CompUSA Bad, HP Great!

I didn't have a particularly good weekend. It rained, it was cold, my knee was killing me, and the power adapter for my computer suddenly decided to stop working.

At first I thought I'd hop over to CompUSA, where I bought the computer back in April, and see if they could provide a replacement adapter on the spot. I waited outside CompUSA for 40 minutes for them to open, went in, explained my issue, and was told in no uncertain terms that the power adapter was not covered by warranty. I left the store less than 2 minutes after I went in, angry and frustrated.

I borrowed a friend's adapter to put a charge on my computer and then fired off an email to HP customer service, explaining my problem and frustration. I heard back a day later saying they would be happy to replace it and it was still in warranty.

I am so angry with CompUSA at the moment. Maybe I should have asked for a manager when I went in, but I was not in the mood to be polite about it. But I know that I'll never go there again.

I want to give kudos to HP for their friendly, effective customer service. They are replacing the adapter at no charge and sending it via Fed Ex. I can't ask for more than that.

As for CompUSA, there was a reason the store went out of business the first time. It looks like history is repeating itself. I won't miss them this time.

/rant

Xerox - Weeding out the bad by abusing their employees

The views expressed in this article are mine and mine alone.

I've been taking an 'HRD' class the last 3 weeks, where I learn how to find a job and interview skills. A couple of the guys in the class have stated that they'll be starting jobs at Xerox (formerly ACS) in the coming weeks, and I decided to share my experience with them.

I didn't want to scare them, I just wanted them to be prepared, because while I had enough experience in customer service to know what to expect from the customers, I had no experience with ACS/Xerox, and if I had known what I know now, I may have been better prepared to handle the stress.

Because Xerox call centers apply the 'ultimate stress test' to their employees.

I say this out of experience and as a warning. Xerox/ACS has advertisements all over the Triangle area, in fact all over the world. They seem like they're hiring like crazy. What's really happening is they're turning over like crazy.

I discussed this with the man teaching the class, and he told me it's a management style. Something like 'turnover management.' He compared it to UPS which apparently pushes new employees to their limits in hopes of getting the 'bad' employees to quit.

I call bullshit on both of them. What they are doing is nothing short of abusing their employees until they quit due to stress. It means they have to give less raises, less benefits and they pay no attention whatsoever to the needs of their employees.

In the case of Xerox, it goes like this: You see hundreds of ads for customer service positions, and they interview dozens of people every day. Some of these positions are labeled as 'contract' which means they'll cherry-pick the best people when it's over to continue. Sometimes, as in my case, it's permanent.

I worked as an Apple Adviser for 6 months back when ACS was just bought out by Xerox. I went through 3 weeks of training on Apple computers. I was thrown on the floor with little other preparation.

The job itself is stressful. Customer service is one of the most stressful occupations you can have. I expected that up front. Apple customers are particularly picky.

The process of judging how well the agent is doing happens on several battlegrounds. Each manager has to listen in on so many calls and rate the call. There is a QA agent who also rates calls. Apple management also listens in on calls.

If that were the end of it, I would have had no problem with them. But there is one more source of how we were rated: The customers. Randomly, a customer is sent an email asking them to rate the agent they talked to. Here is where the problem gets complicated.

Apple insists that there be no more than 1.5 bad customer reviews per 10 calls. Anything less and you get put on probation and you lose whatever bonus you might have made.

The problem is, when the customer gets the email, s/he might have talked to several different agents, and all it takes is one bad experience with one agent to make all of the experiences bad. I had a number of negative feedback from customers who weren't complaining about me, but were complaining about someone else, or some policy of which I had no control over. My manager felt for me, but couldn't remove the negative feedback.

It's a flawed system because Apple and ACS/Xerox only look at the numbers, not the real reason.

In my case the stress was exasperated when ACS decided they were paying us too much, and the $9/hr minimum we were guaranteed, became $8.50.

In the end, it became increasingly clear to me that Xerox did not care about its employees. I'm still in touch with a number of them, and I know of only two of my original classmates that are still with ACS.

Is this the way we want an employer to treat its employees? I know it's a business and there are a number of demands being asked of them, but I've worked at a number of call centers and the stress was never as high as it was with ACS.

So if you see an ad in the paper for Xerox and think, 'Hey, that sounds like fun!' You've been warned. Brace yourself for the stress test that would make an astronaut go nuts.

As always, thank for reading.

My Skillset, Part Deux

Yes, you saw a little bit of my French background. Also enjoyed "Hot Shots: Part Deux" as well!

So we left off in the last blog with me working for Radio Shack as a SALES rep, and me acquainting myself with the Tandy line of computers. This was in 1990 or so, and Tandy was making 80386 and 80486 computers (The predecessors to Pentium processors). They used MS-DOS and something relatively new to the market, something called "Windows." I spent my free time playing with those computers and learning the ins and outs of Windows.

The PC fascinated me and soon I had a hankering for more information. I learned how to BUILD my own x86 system, INSTALL DOS and Windows, and other programs as well. I also learned how to DIAGNOSE problems with my own systems.

Radio Shack went by the wayside and I moved on to a Baby Bell, US West. I started there working PHONES in OUTBOUND SALES of telephone services. I found that line of work challenging, but I also had issues with one of the employees insisting on wearing perfume, which I am highly allergic to. I had my first migraines during this time. I moved from that department to a DATA ENTRY department, which also incurred a transfer to another city.

During this data entry point in my life I was content to enter the data. I was fast and competent. Some part of me liked the lack of challenge, because I could let my mind wander, and soon a story started to form in my head and dreams, and for the first time, I began to WRITE, on an old-style typewriter, no less. Reams of pages and rewrites later, I entered the data on an actual computer, and started to get some feedback from other writers. I also taught myself HTML and JAVASCRIPT to create a web site that highlighted that writing.

Also during this time I began taking classes at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. I wanted a change in my life, and the story I was writing seemed to be something that would fit well on television. UNO had no 'television' courses per se, but they did have a Broadcast Journalism program. I took classes in writing for newspapers, and classes on writing for news. I took classes on how to produce a news show and that was really what I wanted out of it, to get behind the camera.

The job with US West moved along well enough for me to get a promotion. I took a six week training program on how to PROGRAM their computers in COBOL, MVS and JES3. I'd like to say I was challenged by the training and the job itself, but my previous education (though not complete) allowed me to breeze through the training and land squarely on my feet.

Unfortunately, I landed on my feet, but also stepped on the toes of the existing staff. The work I was required to do was tedious, since it was updating existing programs to prepare for Y2K. I had to add lines of code for every reference to a date. It was a stop-gap fix at best, since the 'real' work of creating new programs that did not rely on COBOL was left to others.

I have to say, that in all the lines of code that I corrected, I made one mistake. But it was a doozy! I left out the conversion code on one important segment of code. People were getting high bills and it was all my fault. It left our team scrambling to make changes and to make corrections. I really felt down about that.

But I tried to make amends. I updated the DOCUMENTATION of each program we were responsible for and printed out fresh copies of code. Reams of code. But it wasn't enough, and soon I was let go.

But I had a backup! I was now trained in  broadcast journalism. I took a part time job as a PRODUCTION ASSISTANT for a local station. But I had to leave UNO before I graduated because of the lack of money.

As a production assistant, I had many duties, such as CAMERA OPERATION during live news casts; CHYRON operation, which for those that don't know, is the graphics you see at the bottom and on the side of the newscaster; AUDIO OPERATOR, which means when the newscaster talks, I opened his or her microphone.

Last and not least, I edited footage from news feeds for the 'voice over' part of the newscast.

In the end, I liked the job better than most jobs. I liked it to the point where I wanted to direct newscasts. That was a bit of mistake for me because I was offered two jobs almost simultaneously. One was a 30 hour a week job at a station managed by one of my instructors, who was doing me a tremendous favor. It was  a video editor job. The other was as an ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR at a station in Lynchburg, VA. It was full-time, and obviously had more clout to it.

I made the decision to go to Lynchburg. I should have stayed in Omaha, but hindsight is always 20-20.

The Lynchburg job started okay. The problem was that I was the new guy and a bit of a yankee in the middle of a bunch of southerners who were set in their ways. I tried my best to fit in. They trained me in all their stations, the same ones I already had experience on at the other station. But the director who hired me apparently didn't want to give up the secrets of his position very quickly. I had to learned the director's board on my own time, usually between newscasts.

After doing a little training on the board for six months, I went to the boss, and asked him for more training. He moved me to the morning show, and then began a crash course (literally) on directing. Because I had little experience with live directing before then, I felt a bit overwhelmed by the pace I was subjected to.

I was thrown in as a live director before I was ready, and made a number of small errors. But I was improving show after show. Then one day I made a big mistake in front of a producer who completely freaked out, and the next thing I know, I'm gone.

Anyone in the news field knows that mistakes happen, especially with new directors. I don't feel that I was given a chance on that job.

But that led to another career choice, the one I'm most experienced with at the moment: CUSTOMER SERVICE.

It started with a company that provided customer service for a number of religious organizations, doing things like TAKING ORDERS over the phone, updating customer information, and generally being pleasant over the phone. I can do pleasant.

During that job I was promoted to what they called BUSINESS ANALYST, which in this case meant that I monitored call flow and called for people to get on the phones when needed.

After that I took a job as a TECHNICAL SUPPORT agent for Echostar, where I figured out why people's satellite service wasn't working and dispatched technicians when needed. For a time during my stay with Echostar I was also a SATELLITE INSTALLER, but I didn't have the stamina to do the job correctly and I also had a fear of heights. I went back to being a TSR.

While at Echostar I saw a need for certain services, and I attempted to go into business for myself as a TRAINER in how to install and diagnose satellite systems for the everyday user. Unfortunately, that business was underfunded and failed.

But I moved on and found more customer service work in Raleigh, NC. I worked for a company that provided customer service for a variety of accounts. I used ONLINE CHATS, EMAILS and phones to help the customers. I even had a stint as a MENTOR to one group, which meant I took supervisor calls.

Later, I worked from home as a SMARTPHONE TECH, diagnosing issues with BLACKBERRIES and PALM devices. That ended when I lost my home.

But I rebounded and landed a job as an APPLE ADVISOR, which meant I got to learn all about iMACS, MACBOOKS, and OS X 10.5, 10.6, and 10.7. I handled support calls for those machines.

Yet, despite all that experience, I've always known I'm a writer. I wrote three PUBLISHED BOOKS, SCRIPTS based on some of those books, and even looked into forming my own VIDEO PRODUCTION company to produce those scripts.

But though right now I am unemployed, I have not lost hope, and I still have dreams that I want to come true. In April of this year I formed Mike's News Hangout, where I used skills in VIDEOGRAPHY, EDITING, WEB SITE DESIGN. I spent two months on the road recording video and I have a youtube page with my videos.

My computer skills haven't diminished, but I am primarily self-taught on all things Windows, HTML and Javascript. Though I don't have the funds to get certified, I am confident I could get A+ certified in a number of areas.

I read a lot on the Internet. I watch how other people do things and I try to emulate them. I learn fast and work as fast as I can even when others tell me to take it slower. I am eager to impress, and I just need a chance.

Work: I'm retarded

My life is complete, I've been called 'Retarded' by a customer, who took a holier than thou attitude with me.Just shoot me now! Sad part is he probably makes more money in a single week than I make in a year.