through calls as quickly as possible, which affects quality of service actually provided, and gives the consumer the impression that the tech just wants to get off the phone.
Excuse me for babbling there.
First of all, the employers need to get all their support personnel to sign NDAs. I worked tech support for a small regional ISP and we were not allowed to tell people what brand of AS we used (this could change), the speed of our uplink, the model of our gateway router, details of our network map, etc. What's wrong with that? (I should mention that we also always recommended hardware-based modems and customers could bring in their PC for connection troubleshooting FOR FREE. This was a great ISP.)
Second, though, these tech support people should know better than to identify themselves as employees of the ISP. That makes it sound like it's official company policy when it's really just some guy saying "try this... it might help".
Recently, I had a very interesting conversation on the phone with the Verizon Residential DSL support people. So I call up; I realize (due to factors of age and gender) I don't "sound like a geek" but I am. After a few minutes the tech realized he was conversing with a fellow techie, and we worked together to solve my problem (him using Verizon's proprietary tools and me using RoaringPenguin's pppoe and standard Linux TCP/IP tools). He was quite nice and we even had an ongoing side-discussion about running Linux on the PowerPC architecture while we worked to solve the problem.
Then it came time to hand off the problem to Verizon's internal tech support team, since it became obvious that it was a systemic problem affecting people in my area (or at least me, but we determined that the problem was clearly on their end, not mine). At this point, my friend tech apologized, and warned me that this report might not go anywhere-- since I was not running Windows on my box. Apparently, internal tech support only honors reports from people running Windows...
It's just another example of how the legions of PHBs running the telecom field (and the dot-com field, as I can testify from having worked far too long in said field) are trying to regulate everything in the support process. It's all about the Benjamins, and these people believe that by regulating, and restricting, and prohibiting everything-- to the point of "scripting" common tech support dialogs and replacing human operators with "automatic phone support systems", they can make more money.
They may be right, they may be wrong. In any case, I don't like it...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Basically any company with a big enough apparatus wants to control its public image, and it can't do that if its rank-and-file representatives are speaking when they're not spoken to.
Sprint PCS squelched one such representative who was participating in alt.cellular.sprintpcs. Over the four or five months she hung out in the newsgroup (as a publicly known SPCS employee, but not representing the company in any official capacity), she made a number of customers happy by offering solutions to their problems, or offering ways that they could get Customer Care to take care of their problems without calling the President's office or escalating to a supervisor. Her respect in the newsgroup was very high.
When she left the newsgroup, here is what she said.
It's telling. Especially telling is the 40+ responses she got.
Big companies can't deal with the Internet. It's too new, too public, and too uncontrolled. Despite all of our whining about corporate control and ICANN's UDRP and copyright and DMCA, the fact remains that the Internet scares the crap out of large multinationals.
And that won't change any time soon.
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
While I was working at AOL, I was constantly frustrated by the amount of misinformation that flew around about the company and things that were going on. And we're not even talking about company confidential things. Just stuff that the corporate communications group didn't have the time or inclination to work on. And it was only made worse by the fact that noone at AOL responded to correct or clear up the incorrect information. It was clearly a lack of communication between the industry and the company, and something that could easily be helped by just a little effort on the part of employees who participated in forums like Slashdot and wanted to help.
I tried to propose an internal volunteer group of people who wanted to do this. They'd be held to standards as to the correctness and appropriateness of the information they were providing to outside sources. And there would be peer review and recourse for people doing the wrong things. The idea was that AOL could significantly improve their image within the community by participating in it. Noone wanted to hear it. I wrote a formal proposal and passed it up the line. I don't think it even got past the director.
Corporations sit here and ask for your loyalty as employees. They offer bonuses, options, perks, and tons of other things to try to secure it. But they can't imagine that employees might actually want to do things to help the company in their spare time. And more than that, they don't want to release their tight grip on corporate communications and allow employees to help out with the forums they participated in. Until they realize that these things are harming them and find a better way to deal with employees than by saying "Don't talk to anyone unless we approve it first," they'll have the same old image problems.
The most we can do is continue to attempt to raise consciousness within the corporations we work for. Write proposals for new communications policies for employees. Leave copies of The Cluetrain Mainfesto on the VP's desk. Not much else we can do.
-Todd
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
Besides the legal liability and misrepresentation that a "rogue tech" places on his employer, he also screws the tech support process for the user the next time he/she decides to call in for real help.
Succesful helpdesks, specifically in the level 1 & 2 enivronments, rely on scripts. These scripts are written so that an escalated ticket (one that level 1 cannot handle) arrives at the next level of tech support with that user environment "clean" - that is, level 2 assumes that level 1 has already made sure the user's environment is in a kind of "virgin" state.
When a higher level tech jumps in on a problem from level 1 (such as in these forums) they almost always prolong the length of the customer's next call to tech support because of user assumptions and level 1 ignorance of the support history. While some problems may be solved completely within the context of a forum, the majority of users will at some time in the future call tech support again. This raises costs and decreases the availability of support for the rest of the userbase.
BTW I talk with Optimum Online techs on the BBR forums and Yahoogroups all the time. They are careful not to engage in tech support out in the open, and speak only in an unofficial context. They're extremely helpful and hundreds of users appreciate their unofficial support everyday. If you want a model of how to keep your more advanced users happy while limiting liability and misrepresentation - check out the impromptu support model they've created there.
You remind me of my uncle. When he was 15, he needed a job, so he went to a construction sight, grabbed some tools, and got to work. This was completely on his free time. Later, he expected to get paid for it. Guess what happened! You're right! He didn't get paid for that time he worked there, but he was hired on the spot.
Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
I worked for an ISP that offered incredible customer service. We would take as much time as it took to make the customer happy. We gave advice on hardware and software not related to the online experience. We even offered to go to their house to fix connectivity problems, as a last resort.
In return, most of our customers remained loyal customers despite the fact that we charged a little more than most ISPs.
Unfortunately, this is not a good business model - we were never quite profitable. We ended up getting bought-out by a larger company. Though the current Tech Support is OK, it's nothing like the old days. Now, it's more like "help them, but do it as fast as you can - don't waste time".
How do you find the balance between great service and cost-containment?
--no idea of europe or asia, etc, but in the US our government and our corporations are infested with peter principle managers. People who have gotten promoted to that position where they can't get promoted any longer, ie, they suck at that level but were probably great one level below. The deal is they don't get put back at the level of their competence.
funny story kinda. Once I was made city manager of this company. I hated it. I was great and quite happy at my previous position, acting as a project strawboss/hands on worker. Loved it. Was offered the management position, significant more money at salary so I tried it. It was terrible. So many times it was quicker for me-on the clients nickle-to just "do" a problem rather than try to explain to someone how to do it. I thought this was good customer service, granted, it dropped our billable hours slightly and occassionally, but the industry we were in was/is extremely competitive and it helps to retain established customers and keep them happy. The customers loved it, my bosses hated it, sometimes I would cost the company x amount small bucks on a particular job, but to me at least the brownie points seemed like a decent tradeoff. We lost zero customers under my watch and I got all good reviews and feedback. The bosses hated it ordered me to "manage" only which was a useless expenditure on a lot of smaller jobs, it meant standing around doing nothing a lot of the time. I hated it, prefer working to slacking. Anyway, after a couple of months I went in and demanded my old job back, and they did it for me but were amazed, I mean dumbfounded that anyone wouldn't just keep the superior paid position, it was such an alien concept to the "money is god" types. They had never even seen anyone do that. In short I demanded to not be a peter principle victim, or to participate in it.
Oh ya, the company basically collapsed a coupla years later, none of the bosses got along with each other, they kept losing customers, etc. I was right, they were wrong, but they were the owners. Ho hum I found other work same field easily.
How this applies to bell south and these other ISP's is-this is *probably* what's happening. Internal politics and back stabbing and greed lead to too many rank foul bosses in levels of decision making where they have no ability, no skill and cause problems. I mean, for real, harassing employees for trying to help customers on their own time and for free? ISP's don't charge for tech support as far as I know, seems to me these employees were saving the company money, and also creating more satisfied customers. And this is wrong?
There were many reasons the grand telephone monopoly was broken, customer complaints were right up there, and the baby bells are apparently infected with the same retarded mindset and lack of intelligence. Too many bosses in positions of incompetence.
Hope the fired techs start their own businesses (community WISPSs perhaps?), bell south doesn't deserve quality employees. Let them hire and keep on the clock drones and robots, lead by drones and robots, then let them go broke and collapse and be sold off for pennies on the dollar, let someone else give it a try. the techs actually got a good headsup of who they work for, now they can start looking for better quality humans to work for.
As a former under-paid bellsouth Tech, let me tell you some wonderful stories, and offer any advice i can =)
First off, BS FastAccess is a great service when it works. But when it doesn't, it can take forever to get taken care of. Personally, i've seen enough horror stories i went with cable modem instead.
When you call BS tech support, if they don't sound like they know what they're doing, hang up and call again. The support is handled by several contractors (I worked for one). When they're borderline, ask where they're from, if they're in South Carolina or Florida, hang up. You want Tennessee or North Carolina. Trust me, i've read notes from all of the above.
If all else fails, demand to "speak with the president of bellsouth!" This goes into a special queue, a "presidential" escalation, and you eventually will get at least part of what you want (Free truck roll? definitely. Free home run, maybe. Free replacement equipment... sometimes). Just don't act like you know what you're getting into, and be very, very pissed off. BS has quality standards they promised shareholders they would adhere to or some such, so they have to handle pissy customers very nicely.
If you demand to a "Supervisor," you won't, but it's a fasttrack into second-level technicians. Keep in mind that the best frontline techs get stuck on the front-line because their average handle times are generally very low (they know exactly what the problem is and snip it in the bud) or very high (they're very thorough and check for secondary or tertiary issues).
If you have a network, for god's sake, work with us. We need to prove it's the line that's at issue so we can issue tickets up to DSG.
Dirty little secrets:
DSG (Digital Services Group), another set of "contractors" that happens to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of BS, is the set of people who actually do the line maintenance and such. They handle the lines for all ISPs.
If you had real problems getting online at the beginning of the year, it was because DSG fucked up a BBG upgrade. BBG basically DHCPs IPs out to the PPPoE clients. They tweaked some settings and then rolled some existing customers to BBG and ran out of IPs. Those were hellish days to work.
There's a giant A-B switch someplace, labelled "Atlanta | Miami." If Miami is up, Atlanta is down, and vice-versa. Keep this in mind.
BS tech support has no procedures for dealing with hosed machines, period. If you're lucky, you'll wind up with someone who knows what they're doing as an "escalation."
If your account gets "turned off" for non-payment, and you've still got sync (like they ever turn the circuits off...) try the normal username with a password of "hotline". This was supposed to be changing in the future.
Lots of sensitive customer data is available over the public internet via HTTPs. That 3-digit code can be looked up on a public HTTPS site. Password resets, account cancellation, etc, is on the same site as the customer controls, but with a different login page and set of logins.
Couldn't there be some kind of forum review by the workers' supervisors? Couldn't there be "licenses" or some kind of authorization for people to post on forums as "forum people"?
I worked as Tech Support for a while, and people from my division actually rotated duties including E-mail, phones, and newsgroup. It was a very good way to keep in touch with our user base. But unless there was official policy about how support was done, things got chaotic from time to time.
So we had guidelines for forum work. Is that so hard to figure out? Techs shouldn't be giving out "rogue advice" so to speak, they should keep in touch with their employers, but they also shouldn't be absolutely, expressly forbidden from helping people out when they get the chance!
You can deny it if you like, but there is a strong correlation between having a strong grasp of your native language and not being a fucking moron. If you can't type a sentence without one spelling or grammatical error for every two words, then most likely your thoughts aren't worth reading anyway.
I support Internet customers, both business and residential, for a large cable company. Like some of my coworkers, I read DSL reports regularly. People often post problems there, sometimes after they haven't been able to get them fixed through normal channels. Sometimes I post a helpful response, just on my own time.
Recently, everyone in my department was asked to sign a broad non-disclosure agreement. It covered just about everything we might say about this company I'm not naming. (It's the one who's mission is to "carry out Paul Allen's Wired World vision".)
I balked a bit at signing it, and asked my supervisor (who is pretty cool, having been one of us until very recently) what this was all about. He told me Corporate was concerned about things posted to DSL reports, and mentioned one example in particular.
The post in question was not inaccurate--it was the company's own conclusions. The post sumarized an analysis of a (still) ongoing problem affecting lag time for high use customers.
Since the crackdown on what we can say, many regular posters to DSL reports who work for the company have slowed way down on posting, or changed accounts, or even dropped off. I don't think that helps customers.
Posting anonymously so I don't have to worry about discussing this with someone from HR.
I used to be like this: going out of my way to help people in my free time fix their mouse; reconnect to their ISP; trouble-shoot that broken coffee holder...
I don't do this any more, but that's not really relevant to the point I'd like to make. We live in a day where our government (yes, you Aussies and Euros, too; can't actually see what's happening in Asia but different story) is continuually seeking additional control over our personal lives. Most 1st world governments are largely financed by the people in some form of taxation, but controlled more by corporations within (or even outside) them. Think about that for a second.
So, we get something like 75 - 80 years to live; the first 25 we're busy getting educated, partying and otherwise not doing much productive, and then venture into a 20-year career helping some company with our expertise and best years, all the while making yet a little more money from our boss and paying yet a little more in taxes to our government to help subsidize it's financing for the corporations to use it to control its minions... Seeing a trend here?
I love good samaritanism, generosity and philanthropy just as much as the next dude, but there are other ways to spend our spare time. You don't have much left anyway, so go pick up a guitar, write some poetry, ride your mountain bike off a cliff, or throw frisbees at your mutt, but don't spend your limited leisure time on line helping other people try to figure out what your money-grubbing employer can't make work for them.
And, if you really need to, then go log in and break a digit, or two; just don't say you're representing your employer. They can sue you for helping them out! How cool is that?
just thinking aloud, here...
www.dedserius.com
VB != VisualBasic
Tim
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
I've read most of the posts attached to this article and I must admit to feeling a bit sad when reading the posts defending this kind of behaviour. These posts all use words like 'corporation', 'disclosure', 'liability', 'licensed', 'business practice'. I will never accept any of these explanations no matter how many "legalese" words you throw in. Common sense must prevail. It should be noted that I have first hand experience with this as I work part-time with support, and that helping customers on our free time is pretty much the standard. I could even get paid for it, if I bothered to keep track of the time. But since it's five minutes here and five minutes there, I don't.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Sorry if I get modded down, but people should at least hear this, even if they don't agree.
In addition to the liability issues that would be redundant to bring up, there is the issue of identification.
You don't see people who work for Schwab or Fidelity offer "good sumeritan" advice online for financial services. These guys should know better even if they haven't signed a non-disclosure agreement.
Do you think your doctor's insurer for malpractice would like it if a doctor began diagnosing people outside the scope of his work environment?
These types of people can do what they do anonymously quite easily over the net, but yet they choose to identify themselves as currently associated. A pseudonym or anonymous claim of credibility as "formerly employed" or "technical consultant to" would be sufficient identification to those who would be consumers of his assistance.
I've seen it both ways, though. When I did tech support for an OEM (outsourced, though), one guy I know got led out of the building and fired immediately for posting opinions and disclosures on legitimate problems with certain system configurations and the unlawful actions the OEM was doing to stall and prevent customer returns on the defective product until the engineers came up with the solution. This info (even though unlawful) was considered to be proprietary and a breach of trade secrets according to the outsourced vendor. He got fired without due process and was unable to fight back because he was under the age of 18 at that time.
My bet is that there is more behind the scenes going on than this story reports and that because reporters are lazy, they got the sensational side of this in their back pocket and just let 'er rip.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
I can see two reasons why a company would have a problem with there tech's freely giving away technical advise...
The first reason... The most obvious (well to me anyway)... The less people who get there problems answered freely over the internet the more money the corporations will make if they charge for tech support. In my eyes... this is pulling at hairs. I can't see any reason why a product cannot get free technical support. You did buy the product didn't you? Now I only briefly read the article but I caught the gist of it right away. If companies are legally allowed to fire people for providing free tech support maybe the consumers (us) should take a second look at what were buying. If a product is not designed to break...why should they care?
Here is the other view... Every time someone helps out an end user and says that they are from "xyz" company...they then represent that company... If a tech gives bad advise the company could be liable for what the tech said... Although this is a valid view...I have a feeling this would be used more as a scapegoat then anything else.
Bottom line:
No product is perfect...BUT if the company that makes the product starts to limit the amount of free help there customers are able to get...and they start charging high prices for tech support...take a second look at the companies reputation and the product you are buying...
You know the saying...
I work for an Internet company. I _never_ link myself to that company. I'm sure many others could say the same.
The main reasons for me: Job secruity and a Professional projection of myself and my company.
When I get home, I drink beer, sniff glue, etc. If I were to post to the boards I would probably offer some good help. Then the beer starts to kick in (and the glue, oh boy!) I bet my own level of control and professionalism would begin to disappear. (and if I were in my physical work building they would know)
How many times have you seen post where some "tech guy" or such says, well you know what?: Customers are Idiots, Aholes, etc? I have seen this. How many times have you gone to work the next day and said to yourself, 'shit I really should not have sent that email last night...' because you were half in the bag when you sent it.
It reminds me of the guy who posted on the Ciruit City thing, saying "we don't need customer's like that" (the ones who return a lot of goods). While he may have posted a fact about the company he still sounded like a jerk b/c the companies public position probably is that "the customer is always right". Now the real position is out in the open, for good or bad.
Companies want to present themselves in a professional way. People acting as rogue representative of a company after hours is a bad thing.
But don't get me totally wrong, it took me a while to get to this point (beer, glue, etc) and if I go out for a beer I wear work logos and all (shirts, hats, etc).
If you have so much energy to devote to helping others do it at work. Teach the other techs a thing or two, improve the 'system' don't operate out side of it.
All that being said, if you still want to help out on your own time, don't claim to be an employee of 'the company' and don't reveal the 'secrets' when you do so.
Silly Rabbit: tricks are for kids.
I used to work for ClientLogic, who along with Compaq and TAG (The Answer Group), handled all of the tech support for Bellsouth FastAccess (DSL). The DNS entry for BBR/DSL Reports had been removed so that we couldn't get to their site (unless we used the IP address...). We were told we weren't allowed to post anything related to Bellsouth FastAccess on BBR at all.
Of course we were also told to lie to our customers and tell them that we worked for BellSouth. We were told not to schedule installer/techs earlier than 3-4 days unless the customer was angry, then we could send one out in 24 hrs. We also had the usual stuff like not recommending any brands over others.
Promotions were dependent not on whether we went above and beyond, but if we could get the customer off the phone in a certain amount of time. Our target was 16 minutes total handle time including our opening spiel and verification (1-2 minutes) and ACW (after call work, 1 min) of entering notes about the call. If you averaged about 16 minutes you were meeting the requirement, but you should be about 12 minutes to be "good". Anyone remember OfficeSpace's "flair"?
Half the tech support calls I took were people complaining because the previous agent told them to download new drivers from the website using dialup since they were calling because their DSL was out.
We were supposed to be there to help people, but our "metrics" were about how fast we handled the call and whether we mentioned the "Connection Manager" which didn't actually manage your connection, it was basically spyware and slowly evolved into being able to backup/restore your internet settings... but not drivers etc where we really needed it, and it didn't make a connection to FastAccess like all the customers thought.
Arrogant pricks like you piss me off more than stupid people, and I do TS for a living.
You don't seem to realize that there is no way in hell we can guage your intelligence in a 10 minute phone call. No, saying you are a network administrator/engineer does not make us think any more of you because half the people who are calling us for tech support ARE network administrators who run Win2k networks and have no clue how to set user permissions!
I had a customer profess over and over that he was a cisco engineer, he made routers for a living and our network was down! Uninstalled and reinstalled his dialup networking in windows and look at that, back on the net...
If I had a nickle for every time I've told a customer that he would have to talk to his network admin to fix his network and then have them reply "I am the network admin" I would be a very rich man.
Also, if you're so intelligent why can't you understand that there is no way we can support Linux, *BSD, BeOS, QNX, etc? What part of "Windows and MacOS support only" don't you understand? A select few may be able to pull off Linux support but not every tech can and if we do it we set customer expectation that "well the LAST guy I spoke to helped me!" and start pissing more people off.
Your singular account is quite the exception and not the rule.
Now, I'm not a big fan of scripts and I don't use them myself, we don't generally have scripts where I work. But we do have a thing called support boundaries (only supporting what you make) which I follow almost to the letter because I understand the merits for both I and the customer, even though the customer may think less of me.
-- iCEBaLM
Or rather a friend of mine, he use to work at what most people I know, call "Tech Support Hell," Convergy, they do outsourceing for a whole bunch of people, you can see it all on their website, anyways he posted a few things on (tho got a little carried away, prolly while drunk) and ended up getting himself canned (hence the reason he started posting on how to beat warrenty system. He's lucky he didn't get sued, he still claims its not him. But they threated him, fired him, and said if he ever said anything about it again they'd "sue him into poverty" they even made him sign some lame ass paper (to which he has a copy of) that basically says if he doesn't say anything, they won't sue, if he does they have the right to garnish his current wages for an unspecified amount of damages (he was 18 at the time which is the only reason I could think that he would even sign such a paper)