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Little Old Lady Hammers Comcast
WheezyJoe writes "The Washington Post reports that a little old lady took a hammer to Comcast.
Apparently fed up with the lousy service she received from a botched Comcast installation of "triple-play", and a completely humiliating experience at a customer service center, 75-year-old Mona "The Hammer" Shaw took her claw hammer back to the customer service center and bludgeoned the office equipment into tiny plastic pieces."
First of all, let's qualify "evil". A lot of people (probably not you, but just to get it cleared anyway) have this "Black and White" idea that "evil" means being on a self-destructive quest to cause as much pain as possible, fuelled by pure hatred towards your fellow man. Unfortunately those don't really get ahead in the real world.
RL "evil", especially of the corporate kind, is really just Sociopathy, a.k.a., Antisocial Personality Disorder. And indeed there seem to be a lot of them in management, and especially CEO positions.
These are people who, simply put, don't give a flying fuck about their fellow man. You're an NPC to them. They don't hate you, they just don't care. They might harm you if it provides some momentary entertainment, and they think they can get away with it, but just as well they might pretend to be your friend if it helps them get an advantage that way.
They also tend to be people who can (A) read others perfectly, and (B) fake any feeling convincingly. They can look hurt when they need to look hurt, shed a tear when that gets the emotional message across, or sell you logging rights in Sahara with the most sincere look on their face. They could tell you to do something that will ruin your life with a perfectly straight face, and be perfectly able to look themselves in the mirror the next day. Why not? You're just an NPC to them. You don't matter.
Just as an example of lying with a straight face, a lot love to reinvent their past as something that milks the most sympathy. It helps manipulate people.
And my take is that it isn't money that turns people into sociopaths, but the other way around: in the race up the corporate ladder, these guys have a natural advantage. And in the race between corporations, the one without principles or scruples will have the lower costs and get ahead.
If being rich changed someone that way, then he probably was thinking that way long before. All that's changed now is that he feels powerful enough to drop (a part of) the mask and act like the asshole he always wanted to be.
In a sense, we even expect them to. The idea that a corporation should have no other goals or responsibilities than making more money, at all cost, is, well, just saying that said corporation should act like a sociopath. Unfortunately, a corporation is nothing more than a bunch of people, and its decisions _are_ taken by people. So if we expect corporations to act that way, and put our money on those which act that way, we're pretty much asking them to be led by sociopaths. Or if they aren't, we'll sell their shares and move our money to the ones who can act properly antisocial.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
While funny, it's also true and how companies see the market today. You don't have to deliver a good product. All you have to do is to deliver a product that's not worse than the competition and to make sure that nobody can deliver one that's better.
What worries me is that this is increasingly accomplished by forming cartels and pressure on lawmakers to make sure that nobody can emerge who offers better service.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
<sarcasm> Well, it's only a monopoly because of Government regulation, if the Government would just take the shackles off and go to a laissez-faire economic system all of the natural monopolies of the world like Comcast, Verizon and Time Warner would magically disappear and be replaced by a healthy competitive marketplace where the consumer would win. Because the free market solves everything, from broadband access issues in rural areas to feeding the straving children in Africa.</sarcasm>
(Sorry, had to beat the free market trolls to the punch.... there goes my karma for the week....)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.