Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.
My latest assignment: write up a paragraph or two describing anything I did in the last major release of the product that might qualify as inventive, so that the patent lawyers can pick it over and decide what to patent.
Have I mentioned recently how evil software patents are?
Not only is my job to help deliver those evil advertisements that pollute your movie experience, but now my name is on a software patent application. On the plus side, now that I’m evil, I won’t have a moral dilemma if the only jobs available after this one are producing porn web sites or (shudder) working for the Republicans.
Until I reviewed my mail filter logs today, I had no idea that “Paris Hilton” wasn’t a hotel in France. I’m not sure I’m a better person for knowing that.
I’m on a group of mailing lists. Over the years I’ve gotten a reputation for answering rhetorical questions. That’s partly true – most of the lists live on my system, so I see them before anybody else, so if I know the answer I will answer, without minutely analysing the post to see if it’s a rhetorical question. I think it’s better to err on the side of being helpful – most people would rather see thier question answered, rather than not answered because people couldn’t figure out if it was rhetorical or not. So sue me.
I also have a habit, when somebody makes a ironic statement, of trying to amplify the irony by playing off what they’re saying. Sometimes I do it right, sometimes it falls flat.
Unfortunately because of the first reputation, unlike when other people do it and it doesn’t work right, people just assume I’m totally fucking stupid, and pile all over me. And I’m god damned sick and tired of it. So I’m taking a break. I’m not going to say anything on any of those mailing lists for as long as I can. Maybe if I don’t give them any ammunition, they’ll stop piling on me. Already in the last hour I’ve had to stop myself twice where I was going to reply to a message.
The saddest thing is that these people are the people I consider my best friends in the world. Maybe I need some new friends.
FOXNews.com – Business – Dell to Stop Using Indian Call Center for Corporate Customers
Dell has finally realized that outsourcing isn’t such a great money saver if the lousy service drives away your customers. I’ve emailed for customer support from three different companies recently, and in each case I got back a response that indicated that the person responding didn’t read or understand the question, and merely copied whatever chunks of the FAQ used the same nouns that I did, and in all cases it was signed with an Indian name.
I’m not saying that non-Indians are incapable of bad customer support, quite the contrary, but my experience with non-Indians has only been mostly bad, compared to totally bad experience with Indians.