maleficent

I vented a few weeks back about calling my credit card company to report that I didn't get my new card. I was talking to Mike (no way was it his real name) and he never listened to me, and I could barely understand him. He spent a good 10 minutes trying to upsell me on services that i clearly stated i didn't want... At one point - i lost my patience (which granted isn't difficult these days) and asked the guy what part of I'm not interested are you having a problem understanding. Yes, he was doing his job... but when I call other credit card companies - a simple I'm not interested stops teh spiel.. Mike didn't get it... Does that make me racist? By some standards probably.. but I would have said exactly the same thing if Mike was actually from Wisconsin and spoke perfect english.

I was calling them for a relatively minor problem, i can understand how someone calling for a real problem that they needed solved NOW could get frustrated when the person who's supposed to be trying to help you... isn't able to communicate to you.

Calling a help desk is never a pleasant experience.. thankfully for work computers we can bypass the entry level position and go directly to someone who is knowledgeable and not reading from a script.

Our parent company is outsourcing to India one of the products that we develop. It's technically cheaper to do this rather than paying US engineers. the problem with the outsourcing though.. is that incredible amounts of time is being spent writing the spec on exactly what the software does - in pretty much any situation - in order for the engineers in india to be able to write the code. (it's actually a lot easier to writ ethe code than it is to write the spec) Once the spec is written.. then the code is locked down and no changes will be possible.. that's not gonna make a lot of customers happy. from where we're sitting -- Offshoring is penny wise but dollar foolish.

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