Things that piss you off that shouldn't

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

13 hours ago, Ikantcpell said:

Just got a letter today from an online clothes store saying that they miss me, Awwwwwwwwwwwww

Is your name:-

K. Dilkington ?

[Ikantcpell]

2 minutes ago, Amsterdam_Neil_D said:

Is your name:-

K. Dilkington ?

Why you wonder ?

[Xela]

On 25/07/2016 at 16:10, Paddywhack said:

My mate and his missus live with another couple who yesterday morning went on holiday.

 

Why would 2 couples live together? Is it some sort of commune? 

[Xela]

6 hours ago, Amsterdam_Neil_D said:

Is your name:-

K. Dilkington ?

Just had to listen to the clip! Brilliant. 

 

[Designer1]

Shit days at work.

I very rarely have them, but when I do they tend to be monumental (today basically)

Need a whisky and a nice lie down

[Xela]

I'm snowed under with work but couldn't be bothered to stay late tonight.. so will be in the office at 6am tomorrow.

Not a shit day at work per se, just too much to do. 

[foreveryoung]

At my work lately, we graft our bollocks off while the manager sits in his office all day texting his new girlfriend, an putting nice little poems on facebook to let the world now how much he loves her, Pffttttt!

Wouldn't mind if she was half fit, but unfortunately it must be a crazy mid life crisis, The film "Shallow hell" comes to mind.

[Rob182]

Puns.

 

Piss off with your crap puns filling up every thread in the VT section!!!!!

[chappy]

6 minutes ago, Rob182 said:

Puns.

 

Piss off with your carp puns filling up every thread in the VT section!!!!!

 

[Rob182]

I hate you

[Ginko]

On 26 July 2016 at 11:07, Paddywhack said:

Driving into a small car park the other day behind another car and there were two spaces left. The bloke in front decided to park evenly across both bays, like he thought you needed to park on top of the white lines.

After about 10 seconds of me sitting there flabbergasted, another car started to leave so I parked there.

I gave the bloke such a look, I bet it's still hurting him now.

But now I've typed this I realise it's possible he was in a wheelchair.. 

Had a similar experience on Tuesday. I drove in and parked at a smallish multi-storey just outside the city centre so it's pretty packed. Get to the first floor and this dickhead hasn't just parked on the line, he's gone across two bays with his wheels fully over the line. They're quite narrow spaces and there was a pillar to the left of the space he parked partially across meaning absolutely no one apart from maybe a Smart car could park in it.

Best bit? It's not the first time he's done it. I noticed the same car pull the same trick two weeks ago. I didn't complain the first time but I sure as shit did this time. Might be a bit of a narc but I'd rather grass than let selfish assholes get away with that sort of thing.

Edited July 28, 2016 by Ginko

[mottaloo]

Indian call centres.

In my case it's BT. I have had a landline fault since 10th July. Openreach engineer came monday & fixed it for 10 mins now it's gone again. I switched to sky wef last Tue morning but of course, until the landline is repaired then I'm without broadband and the ability to make/receive calls.

My point is that the staff at these call centres don't think for themselves and stick to a script pretty much. Any question I raise that's even slightly off topic but still related to the original fault they just repeat themselves or say "hello"/"ok" or ask if there's anything else that they can help me with 

As a result, my blood pressure is now through the roof. The angrier I was the more robotic he was and just didn't listen to my point. 

I simply dread calling these call centres now. You just know it's gonna be hassle.

[meme]

34 minutes ago, mottaloo said:

Indian call centres.

In my case it's BT. I have had a landline fault since 10th July. Openreach engineer came monday & fixed it for 10 mins now it's gone again. I switched to sky wef last Tue morning but of course, until the landline is repaired then I'm without broadband and the ability to make/receive calls.

My point is that the staff at these call centres don't think for themselves and stick to a script pretty much. Any question I raise that's even slightly off topic but still related to the original fault they just repeat themselves or say "hello"/"ok" or ask if there's anything else that they can help me with 

As a result, my blood pressure is now through the roof. The angrier I was the more robotic he was and just didn't listen to my point. 

I simply dread calling these call centres now. You just know it's gonna be hassle.

As a TalkTalk user, we'll split the cyanide portions 50-50.

 

On another note, TalkTalk keep asking me to use their 'HomeSafe' security program. I'd rather not use security software made by a company who can't even keep 500k users details safe...

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

1 hour ago, meme said:

On another note, TalkTalk keep asking me to use their 'HomeSafe' security program. I'd rather not use security software made by a company who can't even keep 500k users details safe...

I went to my parents house in Birmingham a few months ago.  Tried to put a bet on, no good, HOMESAFE.

Called them,  took about 2 hours to get it off for Gambling sites.  The game had finished,  words removed.

[Phumfeinz]

Those straws with the little spoon openings at one end, so you can't finish the drink completely unless you flip the straw or pour it into your mouth.

[meme]

1 hour ago, Amsterdam_Neil_D said:

I went to my parents house in Birmingham a few months ago.  Tried to put a bet on, no good, HOMESAFE.

Called them,  took about 2 hours to get it off for Gambling sites.  The game had finished,  words removed.

The question is, would the bet you were going to put on successful or not?

Who am I kidding, if it was for Villa to lose you would have easily won...

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

8 minutes ago, meme said:

The question is, would the bet you were going to put on successful or not?

Who am I kidding, if it was for Villa to lose you would have easily won...

I think i would have lost anyway.  Not the best season betting wise.

[MakemineVanilla]

19 hours ago, foreveryoung said:

At my work lately, we graft our bollocks off while the manager sits in his office all day texting his new girlfriend, an putting nice little poems on facebook to let the world now how much he loves her, Pffttttt!

Wouldn't mind if she was half fit, but unfortunately it must be a crazy mid life crisis, The film "Shallow hell" comes to mind.

There is no sadder sight in the world than some bloke lost in the delusion that if he is only gallant enough, romantic enough, and devoted enough, he will get the unconditional love he has always craved but is never going to get.

[BOF]

5 minutes ago, MakemineVanilla said:

There is no sadder sight in the world than some bloke lost in the delusion that if he is only gallant enough, romantic enough, and devoted enough, he will get the unconditional love he has always craved but is never going to get.

You mean ...

 

[HanoiVillan]

7 hours ago, mottaloo said:

Indian call centres.

In my case it's BT. I have had a landline fault since 10th July. Openreach engineer came monday & fixed it for 10 mins now it's gone again. I switched to sky wef last Tue morning but of course, until the landline is repaired then I'm without broadband and the ability to make/receive calls.

My point is that the staff at these call centres don't think for themselves and stick to a script pretty much. Any question I raise that's even slightly off topic but still related to the original fault they just repeat themselves or say "hello"/"ok" or ask if there's anything else that they can help me with 

As a result, my blood pressure is now through the roof. The angrier I was the more robotic he was and just didn't listen to my point. 

I simply dread calling these call centres now. You just know it's gonna be hassle.

A really good post on the problems of call-centres:

The politics of call centres, part one

'What is it that makes call centres so uniquely awful as social institutions? This is something I’ve often touched on at Telco 2.0, and also something that’s been unusually salient in my life recently – I moved house, and therefore had to interact with getting on for a dozen of the things, several repeatedly. (Vodafone and Thames Water were the best, npower and Virgin Media the worst.)

. . . 

 

Call centres provide a horrible experience to the user. They are famously awful workplaces. And they are also hideously inefficient – some sites experience levels of failure demand, that is to say calls generated due to a prior failure to serve, over 50% of the total inbound calls. Manufacturing industry has long recognised that rework is the greatest enemy of productivity, taking up disproportionate amounts of time and resources and inevitably never quite fixing the problems.

So why are they so awful? Well, I’ll get to that in the next post. Before we can answer that, we need to think about how they are so awful. I’ve made a list of anti-patterns – common or standard practices that embody error – that make me angry.

Our first anti-pattern is queueing. Call centres essentially all work on the basis of oversubscription and queueing. On the assumption that some percentage of calls will go away, they save on staff by queueing calls. This is not the only way to deal with peaks in demand, though – for example, rather than holding calls, there is no good technical reason why you couldn’t instead have a call-back architecture, scheduling a call back sometime in the future.

Waiting on hold is interesting because it represents an imposition on the user – because telephony is a hot medium in McLuhan’s terminology, your attention is demanded while you sit pointlessly in the queue. In essence, you’re providing unpaid labour. Worse, companies are always tempted to impose on you while you wait – playing music on hold (does anybody actually like this?), or worse, nagging you about using the web site. We will see later on that this is especially pointless and stupid.

And the existence of the queue is important in the social relations of the workplace. If there are people queueing, it is obviously essential to get to them as soon as possible, which means there is a permanent pressure to speed up the line. Many centres use the queue as an operational KPI. It is also quality-destroying, in that both workers and managers’ attention is always focused on the next call and how to get off the current call in order to get after the queue.

A related issue is polling. That is to say, repeatedly checking on something, rather than being informed pro-actively when it changes. This is of course implicit in the queueing model. It represents a waste of time for everyone involved.

Repetition is one of the most annoying of the anti-patterns, and it is caused by statelessness. It is always assumed that this interaction has never happened before, will never happen again, and is purely atomised. They don’t know what happened in the last call, or even earlier in the call if it has been transferred. As a result, you have to provide your mother’s maiden name and your account number, again, and they have to retype it, again. The decontextualised nature of interaction with a call centre is one of the worst things about it.

Pretty much every phone system these days uses SIP internally, so there is no excuse for not setting a header with a unique identifier that could be used to look up data in all the systems involved, and indeed given out as a ticket number to the user in case they need to call again, or – why not – used to share the record of the call.

That point leads us to another very important one. Assymetric legibility characterises call centres, and it’s dreadful. Within, management tries to maintain a panopticon glare at the staff. Without, the user faces an unmapped territory, in which the paths are deliberately obscure, and the details the centre holds on you are kept secret. Call centres know a lot about you, but won’t say; their managers endlessly spy on the galley slaves; you’re not allowed to know how the system works.

So no wonder we get failure demand, in which people keep coming back because it was so awful last time. A few companies get this, and use first-call resolution (the percentage of cases that are closed first time) as a KPI rather than call rates, but you’d be surprised. Obviously, first-call resolution has a whole string of social implications – it requires re-skilling of the workforce and devolution of authority to them. No wonder it’s rare.

Now, while we were in the queue, the robot voice kept telling us to bugger off and try the Web site. But this is futile. Inappropriate automation and human/machine confusion bedevil call centres. If you could solve your problem by filling in a web form, you probably would have done. The fact you’re in the queue is evidence that your request is complicated, that something has gone wrong, or generally that human intervention is required.

However, exactly this flexibility and devolution of authority is what call centres try to design out of their processes and impose on their employees. The product is not valued, therefore it is awful. The job is not valued by the employer, and therefore, it is awful. And, I would add, it is not valued by society at large and therefore, nobody cares.'

http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2012/01/21/the-politics-of-call-centres-part-one/