“A prospective employee today saying that they don’t use A.I. is the equivalent of a prospective secretary in 1995 saying that she doesn’t use a PC.” — Scott Galloway
I hadn’t thought of it that way before — being preternaturally suspicious of A.I. as I am — but the more I read and speak to people, the more I’m starting to see why the above is true.
I’m just glad I’m not part of today’s prospective employee group.
Here’s an easily-answered question:
My guess: to make it feel less like you’re driving a toaster oven? Suggested new name for the thing: Taycan’t. And of course, this “new” feature doesn’t come cheaply, so say hello to “price increase”.
Wouldn’t accept one as a gift.
Now as for the real thing (Cayman), however:
In-a-gadda-da-vida, baby.
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.
Some time back, Reader Mike S. sent me this pic, with the comment: “Marketing trumps Good Taste every time.”
My initial reaction is to agree with him. Clearly, this rifle is not aimed at Grumpy Ole Pharrttes like him (or me, for that matter), but at some new genre of gun owner — my guess, a Gen Z person who wants to look cool and doesn’t want to look like his grandpappy (again, like Mike or me) with our old WinMar wooden-stocked “cowboy” rifles.
And yes, while I think that the tacti-cool thing in the snow pic looks like dog’s balls on a Noritake dinner plate, there’s no denying that it would work just as well as its predecessor — I mean, a lever gun is a lever gun is a lever gun, regardless of its cladding.
Also, in places that Must Not Be Named — places that ban “assault rifles” — there is no question but that Snow Gun would escape the baleful scrutiny of said gun-haters because it is, after all, just a lever rifle.
Finally, the marketing executive in me says that we Grumpy Ole Pharrttes are entering the Twilight Years — i.e. we’re not long for the gun world, or any world — so we are, to put it crudely, a shrinking market. In that spirit, therefore, manufacturers should extend their product line to accommodate the tastes of a New Generation…
…as long as they continue to make traditional lever rifles, and not make it an “either/or” situation, because that would make me fucking enraged very sad.
But hey, considering that I had to change my sixty-year deodorant choice because the manufacturer decided to do the above, what the hell. Let’s just join the in-crowd and get some ghastly new thing instead of a rifle that has served its users perfectly well for over a hundred and fifty years.
Update: Panzer Arms has decided to get in on the faerie “white gun” trend, with its semi-auto 12ga:
I’m kinda interested how that thing is going to look after a thousand rounds has been put through it. My guess is that it’s going to look as worn out as a Kardashian’s pleasure pit. But I could be wrong.
Street cost is around $500.
From PSA:
I have no words… no wait, I do:
Ice Cream Gun
Reader Stephen S. chimes in with this little piece of technological bastardy:
How nice.
It has taken me a Herculean effort to stop this OneDrive bullshit from imposing itself on my paltry online existence, and I’m not even sure that I’ve been that successful. I get the occasional “warning” email that my OneCloud subscription has expired or my storage allocation is full, and that they can no longer store any more of my data — to which, of course, my unspoken response is: I never wanted you to store my data anyway, so fuck off.
I have no idea how this is going to end, or if it ever will.