Excuse me, Bangalore, if I don't cry for you
Hey! You! Grocery check-out guy! And You! Fast Food Counter Person! Yeah You! Pay attention! See these !!!!!! They’re called “exclamation points.” They are used to denote forceful expression or strong emotion. Now that I have your obviously short attention span, I will be brief.
You may or may not realize that we are in a recession. It will do me no good to explain to you what that means. Let’s just say the economy is in deep s**t. So, even if you manage to hang onto your crappy minimum wage job through no fault of your own, you still may find yourself in the unemployment line. Why, you ask? Karma. It is because you treated me like crap when I was checking out at the store. Or when you purposely messed up my order in the drive-through line. You do something bad to someone. You reap what you sow. Okay, I’m sure that’s way over your heads.
Seriously though, customer service is so poor throughout American and even worldwide commerce that if one was a mean ol’ SOB they might think it was just deserts if the global economic problems took some snippy customer service weenie down a notch. But you are not like that are you, customer service weenie? Ha! You want to bet?
But it is truly amazing that a lot of the problems companies have in business are brought about by deplorable customer relations. The term “churn” comes to mind. I don’t think I ever saw the word used in the context of business until this afternoon. Maybe I had seen it but didn’t know what it meant. The word is used in industries such as television and wireless technology and relates to the measurement of the percent of customers who leave a business each month for voluntary reasons, usually this is for purposes of bailing to get a competing service. I figured churn would be fairly high across the board — even though I didn’t know churn was what it was called — but it really is higher than I imagined.
One study said that more than seven out of 10 customers switched companies due to poor customer relations compared to more than 40 percent who changed due to lower prices. About half of those customers reported taking some $4,000 worth of business with them.
Bearing such research in mind then, it is rather remarkable that when you talk to Biff or Sunny in Bangalore after waiting 45 minutes before your cellular drops your call and you call back and wait another 30 minutes, the nice young Midwestern-sounding customer service people from way East want nothing more than to get your ass off the phone. Every cell phone company I have ever dealt with, every Internet provider and the bank I have had for five years, all provide customer service that is abhorrent. And no one seems to give a rat’s ass! Yet, 73 percent of their business will bolt and it could cost 35 percent of those businesses at least $4,000.
So pardon me if I don’t shed a tear if a certain company goes blewey and must layoff 30,000 workers to reorganize. I won’t be laughing either. But I certainly won’t be crying.
And what's the meaning of "Toe jam football?"
Driving back to the office down I-10 a bit ago I was wondering when I heard “Come Together” on the radio whether the Beatles ever reflected upon just what in the hell they meant when they wrote and recorded the song.
” … one and one and one is three/got to be good looking cause he’s so hard to see … “
Is he so hard to see in the sense that he is nearly invisible, like he has faded or something?
Is he so hard to see because he’s good-looking and people, women mostly, are taking up all of his time thus he is not available to the public?
Is he so hard to see because he is 3 years old and thus kind of short and therefore unobtrusive? The fact that he is good-looking is therefore irrelevant.
You see, there are just way too many dimensions to be examined. That’s why it’s best not to reflect upon your compositions too much. They just make you looney.
Going full circle
Central Medical Magnet High School
has a dance studio, apparently.
I don’t know if they have dancing
magnets or dancing medical magnets,
or whether one starts dancing inside
an MRI. But as ZZ Top said: “Let that
boy boogie woogie!”
Several days into using IfranView as a photo editor in conjunction with Win Vista, I decided it wasn’t working out. Sorry, ol’ bean. So I decided to go back to Picasa, which I used way back at the beginning of EFD, even before Blogger would let one plop pics right out there on the old bloggeroo. I kind of like the word “bloggeroo” but am probably the only person in the bloguverse who does like it. So what?
We shall see how Picasa 3 does. Hey it’s not like I have to buy a ring or meet the Moms & Pops of all these software(s). Yes, I can just seek out slutty software! Hey baby, you doing anything this evening? Wanna take a look at my hard drive? Okay, that is perverse I know. I’m sorry. But I will not erase it. At least not at the moment.
Katrina's lessons still go unheeded
Folks where I live in the extreme southeastern corner of Texas aren’t indifferent to the suffering of others. Our area was the first to take in those neighbors to the east fleeing Katrina, and fled with Katrina evacuees when Rita rammed our area.
But Southeast Texans and even some of those from Southwestern Louisiana grew weary and downright exasperated once Rita had torn their communities to shreds while the national news media and government leaders continued talking ad nauseum about Katrina. Since that time this area has been hit by Hurricane Ike and other parts of the area were also damaged from Humberto in 2006. Southeast Texas was spared damage from Gustav this year but only after many left their homes for destinations North.
While the national news media have focused a little more this time on the aftermath of Ike, New Orleans and Katrina still generates a lot of ink and a lot of air time.
As a sometimes media type, I understand the fascination with Katrina. It killed a couple thousand people. It wiped out the Mississippi Gulf Coast and caused both a physical and humanitarian disaster in New Orleans. Katrina will perhaps, next to Iraq, remain for many years the legacy of George W. Bush’s failed presidency.
Although I believed it would have been a long time before I could bring myself to read any in-depth literary work about Katrina, I have recently found myself intrigued by Douglas Brinkley’s “The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.”
Brinkley, a historian and biographer familiar from his frequent cable news show appearances and who now is the Distinguished Professor of History at Rice University in Houston, chronicles a week of chaos as Katrina pounded the coast and led to the levee failure that killed hundreds in New Orleans flooding. While he examines the failures of the federal government that were a result of the Bush administration’s incompetence he also notes the shortcomings and negligence of those at the state and city levels of government.
While only a quarter of a way through Brinkley’s 700-some-odd-page hardcover I note that three years later and three months after Hurricane Ike struck our area, the Bush administration and elements of the federal relief structure still don’t get the lessons of Katrina. This is evidenced by people still living in FEMA trailers in New Orleans from Katrina and some only recently moving into FEMA housing from tents after Ike. A slow systemic response by FEMA in the wake of Ike clearly indicates that the agency and perhaps the U.S. Department of Homeland Security of which it is a part needs to be torn down and reconstructed.
Let’s hope former Arizona governor and Obama Homeland Security nominee Janet Napolitano can provide the leadership, foresight and possess the ability to pick knowledgeable people who will shepherd this nation through what will be surely more disasters to come.