However if there's a problem, calling every day or multiple times per day just to whine "is it fixed yet?" doesn't help
At the same time, corrections to billing errors (an almost monthly thing when I was w/Sprint) shouldn't require a callback to ask "is it fixed". It should just be fucking fixed when someone tells you it will be. Instead, Sprint treats you to a giant circle jerk of unaccountability, lies and incorrect information from their CSRs which forces you to call back in, yet again.
And end up with a locked phone, an ETF and the exact same incorrect bill being sent to collections. Great plan!
And as much as the above really sucks, it's still a bargain compared to a lawyer and the time spent to even get a court to look at your case due to the mandatory arbitration clauses in all the contracts. Even TMobile - whose contract w/ mandatory arbitration clause was called "unconscionable" and "not enforceable" by a appeals court judge 2 weeks ago, still has mandatory arbitration in the first paragraph of their "terms and conditions" on their website Go ahead, pick up that phone - call the "arbitrators" who were chosen by, and whose salaries are paid by the company who have a grievance with.
Yeah, but after the cops come and arrest you at work, you spend months waiting and preparing for a trial (assuming you can even afford a lawyer and don't just plead out) - with bills stacking up because you lost your job when the cop told your boss what was going on, what the jury decides isn't as important as it may seem. More often than not, the damage is done.
Granted, this is not saying that the customers are in the wrong, but it stands to reason if a customer has to call over 25 times in a month for the same reason; Sprint should have escalated those calls after the third call.
Except with Sprint, they don't. You get transfered from one fuckwit to another. Over and over and over again. Agents lie to you repeatedly, giving false contact information, forgetting about promised callbacks the moment the line goes dead, "losing" records of previous calls and promised changes. You call back again, hoping that you'll get them to fix their mistake, but instead get kicked in the balls over and over again by yet another agent hates their job and knows there is no such thing as accountability at Sprint.
As for Customer Service, it's the same with all of the carriers. You are never going to get consistently good customer service anymore. The call centers in America have a horrendous turnover rate which impacts service greatly.
It also helps that all the carriers have nearly identical abusive contracts and policies that ensure that if you want to leave, you're stuck with a several hundred dollar cancellation fee and a (probably) a phone intentionally crippled to only work with a certain company's network.
Once your customers are all so afraid of canceling early due to an ETF and you know the "competition" doesn't really provide anything better than what you have, is there a reason you have to care about what your customer service? Americans migrate from one carrier to another like mindless sheep, hoping that one cell phone carrier will be better than the last, but once they get their first bill, they realize that their new cell company is just as dishonest, unethical and scummy as the last bunch of fuckers.
ANY (residential) customer who makes over 25 calls on average, per month, for more than one month is either a bad customer or chemically imbalanced. Notice, that's about 1 call PER DAY for and likely about THE SAME ISSUE (probably billing).
Yeah, people should just stop calling and pay their erroneous bills. What's an extra couple hundred dollars in bullshit charges in the long run, eh?
If you're having an issue with your phone company that requires you to call once a day about, you don't need a contract with them, you either need a lawyer,
Good luck with that... oh.. what? Mandatory arbitration clause? Motion to dismiss because of that? Have fun dealing with the "arbitrators" who were chosen by the company you're filing a complaint against.
If Sprint fucks up and bills you several hundred dollars extra in magical bullshit charges, yeah, you're liable to make calls until that gets fixed. Every couple of months I had to call in, spend a bunch of time on the phone talking to mentally defective CSRs who can't do math and finally wait a few days for the refund to post I can understand a mistake once or twice - but Sprint had a pattern of "mistakes". Seriously folks, incompetence as an excuse goes only so far. Funny how the mistakes were always in their favor too...
Sprint is one of those companies that really needs someone to go on a killing spree at their offices.
Good luck getting past the "mandatory arbitration" clause in the "contract". Sure, the same clause in T-Mobile's contract was ruled "Unconscionable" and "Not Enforceable", but a legal battle with a cell phone carrier is a great way to piss away money.
50-60k really sucks if you live in Vancover or Kelowna, BC though. You can't find anything in Kelowna for under 200 (including tiny condos) and most homes go for well over 300k. For low income earners though, just the cost of health insurance is big difference in your finances. I was paying over $100 a month (company subsidized) for health and dental in the states, in Canada, the cost is less than half. Added to that, no fucking copays, you can actually see a GP fairly quick - any GP - not one from a list your insurance company gives you (all of whom are overbooked so you need to wait a month to see them) I think, in general, you feel that you're getting a lot less nickel and dimed up here.
Immigrating to the states isn't all that bad, btw.
They're probably hoping that the Canadian dollar will take a hit in the next few years and they will have cheap labour. Either that or the Canadian government offered them a subsidy which they will easily reclaim w/tax money from the workers (taxes in Canada are a bit high)
Basically he's saying that if a cop thinks it was/could be created for the purposes of sexual arousal, it's illegal, regardless of the fact that it can be shown on prime time TV and re-run 20 times. Ironically enough, the british film board subsidies a bunch of video - I would not be surprised that a fairly large number of films will eventually end up on the "violent porn ban list". And lets not forget - this is the UK we're talking about - it's not like London isn't the second most perverted city in the western world (SF probably #1).
Not that I've uhh, done this, but those envelopes are a great way to get rid of dead ram sticks and the such. Why waste the energy dragging it to the curb?;)
Terrible / really bad credit ratings will get you plenty of offers - for pre-paid cards that have a $150 annual fee and a $300 credit limit, but that shit never stops.
Re:This is my single biggest push to free software
on
Vista is Watching You
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· Score: 1
The consumer mac drivers are a lot worse than the windows side. Have been for years, and there isn't any sign of that changing. I recall (while working for HP's mac AIO support), the laserjet 1200 printer was bundled with a CD that had drivers that would not work in OSX I'm not talking "buggy" or "conflicts with other programs" but "would not work even if you installed them on a clean install". If you didn't use the drivers, it took literally 30 seconds to connect and have your first page printing.
When the contract got moved to Canada, well over a year later, nothing had changed. That same damn CD was being shipped (and was fucking up the 10.2 printing system)
The Vista downgrade process is horrible beyond words and we've had cases where it would of have been cheaper to buy an oem XP than pay for our time.
What the current process is - and I have a "manager's manager" (a guy somewhere in North America) on tape with this - is that you install using any legit media and a legit xp cd key. Then, when the PC fails activation (which it will, if you've used the same key a few times), you call in, do the song and dance with the crap voice recognition system, talk to an Indian and hopefully* get an activation key. This method will no doubt cause us problems in the future with genuine advantage, etc, but there isn't a damn thing we can do about that.
*I say hopefully because Microsoft reps don't know what the hell they are talking about and different call centers will get you different answers / route you to the wrong people. We've had a call where 2 managers were yelling at each other in Indian in a very heated argument while we sat wondering "wtf". Getting a key normally takes about 2 hours although we've got them in as little as 5 minutes after we've passed through the pointless activation voice system. The process is generally quicker now, although we dread calling. Oh... and we've gotten completely conflicting information - although MS is not supposed to generate xp keys, I've had several keys generated for me (if you bully the female Filipino csrs, they generally do stuff they apparently shouldn't)
Of course, for customer satisfaction, we've written most of this off - it totals in the thousands of dollars at this point. We've been pleading with Microsoft (we have system builder status, but we usually act as resellers) to get us a better process, because this is a waste of our time, but nothing has happened. False promises, missed deadlines, et al. OEMs were supposed to have a policy in place months ago, but as far as I know, not a single large company (from Seanix to HP to Dell and Lenovo) has the capability for their phone technicians to generate an XP cd key to solve this problem.
We're especially hit hard because we mainly deal with small businesses - usually under 75 people (we're in a fairly small town, so those businesses have slowly grown to get that "big"). If our customers were bigger, they'd use volume license agreements. As it is, they don't and we can't exactly say "fuck it" and install a corp edition w/ a wga crack which is what I've heard some of the smaller companies around here are doing.
Furthermore, I worked for Vista support for a few weeks during the rollout (if anyone wants a shitty, low paying job, head up to Sutherland in Vernon, BC) nobody knew what they were doing and we got conflicting information during training. When we were sitting on the line during the downgrade process, none of the indian csrs knew what was going on. From what I understand from my contacts there, nothing has changed.
I'm assuming that Microsoft can reach all their outsourced call centers and provide them with the correct information (they have a centralized call logging application). The fact is that that they have had several months and they haven't. CSRs are still giving out bad info and managers still have no idea what the hell the process is. I don't want to say that Microsoft is intentionally making the process difficult, but I can't see any other explanation except for mass incompetence. I know for sure that we haven't heard the good news or the new process yet... Maybe people in Canuckistan have to wait a bit for the news to filter down...
I wonder if this man would have been freed if not for the media whirlwind and outcry over this. Absolutely not. The DA has career aspirations and didn't want to be labeled as "the douchebag who prosecuted someone for videotaping the cops" If there was no coverage / outrage, the average joe would be spending time in prison (although our prosecutor would of have most likely negotiated down to a misdemeanor of some kind, losses and appeals look bad when you want to start out in politics...)
When I was on Verizon DSL, the DSL service went down with power outages. Comcast seemed to go down if there was a power outage halfway around the city. A UPS isn't going to do shit for you in either of those cases unless you can sneak into the CO and plug your bank into it...
You clearly didn't work for Microsoft as a phone monkey. I did and can say you are completely full of shit. Pretty much the only thing that can make call center work worse is a shitty product with lots of issues.
I guess the saddest thing in this case is that it proves your average jury will convict someone (for a crime that can result in 40 years in prison) so casually. It doesn't matter any longer that the authorities didn't even bother doing most basic investigation, it is simply enough for an "expert witness" with a badge (the detective in this case perjured himself) to state something and it will be seen as gospel truth by the members of the jury. It's disgusting that your average juror lacks the capacity to serve as was originally intended.
Actually, it was a "detective" who perjured himself by saying that you had to click on a link "for it to turn purple" (when, in fact, any visited link - via javascript redirect or whatever - will cause a link to "turn purple") No action has been taken against this lying shitbag and given the behavior of the prosecutor, that "i wanna be tough on crime so I get elected mayor" fuckhead will probably call the same asshole again and some fucking tard jurors won't have any more sense than the last bunch. The legal system is awesome.
I've been running 2003 server as a desktop os for a while, but some stuff won't install properly Doom 3, Rome Total War and quite a few other games, pretty much anything from Logitech unless you coax it, MS powertoys (for some stupid reason) etc. From what I see with longhorn server, it's not that bad either... Beta 2 kicks the ass of vista in terms of usability, etc on my laptop...
Slashdot Mirror
However if there's a problem, calling every day or multiple times per day just to whine "is it fixed yet?" doesn't help
At the same time, corrections to billing errors (an almost monthly thing when I was w/Sprint) shouldn't require a callback to ask "is it fixed".
It should just be fucking fixed when someone tells you it will be.
Instead, Sprint treats you to a giant circle jerk of unaccountability, lies and incorrect information from their CSRs which forces you to call back in, yet again.
And end up with a locked phone, an ETF and the exact same incorrect bill being sent to collections.
Great plan!
And as much as the above really sucks, it's still a bargain compared to a lawyer and the time spent to even get a court to look at your case due to the mandatory arbitration clauses in all the contracts.
Even TMobile - whose contract w/ mandatory arbitration clause was called "unconscionable" and "not enforceable" by a appeals court judge 2 weeks ago, still has mandatory arbitration in the first paragraph of their "terms and conditions" on their website
Go ahead, pick up that phone - call the "arbitrators" who were chosen by, and whose salaries are paid by the company who have a grievance with.
I wonder if you'll get a response from the apologist fucktard you replied to.
Yeah, but after the cops come and arrest you at work, you spend months waiting and preparing for a trial (assuming you can even afford a lawyer and don't just plead out) - with bills stacking up because you lost your job when the cop told your boss what was going on, what the jury decides isn't as important as it may seem. More often than not, the damage is done.
Granted, this is not saying that the customers are in the wrong, but it stands to reason if a customer has to call over 25 times in a month for the same reason; Sprint should have escalated those calls after the third call.
Except with Sprint, they don't.
You get transfered from one fuckwit to another. Over and over and over again. Agents lie to you repeatedly, giving false contact information, forgetting about promised callbacks the moment the line goes dead, "losing" records of previous calls and promised changes. You call back again, hoping that you'll get them to fix their mistake, but instead get kicked in the balls over and over again by yet another agent hates their job and knows there is no such thing as accountability at Sprint.
As for Customer Service, it's the same with all of the carriers. You are never going to get consistently good customer service anymore. The call centers in America have a horrendous turnover rate which impacts service greatly.
It also helps that all the carriers have nearly identical abusive contracts and policies that ensure that if you want to leave, you're stuck with a several hundred dollar cancellation fee and a (probably) a phone intentionally crippled to only work with a certain company's network.
Once your customers are all so afraid of canceling early due to an ETF and you know the "competition" doesn't really provide anything better than what you have, is there a reason you have to care about what your customer service?
Americans migrate from one carrier to another like mindless sheep, hoping that one cell phone carrier will be better than the last, but once they get their first bill, they realize that their new cell company is just as dishonest, unethical and scummy as the last bunch of fuckers.
ANY (residential) customer who makes over 25 calls on average, per month, for more than one month is either a bad customer or chemically imbalanced. Notice, that's about 1 call PER DAY for and likely about THE SAME ISSUE (probably billing).
Yeah, people should just stop calling and pay their erroneous bills. What's an extra couple hundred dollars in bullshit charges in the long run, eh?
If you're having an issue with your phone company that requires you to call once a day about, you don't need a contract with them, you either need a lawyer,
Good luck with that... oh.. what? Mandatory arbitration clause? Motion to dismiss because of that?
Have fun dealing with the "arbitrators" who were chosen by the company you're filing a complaint against.
If Sprint fucks up and bills you several hundred dollars extra in magical bullshit charges, yeah, you're liable to make calls until that gets fixed.
Every couple of months I had to call in, spend a bunch of time on the phone talking to mentally defective CSRs who can't do math and finally wait a few days for the refund to post
I can understand a mistake once or twice - but Sprint had a pattern of "mistakes". Seriously folks, incompetence as an excuse goes only so far. Funny how the mistakes were always in their favor too...
Sprint is one of those companies that really needs someone to go on a killing spree at their offices.
Good luck getting past the "mandatory arbitration" clause in the "contract".
1 2082.PDF
Sure, the same clause in T-Mobile's contract was ruled "Unconscionable" and "Not Enforceable", but a legal battle with a cell phone carrier is a great way to piss away money.
See http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/opinions/documents/A1
50-60k really sucks if you live in Vancover or Kelowna, BC though. You can't find anything in Kelowna for under 200 (including tiny condos) and most homes go for well over 300k.
For low income earners though, just the cost of health insurance is big difference in your finances. I was paying over $100 a month (company subsidized) for health and dental in the states, in Canada, the cost is less than half.
Added to that, no fucking copays, you can actually see a GP fairly quick - any GP - not one from a list your insurance company gives you (all of whom are overbooked so you need to wait a month to see them)
I think, in general, you feel that you're getting a lot less nickel and dimed up here.
Immigrating to the states isn't all that bad, btw.
They're probably hoping that the Canadian dollar will take a hit in the next few years and they will have cheap labour.
Either that or the Canadian government offered them a subsidy which they will easily reclaim w/tax money from the workers (taxes in Canada are a bit high)
Basically he's saying that if a cop thinks it was/could be created for the purposes of sexual arousal, it's illegal, regardless of the fact that it can be shown on prime time TV and re-run 20 times.
Ironically enough, the british film board subsidies a bunch of video - I would not be surprised that a fairly large number of films will eventually end up on the "violent porn ban list".
And lets not forget - this is the UK we're talking about - it's not like London isn't the second most perverted city in the western world (SF probably #1).
*golf clap*
Well played...
Not that I've uhh, done this, but those envelopes are a great way to get rid of dead ram sticks and the such. Why waste the energy dragging it to the curb? ;)
Terrible / really bad credit ratings will get you plenty of offers - for pre-paid cards that have a $150 annual fee and a $300 credit limit, but that shit never stops.
The consumer mac drivers are a lot worse than the windows side. Have been for years, and there isn't any sign of that changing. I recall (while working for HP's mac AIO support), the laserjet 1200 printer was bundled with a CD that had drivers that would not work in OSX
I'm not talking "buggy" or "conflicts with other programs" but "would not work even if you installed them on a clean install". If you didn't use the drivers, it took literally 30 seconds to connect and have your first page printing.
When the contract got moved to Canada, well over a year later, nothing had changed. That same damn CD was being shipped (and was fucking up the 10.2 printing system)
And it definitely won't if you install Vista w/o a key and "upgrade" from a vista install.
The Vista downgrade process is horrible beyond words and we've had cases where it would of have been cheaper to buy an oem XP than pay for our time.
What the current process is - and I have a "manager's manager" (a guy somewhere in North America) on tape with this - is that you install using any legit media and a legit xp cd key.
Then, when the PC fails activation (which it will, if you've used the same key a few times), you call in, do the song and dance with the crap voice recognition system, talk to an Indian and hopefully* get an activation key.
This method will no doubt cause us problems in the future with genuine advantage, etc, but there isn't a damn thing we can do about that.
*I say hopefully because Microsoft reps don't know what the hell they are talking about and different call centers will get you different answers / route you to the wrong people. We've had a call where 2 managers were yelling at each other in Indian in a very heated argument while we sat wondering "wtf". Getting a key normally takes about 2 hours although we've got them in as little as 5 minutes after we've passed through the pointless activation voice system. The process is generally quicker now, although we dread calling. Oh... and we've gotten completely conflicting information - although MS is not supposed to generate xp keys, I've had several keys generated for me (if you bully the female Filipino csrs, they generally do stuff they apparently shouldn't)
Of course, for customer satisfaction, we've written most of this off - it totals in the thousands of dollars at this point. We've been pleading with Microsoft (we have system builder status, but we usually act as resellers) to get us a better process, because this is a waste of our time, but nothing has happened. False promises, missed deadlines, et al. OEMs were supposed to have a policy in place months ago, but as far as I know, not a single large company (from Seanix to HP to Dell and Lenovo) has the capability for their phone technicians to generate an XP cd key to solve this problem.
We're especially hit hard because we mainly deal with small businesses - usually under 75 people (we're in a fairly small town, so those businesses have slowly grown to get that "big"). If our customers were bigger, they'd use volume license agreements. As it is, they don't and we can't exactly say "fuck it" and install a corp edition w/ a wga crack which is what I've heard some of the smaller companies around here are doing.
Furthermore, I worked for Vista support for a few weeks during the rollout (if anyone wants a shitty, low paying job, head up to Sutherland in Vernon, BC) nobody knew what they were doing and we got conflicting information during training. When we were sitting on the line during the downgrade process, none of the indian csrs knew what was going on.
From what I understand from my contacts there, nothing has changed.
I'm assuming that Microsoft can reach all their outsourced call centers and provide them with the correct information (they have a centralized call logging application).
The fact is that that they have had several months and they haven't. CSRs are still giving out bad info and managers still have no idea what the hell the process is.
I don't want to say that Microsoft is intentionally making the process difficult, but I can't see any other explanation except for mass incompetence.
I know for sure that we haven't heard the good news or the new process yet... Maybe people in Canuckistan have to wait a bit for the news to filter down...
I wonder if this man would have been freed if not for the media whirlwind and outcry over this.
Absolutely not.
The DA has career aspirations and didn't want to be labeled as "the douchebag who prosecuted someone for videotaping the cops"
If there was no coverage / outrage, the average joe would be spending time in prison (although our prosecutor would of have most likely negotiated down to a misdemeanor of some kind, losses and appeals look bad when you want to start out in politics...)
When I was on Verizon DSL, the DSL service went down with power outages. Comcast seemed to go down if there was a power outage halfway around the city.
A UPS isn't going to do shit for you in either of those cases unless you can sneak into the CO and plug your bank into it...
You clearly didn't work for Microsoft as a phone monkey. I did and can say you are completely full of shit.
Pretty much the only thing that can make call center work worse is a shitty product with lots of issues.
The only thing worse than slashdot armchair lawyers are slashdot armchair legal scholars.
I don't know about that. Your average juror is pretty fucking stupid...
I guess the saddest thing in this case is that it proves your average jury will convict someone (for a crime that can result in 40 years in prison) so casually.
It doesn't matter any longer that the authorities didn't even bother doing most basic investigation, it is simply enough for an "expert witness" with a badge (the detective in this case perjured himself) to state something and it will be seen as gospel truth by the members of the jury.
It's disgusting that your average juror lacks the capacity to serve as was originally intended.
Actually, it was a "detective" who perjured himself by saying that you had to click on a link "for it to turn purple" (when, in fact, any visited link - via javascript redirect or whatever - will cause a link to "turn purple")
No action has been taken against this lying shitbag and given the behavior of the prosecutor, that "i wanna be tough on crime so I get elected mayor" fuckhead will probably call the same asshole again and some fucking tard jurors won't have any more sense than the last bunch.
The legal system is awesome.
But the jury of fucking mouthbreathers found her guilty... That's sort of the point...
I've been running 2003 server as a desktop os for a while, but some stuff won't install properly
Doom 3, Rome Total War and quite a few other games, pretty much anything from Logitech unless you coax it, MS powertoys (for some stupid reason) etc.
From what I see with longhorn server, it's not that bad either... Beta 2 kicks the ass of vista in terms of usability, etc on my laptop...