I agree that people should complain, the problem is that most people complain about Joe Employee instead of the general level of service which really isn't good for the individual employee just trying to do his job and help people.
An example of this would be a customer calling and having to wait on hold for thirty minutes complaining about the employee on the other end trying to finish the call quickly instead of complaining about how the company seems to be understaffed. The result being that the employee gets flak from his boss instead of any real changes taking place.
I see. You view the people you talk to as assholes.
No, I view those who make assumptions about my level of education, intelligence and similar things and then try to use their assumptions to bully me into giving them as someone put it "something for nothing" as assholes. In my previous job (which was a temp position doing software development) I was a much nicer person even to the most annoying people around me because even the most annoying individual I met on an average day in that job couldn't compare to someone who would be only slightly more annoying than average at my current job.
There are plenty of real jobs, just not for people with attitudes like yours.
What is wrong with my attitude if I may ask? I have stated in my previous posts that I gladly try to help the customers when this is possible, it's not always the rules allow for it though. And if you mean that I should "get out there and look for a job" or something similarly lame then let me assure you that I've spent a lot of time looking for another job (even before getting this one), I still try to keep my eyes open but so far I've seen ads out for maybe ten development jobs in this region, all of them requiring a ton of different skillsets and I've been called to one job interview, for a job as database administrator of a db2 database, didn't get the job thought because some guy with way too much experience also applied as well, this is my problem, I can't get a good job because there's always some guy with 15 years of experience and knowledge of just as many languages (which impresses HR) who applies for the same jobs as me.
I will assume that you are refering to this part of my post: Most of the time we are genuinely trying to help but our hands are tied by the rules, and you getting pissed off is not a problem for us compared to losing our jobs for going against company policy.
Now, what you must remember is that at least 90% of the problems customers have (at least at the company I work for) with the policies comes as a direct result of them not reading the fine print and then wanting us to make an exception for them, we try to help people find loopholes (if they're nice to us that is) but sometimes it just isn't possible and we can't break the rules set in the legally binding contract that the customer signed, it's not about being a "collaborator", it's just being a replaceble cog in the machinery until you find another way to put food on the table. We are not out killing people, we are just the wall the company puts up to protect the "important" people from having to face customers who are dissatisfied with their service, we can't do anything to change the rules but as I said, we do try to bend the rules and find loopholes for those who don't start their complaints with name-calling, accusations of incompetence on our behalf (not the company, the person they're talking to), threats of legal action or threats of physical violence.
I have myself been threatened by a customer who told me he was going to kill me if we didn't immediatly cancel his service without the three month period of notice because the service we provided wasn't what he imagined it would be, in no way did we fail to deliver what we were supposed to deliver, he was just pissed because he didn't have a clue about what he was talking about. This is life in customer services, I've had to quote various points in our contract to angry lawyers who think that they can intimidate us by using legalese (and not reading the god-damn contract!). It's not a fun job and it doesn't exactly fill you with hope for the human race, but it's a living and most of the truly dissatisfied customers just don't know what they signed and are trying to use social status, their "angry voice" or other tools to intimidate us into giving them special treatment.
C) Hopefully I do in front of as many customers as possible, to cause the most possible discomfort in the highschool drop out serving me, and his buinsess college dropout boss.
Hey, I work in customer services/internet helpdesk, I'm college educated (I'm posting on/., guess my major, here's a hint: it wasn't creative writing..) and I deal with assholes like you all the time. Where I work I'd estimate that at least 70% of the bottom-rung underpaid drones are in the same situation as me, they didn't know the right people and there aren't enough IT/CE jobs for all of us so we got stuck enforcing corporate policies.
Here is my advice for those of you running into some customer services rep who is just enforcing corporate policy: Don't be an asshole! Chances are that this person is just working there because there weren't any real jobs and hates the absurd and crazy rules as much as you do. Most of the time we are genuinely trying to help but our hands are tied by the rules, and you getting pissed off is not a problem for us compared to losing our jobs for going against company policy.
It's also worth noting that stupid people are a lot more prone to doing/talking without first thinking, something anyone who has ever worked in tech support will be able to tell you..
If you want to see true weekend binge drinking, come to Sweden! Our nice protestant morals that hang around even though most people aren't religious tell us that drinking even one or two beers during the week is bad but chugging down a case of beer before having a few stiff drinks and then rounding off the evening by having a few shots before getting in a fight is perfectly ok and you can always excuse your bad behaviour by pointing to the fact that you were drunk.. But you'd better not get caught looking tired while smiling because that means you're a fucking junkie and drugs will fuck up your life so we're gonna arrest you, fine you and wreck your life just to "set you straight".
Office smokers routinely take 3 or 4 15 minute cigarette breaks a day, or 10-12% of their productivity. Not to mention the time they take getting the cigarettes, or the time out sick, or dying early.
Actually, at my job the rules are simple, everyone gets a total of thirty minutes of "break time" and one hour for lunch, what you do with that time is up to you, you're not exactly gettting a bonus for not taking breaks so everyone smokers and non-smokers alike use thirty minutes of their day for smoking, coffee, snacks, reading the paper or just about anything. So I wouldn't say that smokers are necesarilly worse employees than non-smokers. That said, there comes a point in your life when you should stop smoking, personally I believe the "cut-off age" for smoking is about thirty or so, if you're still smoking after thirty you'd better be really addicted or a rockstar..
I don't know if they still make them but I remember a place I was at for a while which was an IBM Business Partner or something like that had tons of troubleshooting manuals that let you go through the troubleshooting process one step at a time until you found the broken part and also explained either how to fix the problem or where to find further information on fixing it. And I have to say, in a way it was wonderful because all you had to do was go through all the steps until you had a working computer/printer/whatever, I don't think it ever failed for me. Sure sometimes the appropriate solution was to order a new part and then install it but it generally worked after that...
Or maybe he just doesn't see wealth and expensive status symbols to be the most important thing in life? Maybe he enjoys sharing an apartment with others?
I'm guessing Schadenfreude has the same meaning as the swedish word 'Skadeglädje', glädje and freude meaning sort of the same thing and skada in swedish meaning 'damage', there's even a swedish saying, "Skadeglädje är den enda sanna glädjen", "skadeglädje is the only true joy/happiness.".
I thought most ISPs in Europe billed based on usage,..
This is not the case in Scandinavia, I only know of a few ISPs that have transfer caps as well, with dialup connections you tend to have to pay by the minute though../Mikael
In both cases I wouldn't consider it a "photo" in the sense that it has anything resembling artistic merit, it's just a copy of an existing work, do a HDR photo of it and I might change my mind, that might actually bring something interesting out (not to mention it being fairly unique).
Don't forget that the car salesman points out to you that he will under no circumstances just make you a key for your car because it's much better if you make one yourself so that you can decide if you want just a regular key (like 99% of all drivers want) or if you want to make it six feet long or perhaps you want a key so small you can barely see it... Of course, not everyone is like that, but the loudmouth zealots tend to act that way (IMHO).
/Mikael (I used to run Linux, now I run OS X and FreeBSD)
No, because Big Ben was not intended as a 2D representation of something else (not counting time..) but is a building and taking a photo of that building for the purpose of showing people what the building looks like is not the same thing as trying to bypass the rules by making a low-quality copy of an exact copy of a 2D image, sort of like how you taking a photo of a piece of paper with the word "Cunt" written on it and then tweaking that photo in Photoshop until you can't tell it's a photo but just looks like text on a white background doesn't count as a photo.
I've just thrown my G7 to the side and I'm using a 4-5 year old Graphire (not 4, not 2... just Graphire) from wacom and it's not the best gaming mouse, but at least the bloody thing works.
Personally I've been using a Graphire 3 as my main mouse for quite a while, it works quite well for the kind of games I play (RTS and other non-FPS games) and I also like that if I move the mouse up on the tablet the pointer moves up no matter what direction the mouse is pointing, gets a bit annoying when you get back to work after a long weekend of using the Graphire and all of a sudden the damn pointer keeps going the wrong direction just because the mouse wasn't perfectly aligned..
The commuting time thing is something that annoys me to no end, I read some "study" by a "pro-free market think tank" (lacking a better word) that claimed that people who complained about eight hour workdays were just ungrateful bastards because they had so and so many percent of their time not devoted to work. But this study was of course flawed as hell, they counted eight hours of work time per day and everything else was free time.
If you start thinking about it the average person needs about eight hours of sleep per day, commuting might take another hour out of the day, he/she is probably working 8 - 17 with an hour of lunchtime that could hardly be considered "free" time. So if we subtract eight hours of sleep from the day because we assume everyone needs that and it's not free time we're down to a 16 hour day, since lunch and commuting time are things that you only have to "waste" because of work then let's add them to the work time, at this point we're looking at more than 60% of the day dedicated to "survival". I don't want to spend more than half my day just working for survival, maybe some people do but I have other things I'd like to do with my life.
Even if you add 32 hours per week of free weekend time you're still looking at around 45% of your free time going to work, I wouldn't mind dedicating working 8-9 hours per day three or four days per week. But ten hours per day five days per week, no thanks.
You're getting things mixed up, I think most users were quite willing to get involved in the cyber-war, the problem was that the company didn't have the resources to fight it.
I'll probably sign up for this blackfrog thing once I've checked it out. In fact, I'd probably consider giving money to someone collecting money to pay someone else to beat the shit out of the world's top spammers. I'm serious, they're scum..
/Mikael
Re:Pffft...that's why I bought an iRiver.
on
Apple Sues Creative
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· Score: 1
I parsed your comment as:
It's easy to install the drivers.
It's hard as hell to install just the drivers without a ton of crap.
Non-native speakers of english don't understand english grammar because we're all idiots(?)
BTW, I've experienced the hell that is Creative drivers, another classic move by them was to rename the driver for a piece of hardware to something other than "driver", and they then called that software something else on their website than on the CD that came with the hardware. That was a fun afternoon...
And I'm currently living in a ~450 sqft apartment with my girlfriend, it's pretty small but not the smallest apartment I've lived in. In fact, When I lived in Paris I shared a 350 or so sqft apartment with a friend and there was some swedish guy living the first or second arrondisement who had an apartment that was something like 150-160 sqft. The notion that 1100 sqft is a small home is a US- and family-centric idea, people who don't have a flock of kids don't need a home the size of an airplane hangar.. (Not that I'd mind a larger home)
Don't worry, I'm guessing that within a week some casemodders will start posting step-by-step instructions on how to mount huge neon lights, loud fans and other stupid shit on it to make it look "cool" (oops, almost forgot to mention the "tribal"-shaped plexiglass window with a biohazard sign on it, you need one of those to make your $ANYTHING look stylish).
Reminds me of what a friend of mine asked me about once, if I could fix the laptop she bought while visiting her dad in Hong kong.. I asked what was wrong with it and she replied that she spilled a can of Fanta on it and now it wouldn't start up and the keys were all stuck.. I believe the story ended with her shipping it back to HK to have the mobo replaced.;)
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An example of this would be a customer calling and having to wait on hold for thirty minutes complaining about the employee on the other end trying to finish the call quickly instead of complaining about how the company seems to be understaffed. The result being that the employee gets flak from his boss instead of any real changes taking place.
No, I view those who make assumptions about my level of education, intelligence and similar things and then try to use their assumptions to bully me into giving them as someone put it "something for nothing" as assholes. In my previous job (which was a temp position doing software development) I was a much nicer person even to the most annoying people around me because even the most annoying individual I met on an average day in that job couldn't compare to someone who would be only slightly more annoying than average at my current job.
There are plenty of real jobs, just not for people with attitudes like yours.
What is wrong with my attitude if I may ask? I have stated in my previous posts that I gladly try to help the customers when this is possible, it's not always the rules allow for it though. And if you mean that I should "get out there and look for a job" or something similarly lame then let me assure you that I've spent a lot of time looking for another job (even before getting this one), I still try to keep my eyes open but so far I've seen ads out for maybe ten development jobs in this region, all of them requiring a ton of different skillsets and I've been called to one job interview, for a job as database administrator of a db2 database, didn't get the job thought because some guy with way too much experience also applied as well, this is my problem, I can't get a good job because there's always some guy with 15 years of experience and knowledge of just as many languages (which impresses HR) who applies for the same jobs as me.
/Mikael
Most of the time we are genuinely trying to help but our hands are tied by the rules, and you getting pissed off is not a problem for us compared to losing our jobs for going against company policy.
Now, what you must remember is that at least 90% of the problems customers have (at least at the company I work for) with the policies comes as a direct result of them not reading the fine print and then wanting us to make an exception for them, we try to help people find loopholes (if they're nice to us that is) but sometimes it just isn't possible and we can't break the rules set in the legally binding contract that the customer signed, it's not about being a "collaborator", it's just being a replaceble cog in the machinery until you find another way to put food on the table. We are not out killing people, we are just the wall the company puts up to protect the "important" people from having to face customers who are dissatisfied with their service, we can't do anything to change the rules but as I said, we do try to bend the rules and find loopholes for those who don't start their complaints with name-calling, accusations of incompetence on our behalf (not the company, the person they're talking to), threats of legal action or threats of physical violence.
I have myself been threatened by a customer who told me he was going to kill me if we didn't immediatly cancel his service without the three month period of notice because the service we provided wasn't what he imagined it would be, in no way did we fail to deliver what we were supposed to deliver, he was just pissed because he didn't have a clue about what he was talking about. This is life in customer services, I've had to quote various points in our contract to angry lawyers who think that they can intimidate us by using legalese (and not reading the god-damn contract!). It's not a fun job and it doesn't exactly fill you with hope for the human race, but it's a living and most of the truly dissatisfied customers just don't know what they signed and are trying to use social status, their "angry voice" or other tools to intimidate us into giving them special treatment.
/Mikael
Hey, I work in customer services/internet helpdesk, I'm college educated (I'm posting on /., guess my major, here's a hint: it wasn't creative writing..) and I deal with assholes like you all the time. Where I work I'd estimate that at least 70% of the bottom-rung underpaid drones are in the same situation as me, they didn't know the right people and there aren't enough IT/CE jobs for all of us so we got stuck enforcing corporate policies.
Here is my advice for those of you running into some customer services rep who is just enforcing corporate policy: Don't be an asshole! Chances are that this person is just working there because there weren't any real jobs and hates the absurd and crazy rules as much as you do. Most of the time we are genuinely trying to help but our hands are tied by the rules, and you getting pissed off is not a problem for us compared to losing our jobs for going against company policy.
/Mikael
/Mikael
/Mikael
Actually, at my job the rules are simple, everyone gets a total of thirty minutes of "break time" and one hour for lunch, what you do with that time is up to you, you're not exactly gettting a bonus for not taking breaks so everyone smokers and non-smokers alike use thirty minutes of their day for smoking, coffee, snacks, reading the paper or just about anything. So I wouldn't say that smokers are necesarilly worse employees than non-smokers. That said, there comes a point in your life when you should stop smoking, personally I believe the "cut-off age" for smoking is about thirty or so, if you're still smoking after thirty you'd better be really addicted or a rockstar..
/Mikael
/Mikael
/Mikael J
/Mikael
/Mikael
This is not the case in Scandinavia, I only know of a few ISPs that have transfer caps as well, with dialup connections you tend to have to pay by the minute though.. /Mikael
/Mikael
/Mikael
/Mikael (I used to run Linux, now I run OS X and FreeBSD)
/Mikael
Personally I've been using a Graphire 3 as my main mouse for quite a while, it works quite well for the kind of games I play (RTS and other non-FPS games) and I also like that if I move the mouse up on the tablet the pointer moves up no matter what direction the mouse is pointing, gets a bit annoying when you get back to work after a long weekend of using the Graphire and all of a sudden the damn pointer keeps going the wrong direction just because the mouse wasn't perfectly aligned..
If you start thinking about it the average person needs about eight hours of sleep per day, commuting might take another hour out of the day, he/she is probably working 8 - 17 with an hour of lunchtime that could hardly be considered "free" time. So if we subtract eight hours of sleep from the day because we assume everyone needs that and it's not free time we're down to a 16 hour day, since lunch and commuting time are things that you only have to "waste" because of work then let's add them to the work time, at this point we're looking at more than 60% of the day dedicated to "survival". I don't want to spend more than half my day just working for survival, maybe some people do but I have other things I'd like to do with my life.
Even if you add 32 hours per week of free weekend time you're still looking at around 45% of your free time going to work, I wouldn't mind dedicating working 8-9 hours per day three or four days per week. But ten hours per day five days per week, no thanks.
/Mikael
I'll probably sign up for this blackfrog thing once I've checked it out. In fact, I'd probably consider giving money to someone collecting money to pay someone else to beat the shit out of the world's top spammers. I'm serious, they're scum..
/Mikael
BTW, I've experienced the hell that is Creative drivers, another classic move by them was to rename the driver for a piece of hardware to something other than "driver", and they then called that software something else on their website than on the CD that came with the hardware. That was a fun afternoon...
/Mikael
/Mikael
/Mikael
/Mikael
/Mikael
/Mikael