More on Metrics.

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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.

Jobs don't work.

Marco's update: Apparently my legend grows, even those who loathed me (except for the antagonist) say they miss me. I am touched by the sentiment, but sadly sentiment doesn't pay the rent(iment). I am still planning a crowd funding and to add a donation/buy stuff button as soon as I can figure out a product or service other than "miserably bad advice", "swear word portmanteaus", and "anti-corporate screeds."  Hell, I bet I could raise about 50 dollars just for the service of "shutting my mouth." 

I looked back at my work experience, and I have settled all previous jobs into two categories: "Useless Insanity" and "Unskilled Idiocy." I imagine that I am not the only person to categorize so, nor the first to realize the futility of work. My talent for miscreance, and the words of Michael Ventura, Alan Watts (or read the transcript) ,and Harlan Ellison have left me bereft of job morale.

Why, in that video by Alan Watts, he echoes my sentiment - or perhaps I echo his:

But if you do a job, if you do a job with the sole purpose of making money, you are absurd.

He suggests that when we do so, we begin to equate money with happiness. I can't argue, or won't, rather. I don't want utilize my talent for opposition today

My work has been as absurd as Alan Watts suggests. I was taught, rather harshly, that I must have a job. That my talents were not in fast food or factory, that I have a natural savant-like idiocy when it comes to schedules, rules, and policies. A trained monkey with a severe bleeding head injury can follow rules that I find as alien and incomprehensible as Martian mating rituals.

Actually, given my lewdness, I suspect extraterrestrial sex makes more sense to me. 

I was raised to work jobs. I had to have a job, according to my father. I don't blame my father completely. His father was raised on German work ethic and an industrial-revolution perspective of the world. My father would pull apart guns at age six and draw each part, then put them back together flawlessly. And when he performed this miracle, his father and mother told him that it was "nice" , but he ought get a job in a factory.

Lamentable. If a child showed such precociousness today, his parents would encourage him to study math and become an engineer.

My father said the same thing, like a mantra. You have to have a job. You have to have a job. You have to have a job.

And so I spent much of my time working as call center tech support, my stock and "trade". This trade constitutes being yelled at, screeched at, cried at,  for 40 hours a week, but for the blissful two hours a month when we were  droned at or yelled by our manager about our metrics.

No call center I worked for scored me on customer satisfaction. On the contrary, they scored me negatively if I spent the time to actually help the customer.   I was told at TDS Telecom that despite having more "Kudos" (compliments from customers) than other technicians, if I didn't lower my call times I would be fired.

Let that ruminate in your head. A kudos required extra work from the customer, and generally meant they were satisfied beyond mere resolution. TDS threatened to terminate me for helping customers. 


But that doesn't matter. What matters is call times. If your call takes longer than 6 minutes, you are doing your job wrong. Hang up on the customer - so long as they don't call back - and the managers are happy. Avoid helping the customer and - so long as the customer doesn't complain - call centers are happy. 

And if we are being honest, companies placed "First Call Resolution" as a metric only because agents hung up on customers to meet call length metrics.It's hard to fix someone's error in six minutes when you spend two of those minutes gathering required information and another two trying get them to find the start button.

Absurd, absurd, absurd.  Insanity. Put together unreasonable expectations and then get angry when people cannot meet them. That is the nature of corporate jobs.

I don't have a particularly good answer - I have some, but that will have to wait for another blog post.

If you want to read more, or see videos of these screeds, don't be afraid to subscribe, share on Facebook, on Twitter, or +1 on Google.


Marco's update part II: As I typed this, a  coworker texted me that the blow-job-enjoying manager told the antagonistic coworker to eat a bag of dicks as well. But he did it when they were punched out (and away from the eyes of corporate). Marco's me fired for breaking the illusion of cog-like perfection and order Frank -er, my manager, had cultivated. 
Don't send them hate mail. Send me 5 dollar donation I receive I will mail them a drawing of a bag of dicks. A dollar donation means I'll spent more than 30 seconds proofreading.Or, actually proofread.

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. 

All the world's a stage, yadda yadda yadda.

I love misfits. I admit it. I love people who just don't seem to fit. My favorite fiction, "'Repent Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman." is the story of a misfit. Everette C, Marm, who "wasn't much to begin with, except a man who had no sense of time."  In a world where being on time is the most important of values, he simply had no ability to do so. He couldn't fit in.

I wonder when he stopped trying? What day did he become the Harlequin?

I hero-worship misfits. I can't help it. All my heroes, all the stories I adore, are stories of misfits. Ellison, O'Conner, Butcher, Martin. I identify with them because I am a misfit. I can't keep my trap shut. I cannot be anything but what I am. I am a loudmouth, a snarker, and a clown.

I am not much to begin with, except a man who has no sense of propriety. And we live in a world that values decorum over morality. You can be a scumbag as long as you are polite about it. 

Yesterday during group therapy we read about activities to distract from emotional distress. The last line was "Sex; put a rubber band around your wrist, pull it out, and let it go."

Dear Kittens, when presented with something like this, what am I to do? When the universe gives you a gem like this, who am I say to no? Simon Peter spoke with the Holy Spirit to Jesus, right?

"Sounds exactly like my sex life."

Everybody laughed. I mean the kind of laughing, guffawing, and giggling that comes from releasing pent up energy. Therapy was derailed. Luckily, we neared the end of our session.  

The problem is twofold, my dear kittens. Chiefly, I am rewarded. When I mouth off I get laughter and I get likes and I get attention. Like a comic I get approbation from the audience. I have a reputation for being a funny guy. An amateur - very amateur -Patton Oswald. Which therein lies the second problem: I seem to believe I am always on stage - always entertaining. And it's not particularly exhausting to entertain all the time. But it is dangerous. Talking about telling someone to eat a bag of dicks is all well and good. And telling the story entertains - on stage or in a small group. And certainly all my coworkers were overjoyed that I told off the nagging bitchy shrew.

Seriously, she needed to eat a bag of dicks and shut her pieholster.  

But work is not a stage, and insults, however just and however warranted, are not tolerated in this "PC Bullshit" world. No matter how often we talked that way as a crew, no matter that a manager was blown by a subordinate and another manager sent dick pics to six subordinates without punishment until Marco's was threatened with a lawsuit.

So once again I find myself on the receiving end of a Pink Slip. I have a Kickstarter as soon as Amazon payments goes through.  We'll see what I can do from there. I've been on stage a long time, maybe it's time to pass the hat.  

Failure to Launch!

Well, per my last installment, I am looking for a solution.

Despite drinking a bit last night, and eating late (I know! I know!)

I woke up ravenously hungry. I was quite out of my mind.

And then I did a dumb thing, I didn't eat. I just went straight to work.

Lots of bad habits today.

I also found this study

looks like nicotine and alcohol are good for weight loss.

Who knew? All the skinny drinkers and smokers, maybe?

I am changing my diet a bit. Significantly less carbs, even low carbs, and more vegetables.

Not that I have been paying attention to my diet anyway. :D

I have a new reason to lose weight.

Stupid Hope. :D

Last night was pretty awesome.