"Genius Bar" is just reality distortion field speak for "customer service".
No, the Geniuses aren't customer service, they're tech support (usually high-level tech support at that, with loads of certifications of every piece of hardware Apple has made in the past 10 years). Granted, they *do* deal with customer service issues but they will put those off to customer service specialists over the phone if it takes longer than a few minutes to resolve because that isn't their area of extensive training.
I only offer this correction because (probably like most people) I assumed anyone physically working in a retail space would be pretty low-level, with the occasional fluke of someone overqualified. I was pretty surprised to find out just how much training and technical experience the typical Apple Genius has.
I'm not assuming anything. I know very well that our support is far better than anyone else's. We have the number one customer satisfaction rating in the entire computer industry, and it's not because we read off scripts and rush people off the phone in 5 minutes or less. But we do still expect you to reboot your router and cable modem, because it solves 99% of connection problems, contrary to the suggestion of the parent I was responding to.
The only things my statements encompass are the post I replied to, and the grandparent it replied to.
It is still true now. But of course if someone says "hey, I haven't been able to connect to the internet, I've restarted my router, cable modem and computer", then I'll skip right past those steps (well, I'll still ask them to describe the lights on their cable modem, since half the time they don't notice the whole unit is flashing a "not connected" message).
I don't assume anyone is stupid, but I do assume most people calling tech support are ignorant of technology troubleshooting to one degree or another -- if they knew everything we knew, they probably wouldn't be calling us. My dad is a programmer and started out with vacuum tubes and punch cards, but he doesn't know more than the average guy about hardware, so even though he could find an obscure bug hidden in a million lines of C, I still start out with "did you restart the router?" if he's having a network issue.
You seem to be assuming a maliciousness or lack of care to the sequence of troubleshooting steps offered, when in fact we do them in precisely that order because it saves most customers time. if I can solve their problem in 30 seconds with a reboot of the cable modem, then I just saved them 30 minutes of waiting on hold with their cable provider, or 45 minutes of messing around with their network settings trying to track down a misconfiguration that doesn't exist (possibly creating one in the process).
it will become a big deal for others, once they go through their first or second heat wave with no A/C for several nights
The only way that would happen is if there was a massive brownout in your area, which is precisely what your behavior will cause. The remote management systems exist precisely to prevent anyone's a/c from being shut off for hours at a time in the periods of peak demand.
I'm getting the impression the air conditioners would all shut off at the peak of a heat wave. That would be wild.
No, the way it works in practice is that the system automatically shuts off, say 5% of the residential A/C units for 5 minutes, and then turns them back on and turns off a different 5%. Nobody should even notice that it has happened in their home. But when you're talking about hundreds of thousands (or millions) of houses, such minor individual adjustments add up to massive quantities of electricity being freed up right at the peak demand.
There are sound reasons beyond screen space for breaking long lines.
Why isn't the editor automatically (optionally) wrapping lines to your window size, while also maintaining the proper indentation of that wrapped line? Any decent editor should allow you to set it to wrap at an arbitrary column number regardless of windows size, as well.
Putting line breaks into text for anything other than signaling the end of a paragraph/statement is very 1980s.
I think perhaps AT&T has a legitimate point in that it changes every month. Perhaps you can challenge that as not a valid practice, but it fits reality like it or not.
Nobody is claiming AT&T should have psychic powers or warranty their customers against future changes outside their control. But expecting AT&T to provide *past* and *current* information for the sake of the customer making a more informed decision is perfectly reasonable. If they can't tell you what the taxes were on a given price plan last month, its because they don't care about informing the customer, not because it's a difficult piece of information for the company to provide. If your bill changes by $.01 every month, I'd guess that's just a rounding difference -- hardly something beyond their ability to explain in advance or include in the price information (or even eliminate if it bothers a lot of customers).
For all the similarities between phone companies and cable monopolies, my local cable company was able to tell me in seconds what my monthly bills would be including taxes and surcharges when I asked them about it while signing up. Of course they said it will be *around* this amount, not an exact to-the-penny guaranteed bill, but they broke down how much of the extra was for each tax or fee and then I had a sense of what might go up in the future.
Phone companies disclaim nearly everything they advertise about coverage, service availability and quality, the idea that they can't figure out how to disclaim future tax changes or accounting changes from any information they provide is absurd.
So when you're unable to provide them with the information they request, do you direct them to people who *could* provide that information (even if they're unwilling to)? If you're doing email support, do you reply and CC the billing department or sales department of their local store (along with providing a phone number), indicating to the customer that since those people are local they could provide the accurate local information you don't have access to (even though you should)?
I guess I don't understand why you say "it goes from customer service to making my life difficult" -- the customer isn't making your life difficult, the company is. The customer is asking perfectly reasonable pre-sales questions, and *should* be dissatisfied with a useless response that gives them no information or specific place to go to obtain that information. If your company is unable to answer such simple questions as how much you're going to charge somebody if they buy your product, then it is failing at customer service, and the customer has every right to be upset or disappointed. You may be in a bad position if you're not given the tools to do your job properly, but don't blame the customer for recognizing you're not doing the job (of course if your job is just to process XX number of emails per hour, regardless of whether or not you've actually helped any customers, then you're doing your job just fine and it shouldn't bother you at all that the customer is confused about what your job is).
I'm speaking of the customer service at the corporate level, not the individual level, when I say the backend system is of no concern to the customer. Obviously a front line agent has no ability to hack into the system, but there's nothing impossibly complicated at a corporate level about them telling the business group to provide this information to agents. They just choose not to, and thus provide poor service that can only be overcome by individual agents doing far more than should be required of them.
But your personal customer service has nothing to do with the org chart. You can provide excellent customer service while saying "no", because you can always give options other than "go fuck yourself" when turning down a request. Don't call corporate and complain, be very empathic and helpful when explaining you don't have that information -- provide them with the number, email and address of the local, state and national corporate offices so that the customer can contact them for more information. Offer to dial the phone for them. Provide no resistance and there's nothing for the customer to fight you about.
You could also be proactive and go the extra mile in finding the information through unofficial channels -- you certainly have access to current bills, if only your own personal bill. A customer will be impressed if you explain that you don't have the exact information they want, but from your *own* bill you know that the local taxes for one plan were $$ and the fees were $$, so while that isn't an exact figure that would be the same for the customer's plan and ZIP, it at least gives them a sense of proportionally what to expect if they live in the same state as you. Maybe even call corporate, go onto speaker phone with the customer, and try to find someone in billing who can provide you with the info. Call them every time a customer asks you, even if you know corporate billing will turn you down and tell you never to call again. eventually the guys in corporate billing will start providing the information or get you fired for being too helpful to customers. I also suspect you can set up an account for them in the computer and then cancel it after seeing the first billing amount, but that takes time and may hurt your metrics.
I sympathize if your company rewards you based on sales results or customers handled per hour rather than customer satisfaction, but that's a choice the company made to prioritize customers below other factors, and a choice you accepted when you took the position. It has nothing to do with the customer and everything to do with the company. If the customer is unhappy with that situation, quite frankly they have a right to be and you deserve to be made aware of it.
And yes, I do work in customer service. I spend every day doing nothing but talking to people who have problems with something we sold them. We are evaluated almost exclusively by customer satisfaction surveys. Our customers love us. Our employees love working here. Not surprisingly, we make money hand over fist because even our unhappy customers would rather deal with us than someone else. Sure, we get the occasional jackass or crazy person, but they're pretty darn rare. Most of the people who seem rude or crazy to other companies are only acting that way because the companies are being rude and crazy back at them.
You fail to grasp that all of those taxes are handled by business rules on the back end
Don't blame poor customer service on your org chart. That's the kind of excuse offered by companies who deep down don't actually give a shit about their customers. If it was a priority, you'd find a way to make it work.
But let me repeat myself, since you're so busy making excuses you didn't even read what I wrote -- I'm not asking that the salesperson be given access to the backend business systems to do realtime calculations. I'm asking that the business system calculate and publish every month what the actual cost of each current plan was for each ZIP code on the day of the calculation. Each region can pull up a page (or be provided with printouts along with all their other promotions) with the prices and disclaimers for the billing ZIP codes they service.
Figuring out the taxes on a phone line is rather complimakated
And yet they manage to send out hundreds of thousands of bills every month that calculate it down to the penny. Sure, they might make mistakes and have to offer refunds or disclaimers, but there's no excuse for them to not be able to tell you exactly what a $79.99 plan in a given ZIP code would have been billed after all taxes/fees were added last month.
This is basic customer service, not some advanced alien technology beyond the reach of AT&T.
Better to just sidestep it and let you figure out the taxes yourself, like you would have to with any other purpose that is taxed.
I don't know about you, but I don't buy anything else on which the tax is unknown by the seller, even though the seller is the one collecting it. When i buy something, they ring it up, the machine calculates the tax, and they tell me how much it is before I pay. The problem is that they're essentially telling you to sign a two year contract committing yourself to paying whatever bill they send you, but won't tell you what the bill will be.
It would be very easy for ATT to push out a list to their stores every month in which they say what each price plan worked out to with taxes for each state or zip code in the past billing cycle, with a disclaimer that of course if taxes and fees change the amount will be different in the future.
They just don't want to because they don't give a shit about customers or customer service, not because it's a difficult task or some mysteriously unknowable figure.
Don't be silly. That's exactly the kind of thing they'd want.
Don't be silly, making speeches is lousy theater. Video of anguished families rending their garments over the corpse of their child killed by an American soldier is a lot more effective in recruiting dissatisfied people than giving a powerpoint presentation about the oppressors.
Your enemies will certainly try to spin anything in their favor (what do you think the job of the White House press secretary is?) because nobody is going to hold a press conference to say "wow, we're idiots, it turns out those other guys are really great, look at this awesome aid package they're giving us!"
You have to convince people not to follow crazy leaders, which is difficult (it's taken eight years for us to ignore ours). You can either kill them mercilessly and terrify everyone into not wanting to risk it, you can give them jobs and food so that they're too comfortable to want to upset the status quo, or you can give them an alternate leader who they believe will be more effective (see: political history of Hamas).
As it stands, we're giving them jobs and then shooting them on their way to work, which doesn't make us look either strong or benevolent, it makes us look alternately malicious and idiotic.
Look, if you like being the hero and accepting more responsibility with no increase in compensation, feel free. If I need to be on call 24/7 to personally reboot computers, it will be reflected in my paycheck and scheduled in a professional manner so I know which periods I need to be available. Don't just hand out Blackberries and act like you're giving employees a treat by allowing them to instantly respond to any issues that arise any time of day or night.
If you need 24/7 support, then you pay for it. If 24/7 support is necessary for your company to be efficient, then pay for it. If you call a plumber at 3am, it will cost you a small fortune. But if the option is waiting until 9am when the plumber is cheaper and having the entire building flooded and all your employees sent home, then I guess the cost is worth it. Why do you think IT staff should behave less professionally than the average plumber?
If you expect to be treated like a professional, you have to act like one, and part of acting like one is negotiating responsibilities and compensation.
If someone needs me at 3am to accomplish a critical task, it's important enough for them to pick up the phone and call me and personally explain why I need to get out of bed and do this task right at this moment. I guaran-fucking-tee you that's the same answer your CEO would give to this question. And when we're done with the 3am task, he and I are both going to sit you down and ask why your poor planning required us to get out of bed at 3am to save your ass.
If a fsking fileserver is down you should be freaking fixing it, not waiting till hundreds or thousands of manhours have been wasted the next morning!
If the file server is that important, they should have 24/7 staff on-site to keep it running.
You can't complain about the prohibitive cost of having a professional IT staff available all hours and then turn around and say what a financial disaster it would be if they weren't there.
Okay...so you have a poorly-worded complaint that has nothing to do with anything I've said, and in fact agrees completely with me while getting very upset at my post? Thanks for clearing up who is dense.
I don't have any idea what your comment means. Are you complaining that if you want to be a part of the electric grid you have to be connected to the only grid that exists in an area? That there aren't multiple grids with different entities running them? I'm sorry if the laws of physics offend your economic theories, there's only so much surface area on the planet and only so much space underground for stuff to go.
The municipalities aren't gifting anything to anyone, they're generally contracting a company to create the network and (sometimes) run it for a fixed number of years. The network is public property in the proposals I've seen over the years (or if it is owned by the company and "leased" to the city, it is for accounting purposes and the city has the right to buy it back at any time) -- if there was a different article linked on your version of Slashdot, feel free to link to it. The only hyperbole I see is you flinging curse words and insults at anyone who has a better grasp of economics than you do.
I don't see anytime wrong with an organization selling bonds on the open market to fund capital improvements, and contracting someone to maintain that infrastructure. If you disagree with that basic premise of capitalism, that's your right, but it won't get you very far in the US.
The only "complaint" I see in the article is that the companies are complaining municipal bonds are more reliable notes, so investors like them too much which puts the company at a competitive disadvantage trying to roll out major infrastructure. Tough shit, that's how markets work -- municipal notes are considered reliable because they ARE reliable, and municipalities suffer greatly if they default on them. Private companies have to provide a better returns on their notes because they're much less reliable investments. Don't bitch to the courts just because your company is more likely to go out of business and leave your investors broke, and investors are smart enough to know that.
This is the same bullshit argument that banks make to try and eliminate credit unions -- as if the US Court system has nothing better than protect an existing business' right to make a profit, even if their own customers want something else and are willing to implement it themselves, risking their own money.
People don't care about transmitting, they just didn't have an easier way to hook up their iPod. If you could wave your wand and give them an AUX input on their stereo, they'd throw out the transmitter in a heartbeat.
Seriously, do you actually think that these local governments are doing it themselves? They're not. They're borrowing money and paying a telco to do it for them. That's why we're talking about subsidization.
So hiring people with the expertise to do something is bad? I thought that was the key to efficiency.
A magical Verizon Fairy doesn't go out and lay cables, they borrow money and then hire people with experience to do it for them.
The people didn't worry when the same thing happened with electricity, they didn't worry when it happened with telephone service. They didn't even worry when a "radio set" came to mean just a receiver.
Commercial radio receivers always outsold transmitters. Other than building a crystal set in the basement to learn electronics, 99.9999% of people have never given a damn about transmitting.
Everything else you said seems to disagree with your premise. I don't know of anyone who wishes phones were still rare items with few connections and outrageous charges. I don't know anyone who wishes electricity still had a dozen different standards and was only available a few hours a day for rich people.
You're right, people didn't worry when those things became basic infrastructure, because they wanted them to be invisible and ubiquitous. Just like they want the Internet to be. I'm sure not going to buy that an outhouse is better than indoor plumbing hooked up to a municipal sewer system.
yeah or maybe it just costs too much to run cabling and equipment out to rural areas...like more than they'd make selling internet connections so they don't do it. Consipiracy theorists tend to really leave logic behind. The whole suing thing is just because telecom companies know the cost per person will be so low, it's crazy. I mean a 100 megabit connections could cover a decent sized small town and that's relatively cheap when you divide it out per person. So then everyone's gonna want it and drop the traditional ISPs in favor of probably free municipal internet and their business will collapse.
Well, shit or get off the pot. Either it's so unprofitable that nobody can do it, or it is relatively cheap when you divide it by person. You can't have it both ways.
Letting a local government run your Internet is a stupid-bad idea.
You will see caps, filters, and all kinds of other crap.
And you're basing this on...? Legally speaking, if the government is providing the infrastructure, that's the surest way to guarantee it will be available to all and open to new uses, since they have a constitutional obligation to be content-neutral and not discriminate towards customers or services. Every home provider of internet service today is experimenting with -- and extolling the virtues of -- all the bad things you're talking about.
But to the parent's point, companies realize this cost-benefit analysis far far better than governments and politics.
What do you base this conclusion on? There are very few municipalities in the US that declare bankruptcy or have their bonds reduced to junk status in any given decade, primarily because such actions have very long-term consequences that are unescapable and far more painful than even the most drastic short-term fiscal measures.
The vast majority of businesses fail within a few years, and even massive multi-billion dollar corps go bankrupt with regularity, because if they make a poor risk there is no real negative consequence to simply walking away.
It's that governments need to realize that their decisions have consequences.
But businesses have consequences to their decisions, as well. Amazon doesn't have those warehouses and distribution centers spread across several states just because they liked the scenery -- it offers a business advantage to them, in lower labor costs, faster shipping times, whatever. Sure, they could just shut them all down to "punish" the states, but they risk losing business if shipping takes longer or they have to raise prices to reflect higher local wages.
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No, the Geniuses aren't customer service, they're tech support (usually high-level tech support at that, with loads of certifications of every piece of hardware Apple has made in the past 10 years). Granted, they *do* deal with customer service issues but they will put those off to customer service specialists over the phone if it takes longer than a few minutes to resolve because that isn't their area of extensive training.
I only offer this correction because (probably like most people) I assumed anyone physically working in a retail space would be pretty low-level, with the occasional fluke of someone overqualified. I was pretty surprised to find out just how much training and technical experience the typical Apple Genius has.
I'm not assuming anything. I know very well that our support is far better than anyone else's. We have the number one customer satisfaction rating in the entire computer industry, and it's not because we read off scripts and rush people off the phone in 5 minutes or less. But we do still expect you to reboot your router and cable modem, because it solves 99% of connection problems, contrary to the suggestion of the parent I was responding to.
The only things my statements encompass are the post I replied to, and the grandparent it replied to.
It is still true now. But of course if someone says "hey, I haven't been able to connect to the internet, I've restarted my router, cable modem and computer", then I'll skip right past those steps (well, I'll still ask them to describe the lights on their cable modem, since half the time they don't notice the whole unit is flashing a "not connected" message).
I don't assume anyone is stupid, but I do assume most people calling tech support are ignorant of technology troubleshooting to one degree or another -- if they knew everything we knew, they probably wouldn't be calling us. My dad is a programmer and started out with vacuum tubes and punch cards, but he doesn't know more than the average guy about hardware, so even though he could find an obscure bug hidden in a million lines of C, I still start out with "did you restart the router?" if he's having a network issue.
You seem to be assuming a maliciousness or lack of care to the sequence of troubleshooting steps offered, when in fact we do them in precisely that order because it saves most customers time. if I can solve their problem in 30 seconds with a reboot of the cable modem, then I just saved them 30 minutes of waiting on hold with their cable provider, or 45 minutes of messing around with their network settings trying to track down a misconfiguration that doesn't exist (possibly creating one in the process).
The only way that would happen is if there was a massive brownout in your area, which is precisely what your behavior will cause. The remote management systems exist precisely to prevent anyone's a/c from being shut off for hours at a time in the periods of peak demand.
No, the way it works in practice is that the system automatically shuts off, say 5% of the residential A/C units for 5 minutes, and then turns them back on and turns off a different 5%. Nobody should even notice that it has happened in their home. But when you're talking about hundreds of thousands (or millions) of houses, such minor individual adjustments add up to massive quantities of electricity being freed up right at the peak demand.
Why isn't the editor automatically (optionally) wrapping lines to your window size, while also maintaining the proper indentation of that wrapped line? Any decent editor should allow you to set it to wrap at an arbitrary column number regardless of windows size, as well.
Putting line breaks into text for anything other than signaling the end of a paragraph/statement is very 1980s.
Nobody is claiming AT&T should have psychic powers or warranty their customers against future changes outside their control. But expecting AT&T to provide *past* and *current* information for the sake of the customer making a more informed decision is perfectly reasonable. If they can't tell you what the taxes were on a given price plan last month, its because they don't care about informing the customer, not because it's a difficult piece of information for the company to provide. If your bill changes by $.01 every month, I'd guess that's just a rounding difference -- hardly something beyond their ability to explain in advance or include in the price information (or even eliminate if it bothers a lot of customers).
For all the similarities between phone companies and cable monopolies, my local cable company was able to tell me in seconds what my monthly bills would be including taxes and surcharges when I asked them about it while signing up. Of course they said it will be *around* this amount, not an exact to-the-penny guaranteed bill, but they broke down how much of the extra was for each tax or fee and then I had a sense of what might go up in the future.
Phone companies disclaim nearly everything they advertise about coverage, service availability and quality, the idea that they can't figure out how to disclaim future tax changes or accounting changes from any information they provide is absurd.
So when you're unable to provide them with the information they request, do you direct them to people who *could* provide that information (even if they're unwilling to)? If you're doing email support, do you reply and CC the billing department or sales department of their local store (along with providing a phone number), indicating to the customer that since those people are local they could provide the accurate local information you don't have access to (even though you should)?
I guess I don't understand why you say "it goes from customer service to making my life difficult" -- the customer isn't making your life difficult, the company is. The customer is asking perfectly reasonable pre-sales questions, and *should* be dissatisfied with a useless response that gives them no information or specific place to go to obtain that information. If your company is unable to answer such simple questions as how much you're going to charge somebody if they buy your product, then it is failing at customer service, and the customer has every right to be upset or disappointed. You may be in a bad position if you're not given the tools to do your job properly, but don't blame the customer for recognizing you're not doing the job (of course if your job is just to process XX number of emails per hour, regardless of whether or not you've actually helped any customers, then you're doing your job just fine and it shouldn't bother you at all that the customer is confused about what your job is).
I'm speaking of the customer service at the corporate level, not the individual level, when I say the backend system is of no concern to the customer. Obviously a front line agent has no ability to hack into the system, but there's nothing impossibly complicated at a corporate level about them telling the business group to provide this information to agents. They just choose not to, and thus provide poor service that can only be overcome by individual agents doing far more than should be required of them.
But your personal customer service has nothing to do with the org chart. You can provide excellent customer service while saying "no", because you can always give options other than "go fuck yourself" when turning down a request. Don't call corporate and complain, be very empathic and helpful when explaining you don't have that information -- provide them with the number, email and address of the local, state and national corporate offices so that the customer can contact them for more information. Offer to dial the phone for them. Provide no resistance and there's nothing for the customer to fight you about.
You could also be proactive and go the extra mile in finding the information through unofficial channels -- you certainly have access to current bills, if only your own personal bill. A customer will be impressed if you explain that you don't have the exact information they want, but from your *own* bill you know that the local taxes for one plan were $$ and the fees were $$, so while that isn't an exact figure that would be the same for the customer's plan and ZIP, it at least gives them a sense of proportionally what to expect if they live in the same state as you. Maybe even call corporate, go onto speaker phone with the customer, and try to find someone in billing who can provide you with the info. Call them every time a customer asks you, even if you know corporate billing will turn you down and tell you never to call again. eventually the guys in corporate billing will start providing the information or get you fired for being too helpful to customers. I also suspect you can set up an account for them in the computer and then cancel it after seeing the first billing amount, but that takes time and may hurt your metrics.
I sympathize if your company rewards you based on sales results or customers handled per hour rather than customer satisfaction, but that's a choice the company made to prioritize customers below other factors, and a choice you accepted when you took the position. It has nothing to do with the customer and everything to do with the company. If the customer is unhappy with that situation, quite frankly they have a right to be and you deserve to be made aware of it.
And yes, I do work in customer service. I spend every day doing nothing but talking to people who have problems with something we sold them. We are evaluated almost exclusively by customer satisfaction surveys. Our customers love us. Our employees love working here. Not surprisingly, we make money hand over fist because even our unhappy customers would rather deal with us than someone else. Sure, we get the occasional jackass or crazy person, but they're pretty darn rare. Most of the people who seem rude or crazy to other companies are only acting that way because the companies are being rude and crazy back at them.
Don't blame poor customer service on your org chart. That's the kind of excuse offered by companies who deep down don't actually give a shit about their customers. If it was a priority, you'd find a way to make it work.
But let me repeat myself, since you're so busy making excuses you didn't even read what I wrote -- I'm not asking that the salesperson be given access to the backend business systems to do realtime calculations. I'm asking that the business system calculate and publish every month what the actual cost of each current plan was for each ZIP code on the day of the calculation. Each region can pull up a page (or be provided with printouts along with all their other promotions) with the prices and disclaimers for the billing ZIP codes they service.
And yet they manage to send out hundreds of thousands of bills every month that calculate it down to the penny. Sure, they might make mistakes and have to offer refunds or disclaimers, but there's no excuse for them to not be able to tell you exactly what a $79.99 plan in a given ZIP code would have been billed after all taxes/fees were added last month.
This is basic customer service, not some advanced alien technology beyond the reach of AT&T.
I don't know about you, but I don't buy anything else on which the tax is unknown by the seller, even though the seller is the one collecting it. When i buy something, they ring it up, the machine calculates the tax, and they tell me how much it is before I pay. The problem is that they're essentially telling you to sign a two year contract committing yourself to paying whatever bill they send you, but won't tell you what the bill will be.
It would be very easy for ATT to push out a list to their stores every month in which they say what each price plan worked out to with taxes for each state or zip code in the past billing cycle, with a disclaimer that of course if taxes and fees change the amount will be different in the future.
They just don't want to because they don't give a shit about customers or customer service, not because it's a difficult task or some mysteriously unknowable figure.
Don't be silly, making speeches is lousy theater. Video of anguished families rending their garments over the corpse of their child killed by an American soldier is a lot more effective in recruiting dissatisfied people than giving a powerpoint presentation about the oppressors.
Your enemies will certainly try to spin anything in their favor (what do you think the job of the White House press secretary is?) because nobody is going to hold a press conference to say "wow, we're idiots, it turns out those other guys are really great, look at this awesome aid package they're giving us!"
You have to convince people not to follow crazy leaders, which is difficult (it's taken eight years for us to ignore ours). You can either kill them mercilessly and terrify everyone into not wanting to risk it, you can give them jobs and food so that they're too comfortable to want to upset the status quo, or you can give them an alternate leader who they believe will be more effective (see: political history of Hamas).
As it stands, we're giving them jobs and then shooting them on their way to work, which doesn't make us look either strong or benevolent, it makes us look alternately malicious and idiotic.
Look, if you like being the hero and accepting more responsibility with no increase in compensation, feel free. If I need to be on call 24/7 to personally reboot computers, it will be reflected in my paycheck and scheduled in a professional manner so I know which periods I need to be available. Don't just hand out Blackberries and act like you're giving employees a treat by allowing them to instantly respond to any issues that arise any time of day or night.
If you need 24/7 support, then you pay for it. If 24/7 support is necessary for your company to be efficient, then pay for it. If you call a plumber at 3am, it will cost you a small fortune. But if the option is waiting until 9am when the plumber is cheaper and having the entire building flooded and all your employees sent home, then I guess the cost is worth it. Why do you think IT staff should behave less professionally than the average plumber?
If you expect to be treated like a professional, you have to act like one, and part of acting like one is negotiating responsibilities and compensation.
If someone needs me at 3am to accomplish a critical task, it's important enough for them to pick up the phone and call me and personally explain why I need to get out of bed and do this task right at this moment. I guaran-fucking-tee you that's the same answer your CEO would give to this question. And when we're done with the 3am task, he and I are both going to sit you down and ask why your poor planning required us to get out of bed at 3am to save your ass.
If the file server is that important, they should have 24/7 staff on-site to keep it running.
You can't complain about the prohibitive cost of having a professional IT staff available all hours and then turn around and say what a financial disaster it would be if they weren't there.
Okay...so you have a poorly-worded complaint that has nothing to do with anything I've said, and in fact agrees completely with me while getting very upset at my post? Thanks for clearing up who is dense.
I don't have any idea what your comment means. Are you complaining that if you want to be a part of the electric grid you have to be connected to the only grid that exists in an area? That there aren't multiple grids with different entities running them? I'm sorry if the laws of physics offend your economic theories, there's only so much surface area on the planet and only so much space underground for stuff to go.
The municipalities aren't gifting anything to anyone, they're generally contracting a company to create the network and (sometimes) run it for a fixed number of years. The network is public property in the proposals I've seen over the years (or if it is owned by the company and "leased" to the city, it is for accounting purposes and the city has the right to buy it back at any time) -- if there was a different article linked on your version of Slashdot, feel free to link to it. The only hyperbole I see is you flinging curse words and insults at anyone who has a better grasp of economics than you do.
I don't see anytime wrong with an organization selling bonds on the open market to fund capital improvements, and contracting someone to maintain that infrastructure. If you disagree with that basic premise of capitalism, that's your right, but it won't get you very far in the US.
The only "complaint" I see in the article is that the companies are complaining municipal bonds are more reliable notes, so investors like them too much which puts the company at a competitive disadvantage trying to roll out major infrastructure. Tough shit, that's how markets work -- municipal notes are considered reliable because they ARE reliable, and municipalities suffer greatly if they default on them. Private companies have to provide a better returns on their notes because they're much less reliable investments. Don't bitch to the courts just because your company is more likely to go out of business and leave your investors broke, and investors are smart enough to know that.
This is the same bullshit argument that banks make to try and eliminate credit unions -- as if the US Court system has nothing better than protect an existing business' right to make a profit, even if their own customers want something else and are willing to implement it themselves, risking their own money.
People don't care about transmitting, they just didn't have an easier way to hook up their iPod. If you could wave your wand and give them an AUX input on their stereo, they'd throw out the transmitter in a heartbeat.
So hiring people with the expertise to do something is bad? I thought that was the key to efficiency.
A magical Verizon Fairy doesn't go out and lay cables, they borrow money and then hire people with experience to do it for them.
Commercial radio receivers always outsold transmitters. Other than building a crystal set in the basement to learn electronics, 99.9999% of people have never given a damn about transmitting.
Everything else you said seems to disagree with your premise. I don't know of anyone who wishes phones were still rare items with few connections and outrageous charges. I don't know anyone who wishes electricity still had a dozen different standards and was only available a few hours a day for rich people.
You're right, people didn't worry when those things became basic infrastructure, because they wanted them to be invisible and ubiquitous. Just like they want the Internet to be. I'm sure not going to buy that an outhouse is better than indoor plumbing hooked up to a municipal sewer system.
Well, shit or get off the pot. Either it's so unprofitable that nobody can do it, or it is relatively cheap when you divide it by person. You can't have it both ways.
And you're basing this on...? Legally speaking, if the government is providing the infrastructure, that's the surest way to guarantee it will be available to all and open to new uses, since they have a constitutional obligation to be content-neutral and not discriminate towards customers or services. Every home provider of internet service today is experimenting with -- and extolling the virtues of -- all the bad things you're talking about.
What do you base this conclusion on? There are very few municipalities in the US that declare bankruptcy or have their bonds reduced to junk status in any given decade, primarily because such actions have very long-term consequences that are unescapable and far more painful than even the most drastic short-term fiscal measures.
The vast majority of businesses fail within a few years, and even massive multi-billion dollar corps go bankrupt with regularity, because if they make a poor risk there is no real negative consequence to simply walking away.
But businesses have consequences to their decisions, as well. Amazon doesn't have those warehouses and distribution centers spread across several states just because they liked the scenery -- it offers a business advantage to them, in lower labor costs, faster shipping times, whatever. Sure, they could just shut them all down to "punish" the states, but they risk losing business if shipping takes longer or they have to raise prices to reflect higher local wages.