Today I called the company that dumps chemicals on my lawn to get more chemicals dumped on my lawn. (I know, I’m a bad human.) It was a low quality experience. I was on hold for a loooong time listening to their pre-recorded excuse making and entreaties to log on to their website or use their app to change my plan. No, and fuck no, were my thoughts on those requests — I knew that signing up for the website or, Yahweh forbid, the app, would require me to jump through a dozen hoops that would probably include my account number or some other piece of info that I don’t have. I wanted to talk to a human to hear my alternatives for getting cancer from the chemicals leached through my front lawn, pick an alternative, and not think about it again for a few years.
When I finally talked to the harried customer service representative, she just didn’t do a very good job, probably because she was out of context. My guess is that she normally drives to some call center, sits in a tiny cube in front of her company-issued computer, talking on a company-issued phone, where she deals with idiots like me who call to talk about their lawns once every 5 years (which might severely underestimate how long it’s been since I interacted with this company other than to write them a check.) Doing that from home clearly didn’t allow her to put her best foot forward.
I think I know why: Most of the companies with whom I do business have an online site that I use to do so, but there are a few times when I want to get on the phone and deal with a human. Generally, that person is low paid, and one of the main requirements for their job is that they park their ass in a chair in some God forsaken business park for 8+ hours per day. In our gleaming new post-COVID future, the theory of the case is that these people will embrace working from home due to the convenience and savings of not having a commute.
Perhaps, but just as it is a burden to expect an employee to transport themselves to a call center, it is a much greater burden to expect them to have a reliable Internet connection, a quiet and secluded place to work, and the minimal technical wherewithal to fix minor issues with their company computer, if the company deigns to provide them one. The ability to work from home requires that the employee has a home from which they can work efficiently. And this is often not the case for employees paid $12.50 per hour, or whatever the lawn service is paying.
In other words, if you want people to work from home, you can’t pay them shit wages. You need to pay them enough so that they can maintain some kind of home office. And the fuck-the-poor salaries and benefits that these miserly enterprises dole out just aren’t enough to support a home office. So I predict as soon as this crisis has passed, these companies will pack the cubicles in their office parks, because we all know that the invisible hand just doesn’t allow a living wage.
Gvg
When the kids are back in school, we may get a more accurate view of what it would be like. Not to bad for me, could use some training in the hastily selected software to get us out of the office fast. I’m single. My nephew is pretty much living with grandparents that have become nearly full time teachers aid. Luckily grandma was a teacher though 12 year old pre teen doesn’t appreciate his luck. His mom my sister is a doctor with long hours almost 2 weeks on 2 weeks off who indicated that being teachers aid for online elementary school was exhausting and she is not born to be a teacher. Both of us watched mom, and said nope. Sooner or later she will test positive, and then the kid will have to stay with grandparents till it’s over.
other coworker gossip indicates the school kid issue is a big issue. This isn’t a normal time test.
another factor is when it’s two spouses suddenly home needing work space PLUS a kid or more. And people were saying houses were getting too large. Some were choosing tiny houses. Imagine that now.
Another Scott
Good points.
Do you suppose that COVID-19 might lead to some grand renaissance of “dumb terminals”? If someone has to work from home with no technical support, it seems to be a guaranteed disaster in the waiting. “Are you running Chrome 8.29.3901.9010 (c3)? No, well, you need to update that, then make sure your Java is updated to Java 2 v 7.378.9310 (c4ii). Oh, and if you’re running Windows 10 1909, well you have to turn off your antivirus to install those things because the AV isn’t updated for 1909 yet… And remember, if you need to connect to the company database, you have to run IE because we haven’t updated the Oracle system with the correct certificates, so nothing else will connect to it…”
Yeah, people are going to debug stuff like that at home. For $15 an hour. Sure.
If Google’s Chrome is up to it, they should move heaven and earth to get call-center clients running on it…
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
MobiusKlein
Call centers are heavily impacted by COVID lockdowns. For various companies, security policies require VPN / special hardware / etc.
hells littlest angel
I’m having a hard time sympathizing with people newly working from home for one reason: MUTE YOUR FUCKING TV BEFORE YOU PICK UP THE PHONE!
On the other hand, yeah, it’s unreasonable to expect much from someone working a shit job for shit wages.
Omnes Omnibus
@MobiusKlein: On the radio the other day, I heard that spam calls are down 58% since the pandemic was declared.
rikyrah
Watching Maddow.
Back to the outbreak at the Smithfield plant in South Dakota.
Got 800 tested positive.
But, the Governor who won’t issue a stay-at-home order, is now saying that there is no need to test the other people at the plant.??
These lowdown, no good muthaphuckas ??
Gin & Tonic
@Another Scott: Citrix really offloads an awful lot of issues that we have with remote configs.
HumboldtBlue
I posted this in the wrong thread below but now it fits even better here.
catclub
also tell that to the DOD training websites. Chrome is standards compliant. Use it.
Mousebumples
I’ve been working from home for about a month . (my job had periodic “snow days” where we could work from home and not need to drive in , but this is more extensive , obviously) I’m pretty tech savvy , and I had some hiccups the first week … And I’ve been troubleshooting for my coworkers ever since. But I know which programs to open each morning , in what order , and the best way to logoff at night . (and which websites need IE, which require Citrix, and which are broken by Citrix)… But I’m more fortunate than most , I’m sure .
catclub
reminds me of Cormac McCarthy.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mousebumples: People shouldn’t need to know that just to do an unrelated job.
m.glafmer
My company sent out warnings about increased phishing and other security breaches, while at the same time cut out two factor authentication for access to our VPN. Because increased usage was overloading the system.
different-church-lady
“There are more important things than living.”
HumboldtBlue
@catclub:
That’s very kind of you. Thanks.
different-church-lady
@HumboldtBlue: Peaky Blinders reference. Nice.
Robmassing
I would think that with the money companies could save by closing call centers, they could provide their employees with the technical necessities of a good work from home environment.
Brachiator
A lot of weird speculation here about a call center employee working from home. I don’t know that this is likely. It might be cheaper to flip a switch to a call center in India, which has its own complications.
At my previous company, people who worked from home already had good Internet service. They would get a loaner laptop and IT support. Doing self diagnosis and fixing of tech problems was discouraged. It was not cost effective to let people without a strong tech background noodle around with a problem.
This tax season I have been working at home since November. If I have tech problems, there is an established protocol for asking for assistance, and tech folk can even take over my laptop and do trouble shooting.
We use fairly well paid seasonal people who also work from home, and I have found that there is a remote work culture of people who look for part time remote work and who have been doing this for some time. They have been very helpful to new staff like me in recommending gear and related matter.
A former coworker has found that her life has become much more complicated now that her husband also works from home and her daughter is doing remote learning. The Internet connection that was sufficient just for her sometimes is taxed by everyone’s heavy usage. Since she is a critically important employee, her bosses might subsidize a higher cost improvement, allowing her husband to piggyback on her good fortune, this is not available to everyone. Internet service providers can actually often improve quality of service without passing huge fee spikes to customers, but this is a regulatory issue, and also needs a change in administration.
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
Probably not. Depends on the business, I guess.
No business can afford to have significant numbers of employees working at home playing around with their computers in order to get working.
One company I do business with uses Amazon Workspaces. So, people log in to this and find a suite of programs related to their work. Office 365 and some other stuff. Many of these programs are updated by the company. When people fire up AWS, they already have the current version of whatever it is they are supposed to have.
There is still a need for some troubleshooting, but some of the time consuming pain has been reduced.
Gvg
I get paid moderate wages and I could see how I could continue to work from home. It might happen, depending on the bosses views after. I can see a lot of benefit in doing 1/2 and half. Training, access to coworkers for easy tips, work morale…compare with quite, few interruptions and not dealing with the parking (it was an issue when my father attended this University before I was born and i’m 55. Parking will never be solved here) I bet the previously growing city bus system is going to not be as popular for quite awhile, and it was really working well before. Meant you didn’t have to pay premium rent to get to class, you could pick any apartment…no student assistant jobs, they got sent home. Bosses will have a lot to think about after, but right now…everyone is just managing. This includes the bosses who are also dealing with the he same issues themselves.
its been a long time since I had money grubbing cheapskate bosses, so i’m Not sure I can predict them anymore.
gogiggs
@Omnes Omnibus: For the sake of everyone else, I hope this is true, but that hasn’t been my experience. I’ve been getting way more than the usual volume of calls warning me that the warranty I don’t have on my car is about the expire, that the credit card I don’t have has been flagged and the Verizon account I do actually have has been suspended, despite which, they are somehow using it to call me.
Omnes Omnibus
@gogiggs: I have not been getting them. Maybe we average out.
Brachiator
@Omnes Omnibus:
Interesting. My main phone is a Google Pixel phone that has some mojo that somehow discourages spam calls.
I have another phone that I use for work that gets Chinese spam calls. A real pain.
Grover Gardner
The startup my wife works for was recently acquired by a major media company, just at the stay-at-home orders were hitting. Now this startup always used remote workers and had a very sleek system in place. This huge media company had to send everyone home, and it’s like their people never used computers before. ;-) Turns out another challenge for this huge media empire has been to get their book reviewers to work with PDFs instead of print copies.
In contrast, the modestly-sized media company I work for has spent six years developing their own centralized work suite that contains everything we need. Three weeks ago they sent everyone home, gave them a login, and you’d never know anything had changed. I got to hand it to them for that.
Omnes Omnibus
@Brachiator: I got the Chinese ones for about six months. Nothing since around February or so.
Martin
It’s more than that.
Our work from home plan has worked well because we were prepared to turn it on with zero notice because it was part of our earthquake plan. When an earthquake hits and your workplace falls over and burns down, you have no time to retrieve files or start distributing laptops or whatever. You had to have done that before. Your VPN needs to be running before. And for the wide variety of things that don’t translate well to work from home, like call centers – do as much as possible to eliminate the need for them. Create a functional, non shitty, non privacy invading app or website. What you tend to find is that the thing you thought was key was actually pretty shitty to start with, and could be improved upon considerably with an honest, competent effort.
Now, you can’t eliminate all of it, but you can shift it in such a way that instead of a huge call center you can get by with a handful of well paid employees. Years ago I had a team of people who were part of a call center for addressing some administrative issues within my unit. They were okay at it, but they didn’t design the systems or the policies, and so it wasn’t uncommon for them to have to leave a question unaddressed so they could talk to me about it, etc. After a bunch of work we improved our online information as well as the quality of the work overall, and the number of calls started to drop. I finally made the decision to put my personal contact information as the support line. I had gotten things down to maybe a dozen calls per year – easy enough for me to handle personally, and I almost never had to leave a problem unresolved on the first call. My unit temporarily shrank due to attrition but I could also reclassify the positions out of clerical ranks and into professional ones. Fewer FTE, but they were earning a lot more, doing a lot more for the institution, and were happier.
In my experience, poor customer service is usually a result of a business overdependent on rent-seeking. They don’t need to provide good service because they know you’re captive due to a contract or some other dependency. When you see it, it tells you what you need to do as a customer, but when you see it in your own organization, it tells you how you need to change that business.
Another Scott
@Brachiator: I work for a certain very, very large employer. We’re all teleworking to the extent possible. Just the paperwork to make that happen has been a challenge… We’re trying to use MS Teams. Lots and lots of us are still just fumbling around in it, and the rollout has been slow. And there’s the workflow issues – people used to doing things by e-mail have to remember to check Teams. People used to checking the main webserver for news have to remember to check Teams.
“Can you hear me? I can’t get my microphone working!”
“I keep getting disconnected for some reason. I’m using my cell phone as a hot spot so please don’t call my cell phone now!!”
Etc.
Everyone’s configuration is different because people have different software needs. There was talk a couple of years ago about rolling out of a standard computer platform for things like this, but who knows when that will happen.
It’s fun!!
:-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Belafon
Being at work right now should also require a significantly higher minimum wage than we’re currently providing.
CaseyL
I was just talking to a friend who wondered how many employers will allow people to keep on WFH, if doing so has been working well so far. I had to think about what things I really need to be in the office to do, and the list was surprisingly short. That’s specific to my current position, though; almost any other administrative position at the University would require more office presence for meetings, public contact, curriculum projects, etc.
Going into the office two or three times a week and WFH the rest of the time would be fantastic.
My guess is that good employers will think about changing the way things are done to make employees happier (happier = more productive). Whether that means higher salaries is… iffy. In the public sector, salary ranges are generally set by labor contract and legislation. Hard to change before the next negotiating round. Private sector – in my experience, small to mid-size businesses generally don’t have the financial room to pay more across the board, and the big ones have stockholders/institutional portfolio managers to contend with. And raising the national minimum wage depends on getting a Democratic President and a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress.
Bill Arnold
Open plan offices are hives optimized for killing worker bees via deadly infectious respiratory infections. (They weren’t killing many with influenzas.) They really can’t be fixed; their whole point was high density of human bodies per square foot of office space, and tight packing of live breathing, talking((, sneezing, coughing) human bodies spreads infection, and makes some of those live bodies dead. Companies need to bring back offices with doors and non-shared ventilation. Or make WFH the norm, investing in making it actually work for their employees.
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
I’ve been seeing how setting up for remote learning and remote work is often challenging.
Both medium size companies I have most recently worked for have had a remote work component for a number of years. So, fortunately, a lot of the bugs have been worked out.
The biggest challenge that I most recently had was keeping all my passwords straight. Other admin is kept to a minimum.
We use Skype for primary communications even though we also have a Teams Account.
Skype is set up into a number of channels. One is for System issues. People post there if they have Internet and other problems. But there is also a channel called 911 for severe problems. These channels are scanned regularly by IT and system whiz kids. The idea is that you got to be able to get people up and running quickly when they run into problems.
Mys sister and her husband also now work from home. And my nephew works at home for a huge ass giant corporation. I don’t know whether they have had any big issues yet.
But obviously this is an experiment that a lot of people have been thrown into. Even though I had a relatively smooth experience, I have passed on some ideas and asked a few questions.
jonas
So I had to drive out to my local bank branch yesterday to get a new debit card because my old one was recently blocked/deactivated due to some unauthorized charges. Fine. Whatever. Seems like this happens every 2-3 years. So I arrive around 12:30 and there’s of course a massive line of cars to use the drive-up teller window because the branch lobby is closed. Things move along gradually — I’m sort of spacing out listening to a Fresh Air interview with someone I’ve never heard of — and then I’m almost to the window and this car in front of me takes, I’m not kidding, 30 minutes to transact some business with the teller. WTF is this guy doing? Taking out six mortgages on properties in Tahiti? Cashing 80 out-of-state, third-party checks? When he finally pulls his rusting, backfiring 98 Corolla out of the bay, I pull in and the exasperated teller apologizes profusely for the delay, but it becomes immediately clear that she and one other person in the bank are the only employees on duty and they’re running around with their hair on fire. I explain that I need to replace my debit card and she tells me that the manager will take care of me in the parking lot in front. I go around front and wait in the car for about 5 minutes and this nice lady comes out and gives me a new debit card and tells me how to activate it at the drive-through ATM on the side of the bank. I thank her and walk over — the regular lane in the back being taken up by people using the drive-through teller window — and try my new card. Invalid transaction. It won’t take the temporary PIN. The ATM screen says to call customer service. My cell phone shows no battery. So I head home with a defunct ATM card and no cell phone and pour a stiff drink.
That’s my quarantine diary for the day. How’s yours?
Soprano2
My boss got the IS department to do what would be necessary for me to work from home if I have to – if someone in my group gets sick and I have to quarantine, for example. I’ll set up at the pub if I have to do that. I don’t want to work at home. My husband is retired and so is home all the time. I don’t have anywhere convenient to set up at home, and there are way too many distractions there for me to get very much done. Going to work is the only normal part of my life left, so I want to keep it.
Robert Sneddon
One thing this world-wide clusterfuck is proving is that (for the more advanced nations at least) internet connectivity is no longer a luxury but an essential good, like sewers and roads and electricity. Imagine what it would have been like without near-ubiquitous connectivity for Joe and Jill Common-man.
Andrew Johnston
RE Call centers: I briefly worked in one of these places and it is truly one of the shittiest jobs that there is – possibly the worst that doesn’t actually put your health in danger. One thing that people don’t appreciate if they’ve never done it is the sheer pace of the calls, which are back-to-back for much of the day. You deal with that training, a process through which a well-rounded and mostly emotionally healthy human is taught to behave as much like a machine as is feasible. Call comes in, log the call, follow the script, transfer when appropriate, return to ready mode – pretty much that, over and over again for eight hours.
Of course, hypothetically there’s no reason you couldn’t do this from home…except that the call center is designed to put you in a frame of mind for this kind of work. You have a desk that, in most cases, you’re barely allowed to personalize. You have a software suite (which, again, you can’t personalize) that omits anything you don’t need. And you have an environment that manages to be free from distraction even when it’s noisy. The call center is an awful environment, but there’s a method to the madness.
Just something to ponder when dealing with people who spend a good chunk of their lives glued to a company phone.
Central Planning
@Robert Sneddon: I think a bigger problem is the WiFi inside peoples houses. Generally, people don’t have any idea how their home WiFi should be configured and there are all sorts of incorrect settings that need to be fixed or optimizations that need to be enabled.
I wrote a 1-page doc for my wife to share with the parents of her students. She said it was too complex for most of them to understand. The problem is that I can’t write something that will apply to every piece of hardware in use, and I expect people to be able to take a suggestion and apply it to their hardware. She didn’t send it to anybody.
I think the only suggestion that would work is “don’t use wireless. Plug into your router with an Ethernet cable”
Robert Sneddon
@Central Planning: I’m thinking more that internet routing, backbones and data distribution is key to keeping a society functional these days. Wifi connectivity issues at a single endpoint is not problematic other than for the individuals involved. If there are no big fibre bundles running between data centres and the cities or across the oceans, if the Big Twelve primary DNS registry centres fail to distribute updated tables to the secondaries, if the switches stop working then everyone everywhere is in a world of hurt.
For myself I run GigE cat-6 cable around the flat. I only enable our Wifi AP when I need it and keep it shut down otherwise for security reasons. Saying that Wifi is easier to set up than it used to be but it’s promiscuous in a way cabled Ethernet isn’t.
PenAndKey
@Central Planning: Except then you’d probably end up with half the parents asking what an ethernet cable looks like.
Kosh III
Fortunately my work place, a large govt agency, was already promoting WFH. I started 3 years ago and was already doing 4 days at home so going to 5 wasn’t a big change.
We were provided a nice laptop, decent vpn and tech support so that’s a plus.
But, when I first started I had problems with staying connected. It took 2 weeks and 3 visits by (fraking) comcast techs to get it right.
BethanyAnne
When I designed call center software, I remember learning that the average employee lasted six weeks at the job.