The phone rings and I pick it up to hear a voice with a heavy Indian accent. “Hello is that Nigel Thompson?” I tell him is, and ask what his name is. He tells me it’s John Nash. Right, I ask him if he’s in Bangalore or Hyderabad. He says that it is company policy not to disclose that information. I’m sure it is. The company in question is AT&T, our former long distance carrier. They are calling to find out why we haven’t paid the bill for calls we made after we closed our account with them. That’s not their version of it, of course but that’s the deal. We switched long distance carriers and AT&T continued to bill us. Now I really don’t want to get into who owns the fibre that carries the calls that my local phone company uses because at the end of the day they belong to MCI or some other large company and all these phone companies just send your call over whatever lines they have arrangements to use. This is just how it works. The real pain in this case is that the person calling to attempt to get me to pay for services not rendered is not willing to send me an itemized list of the things they are claiming I need to pay for. We have tried customer service and countless other people at AT&T but none of them is willing to send us a record of the calls we made. So it comes down to this: AT&T puts a guy on the phone from its collections department who doesn’t speak English very well, isn’t able or just won’t to send me a copy of the records he tells me he can see on his screen. He doesn’t care that we closed the account – he can see that on his screen along with the bogus billing records. He’s not talking to me as an AT&T customer (which I’m not at this point). He’s just doing some mindless job for twenty rupees a week by reading a script over the phone. Please tell me how this is helping AT&T make money? If you’re an AT&T shareholder, here’s some news: the company you’ve bought into is run by morons who think that employing non-native English speakers with fake American-sounding names is helping business because it’s cheaper than employing someone in the U.S. To digress for a moment, is letting an employee represent himself by a fake name fraud? Perhaps he’s not even with AT&T? After a long time on the phone with this guy I decided two things: My time was being wasted by someone who could care less about me, and I had now cost AT&T a fair amount of money in talking to me. I don’t suppose I cost them as much as the amount they were trying to stiff me for but I had hopes that it was close. Here’s another business tip for the idiots running AT&T: If the customer has closed the account and only owes (say) less than $100, don’t bother trying to collect – it will cost more to collect than it’s worth. Write it off and move on. Of course the modern computer-based company can’t make a decision like that. If I owed AT&T just one cent, I’m sure the process would schedule the call anyway. This is how business is done now. Some program implements a policy and spits out instructions to a building full of low-cost employees in Bangalore who use AT&Ts long-distance lines to phone you and ask you to pay the bill. After putting down the phone I decided that dealing with these morons wasn’t worth it. The amount of money was very small and I consider my time away from work valuable (this was on a Saturday) so I decided to pay the bill and ignore the fact that I really didn’t think we owed them the money. I call the number and get another India voice. This one is far more polite (must be earlier in his shift). When I made the call, the automated robot asked me for my phone number before it connected me. They don’t have caller ID at AT&T? I type it in one the phone. So what’s the first question the guy asks when I’m connected? “What is your phone number?” Really these guys must have worked for the CIA in a previous life. They have NO IDEA how to keep track of any information at all. There is a pause and he says: “You are not an AT&T customer”. Right. That was the point I was trying to make about two months ago when we closed the account. No matter, I am un-phased by this attempt to side-track me from getting the AT&T monkey off my back. I ask him to check our records, confirm the account number and verify the amount outstanding. The computing gods are with us. He even has a record of the so-called John Nash conversation. I pay the bill by credit card, get a confirmation number and we’re done. But no, not quite. I am dumbstruck as he asks me: “How much are you paying for your long distance service?”. I tell him that’s none of his business. I visualize the guy reading from his script: “AT&T has several long-distance packages ...” I cut him off. I don’t want another AT&T account. AT&T has one long-distance package I never want again – their Indian-based customer service.
This problem is not unique to AT&T. There are a lot of other U.S. companies who outsource their technical support, customer service and so on. If you are a customer of one of these companies and you find yourself in the unfortunate position of having to call them, ask them where they are. These companies don’t want to admit to you that they took jobs from the U.S. and outsourced them. They allow their employees to provide fake names. Some even have training so they can learn a few American expressions to use casually in the conversation. [Please imagine strong Indian accent] “Howdy, very pleased am I to be having speaks with y’all today. My name is Buck Rogers. How may I be helping you please?” Some of them are in Costa Rica of course, not India but I can’t do the accent.
On a final note, let me say that I have absolutely nothing against Indian people. I have some friends who are Indian and work with some of them too. My issue is with the American companies who are exploiting these people because they cost less to employ than a body here in the U.S. Yes, this is exploitation. The goal is to push up the stock price. If they can’t do it by selling more good, they try to do it in the short term by lowering costs. Nowhere in that equation is the effect on customer satisfaction. So long as we all keep putting up with this crappy service, they’ll keep taking our money.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Waters Rocks (repost from 2009)
My son and I went to see Roger Waters in Denver this week. This was one of the best rock concerts I've ever been too. I think my teenage son was the youngest person in the audience but he knew all the words to the songs as did the rest of us. The musicians accompanying Waters were brilliant especially the lead guitar and the female vocalists. The flying pig made an appearance but I think the high point of the effects was the pyramid and laser spectrum scanning the audience. A pity that the pyramid had a triangular base - those in Egypt have four sides Roger. As with most modern rock concerts, the music was accompanied by a political theme and it was well taken by the audience. I you have a chance to go, please go and see this show. I felt so alive when we came out. I'd forgotten what they felt like.
Silly Wikipedia post (repost)
As an experiment, two of use posted the following junk on Wikipedia. It took all of about 15 minutes for it to get flagged as bogus which just goes to proove that Wikipedia is a peer reviewed system.
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The Effect of the Rorabaugh Field on the Assimilation of Complex Systems Information
Abstract
The Rorabaugh field is the connectivity plane that provides the fabric for information interchange between complex systems in the super-domain space. In practical implementations of hyper-connected complex systems, we find that the Rorabaugh field itself contributes significantly as a communication inhibitor between the systems that intersect the connectivity plane.
Background
The interchange of information between complex systems is essential to the growth of knowledge of both the individual systems and the group of systems or super-system. Governance of the super-system is achieved by application of a mentor or supervisor object or may be delegated to a secondary level directive object such as a member of the class typically known as instructors.
For the purposes of discussion we consider the super-system to be spatially constrained by a physical container and an initial and final temporal markers. This gives us constraining factors in four dimensions which is adequate for first-order analysis of the primary issues of communication.
During normal operation of the super-system, the Rorabaugh field has only second or third order effects on the communication pipes established by the complex system matrix. The Rorabaugh filed operates in Trojan mode, masquerading both as an interconnectivity field and as a system that intersect the field.
When the super-system has been constrained spatially for an extended period of time, the Rorabaugh field mutates slightly such that an increase in the noise level occurs on the pipes between the systems intersecting the plane of the field. This increase in noise level reduces the effective bandwidth of established communication pipes and inhibits the creation of new pipes by denying transport of the initiation sequence data structures or by intercepting the directory system lookups required to resolve destination target addresses.
Information Assimilation Effects
The increased noise caused by the intersection of super-system members with the Rorabaugh filed primary plane inhibits the transfer of information between the systems that comprise the super-system member set to an extent that over time, the field effect causes not only a reduction to zero of the information accumulation at targeted super-system nodes but also a change of state in a significant percentage of nodes which leads to the secondary effect know as inter-factional disruption.
During the onset of inter-factional disruption, the systems in the super-set combine by reducing the physical special factor thus creating local sites of clustered nodes. The clusters use close physical proximity to combat the reduced bandwidth of the primary pipes. Secondary communication is achieved by optical methods or through the use of encrypted electromagnetic spectrum modulation methods using the Andress normal vector cross product mechanism.
The local clusters form inter-system data exchange based on the normal vector and matrix dot product values that combine to achieve a defense mechanism which increases visibility of the Rorabaugh field’s node to the other members of the super-set.
Once the Trojan node has been identified, one or more clusters move along the time axis at a rate inversely proportional to the cube root of the distance between the geometric center of the cluster and the perihelion of the Rorabaugh Trojan node orbit with respect to the center of mass of the local clusters within the super set. The net effect of the time-axis move is to reduce the effect of the Rorabaugh field on communications restoring effective communications within the local clusters. As inter-system communication reliability increases with a cluster the bonding force between systems elements of the cluster weakens and the cluster members begin to gain spatial separation that increases linearly with the approach of the center of mass of the super-set to the upper temporal bound. Once spatial separation increases from the Trojan node, the establishment of pipes between non-cluster aligned nodes is enabled. This tends to further suppress the effect of the Rorabaugh field returning the system to its initial state.
Conclusions
Although the Rorabaugh field can significantly disrupt communications between complex systems that intersect the field plane, the normal defensive mechanism of the set members combine to nullify the field force and redder the field ineffective.
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The Effect of the Rorabaugh Field on the Assimilation of Complex Systems Information
Abstract
The Rorabaugh field is the connectivity plane that provides the fabric for information interchange between complex systems in the super-domain space. In practical implementations of hyper-connected complex systems, we find that the Rorabaugh field itself contributes significantly as a communication inhibitor between the systems that intersect the connectivity plane.
Background
The interchange of information between complex systems is essential to the growth of knowledge of both the individual systems and the group of systems or super-system. Governance of the super-system is achieved by application of a mentor or supervisor object or may be delegated to a secondary level directive object such as a member of the class typically known as instructors.
For the purposes of discussion we consider the super-system to be spatially constrained by a physical container and an initial and final temporal markers. This gives us constraining factors in four dimensions which is adequate for first-order analysis of the primary issues of communication.
During normal operation of the super-system, the Rorabaugh field has only second or third order effects on the communication pipes established by the complex system matrix. The Rorabaugh filed operates in Trojan mode, masquerading both as an interconnectivity field and as a system that intersect the field.
When the super-system has been constrained spatially for an extended period of time, the Rorabaugh field mutates slightly such that an increase in the noise level occurs on the pipes between the systems intersecting the plane of the field. This increase in noise level reduces the effective bandwidth of established communication pipes and inhibits the creation of new pipes by denying transport of the initiation sequence data structures or by intercepting the directory system lookups required to resolve destination target addresses.
Information Assimilation Effects
The increased noise caused by the intersection of super-system members with the Rorabaugh filed primary plane inhibits the transfer of information between the systems that comprise the super-system member set to an extent that over time, the field effect causes not only a reduction to zero of the information accumulation at targeted super-system nodes but also a change of state in a significant percentage of nodes which leads to the secondary effect know as inter-factional disruption.
During the onset of inter-factional disruption, the systems in the super-set combine by reducing the physical special factor thus creating local sites of clustered nodes. The clusters use close physical proximity to combat the reduced bandwidth of the primary pipes. Secondary communication is achieved by optical methods or through the use of encrypted electromagnetic spectrum modulation methods using the Andress normal vector cross product mechanism.
The local clusters form inter-system data exchange based on the normal vector and matrix dot product values that combine to achieve a defense mechanism which increases visibility of the Rorabaugh field’s node to the other members of the super-set.
Once the Trojan node has been identified, one or more clusters move along the time axis at a rate inversely proportional to the cube root of the distance between the geometric center of the cluster and the perihelion of the Rorabaugh Trojan node orbit with respect to the center of mass of the local clusters within the super set. The net effect of the time-axis move is to reduce the effect of the Rorabaugh field on communications restoring effective communications within the local clusters. As inter-system communication reliability increases with a cluster the bonding force between systems elements of the cluster weakens and the cluster members begin to gain spatial separation that increases linearly with the approach of the center of mass of the super-set to the upper temporal bound. Once spatial separation increases from the Trojan node, the establishment of pipes between non-cluster aligned nodes is enabled. This tends to further suppress the effect of the Rorabaugh field returning the system to its initial state.
Conclusions
Although the Rorabaugh field can significantly disrupt communications between complex systems that intersect the field plane, the normal defensive mechanism of the set members combine to nullify the field force and redder the field ineffective.
Moview - Borat (repost)
Movies: Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit of Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
I went to see "Borat" this weekend and laughed so hard in some places that my face hurt. This is a very funny movie but it's funny because it's so blatantly offensive in many ways. This is a movie that I could only watch once. If you are planning to see it, don’t ask anyone who's already seen it what happens. The comedy is in the (sometimes predictable) things that Borat does in various situations. Apparently, many of the scenes were improvised with non-actors. It certainly has that feel in places. As you sit and watch, you get the feeling that the events are real - this makes you feel very uneasy in places because you know he's going to do something very offensive.
It was interesting to listen to the audience reaction. There are places in the movie when most of the audience laughed together. There were places where I could hear that only the men were laughing. There were places where I heard only women make comments (notably during the interview with some feminists). And, there were places when the entire movie theater was totally silent. These were the most interesting points. Even if you're not the PC type (and I'm not as most of my friends and colleagues are well aware) a few parts of the movie made me feel very awkward - and judging by the silence, the rest of the audience too.
You should know that Sacha Baron Cohen who plays Borat is Jewish. He also happens to be English (as I am).
I am not sure I'd recommend this movie to everyone. You have to be able to accept that this is a mockumentary not a real documentary (of course) but also that laughter is an expression of embarrassment - not an agreement with someone's political or religious views. It's OK to laugh - and I think it's good for you too. I came out of the movie still giggling about some of the most awful scenes because they are just so embarrassing to watch.
When I got home, I turned on the TV and ending up watching part of a real documentary (on the History channel I think) about our combat hospitals in Iraq and how our young injured troops are treated, cared for and shipped out of Iraq via Germany back to the USA. Our death toll in Iraq is somewhere around 3,000 now but the number of injured is somewhere near 20,000 I believe, and some of these injuries are very serious including loss of limbs and (from a mental point of view) loss of comrades. So as it stands today, about 3,000 of our young men and women won’t be coming back to their families and 20,000 will come back with physical or mental burdens that they will have to bear for the rest of their lives. This is the real world. Borat is just a funny movie. I hope you see it that way too.
I went to see "Borat" this weekend and laughed so hard in some places that my face hurt. This is a very funny movie but it's funny because it's so blatantly offensive in many ways. This is a movie that I could only watch once. If you are planning to see it, don’t ask anyone who's already seen it what happens. The comedy is in the (sometimes predictable) things that Borat does in various situations. Apparently, many of the scenes were improvised with non-actors. It certainly has that feel in places. As you sit and watch, you get the feeling that the events are real - this makes you feel very uneasy in places because you know he's going to do something very offensive.
It was interesting to listen to the audience reaction. There are places in the movie when most of the audience laughed together. There were places where I could hear that only the men were laughing. There were places where I heard only women make comments (notably during the interview with some feminists). And, there were places when the entire movie theater was totally silent. These were the most interesting points. Even if you're not the PC type (and I'm not as most of my friends and colleagues are well aware) a few parts of the movie made me feel very awkward - and judging by the silence, the rest of the audience too.
You should know that Sacha Baron Cohen who plays Borat is Jewish. He also happens to be English (as I am).
I am not sure I'd recommend this movie to everyone. You have to be able to accept that this is a mockumentary not a real documentary (of course) but also that laughter is an expression of embarrassment - not an agreement with someone's political or religious views. It's OK to laugh - and I think it's good for you too. I came out of the movie still giggling about some of the most awful scenes because they are just so embarrassing to watch.
When I got home, I turned on the TV and ending up watching part of a real documentary (on the History channel I think) about our combat hospitals in Iraq and how our young injured troops are treated, cared for and shipped out of Iraq via Germany back to the USA. Our death toll in Iraq is somewhere around 3,000 now but the number of injured is somewhere near 20,000 I believe, and some of these injuries are very serious including loss of limbs and (from a mental point of view) loss of comrades. So as it stands today, about 3,000 of our young men and women won’t be coming back to their families and 20,000 will come back with physical or mental burdens that they will have to bear for the rest of their lives. This is the real world. Borat is just a funny movie. I hope you see it that way too.
Kids Driving (repost)
On Monday night I was woken at 3:00AM by the sound of an aircraft overhead. It was incredibly loud and seemed to stay overhead for quite a while. I thought perhaps it was someone from the local air strip getting in some instrument practice. As the noise faded, I went back to sleep.
I found out later that the noise was the Flight for Life helicopter and it was trying to find somewhere to land. There had been an accident about half a mile from our house. Four kids had been visiting one of our neighbors and had left at around 2:00AM. It's about 200 yards from the house they were at to the accident site on a dirt road. The driver had managed to roll the car four times and ended up through the fence of a neighbor's yard. Apparently, the kids they had been visiting heard the noise and called 911. It took 30 minutes for them to arrive. By that time the driver was dead. The other three survived.
The girl driving had gotten her driving license just two days before.
I am in the process of teaching my younger son to drive. This is the third of my four that I've white-knuckled my way through explaining how to drive at a safe speed, control a slide and generally get comfortable driving a car at the speed limit with an idiot in a truck six inches from your back bumper. We start our kids off with Master Drive which has a truly excellent program run by a great set of instructors. They treat teenagers as adults and over the course of a weekend give them amazing skills. On the Sunday afternoon you get to ride shotgun as your child hurls the car through an obstacle course of cones. It's a better thrill ride than Disney Land.
I'm quite paranoid about what my kids will do once they have a license. I make them sign a driving agreement which you can find here: http://www.nadtec.to/doc/personal/DrivingAgreement.pdf. We've had one horrible experience and one very good one with our older kids. I have no advice to parents other than to try to do the very best possible job you can to stay connected with your kids. Keep telling them the same stuff over and over again even if they are not listening and set boundaries that will make you unpopular with them but might keep them out of trouble.
It's very tragic when young kids die at any time but I find it especially horrible when they die after this right of passage - getting a driver's license. My thoughts are with the families of the kids in that car.
I found out later that the noise was the Flight for Life helicopter and it was trying to find somewhere to land. There had been an accident about half a mile from our house. Four kids had been visiting one of our neighbors and had left at around 2:00AM. It's about 200 yards from the house they were at to the accident site on a dirt road. The driver had managed to roll the car four times and ended up through the fence of a neighbor's yard. Apparently, the kids they had been visiting heard the noise and called 911. It took 30 minutes for them to arrive. By that time the driver was dead. The other three survived.
The girl driving had gotten her driving license just two days before.
I am in the process of teaching my younger son to drive. This is the third of my four that I've white-knuckled my way through explaining how to drive at a safe speed, control a slide and generally get comfortable driving a car at the speed limit with an idiot in a truck six inches from your back bumper. We start our kids off with Master Drive which has a truly excellent program run by a great set of instructors. They treat teenagers as adults and over the course of a weekend give them amazing skills. On the Sunday afternoon you get to ride shotgun as your child hurls the car through an obstacle course of cones. It's a better thrill ride than Disney Land.
I'm quite paranoid about what my kids will do once they have a license. I make them sign a driving agreement which you can find here: http://www.nadtec.to/doc/personal/DrivingAgreement.pdf. We've had one horrible experience and one very good one with our older kids. I have no advice to parents other than to try to do the very best possible job you can to stay connected with your kids. Keep telling them the same stuff over and over again even if they are not listening and set boundaries that will make you unpopular with them but might keep them out of trouble.
It's very tragic when young kids die at any time but I find it especially horrible when they die after this right of passage - getting a driver's license. My thoughts are with the families of the kids in that car.
Movie - Charlie Wilson's War (repost)
This is a pretty good movie. Philip Seymour Hoffman is excellent as the apple importer. Watch this to remember how we got the Israelis, Egyptians and Saudis to arm the Afghanistan Mujahadin with Russian-made weapons to shoot down those amazing Hind helicopters. I didn't know this story. If it's true then one man can stop a war, but he can’t always finish the game. We've spent a great deal of money giving weapons to other countries. It's amazing how often that has gotten turned around so the weapons get pointed back at us. Perhaps there is a lesson there? It's a bit like growing corn to make ethanol to replace gasoline. Sounds good at first but once you get into it you find that the side effects are as bad or worse than the original problem.
Older posts
I've decided to repost some of the posts from my other blog which quit working. Nothing stellar here.
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