Author: Kim du Toit

Forced Participation

Retailing

Of late, there’s been a lot of what I’ve come to call “forced participation” in that after almost every retail transaction, it seems, one has to respond to a follow-up questionnaire on said transaction.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t mind, but the problem is that this is becoming increasingly tiresome.  FFS, the transaction took at most a minute, which is what one would expect from a routine transaction, and now I have to take three minutes to say the thing was worth 5 stars?  Frankly, given that the transaction was unexceptional — I paid my money, got the item, all pretty normal — in the normal scheme of things I’d just give it three stars and away we go.

Except that’s not how it works these days, is it? because now Management uses these “service metrics” as a performance indicator for the staff member in question, and (I’m told) anything less than 5 stars has (bad) consequences for the employee come salary review time, or bonus time for that matter.

So now one is more or less compelled to give 5 stars regardless (unless the service was crap, in which case the reduced star count is or should be unexpected).

And here’s the problem.  If five stars is de rigeur, then how do we describe or reward outstanding service?  Like so much grading nowadays, if everyone gets an A, then what is the worth of an A?

I remember once awarding a single star (because I couldn’t give 0 or a negative) for a truly horrendous experience.  The problem was, as I explained to the drone who actually called me to see what had happened (!), that the problem was not with the customer service rep — who had been truly excellent, by the way — but with the corporation’s stupid policy, something over which the poor girl had no control.  But what was I supposed to do?  Give five stars for a monumental clusterfuck?  How does that help?

The situation didn’t improve when I asked the supervisor if I was going to get a survey on his service call, because he hadn’t helped the situation either.  At the end of it, I simply told the supervisor that the outcome was that I was never going to do business with his company ever again, given their shitty policy and terrible backup.  (And I never have.)

As with so many of he little technologies that have injected themselves into our lives of late, this one is being misused (even abused) by people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing and don’t know how to set up or manage information streams.

A plague on all their houses.

Oh, and there will be a followup post on a related matter, all about how I stopped doing business with a longtime service provider precisely because they’ve started abusing the data that I’ve been exchanging with them.  I have to allow a little time to pass before I do because if I rant about what I really think at the moment, there could be lawyers (theirs, of course).

Watch this space.

Update:  Got another one just this morning.

“You recently made contact with Tina at our Customer Service Center. As one of Tina’s customers, we believe you are the most relevant and credible expert to offer advice to help Tina continue to improve. Tina would love your help and it should only take two minutes. Click on the button below to take the survey.”

Yeah, “Tina would love your help” — like she’ll ever see my input other than if I call her service (which was outstanding, by the way) terrible.

Assholes.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD, Watermelons

Concerning the inconvenient facts that confront the Climate Screamies:

Equatorial island chains stubbornly refusing to disappear below rising seas, the Great Barrier Reef hitting record coral levels, animal populations thriving, with higher CO2 levels (almost entirely from natural geological emissions) bringing record greening to parts of the planet that desperately need it. But then again with atmospheric CO2 levels of a scant 420ppm (with industrially insane mankind providing just a trace proportion of that), which in our distant past were as high as 6,000ppm, and which would witness the end to life on earth if they fell below 180ppm, reality, sadly for the cultists, is dawning. — Danny Lockwood

So long, losers.  First it was the Population Bomb, then the New Ice Age, then Glueball Wormening, then (unspecified) Climate Change.  Sprinkle liberally [sic]  with Pandemic Fairy Dust, and you have a near-complete list of bullshit that has been used to frighten the global population into some kind of societal regression.

And sadly, it’s mostly worked.  Except, of course, in places that are contributing the most towards the befoulment of the planet — that would be China, Southeast Asia, Africa and other Third World shitholes — but we can’t say anything bad about these people of course because RAAYYYYCISM! (And there’s the final item on the list.)

A pox on all of them.

I’m Thinking Jail

Government Thugs

…with weekly ball-kickings, having committed this piece of bureaucratic foulness:

This entire monstrosity started when the ATF sent a confidential informant to buy machineguns from Adamiak, who never sold any machineguns, of course. Adamiak never had any machineguns.  Instead, Adamiak sold the informant barrel shrouds, which were even cut up into pieces.

Barrel shrouds surround a machinegun barrel. They’re meant to keep a young soldier from burning their hands on a hot machinegun barrel. The weapon can fire full-auto with or without a shroud. They certainly aren’t vital parts. They definitely are not a “machinegun.”

Anyone who misclassifies cut up barrel shrouds as machineguns shouldn’t be working for the ATF, but that’s exactly what ATF Firearms Enforcement Officer Ronald K. Davis did. He put this deception into a report, which ATF Agent William S. Harston, Jr., quickly used as evidence to obtain a search warrant of Adamiak’s home. Hairston, the ATF’s lead case agent, even held up a toy during Adamiak’s trial, which of course was also classified as a machinegun.

“If they never lied about those shrouds, they never would have gotten a search warrant,” Adamiak said Wednesday.

During his trial, Adamiak’s defense team tried to argue that the barrel shrouds weren’t machineguns, so the search warrant was flawed, and the ATF’s entire investigation was based on lies… but the judge cut them right off.

So the ATF agents who cooked up this specious bullshit (up to and including the senior officer who signed off on it), the prosecutor and team who decided to prosecute it, and the judge who allowed the cooked-up evidence into court:  each and every one of them should be charged and imprisoned because every single thing they did subverted the course of actual justice in one way or another.

And screw this “hearing next month” nonsense.  Patric Adamiak should be freed within the next hour, following a pardon by President Trump.

One last word to POTUS:  inactivity on manifest injustices such as this one are the kind of thing that persuade once loyal supporters to stay home at the next election.  Yes, it’s that important — because what happened to Adamiak could happen to any one of us, if allowed to proceed unchecked.

Get it done.  Hundreds if not thousands of people have been pardoned for far greater crimes — and Pat Adamiak never committed a crime in the first place.