There is so much focus on the Presidency, and so much hand-wringing about what the big bad government is doing, and in the midst of it so many people seem to forget that we, as individuals, CAN have some influence here.
How many of you have actually taken the time to write or call your local representative? You would be suprised how approachable and responsive they really are. Thier districts are relatively small, and they have by far the most sensitivity to thier constituents of any branch.
I recently wrote to my local rep. expressing my concerns about the DMCA, the proposed INDUCE act and copyright legislation in general. Within a week I received a nice, substantive letter with his position on the issue, a summary of all related bills currently in progress or under consideration, and his take on them. True, the letter was probably boiler-plate although considering it's substance, it's apparent he is at least informed on the issue, and cares enough about what I think to respond in a timely manner.
When the difference between getting elected or not can come down to hundreds, or sometimes dozens, of votes they tend to pay attention when people don't like what they are doing.
The President can have half the country hate him, and still get elected. A senator can have half of a state hate him (and the bigger the state, the less an individual matters), and still get elected. A rep can lose with a well-placed handful of people hating him, and they know it. And as the closeness of the vote in the article shows, getting one rep to shift closer to your ideal CAN potentially make a substantive difference in U.S. policy.
So if you have something to say about it, take the time to address it to them directly. It isn't much harder than commenting here on/., and is likely to be quite a bit more effective.
I think it depends on the situation. If they expect you to be on call, they should supply a pager. If they have an expectation of a certain level of response time (i.e., less than the time it would take you to get into the office), and/or expect your after-hours issues will be frequent, they should supply the means for you to connect remotely.
If you realistically only get called once in a blue moon, providing a full-time broadband connection is overkill, and I think they have a point. I don't think it's reasonable to expect a company to pay for everything that might conceivably be used for work, when it's something you likely would already pay for, and will likely use predominantly for personal use.
With the company I work for, it's a judgement call by the manager - direct work-related expenses are reimbursible (i.e. work related cell phone calls). They will only pay for the phone itself, or the monthly fee if you are in a position where you need to use the cell phone day to day to do the job, such as sales folk.
In my case, I telecommute full time, so they pay for a telephone line, my DSL connection, and misc office equipment and supplies. They don't pay for my cell phone (except work-related call charges), but it is a tiny minority of my usage.
The only problem I see in the scenario as it's laid out is that it was a blanket decision by upper management, rather than giving lower level managers the ability to decide what is appropriate for an individual situation.
Part of it is driven by the economy - the better thre economy (particularly unemployment rates), the worse the service you tend to get.
I saw this first hand when I used to manage a fast-food joint. The pool of quality employees went from reasonably acceptable when the economy was slow, to almost impossibly bad when the economy was very good, since the better people tended to move up to better jobs.
I had situations where I had three positions to fill, and only four applicants, none of whom could complete the basic math test on the application. You get to where you simply need to fill a shift, so you take a chance on someone who you never would have hired otherwise, and hope for the best. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it's a total horror show. It's rarely a sunny paragon of quality service though.
Now that you mention Sears - I actually had a great experience there a few years ago. I had a microwave oven that died after only a couple of years. It was out of warranty, but I went in anyway and talked to a sales rep about it.
After a brief discussion with a manager, I was told that, though it was out of warranty, they agreed with me that it shouldn't have died so quickly, and in fact they had a chart that showed expected life span for various appliances. The expected life span of a microwave was about 5 years, and mine had lasted a bit over 2, so they gave me a credit for 50% of the purchase price toward a new microwave.
I have no idea if they still have this sort of "policy" anymore, or if it was just this particular manager or particular store, but that is the sort of service that will keep people loyal to a place.
The bottom line is that if you improve the level of customer service, you will improve the attitude of your customer base. People will be less likely to try to scam every dollar out of a store that treats them well.
I am in the Hartford area as well, and have had the 6000/512 plan for a couple of years now.
Despite an incredibly, comically bad installation experience, the connection has been incredibly solid. In that time I have had exactly one day of significant downtime. The other outages I could count on one hand, and lasted no more than 5 or 10 minutes.
Based on the install, I imagine if anything DID go wrong, I would not have much luck with tech support. Most of the "techs" I dealt with (and it was several) had no idea how to configure the router they gave me - they couldn't even get it to connect, let alone set it up to work with even my smallish (7 boxes) home network.
Once they left, I managed to get connected in within a few minutes, and everything set up all nice and happy in an hour or so.
If I were running an office, and had this kind of experience (and the ongoing support one would expect as a result), I certainly would not be a happy camper.
There is a useful middle ground.
I run a "mail server" - mostly just a mail storage/IMAP/Webmail host.
I use my ISP's SMTP address for all outgoing mail, so no need to worry about configuration there. My e-mail addresses actually point to Yahoo! mail accounts, which I use fetchmail on my server to grab via POP.
This saves a lot of hassle in configuration of the MTA - and less worry about patching and such, since it's not directly recieving or sending anything, and none of the mail ports are opened to the outside.
On the upside, I get unlimited storage (well, as much as I care to buy drives for), server side spam filtering, as well as just general organizational filtering, and IMAP, and the ability to back my mail up to another machine with a simple cron job.
Once it was set up it takes almost zero maintenance, and is all running happily on an old Pentium II box you can purchase on Ebay for well under $200.
While true, those of who have DSL through one of Yahoo!'s partners get "Email plus" for no additional cost. With my plan, I can now have 10 2-gig accounts for "free".
Doesn't really do me any good though - I run my own mail server and so have essentially unlimited storage.
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How many of you have actually taken the time to write or call your local representative? You would be suprised how approachable and responsive they really are. Thier districts are relatively small, and they have by far the most sensitivity to thier constituents of any branch.
I recently wrote to my local rep. expressing my concerns about the DMCA, the proposed INDUCE act and copyright legislation in general. Within a week I received a nice, substantive letter with his position on the issue, a summary of all related bills currently in progress or under consideration, and his take on them. True, the letter was probably boiler-plate although considering it's substance, it's apparent he is at least informed on the issue, and cares enough about what I think to respond in a timely manner.
When the difference between getting elected or not can come down to hundreds, or sometimes dozens, of votes they tend to pay attention when people don't like what they are doing.
The President can have half the country hate him, and still get elected. A senator can have half of a state hate him (and the bigger the state, the less an individual matters), and still get elected. A rep can lose with a well-placed handful of people hating him, and they know it. And as the closeness of the vote in the article shows, getting one rep to shift closer to your ideal CAN potentially make a substantive difference in U.S. policy.
So if you have something to say about it, take the time to address it to them directly. It isn't much harder than commenting here on /., and is likely to be quite a bit more effective.
If you realistically only get called once in a blue moon, providing a full-time broadband connection is overkill, and I think they have a point. I don't think it's reasonable to expect a company to pay for everything that might conceivably be used for work, when it's something you likely would already pay for, and will likely use predominantly for personal use.
With the company I work for, it's a judgement call by the manager - direct work-related expenses are reimbursible (i.e. work related cell phone calls). They will only pay for the phone itself, or the monthly fee if you are in a position where you need to use the cell phone day to day to do the job, such as sales folk.
In my case, I telecommute full time, so they pay for a telephone line, my DSL connection, and misc office equipment and supplies. They don't pay for my cell phone (except work-related call charges), but it is a tiny minority of my usage.
The only problem I see in the scenario as it's laid out is that it was a blanket decision by upper management, rather than giving lower level managers the ability to decide what is appropriate for an individual situation.
I saw this first hand when I used to manage a fast-food joint. The pool of quality employees went from reasonably acceptable when the economy was slow, to almost impossibly bad when the economy was very good, since the better people tended to move up to better jobs.
I had situations where I had three positions to fill, and only four applicants, none of whom could complete the basic math test on the application. You get to where you simply need to fill a shift, so you take a chance on someone who you never would have hired otherwise, and hope for the best. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it's a total horror show. It's rarely a sunny paragon of quality service though.
After a brief discussion with a manager, I was told that, though it was out of warranty, they agreed with me that it shouldn't have died so quickly, and in fact they had a chart that showed expected life span for various appliances. The expected life span of a microwave was about 5 years, and mine had lasted a bit over 2, so they gave me a credit for 50% of the purchase price toward a new microwave.
I have no idea if they still have this sort of "policy" anymore, or if it was just this particular manager or particular store, but that is the sort of service that will keep people loyal to a place.
The bottom line is that if you improve the level of customer service, you will improve the attitude of your customer base. People will be less likely to try to scam every dollar out of a store that treats them well.
I am in the Hartford area as well, and have had the 6000/512 plan for a couple of years now.
Despite an incredibly, comically bad installation experience, the connection has been incredibly solid. In that time I have had exactly one day of significant downtime. The other outages I could count on one hand, and lasted no more than 5 or 10 minutes.
Based on the install, I imagine if anything DID go wrong, I would not have much luck with tech support. Most of the "techs" I dealt with (and it was several) had no idea how to configure the router they gave me - they couldn't even get it to connect, let alone set it up to work with even my smallish (7 boxes) home network.
Once they left, I managed to get connected in within a few minutes, and everything set up all nice and happy in an hour or so.
If I were running an office, and had this kind of experience (and the ongoing support one would expect as a result), I certainly would not be a happy camper.
There is a useful middle ground. I run a "mail server" - mostly just a mail storage/IMAP/Webmail host. I use my ISP's SMTP address for all outgoing mail, so no need to worry about configuration there. My e-mail addresses actually point to Yahoo! mail accounts, which I use fetchmail on my server to grab via POP. This saves a lot of hassle in configuration of the MTA - and less worry about patching and such, since it's not directly recieving or sending anything, and none of the mail ports are opened to the outside. On the upside, I get unlimited storage (well, as much as I care to buy drives for), server side spam filtering, as well as just general organizational filtering, and IMAP, and the ability to back my mail up to another machine with a simple cron job. Once it was set up it takes almost zero maintenance, and is all running happily on an old Pentium II box you can purchase on Ebay for well under $200.
While true, those of who have DSL through one of Yahoo!'s partners get "Email plus" for no additional cost. With my plan, I can now have 10 2-gig accounts for "free". Doesn't really do me any good though - I run my own mail server and so have essentially unlimited storage.
The ICH5R RAID works dandy in Linux - just don't bother with the ICH5R RAID bios and drivers - let Linux' built in software RAID support handle it.