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.'"

Comments

Butthurt

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't have our employees making light of our oppressive workplace policies, they might actually improve morale!

Re:Butthurt

[GiantMolecularCloud]

"You think this is a GAME!?!"

Re:Butthurt

[Jetra]

"The truth?...You can't handle the TRUTH!"

Re:Butthurt

[sunderland56]

Best thing about writing a customer-service simulator: if your code freezes, people don't care, they think it's part of the simulation.

Re:Butthurt

[AtomicTomatoOfDoom]

In all honesty, though, their workplace policies aren't all that bad. I've worked as an IT analyst for the CRA for a few years. I regularly had to interact with employees that manned the phones and made friends out of a few of them, all of whom eventually quit. Essentially, the workplace environment isn't all that bad (I'd even go as far as to say that it's relatively nice). However, those who quit explained to me that they felt like they were slowly dying from the inside. See, their job is to call people owing the government money and essentially threatening them of legal action until they would pay up. Calling that one guy who owns a yacht and hasn't paid his taxes in 4 years feels okay, satisfying even. It's when they have to call a grandmother living alone in a small apartment, who breaks down in tears when they tell her the amount she owes that their job gets rather excruciating.

Correction please.

[will_die]

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.

Re:Correction please.

[Sockatume]

"Man not fired from job he doesn't like, for making game about how much he hates his job, to fund aspirations of leaving job" doesn't exactly invoke outrage.

Re:Correction please.

[benjymous]

From his twitter, he said he was fired after that article was posted (which is why it doesn't mention it explicitly) but isn't able to talk more. Do you have information showing that this was false and he's still in the job (or quit rather than being fired?)

Re:Correction please.

[ice_nine6]

Seems he has actually been fired: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2013/01/30/game-developer-draws-ire.html

Re:Correction please.

[mdm42]

From his twitter, he said he was fired ... but isn't able to talk more.

140 characters. Didn't stand a chance.

Re:Correction please.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe he isn't allowed to talk more because he has a decent lawyer who told him to STFU and not say anything to diminish his payoff for illegal termination.

Re:Correction please.

[Big Hairy Ian]

Game over Dude!!

American sweatshop

[alphatel]

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.

Re:American sweatshop

[Smauler]

And then complain when it's outsourced for someone else to cope with.

One point to note is that _we_ are the abusive customers. I personally always try to be nice (I'm not talking "have a nice day" nice, I mean sincerely - I don't have to do it all day, every day), especially to people I call up for a service (even if they do have to try and sell me the little add on warranty whatever it is at the end).

Re:American sweatshop

[acidfast7]

Not me! I left the US behind almost 6 years ago. In the meantime, I've had a full year of paid holiday (6 years x 35 days/year holiday + 10 days/year of federal days off.)

My gross salary is even higher, but the net salary lower with the 50% deductions.

No desire to go back. The lack of unlocked phones and reasonable prepaid plans it just one recent example of you guys taking it in pooper.

Re:American sweatshop

[Grimbleton]

You got Windows XP? I had a fucking amber text WYSE TERMINAL in 2007. That they're probably still using.

Re:American sweatshop

[prefec2]

I would recommend two things in this situation:
a) Found a union, based on continental European approaches. The UK and US approaches are not that good.
b) If a) does not work, because your colleagues and fellow US citizen like to be mistreated, leave the country. In Europe we have standard health care above the MediCare stuff you have. You get 4 weeks holiday a year, protection from too many over hours, payed sick leave (in Germany) etc. according to apologists of neo-liberalism that will cause high unemployment rates. However, we do not have such thing in Germany.

On a side note: You really should get organized in the US. The information we get from the US looks more and more like stories normally associated with developing countries not a first world country.

Re:American sweatshop

[DaMattster]

America has always been about sweatshop workplaces. We need more unions, not less but styled after a European one. Heaven forfend should we offer an real perks to our employees. Why, perish the thought, we might be seen as socialists! Hopefully you've concluded that my statement is dripping with sarcasm. No wonder America ranks lower than its industrial counterparts in lifespan, health, and education.

Re:American sweatshop

[ArsonSmith]

" The information we get from the US"

and is mostly false. It's mostly good here except for the noisy people with political agendas to push.

Re:American sweatshop

[prefec2]

I never heard of any factory worker, who works for 1€ per hour. This 1€ program is for people who are unemployed for a long time, who require help to get back in normal jobs. Therefore the state provides them with a basic income, called ALG II. which is considered the existential minimum (I personally think it should be higher, but that is not the point here. They get money to live and the state pays their rent and health insurance, definitely more than the average unemployed person in the US has). On top of that income they can earn extra money in such so call 1€ jobs. By law these job grants are not allowed to be used by employers to replace staff on normal income.

I personally think, that the German system is too harsh, but compared to the US, it is still better.

Re:American sweatshop

[realityimpaired]

Don't have to go that far... Canada has on average one statutory holiday (federally mandated day off) per month, and many employers give people fresh off the street at least 2 weeks' paid vacation, with the trend being towards more vacation: many larger companies will give you 3 or even 4 weeks at the start, and will give you the option to buy an extra week as part of your benefits package. Some provinces have provincial statutory holidays in addition to the federal ones. They're slowly coming to the realization that a well rested and happy worker is more productive, and allowing this much vacation actually costs less than not allowing it.

35 days is a bit much for most companies yet, but I've been able to book 5 full weeks of vacation this year (1 week of carryover from last year), and because I picked weeks where the statutory holidays come, I've managed to parlay that into an extra week of vacation in the form of days-in-lieu for statutory holidays. That's 30 working days of vacation, or 42 calendar days this year, and I still have 2 floater days and 2 personal emergency days, in addition to paid sick leave.

And most of Europe has even more vacation as standard than we do.

Re:American sweatshop

[suutar]

I think I disagree. We don't especially like to do hard work, but we do like to accomplish significant tasks, which generally involve hard work. (If it wasn't hard it wouldn't be significant :) Hard work for its own sake sucks.

We're with the government...

[VendettaMF]

We're with the government. We don't have a sense of humor.

Did he do it at work or at home?

[Viol8]

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?

Re:Did he do it at work or at home?

[ciderbrew]

Years ago when I had a phone job - I got pulled in to the office for drawing at my desk. I said everyone here doodles. Apparently there is a skill level limit to the doodle. Bored managers amusing themselves by being awful never helps a bad job.
Good job this guy didn't work there http://www.biro-art.com/

Re:Did he do it at work or at home?

[Phrogman]

I did a few years of tech support for a Real Estate software company. They claimed they had 700,000 US Real Estate agents as customers.
* The software was written in Visual Basic 5, and used an Access Database.
* We suggested that customers limit their list of potential customers to 20,000 so that the database would not have issues as often (it was Access based so it was guaranteed to have at least some issues some of the time). One of the people I talked to wanted to load 1 million names into his database, and tried to do so before calling. He had no forethought to back things up first. It did not go well.
* Real Estate agents as a whole do not understand computers, and seem generally to have little patience for any problem - whether or not they caused it. The conversations got rather heated - a lot. I remember one guy who worked in Beverly Hills, screaming at the top of his lungs that he was losing 100k a hour while he was on the phone with us. My coworker in the cubicle took the call but I could hear it clear as day over top of the call I was taking at the time.
* We had over 60 tech support people crammed into their cubicles. I must say the quality of the Staff and the Tech Support leaders was actually quite high.
* We had a script we were required to follow and which was almost never relevant. This was a major problem since usually we could identify the problem quite quickly, but had to trudge through the routine first until that failed to solve the problem and we could carry on with actually solving the problem.
* A lot of the problem was of course the Sales staff who would lie through their teeth to get a Sale, knowing that Tech Support or Development would have to solve the problem, not them. In general, I hate Sales people as a result of those at this company.
* Our in house tools were written by the company too, and since what they knew was Visual Basic, thats what they wrote them in. Since the database they knew was Access, thats what we used. Every day at noon, for 1 hour, we had to revert to pen and paper because the Access Database for *our* customer base had to be repaired. Then we would madly enter call details in, in between other calls until we got caught up.

It was an "educational" experience, but not one I care to repeat if I can avoid it :P

Real problem with phone jobs

[prefec2]

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.

Re:Over Reaction from the Goverment !

[radiumsoup]

I always thought the French had the fashion industry to themselves, not the Canadians. Learn something new every day on /.

Re:I wonder why this game is not free

[Prokur]

nevertheless, game is available for free here

Excruciating

[phorm]

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.