AT&T Finds People To Take Jobs In U.S. After CEO Calls U.S. Workers “Defective”

You might remember this post from a while back that had this quote from AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson who was commenting on the fact that he couldn’t find skilled people to fill the 5000 jobs that he had previously outsourced and wanted to bring back to the good old U.S. of A.:

“If I had a business that half the product we turned out was defective or you couldn’t put into the marketplace, I would shut that business down.”

Fast forward almost a year and according to this press release, AT&T has found more than 3000 US citizens to fill those open positions:

“We expect to complete this ambitious 5,000 job in-sourcing initiative by this summer, less than three years after the program was announced,” said Bill Blase, senior executive vice president of Human Resources. “These are good jobs with good wages and benefits, and we are delighted to have them back in-house and on shore.

Imagine that. I guess not all Americans are “defective” after all.

The bulk of the new support jobs are located in broadband support centers in North Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida and Kentucky. I’m guessing that Americans will be overjoyed that the tech support for their broadband will be handled by non-defective Americans rather than someone in a call center in Bangalore. But before you applaud AT&T, consider this statement from the same press release:

“We applaud our union partners in the Communications Workers of America who worked with us to create competitive cost structures that allow us to meet the demands of this competitive market while still providing good domestic jobs.”

Translation: To get the jobs back to the U.S.A., the Communication Workers Of America took it like a whore likely agreed to some measures that allowed the cost structure of on shore call center employees to be closer or equal to ones that are offshore.

Oh well. At least the jobs are back in the U.S.A. That’s a good thing, right?

Google To Use Its Powers To Expose ISP’s Who Throttle

Fresh from finding missing children and discovering pot farms, Google via their company blog has decided to tell the world which ISP’s throttle your connection:

“At Google, we care deeply about sustaining the Internet as an open platform for consumer choice and innovation,”

Uh yeah. Right. It’s more like your business model depends on the Internet being an open platform for choice and innovation.

But I digress.

Google has launched Measurement Lab (M-Lab) and the tools that this site provides “allow users to, among other things, measure the speed of their connection, run diagnostics, and attempt to discern if their ISP is blocking or throttling particular applications.” Any info collected will be made public.

It will be intersting how the Bell Sympatico and Comcasts of the universe react to this as infomed consumers may make their ISP choice based on what this site finds.

Dude! Russia Is So Not Getting Dells!

Picture this: At the World Economic Forum, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin spent some time trashing the west, Dell CEO Michael Dell then asked if there was any way his company could help Russia with its computers.

What a lame sales pitch.

Putin then basically trashed the guy by saying that “We don’t need help. We are not invalids. We don’t have limited mental capacity.”

Ouch.

Here’s the video evidence. The rant starts at 1:24 into the video.

iPod/iPhone CES Pavilion Sells Out In Record Time… Then Quadruples To Include More Stuff…. MacWorld Is Toast

I think the writing is on the wall for MacWorld. This press release appeared today on the CEA site (the company who runs the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas) which has dire news if you like going to MacWorld:

“We have received an incredible response from companies interested in exhibiting in the iLounge Pavilion at the 2010 International CES,” said Karen Chupka, senior vice president, events and conferences, CEA. “In fact, the original space allocated for the pavilion sold out in less than one week – a CES show record – and we’ve quadrupled the space to accommodate the overwhelming demand. This exciting new CES Pavilion brings momentum to the consumer technology industry and reinforces the International CES as the global hub for the latest innovative technologies.”

Okay… Given that there’s going to be no Apple at next year’s MacWorld, this news from the CEA, and the fact that companies are not going to do two trade shows in the same month, there’s really little reason for Apple fanbois to go to San Fran next year. MacWord is doomed. Period. Although, I will point one thing out. To date, there is no indication that Apple themselves will show up at CES. So perhaps that’s something that may keep MacWorld alive.

Maybe.

Police Bust Potheads Using Google Earth…… Groovy!

Google products don’t just find missing children, they can also find pot farms. Police in Switzerland found a large pot farm by using Google Earth:

Officers discovered the hemp field in the northeastern state of Thurgau last year while investigating an alleged drug ring, said the head of Zurich police’s specialist narcotics unit Norbert Klossner.

The plantation was hidden inside a field of corn.

But officers using Google Earth to locate the address of two farmers suspected of involvement in the drug operation quickly spotted the illegal crop.

Sucks to be those dudes. But it’s another victory for the good guys thanks to Google technology. Something that I’m sure will send a chair or two flying in Redmond.

An Update On My Toyota Customer Service Issue [UPDATED x2]

This keeps getting better and better…..

I had a call with my lawyer this morning in regards to this circus and upon hearing that my wife and I had not received a call back from Toyota Canada, he advised me to call them back and ask the following question: “On the advice of my lawyer, I am calling to see if my case has been assigned and when I can expect to hear from the person it is assigned to.” I did that  and was told that it had been assigned to someone and they will get back to me shortly. I told the person that I would feed that information back to my lawyer and thanked them.

10 Minutes later I got a call from Toyota Canada. Coincidence? I think not.

The customer service rep first apologized for the delay in calling me back and for this issue. Then she went about telling me that a part was on order and explained why they are replacing this part and they are working on getting an ETA on the part. I took the opportunity to say:

A) This has been going on for months with no resolution.

B) There seems to be a “lets throw a part at the car and see if it fixes the problem” approach to this which is lame.

C) How much longer is this going to take before I have a fully functioning car?

The rep assured me that Toyota Canada was doing everything possible to deal with the issue and this was going to get fixed.

You’ll excuse me if I didn’t exactly jump for joy upon hearing that.

In any case, after I got off the phone I fed this info back to my wife who wasn’t happy at the news but we decided to live with it for now. That was until our dealer called ten minutes later with the wonderful news that the part was backordered until the 17th of February.

WTF?!?

So my wife (who is now beyond pissed at this point) and I got back on the phone with the Toyota Canada rep who said “It’s not Feb 17th, it’s expected in Feb 3rd.”

My friends, that’s one hell of a disconnect between Toyota Canada and the dealer.

My wife then took the opportunity to express her displeasure at the customer service experience thus far, and I took the opportunity to to point out that we both had better things to do than to chase this issue and we wanted our car back working properly in the shortest amount of time possible. The Toyota Canada rep then said that she would call us back today to confirm the ETA as well as speaking to the in house mechanics who were handling the issue with the dealer to ensure that “parts are not being replaced for no reason” which I think translates to “figuring out WTF is actually wrong with the car.”

I must admit, I am still less than impressed with the response as there doesn’t seem to be any co-ordination between the dealer and Toyota Canada. Plus it seems that they both are reacting to us rather than being proactive and doing everything possible in the shortest amount of time to fix the issue with the car. That doesn’t bode well in my books.

But at least there was some sort of apology today from Toyota Canada. That I suppose is some amount of progress.

UPDATE: The rep from Toyota Canada called back as she promised. She confirmed that the part in question will arrive on Feb. 3. She also told us that they (via their in house mechanics) have instructed the dealer to take the part from our Matrix that they think might be malfunctioning and put it into a new and similar car to see if they can reproduce the issue. Interesting. Also of note, the rep mentioned that a “district manager” was also involved as well as the in house mechanics. It now seems that Toyota Canada has decided to put resources behind resolving this issue. That’s somewhat reassuring. But the only true reassurance will come when the problem is fixed in the shortest time possible.

UPDATE #2: Our loaner is being upgraded to a Toyota Corolla which I will pick up this afternoon. Interesting…. Also the dealer is apparently working on the car as I type this and asking me some very specific questions (I had to communicate with my wife to get the answers to some of them). Seeing as the parts are still on order, one has to assume that they are playing a game of “swap the parts” from a similar car that Toyota Canada asked them to use to see if they could replicate the issue. It also proves that Toyota Canada may actually be serious about solving this issue. That is starting to inspire some confidence.

MacBook Pro Glossy Displays Suck Says Top Photographer

I remember the days where if you wanted a great display for using Photoshop, you bought a Mac display or used one of Apple’s Pro quality notebooks. Those days appear to be over according to Rob Galbraith who is one of Canada’s top photo journalists and a published expert in digital photography. According to him, the glossy display on the MacBook Pro are no longer at the top of the food chain. His review starts off on a positive note:

Starting on a positive note, the display quality is comparable to what we’ve seen before in earlier editions of the LED-backlit MacBook Pro 15 inch. Screen brightness is impressively even, as is black and white photo rendering, while overall colour accuracy is decent. Deep shadow posterization, a common laptop screen problem, is present but kept to a minimum. The only significant colour error is in reds and oranges, which are considerably skewed in both hue and saturation and really don’t look right on this display. Secondarily, and far less noticeable, are slight yellow and blue shifts in open shadows.

But it starts to go downhill from there:

And as long as the ambient light is subdued. The glass sheet in front of the screen is about as reflective as it could be, which means that in a coffee shop, on an airplane or even a typical office, the glossiness is either a minor irritant or a major distraction, depending on the surroundings and your tolerance for screen reflections. During testing we used the late-2008 MacBook Pro 15 inch in all three environments, and that was enough to conclude that it’s not for us. This is not the first glossy laptop display of this size we’ve used, but it’s by far the most reflective.

He goes on to say that:

For the longest time, Apple laptop displays ruled the roost around here. With very few exceptions, going back to the days of the PowerBook G4, portable Macs were considerably more colour accurate than any of the dozens and dozens of PC laptops we’d profiled during workshops and on-site training. The difference between Apple gear and everybody else’s was stark. Thanks to Lenovo, however, and Apple’s decision to standardize on the glossiest of glossy screens (only the soon-to-be-shipping MacBook Pro 17 inch will be available in what Apple calls an “antiglare” version), Macs are no longer at the top of the laptop display heap in our minds.

I’ve been saying for a while that Apple has made a huge mistake by going to glossy displays. They have an option on the 17″ version to put a “anti-glare” display on that model. But no such option exists on the 15″ or on the MacBooks. The fact that a company called TechRestore has a service that allows you to swap the display for one that isn’t reflective shows that Mac users don’t want glossy screens.

I wonder when Apple will finally clue in on this and ditch this once and for all?

It’s Official….. Customer Service Is Dead [UPDATED x2]

Frequent readers of my blog will recall that over the last few months I’ve come across my fair share of customer service issues. One with APC (where one of my customers was involved), another with D-Link are the ones that come to mind quickly. Now I’m in the middle of a third. This time it’s not with a company that makes computers, it’s with a car company. Toyota.

My wife and I bought a 2009 Toyota Matrix last March and it was working fine until the AWD, VSC (Vehicle Stability Control), Traction Control Disable, and Check Engine lights popped up onto my dash last October, all at the same time. We took it into the nearest dealer and reset the computer as the part the computer was pointing towards was perfectly fine. The problem returned less than a week later  and the dealer replaced the “A” vehicle speed sensor. That was fine, until the problem returned again in January. They replaced the “B” vehicle speed sensor. That was cool.  Too bad the fix only lasted a week when the problem returned again. This time it was worse. The car would now rev to 6000 RPM and surge forward randomly. My wife almost rear ended a E class Mercedes Benz the first time it happened. While my wife was en-route to the dealership, I phoned the service manager at the dealership and described the situation to him. I also made it clear to him that I wanted it resolved. The car spent a week in the dealer while they waited for an ECU as they thought that this was the issue. This was great for three days until the lights returned. The car is currently sitting in the dealership waiting for parts since Monday. The only info that I have from the dealer is:

• It is waiting for parts. That may take “a few days.”
• The parts that they ordered were on the advice of Toyota Canada whom the dealer is consulting with.
• They are not sure if these parts will fix the issue as they’re not sure what’s actually wrong with the car.
• There is no timeline as to when I can expect to get the car back.

Oh yeah, I’ll also point out that we have called Toyota Canada on the advice of our lawyer and have a case open with them. However, it will take “a few days” before somebody even calls us back as they apparently need time to investigate our case.

The dealership gave us a loaner (a Toyota Yaris). I shouldn’t complain, but after being in the Matrix, the Yaris is several steps down the food chain. Having said that, Toyota Canada dealers only have to give loaners to people who purchase their extended warranty. We did not so we’re guessing that because we’re up to our fifth visit to the dealer about this issue and I have complained to Toyota Canada, that’s why we have a loaner.

Here’s why my wife and I are ticked off:

• Toyota claims to have the best quality in the business. According to the Toyota Canada website: “You purchased Toyota because of our reputation for quality – and because you have better things to do than worry about vehicle reliability and dependability.” Clearly the quality is absent from this vehicle.
• Having to wait for days to get parts in this day and age is unbelievable. It’s inconceivable to me that there isn’t a parts warehouse someplace that allows them to ship parts to dealers for next day delivery.
• Not having an idea what is wrong with the car and simply throwing parts at it seems a really lame way to try and fix a problem. According to the Toyota Canada website: “The philosophy behind Toyota Quality Service is the provision of accurate, efficient and reliable servicing at every Toyota Dealership in Canada.” I haven’t seen this in action to this point.
• Any updates that I’ve received about the car have been from me calling the dealership and not from the dealer calling me. Being reactive to your customers issues is not a great way of making them happy customers. I guess that because they gave us a loaner, they feel that they can just ignore us.
• The fact that it takes “a few days” for somebody at Toyota Canada to call me to discuss this issue shows that there’s a real lack of customer focus. If I were in their shoes, I would call the customer back within one business day or less to not only get their side of the story and flesh out the details, but to also explain what the next steps in the process are and to set the expectations of the customer.
• The closest that anybody representing Toyota has come to apologizing for this circus is when the service adviser at the dealer said “You are justified in feeling frustrated” which is a textbook response from most customer service courses that I’ve taken. Now I understand why they won’t say the words “I’m sorry” but I did write in this posting the following: “One of the things that I’ve always believed is that you have be upfront by providing the public with information and apologize when you screw up. You need to express regret and sympathy or you just come out looking like you’re protecting your backside.” They could try that with us and see how far it gets them.

So, where do we go from here you ask? First we’ll wait for Toyota Canada to get back to us and see if they step up to the plate and deal with this. If they don’t resolve it, our lawyer has advised us that our next step is to apply to the Canadian Motor Vehicle Arbitration Process to deal with this issue. But it doesn’t have to get that far. All Toyota Canada needs to do is to step up and put the resources in place to get the car fixed correctly in the shortest amount of time possible. That’s what I would do if I were in their place as an unhappy customer is one who tells their friends about their negative experiences with a given company, which affects their sales and public perception.

It’s too bad that customer service seems to no longer exist. Perhaps major corporations will learn that it’s easier to keep customers happy than to go find new ones, and customer service is the best way to do that. After all, there are going to problems with stuff that you sell, what puts you at the top of the heap is how you deal with those problems. In this case, this is not being dealt with very well. That’s too bad because this is my first experience with Toyota, but given how this has gone thus far, it may well be my last. Of course that can be avoided if Toyota Canada does the right thing sooner rather than later.

I’ll keep you posted as to what happens next.  Oh, if anybody from Toyota Canada is reading this, please fix my car.

UPDATE: I recieved a call from the dealer saying that they’re still waiting for parts and I’ll be called again tomorrow with an update. Also, I should just keep driving my loaner. This is the first time that the dealer has called me with an update rather than I having to call the dealer to get an update. Interesting….

UPDATE #2: A reader sent me this story that Toyota is recalling 1.3 million Yaris cars worldwide. Apparently in severe front-end collisions the mechanism that tightens the vehicle’s seat belt expels a gas that could cause a sound-insulating foam pad nearby to ignite. The recall covers 2006 and 2007 model years. We have a 2008 as a loaner so we’re safe (I hope). But this news doesn’t exactly make me feel any better. Thanks for the tip!

IBM And Apple Settle Differences… Mark Papermaster To Start At Apple On April 24th

Ex-IBMer Mark Papermaster who left IBM to join Apple before IBM slapped a lawsuit on him to stop that from happening, which led to Papermaster filing suit against IBM to kill their lawsuit is now going to start working full time at Apple:

Apple® today announced that Mark Papermaster will be coming to Apple as senior vice president of Devices Hardware Engineering, reporting to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, on April 24. Papermaster, who comes to Apple from IBM, will lead Apple’s iPod® and iPhone™ hardware engineering teams. The litigation between IBM and Mark Papermaster has been resolved.

I’m guessing that some cash changed hands or a deal was negotiated between the legal teams of Papermaster, IBM, and Apple’s iLawyers. In any case, it is good to see this saga resolved.

Teen Holds Parents Hostage Because Her Mobile Phone Got Taken Away…. WTF?

There’s something seriously wrong with the universe. Recently we’ve had a teen run away from home and end up dead because his parents took away his Xbox360, another teen kill his mother and wound his father because they kept him from playing Halo 3, and now this weird case of a 16 year old girl who held her parents hostage with a couple of knives because they took away her mobile phone due to the fact that she was stealing to buy prepaid minutes. Apparently cops were called after the parents barricaded themselves in a bedroom while she frantically stabbed at the door with two knives. Which led to some negotiations to defuse the situation.

WTF is wrong with kids today?

Do we have a problem with parents, or are kids really screwed up? Perhaps there’s another reason behind stuff like this? It just seems really weird to me that kids act like this because technology is taken away from them.

Does anybody have any insight on this?