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Man Fired For His Online Customer Service Game
First time accepted submitter DiscountBorg(TM) writes "An employee of the Canada Revenue Agency lost his job after releasing a humorous game in which the player answers customer service calls for the Agency, usually leading to his termination. In an email National Revenue Minister Gail Shea said: 'The Minister considers this type of conduct offensive and completely unacceptable. The Minister has asked the Commissioner (of Revenue, Andrew Treusch) to investigate and take any and all necessary corrective action. The Minister has asked the CRA to investigate urgently to ensure no confidential taxpayer information was compromised.'"
Can't have our employees making light of our oppressive workplace policies, they might actually improve morale!
As of the stories the guy had not been fired or another done to him. The guy is playing up that he could be fired and is using that as a reason people should purchase the game.
Welcome to fashist Canada, where satire is a crime.
You have to smile while you're on the phone (uhm really?), follow the cubicle dress code (but I just answer the phone), not allowed to hang up on abusive customers no matter what they do. The week's vacation you earned and got approved 3 months in advance was just re-allocated as forced time off due to the business being slow. World's worst health insurance if you get any at all.
Fluorescent lighting from hell, vending machines for lunch, 19" square monitors from the 1980's, computers running Windows XP, no service pack.
We live this job every day.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
We're with the government. We don't have a sense of humor.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
If he did it at home then firing him is a flagrant abuse of the departments power. If he did it at work then its a flagrant abuse of his position and he deserved to be fired. Anyone know which?
That is all.
Heh some people are slow to wake up. I left Canada 20 years ago...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
That's a whole other Slashdot story...
I LOVE my 19" square monitor, can't stand widescreen. I am not alone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVED_IrcA-w
He was investigated for disclosing "confidential taxpayer information". Right. He used real customer names and numbers? At least they could be honest and say his crime was making a joke about his job -- and since it's a government job, at the tax department, (though he didn't actually say that in his game) it's not like they have to worry about losing customers.
I second this: 18 months was enough for me, it's a shit of a place to live.
There are a lot of people out there calling help or support lines. Some of them are frustrated, some of them are angry, depressed or helpless. Depending on their mood and way dealing with it, they use the support stuff as a verbal punching ball. However, for some problems there is a solution.
a) A person calls and does not have ready all the stuff required to have a successful help line talk. For example, the do not have their customer number or other details available. And they start searching for them while on line.
Solutions:
A) Tell the person on the other end which information they have to collect, and that they can call back when the have it. These request should include all required and optional information you want to have as a help line person. Then wish him or her goodbye.
In cases where people are waiting for hours to get through, this is often not an option. Also some company policies could require you to keep the line open. In that case use B
B) Tell the person on the other end which information they have to collect, and that you are waiting for her/him until she/he can bring all the information. To survive this situation you have to switch from a goal centric state of mind, to a service state of mind. Even if you are doing nothing beside breathing and other vegetative stuff, you are there for the caller, your pure presence is the job. This might look like nothing, but it means a lot mentally for the caller, which has now someone who is there for him or her. For Europeans and people with a similar cultural determination have often a problem with that. That's why (beside the money) India is so popular for helplines. For help on that issue ask someone who meditates or a Buddhist.
In cases where the person is angry or otherwise aggressive, it helps to think that it is not you the person is angry with. It is like parenting. If you little baby cries, it is not angry with you it is just angry. It is not personal. Therefore, do not act like you are the source of the anger. You just have to comfort the baby. For older children, the approach is a little different. However, do not try to persuade it, as it is not open to any reasonable argument. Working at a help line is very similar. And you should act similar to that. Also you might have a supervision talk with your colleagues on a regular basis. If your company is great, they pay for it. If not, do yourself a favor and organize something privately.
....please give this gentleman a real, non-soul sucking, non-phone job.
The kid that was kicked out of school for finding the security issue was given an internship and a scholarship to help get him back on track when he was the victim of administrative idiocy. I hope someone with some power to help can do the same here.
usually leading to his termination
Yep, just like what happened to him in real life.
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I'm just glad to know that some tax collector has been fired.
He pissed off the wrong people, the ones with the tight asses and dour faces.
How may I obtain this game?
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
the Conservative government.
and involves employees getting fired.
Surely this result was not a surprise. He should be thrilled that he got what he wanted AND gets to whine in public about it.
Looks like a plan to earn money, because in order to download this indie game you have to pay 2 bucks. And all those news is part of good promotion and advertising program.
The Minister has asked the Commissioner (of Revenue, Andrew Treusch) to investigate and take any and all necessary corrective action.
...means that the Minister is referring to sad state of customer "service" in the agency and not to someone who's poking fun at it. But that's a sucker bet, for sure.
He does a podcast on the Bonus Level Radio Network where they take a look at the first level of video games. You should totally check it out.
http://www.bonus-level.com/podcasts/first-level-2/
You have to hand it to slashdotters to take a post that is (a) misrepresented in a headline (the guy wasn't fired) and (b) about civil service in Canada and turn the discussion into an argument trashing both the United States and Microsoft.
Do I see a trend here? It's almost as if people come to slashdot with an agenda to push or something ...
I actually came to the article expecting to read that he made a game where players answered real calls for the agency and earned points doing it.
Think about it this way. It is not good for your company if your customers believe that customer support staff are sitting on the other end of the phone rolling their eyes, or worse.
That is the image that this portrays.
Or when they ruin somebody's life because he wouldn't pay a crooked taxman's bribes, conveniently losing all his documentation, and then refuse to pay back damages.
I worked at a notorious Canadian call center in 2004 providing Comcast internet support. It was part of the call center culture to share the annoying and stupid calls with our coworkers. I don't think for a minute that the same culture doesn't exist inside the CRA call center. Lets face it - some of the people that we are forced to deal with in customer service positions are .. well, stupid. Some of the other calls are downright hillarious - like the one-armed man that kept dropping his phone while his windows 98 ocean theme kept making toilet-like bubbling noises in the background. You can't make this shit up.
...even if it is sweeping up some of my overly self-important, pompous, posturing country-mates!
Whenever discussions about customer support come up, I remember my experience working for a regional ISP before and during the bubble burst.
I had been with the company for several years, working my way up from dialup customer support (Internet helpdesk, Please hold) to manager of the web hosting services.
Manager was a broad term, just as web hosting services was. In fact I had my hands in every part of the internet divisions operation.
So when the bubble popped, I found myself working for a company in receivership. However there was value in the internet division so it was kept going by the receiver until a buyer could be found.
Finally a buyer was found. At that point myself and several other top techs were just about to jump ship. The new owner took us all out for a fancy dinner, the intention being to keep us from leaving.
I have noticed that you can tell a lot about a person, especially a manager, by how they treat wait staff. People that treat wait staff poorly tend to treat anyone that they perceive as being of lower status then them poorly as well. They are not the type of person that you want as a manager.
This purchasing company's source of wealth was long distance, pre-paid phone cards. One of their big selling points was that they had support staff that could speak many languages, so people that used their phone cards to call India, Pakistan, etc, could talk to someone in their native language if they had problems.
So the new owner at this supper was wooing us with wonderful promises. Yet we couldn't help but notice how poorly he treated the wait staff.
Then, during the course of the evening, he made a statement that he liked to employ new immigrants to the country as his customer service representatives. This made sense. He wanted people with the ability to speak to callers in their native language as his customer support reps.
But then he stated that he also liked to employee new immigrants since they don’t know what they should be getting paid, so he could pay them the minimum wage. Then if they found out what they should be getting paid, and asked for any sort of a raise, he would just fire them and get some other new arrival.
We were all horrified and all left the company within a few weeks.
Relatively recently the British have created a "Get Britain Working" program that includes both "working for volunteer/charity organizations" and "working in the private sector". As you said, "by law" they aren't to be used to replace staff on normal income. But it's the private sector, there's little supervision, and it gets a lot of abuse. See also this recent court decision.
Note that to retain "jobseeker benefits", even people who had held down a regular job for a significant time might be required to work unpaid for 4 or 6 weeks (depending on which article you read). Asking someone who held a job for 10 years to work "to develop working skills" is asinine.
which came into existence because the Liberal government was worse.
Shall we continue with this game, or do you want to realize they're all terrible, because they're all government?
Dude, in most of Europe, 4 weeks is the legal minimum! Most people in office jobs get 6!
Who would have a thought a government tax agency would have no sense of humor?
productivity is through the roof in America. We're working our asses off. Take most Americans out of the job and they have no idea what to do with themselves. We might not work as hard as a Chinese man who is literally fighting for his life when he goes to work, but then again if you own a restaurant you do. And most of my coworkers are doing tons of side work. They rent properties (and maintain them themselves), do support work on the side, etc etc. My neighbors all have second jobs or are in school (albeit diploma mills, but what can you do?). Americans work like demons. You're just being mean-spirited.... :(
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