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

[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

[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

[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

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 /.

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.