Telephone Jobs Outsourcing

11:53.53 - Friday 9th January 2004   (Link to This Entry)

M's sister came over the other day for some paperwork. She works for a major home shopping catalogue chain and we somehow got talking about how jobs are being sent overseas. Well, it turns out it's not just BT and computer programming jobs that are going to India - just about any telephone-based Customer Service job is being sent out there.

Many customers are now getting through to her department and complaining about being put through to Delhi or Bangalore, where they're finding it impossible, or at least very difficult, to understand the thick Indian accents. Worse, this is actually the first the UK-based workers had heard of it, as management had not told anyone here. They've even shipped someone out there to train people in doing her job (they wouldn't being the Indian workers here - that would cost far too much, even though the results would be better), and she's now wondering if she's even going to have a job for much longer.

We've already had experience of this: Just the other day, M rang someone at NTL to complain about a billing error with the digital TV and she got put through to someone in India as well, although thankfully it was someone with a good accent. Maybe you'd expect this kind of decentralisation with a major International communications company like NTL, but a catalogue/home shopping company? Tip of the iceberg, I reckon.

And of course, all this is going to backfire when the Indian workers band together and start demanding higher wages, better conditions etc. Will the jobs be transferred back to the UK? How can you maintain quality of service with people halfway around the world and in a vastly different time zone?

Tits Out for MS!

12:07.33 - Friday 9th January 2004   (Link to This Entry)

No, not Microsoft. Multiple Sclerosis. You, each and every one of you, could be struck down by this nasty shit at some point, so what better way to introduce you to it than by showing you a pair of tits? Quite a nice pair of tits at that! Vix, from Somerset, has decided to try and raise money for MS research (she suffers herself) by flashing her tits. Simple enough I guess, click the banner below, have a gander, and if you've got a few quid spare, pay the girl!

Outdated Again!

12:55.47 - Friday 9th January 2004   (Link to This Entry)

Looks like Broadcom are gearing up to launch their 802.11n waaaay ahead of any standard being finalised, just as they did with .11g before that came out. It paid off then, and it may well pay off again this time around.

The other 'bugger' I guess is that Mr.Foo has only just bought some .11g kit and that's gonna be out of date pretty soon. At least my double-pumped .11b (22Mb instead of 11) is old enough to abandon now without me feeling too pissed off.

Apparently .11n is going start at 108Mb, which is nice. If it remains backwards-compatible, that can only help. Further information on T'Reg, here.

Well this is.. different.

21:12.07 - Friday 9th January 2004   (Link to This Entry)

After trailing round B&Q, MFI and bloody Wickes, I found myself getting fed up with all the walking and decided to design the new kitchen myself.

Not having access to any of the fancy custom-written software, I dug out Flash and banged it together in that, instead. The snap-to-object functions in Flash are great for this kind of thing. I made up all of the units as Symbols and I can now just drop and rotate them as needed, and shuffle things about until I get it just so.

In the end we decided what units we wanted and then printed out three sheeds - one showing base units, another showing wall units and the third showing both overlayed. It's pretty impressive stuff!