A Mistake

As I apply for the umpteenth mcjob. As I send out countless digital resumes, I realized, once again, I made a terrible mistake.

Now,I am not one for great regret, but the other day, waiting for a meeting to determine my future among the "not-a-living-wage" type jobs, I found a book on tackling the"Brick Wall" of a tight, hyper-competative job market. 

This book starts, with all, to find a direction. You have to know what you want. It asks that we perform an exercise called the Seven Stories. The premise is simple: write down 20 to 25 enjoyable accomplishments. Look back into childhood,  in young adulthood, hobbies and in jobs  orcareers you have held.

I did my list on the back of the folded piece of paper I snagged; some expired advertisement for well-passed Employment Fairs. When I have a phone, or camera, or scanner, I can prove it. Imagine a scribbled note here:

Editors Note: Scribbly Note goes here. Use your imagination.

Some items that were on the list were: Piggy Pirates, A relationship that helped me learn about relationships, myself, and people, My brief stint with chain mail, Several stories I wrote in college and my work in  400 University Drive and the Ubiquitous. A portrait of Ian Anderson that caused my father to not have a critical remark. Tutoring adults and children in several subjects and having them do well.

I want you to note something - something immediately apparent. Not a single accomplishment was related to IT, Technical Support, or call center work.  I am reminded of 2001 when I had the option
to intern with an Art Instructor. Since I could not ratiocinate both work and the instruction with respect to time, I gave up on the internship, because you've got to work to eat.

The mistake has always been my inability to sacrifice a job for a career.  I always chose the job: A small piddly, temporary thing over the work of a career: a long course. My head wa snever one for computers. I can work with computers, I understand their value,  but I found them incredibly tedious to work with. Had I been able to find them even a bit interesting, perhaps I would have tried harder. But the work with them was about as interesting, and important to me, as one might feel working at Mcdonalds.  And whilst working these jobs, I did not work on my talents/


 When you have gifts, you must work in the direction to increase efficacy. If you have talent for something, it would be foolish to let it whither.

And I am not saying I am special (not in this post, anyway). I think we all have talents and I think most of us give up on using them. I want to say it's circumstances that lead us to this, but that's only half of it.  Circumstances, internal and external can only become so obnoxious before your will is thwarted.

Mastering a skill boils down to desire overcoming obstacles.  And success, and expertise, is simply displaying mastery in a skill. Your upbringing and genetics make it somewhat more easy to walk some paths than others. We call these talents.
 
When I was offered opportunities to master skills in my life, to test skills, I tended to withdraw. And this was my mistake. I was not prescient enough to realize the existential pain of regret would be far worse than the difficulty at the time.

I don't know if GenY has this problem. Do you? There seems a certainty among others that I never felt. Better parenting, better schools? Better information? The Internet has done wonders to help our self-esteem, and (destroy it).

All I can say, is, in wisdom borne from foolish mistakes plus years of making the same mistakes, is that if you have a passion, do make time to work on them. Work on them intensely, passionately, and consistently.

More on Metrics.

Editor's Note:** According to our metrics, your donation makes increases beatings of the author by 21%. this, in turn, leads a 7% increase in writing quality and quantity. Your donations matter. 


I realized, as I worked on this post, about Comcast, I have a lot to say about metrics. A whole lot. It's not an easy subject, and the corporate world loves metrics. Every middle manager in the country becomes flush at the sight of a report detailing the After Call Percent, the Labor Percent, and the time in queue. They are positively froth at the notion.

Now, I am going to upset a lot of people. Maybe I won't come off as an expert. I have a lot of experience with metrics. And before you say that studies show that metrics are the best performance measures we have, remember that whenever you say "best" you have to ask, for whom.

Metrics, in a lot of ways, are a justification. No company likes it's technical support division. This love-child of rapidly growing tech, coupled with furtive and error-prone tech, is a sinkhole for company money. I'd bet that half of R&D is basically just "make it less error prone."  It's certainly cheaper.

But as technology increased, Tech Support became the second sales associate. We were the soft sell. "Hey, thanks for buying out product. All technology, even that car, has issues. We know that it's inconvenient when it doesn't work, let's get it working right for you."

The flip side - it's a sinkhole for companies to offer free support. They'd charge but most customers suffer a disconnect - they see a technician fiddle some buttons and then the computer works. The technological "wizardry" is largely subtle. When you take your car in for  a repaire, they lift it up on blocks, pull out parts. It looks like work. It's easy to understand as actual skill.  When a technician rapidly scrolls through text, presses a few buttons, reboots your computer, there doesn't seem to be any substance.

So the company wants a profit on a department and the customer doesn't want to pay for what looks like crystal waving hoodoo. But tech support needs to exist.


So Technical support managers use metrics because to the executives, who care only for the bottom line and who listen only to bean-counters, need, desperately need, to know why this red mark exists in the the ledger of their exchequer. They see this entire department that has no income and they can seem to justify it.

I don't understand why. They happily understand exchange of money for goods, at least - they ought. Unless, they don't. When they take their ski trips, do they not pay people for food? For shelter? Why do they think the $30 dollar bottle of hair product is worth it? I mean, their computers need fixing too. I get frustrated that I have to buy cleaning supplies, but after living in some lichen-coated ogre-caves in my past, I wouldn't be caught dead without at least a bottle of bleach. .

Metrics, in this case, justify something that ought need no justification. Tech Support is the second customer service. Once the item has been sold, follow-up falls, mostly, on service. If service is handcuffed to metrics, or poorly staffed, or poorly paid, you lose your ability to create meaningful and important customer experience. Yes, you will have a trickle of naive and bright-eyed techs who will begin the job with open-hearts. But your system will turn them into cowering, mumbling misanthropes in six months. And then, you'll need a retention team.

My point is exactly this: Metrics should never cost the customer experience. The customer experience needs to be managed. If you manage the customer they will have a bad experience.

Truth is, metrics are not all bad. On the contrary, someone I admire, Jon Taffer, uses a type of metric called analytics. He touts the "science of the bar business." He uses these metrics to aid the bar in increasing profit. But bars make money by improving and lengthening the positive customer experience. It's may sometimes come off as if you your chairs are 5 cm higher then profits increase 10%, but only because on TV, they edit and use shorthand. Bars make money on happy, well-served, pleasantly-buzzed-and-entertained customers. If a metric increases short-term profit for a bar at the cost of long term customers - then it isn't used.

Growth under the current system that puts profit first will fall. Profit is important, despite my difficulty understanding work, I can understand profit.

Good service, a good product, and good follow-up, is not a detriment to service. You don't make profit and then, as an afterthought, offer a good experience, or an experience.  You don't begrudgingly slough off to work, petulant and angry like a spoiled child, (or yours truly). You don't try to mitigate it as a "unfortunate and unintended consequence."

You offer a service and a good experience, and, in trade, you are provided other services or goods, or the shorthand, money.

Imagine! Imagine the bar that, as a a consequence, has nice lighting and a dance floor. "What do you mean, we have to have good liquor and clean bars? I just want to sell drinks!" or  a Pizza place? "Quality ingredients? Psh! Just sell them them ground up cardstock!*" How many people would be impressed by an executive with unwashed hair and a ratty suit? 

And, as  customers go elsewhere (assuming they can - Telecoms have the system locked up). You are left with needing "Retention specialists", basically glorified beggars and strong-arm experts who's sole purpose is to keep your unhappy customers on the hook.  You are no better than some back alley clip joint.

If you need metrics to justify your position, you haven't adequately managed your value. And if you need, god help you, an extortionist in "retention." then you aren't providing a service worth retaining.



* I am talking to you Pizza Hut.  Little Caesar's tastes better. And it's cheaper. You should be ashamed. 

** It's just me, but I put on a spiffy bowler and a monocle.

The Comcast Effect.

I seem, very much, to be in a tizzy over the economy - specifically how we work, why we work, and what we work on. I think the whole system, created by industrialization, has turned like some modern-day ouroboros, onto itself. The mechanization and industrialization has ran away with regulations (and de-regulations) all in the wrong places. It's left the free market, good work, and the lower-class gasping in the dust.

As for the middle class, our current legislative body, from fed to state, and often local, stabbed it in 2002, it just took this long for it to bleed out. The middle class barely had tiem to gasp "Et tu?"

The ever-increasing hatred of Comcast is a bandwagon that has perhaps circle. Recordings and interviews  making the rounds, showing us the madness of the Comcast system. And regardless of claims to the otherwise, Comcast knows about and encourages it.
In fact, I feel like translating the Comcast apology:

We are very embarrassed by the way our employee spoke with Mr. Block and Ms. Belmont and are contacting them to personally apologize.

 Translation: We are so busted. This is just like when mom caught me stealing as a child. I had to go, apologize, and promise to pay back the shopkeeper. So now we have to apologize even though the candy we stole was delicious. Lame 

 The way in which our representative communicated with them is unacceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives.

Translation: We do not precisely train our CSRs like this. In fact, it's not until they get on the call center floor where we discreetly discuss metrics. We reinforce these metrics at their 30- and 60-day reviewt

We are investigating this situation and will take quick action. 

Translation:   So, we know what's up and we will handle it in-house by completely ignoring it and.or firing the employee. 

While the overwhelming majority of our employees work very hard to do the right thing every day, we are using this very unfortunate experience to reinforce how important it is to always treat our customers with the utmost respect.

 Translation: This happens all the time, but we will add an extra ten minutes in training to discuss how much we care about our customers so we can update the published date on our training materisl. We'll make it look like an overhaul by paying people way more money than they ought to rewrite the language of our training materials.

(As a mercenary who doesn't have apersonal beef with Comcast, I'd like to say to them: I am up to the rewrite job, and my fees are reasonable. It's will be $10,000 a month. You can bundle that with my $5000  a month  consulting and my $3000 cartooning. Now separately you'd pay 18 grand for all that, but with introductory bundling, I can get you two for $9000 or all 3 for only $6000 for 6 months!  What a deal!)*

 Sometime in the past we gave up on the simple idea of good products and services. There used to be this process. You made a product or a service, then shared it and exchanged it for money. if the product and/or service was good, and you were reasonable, you would get returns and some profit. Industrialization was, supposedly, simply an extension. of this.

But something went sideways. We stopped looking at return customers and happy customers as signs of good work and started engineering opinions. We sent out surveys. And the surveys said things like 'the call was too long" or "they didn't fix the problem and I had to call again."  And we valued signing up new customers, at any cost. We added flow lists and databases and metrics because we thought the science and data backed it up. And it did, to a point. 

But we stopped offering service, and offering to do the jobs, and starting managing the customer. Not his expectations, but them. We forgot that all the data in the world isn't giving the customer what they want or need. 

The fact is, while it's true that no sane or honest business owner goes into the game to lose money, the profit - the bottom line, comes from relationships, and connections.

Rather than asking "What can we do to help the customer?' We ask: "Can we make the customer happy in 6 minutes." Then we ask "Can we finish the call in 6 minutes to help the next person, and can we make them wait in a queue."

I have discussed this before here.

Comcast is not alone. I worked for a small Telecom, TDS. I was a pretty solid employee,but I had a problem. I wanted customers to be helped. I want to solve their problem and make sure they didn't need to talk to me again.
Did some of the customers need multiple things? Yes. That, at first, didn't bother me. Did some customers ask me for things outside my scope of support? certainly - I explained that I could help, or couldn't. If I could help, I said other agents might not be able to help.

I had excellent customer service. But in the world of metrics and numbers, this was unacceptable. And the simple answer is because our managers were so divorced from the customer and the process that they couldn't even understand good customer service, and why their metrics were detrimental to the people on the floor. Customer Service Representatives breaking out in a sweat when the difficult call takes very long. raises lost to skewed averages and you miss a metric.  

All companies do this. Marco's Pizza did this. Measuring the time to make pizza, the time in the oven, the time on cut and time out the door. All of these do, in fact affect customer service. But, in the end, the only thing that really matters is the quality of the pizza and the good customer experience.  At Marco's Pizza, the management is not distant from the customer. If a customer is happy, metrics are loosened. If a customer is unhappy, no amount of metrics repair it.

Metrics tell very little about the customer experience. It is a game of testing boundaries - how much can we get away with in our search for profit and speed and still have a positive experience.

It seems insane. In order to give a "positive experience" I had to not do all the things that made an experience positive.

Now the same telecom sent all their tech jobs to uneducated Jamaicans, costing the US jobs and giving a worse customer experience.

Madness and bad customer experience in a search for profit. No company went out of business by building positive relationships.

Something has happened. Industrialization and profit-hunting have become metric chasing. Desperate attempts to show your job is relevant by explaining why your imaginary measurements are good measurements. That the science of profit, time management, and efficacy replaced the ability to craft a good customer experience.


*Comcast must sign a 12 month contract. After 6 months the introductory rate become $19,999 a month. Early termination fees apply.

Self-Soothing, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Learned to Love the Moment.

A lot of times people say you need to let go. Yesterday I finally understood it. I discovered something that helped me. Hopefully it will help others.

I am not a psychologist, a psychiatrist , or a psychic. But it struck me with a particular pop profundity.

Depression causes me to hold on tightly to negative experiences instead of positive ones.

Experiences are how we build self-identity. What we experience informs who we are. In self-soothing, we are asked to experience, in a positive way, a moment in our day.  We are to focus on the five senses. they say, for ease of remembering, this mnemonic: 5 sights, 4 sounds, 3 touches, 2 smells, 1 taste.

For example:

After my workout, I sat in McDonald's and watched a breeze play over a pink dogwood. The leaves rippled and swayed, I imagined, in an extemporaneous and improvised dance. As I watched, a woman leaned urgently over an envelope in a table to my left. She would carefully write in small letters, then look up at me tersely. Her arms warded off onlookers.
I sipped my ice water. Condensation collected on the outside in spite of the the air conditioning. I lifted the cup to my lips, and I was struck by how heavy and leaden it felt in my hands.My knee pressed into the half-wall near me. I felt grave. I moved my knee away and suddenly felt as if I might fly away. I turned and set it again to the wall.

In therapy we discussed some moments in our past that were pleasant. As we relived them, even the most unhappy of us smiled wistfully. It was then that the thought struck me that for the briefest instant that telling these stories, these details, made us seem like people without depression.  When "normies" talk, they share positive experiences. In sharing them they relive them. Most often they share humorous, happy, and pleasant stories. Let me emphasize: They are routinely connecting with levity.

I hold tightly to negative experiences and ignore positive ones. So my self-identity is made up of a remarkable number of sadness.
 And in pandering to this depression caused me to avoid positive experiences. I often suffered bouts of depression that kept me from engaging in and enjoying positive experiences. Parties, concerts, dinners with friends.

I see it a lot in my father. He will have a bad day if he has a single bad experience in a day. If I attempt to argue that his day went well, he will refuse to acknowledge it.

Depression is described as a black hole. I can't argue. i use positive emotions to try and fill that hole, but can't seem to. And while I won't discount biology (Well, I will for me), I will say that depression has trained me to connect with negativity. I feel intimately tied to it. It's cliche to say, but I wrapped myself in it.I gave unhappy moment s more gravity than they deserve.And I've spent years practicing this.

People without depression seem to have a much easier time letting go of  sadness. They have an easier time finding pleasant experiences that connect them to happiness. they, in fact, have a long history of practicing self-soothing.

Self-soothing is connecting with positive experiences. Pleasant experiences. As trite as it sounds, self-soothing trains people with depression to look on the bright side. Something we often dislike being told to do.

This module has convinced me further that dialectical behavioral therapy simply trains you to think and act like a normal person. 

How to be happy: Get off the computer!

For those tuning in, I want to advise something. If you want to be happy, get off the computer.

Remember when the computer first appeared? It was going to revolutionize our lives. We were going to share information and research. We would link the wolrd and share culture.

Now all we do is look at cat pictures.

Social media like Facebook and Twitter have replaced conversations. I have to hold back on what I say on Facebook, lest I have this conversation.

Me: "Did I tell you I saw Iron Man 3 finally?"
FB Friend: "Yeah, saw it on Facebook."
Me: "I rather liked the part where <spoilers>."
FB Friend: "Yeah, I saw your tweet"
Me: "Oh."

That's it. It's worse in person. What do we talk about?
Well, I used Facebook for good, and not evil. I crowdsourced a list of books I am to read, both Classic Fiction and Non-Fiction.  The Art of Nonconformity suggests at least 30 of each. Well, I have nothing but time and a Library Card, so let's do this:

First 15 of each:

Non Fiction:
1. Conflicted leader
2. Defending the Crown
3. The Selfish Gene
4. The God Delusion
5. Guns Germs and Steel
6. "Surely You Are Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
7. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
8.  The People Who Eat Darkness
9. Hired Swords, the Rise of Private Warrior Power in Early Japan
10. Samurai, Warrior, and The State in Early Medieval Japan
11. The Teeth and Claws of the Buddha
12: The Vikings
13: The Vinland Sagas
14. The Signal and the Noise
15. Freakonomics

Fiction:
1. The Prose and Poetic Eddas
2. Egil's Saga
3. Dispair by  Nabokov
4. White Guard by Bulgakov
5. The Pigeon by Suskind
6. Fahrenheit 451
7. Count of Monte Cristo
8. Ivanhoe
9. The Brothers Karamazov
10.Watership Down
11. Anna Karenina
12. Voyage of the Beagle
13. Hojuki
14. The Tale of Heike
15. Dream of the Red Chamber

Thanks to Lorrie, Mike, Chris, Joe-Bear, Lynn, and the restof my literate friends. If a book you recommended isn't listed, then it is in the second part of the series, I have read it, or it's a Bronte sisters' book.
Now I shall take my own advice and get the hell off the computer!


EDIT:  I found a list of books I wanted to read. So I have added:

Fiction:
16. A Sport and Pastime
17. The Postman Always Rings twice
18. Tropic of Cancer
19. Revolutionary Road
20. As I Lay Dying
21. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
22-25. Factotem, Post Office, Ham on Rye and Women by C. Bukowski
26. Midnight's Children
27. Lolita
28. Underworld by DeLillo
30. CivalWarLand in Bad Decline

Non-Fiction
16. Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson
17. Artful Sentences
18. Super Freakonomics.