Slashdot Mirror
The Irksome Cellphone Industry
gollum123 writes "David Pogue of the NYTimes wonders why Congress is worrying about exclusive handset contracts when there are more significant things that are broken, unfair, and anti-competitive in the American cellphone industry. He lists text messaging fees, double billing, handset subsidies, international call rates, and 'airtime-eating instructions' among the major problems not being addressed by Congress. 'Right now, the cell carriers spend about $6 billion a year on advertising. Why doesn't it occur to them that they'd attract a heck of a lot more customers by making them happy instead of miserable? By being less greedy and obnoxious? By doing what every other industry does: try to please customers instead of entrap and bilk them? But no. Apparently, persuading cell carriers to treat their customers decently would take an act of Congress.'"
The Windows Registry: because "single point of failure" looks good in our design specifications.
There is NO United States. Unless you've been in Richard B. Cheney's spider-hole, the U.S. collapsed several years ago.
Cell phone companies demise will mimic that of U.S. "Little Three" auto manufacturers with the assistance of the continued rise in PRIVATE health care insurance premiums which guarantee the comparative DISADVANTAGE of U.S. firms around the world.
Yours In Globalism,
K. Trout
Take this little vignette of 'customer service.' It's a bit long-winded but I can't think of a better exemplar of what NOT to do to please the *gasp* paying customer:
There was this woman I knew. She was a child of the Sixties and a bit of a paradox. She had been a hippy and an Outlaw Biker bitch and she danced topless in gentlemen clubs in and around the Caribbean and Mexico. She was also my stepfather's daughter from a previous marriage. Nice, huh?
After my mother married her father, she was all set and ready to hate my guts because I dared to love her father (Her father was probably the most noble soul I've ever met). But after a weekend in the mountains, we were holding hands and nibbling each others ear. Well, for 25 years, we had a secret relationship because my mother hated her because of some twisted philosophy that my mother had picked up somewhere about there can only be one queen bee to every hive. My mother had already tried to savagely ruin the marriage of one of my brothers and had turned the other brother damn near into Norman Bates.
So my stepsister and I decided to wait. My mother was not well. She was a lifelong alcoholic. She had been in and out of the hospital numerous times. All we thought we had to do was wait. 25 years later, my stepsister woke up one morning and said, "fuck it." She swallowed an entire bottle of Tylenol and drank most of a bottle of red wine. She was in a hideous painful coma for eight weeks before she died.
*That* was the good news. Now for the worst part: my mother died in her sleep six months later.
I don't think there's anything after this life. Even if there is a God, I don't think God could possibly be that cruel. But if I could interview my stepsister, I would ask her just the one obvious question: what the holy fucking hell were you thinking trying to screw your stepbrother at every possible moment? What does all of this have to do with customer service (or lack thereof)? Well, nothing, frankly, but if you read this far - and I charged a subscription fee to browse Slashdot - wouldn't you be pretty red-faced pissed right about now? I know *I* would.
=Smidge=
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
What is it with obsessive programmer types and the Wookie look? Have you just completely given up on ever seeing a non-Anime vagina, so you decide to quit bathing and to grow all of your body hair out like some kind of freakish Chia Pet? I don't get it. Would you not freak out if you saw a woman with a 3-ft long beard on her pussy?
The title of this article is redundant.
For most purposes, 355/113 is close enough.