MESSAGE
| DATE | 2017-09-10 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Bank Tellers and Customer Support as corporate
|
I was reading buzzfeed recently and they do this cheap gimmick of a list
of seemingly related things that would be of interest to people. Child
actors is a big example, amazing car accidents, but this one was
"19 Brutally Honest Things Bank Employees Want You To Know"
which caught my attention for some historical reasons. Spending much of
my life as a Pharmacist, it seems like being a bank teller on steroids.
I then ran across this it:
6. They are not in charge of fees and policies. Please stop
taking your frustrations out on them.
"I desperately wish customers would realize that the people they
deal with on a day-to-day business have ZERO part in the
decision making that has upset them. Of course that won't happen
and we will continue to get ripped into for choices made above
our heads."
I've heard a similar complaint from Subways conductors reported in the
local papers as service on the system has been slowly grinding to a
halt. Insurance companies also do this, as do telephone sales scams,
and the cable companies and any company or government agency that
insists that it can abuse the public and hide behind a battery of low
paid staff who have no decision making powers. It is what I call the
castle and bunker strategy of companies and governments who want to
provide poor service and do illegal or immoral acts on the public.
And things are going to get worst before they get better as the public
faces great and greater abuses, and fewer and fewer choices as to what
to do about it.
Lets take for example the City of New York in the advent of illegal
dumping (or any other matter). New You has a 311 complaint line but the
rules for illegal dumping are designed to not clean up the dumping,
which is the urgent need of the public, but to force private property
owners to deal with the dumpers and to collect fines. The city is in
the business of collecting fines. The city is more interested in fining
people that stopping dumping or cleaning the streets.
You see that someone has dumped a huge amount of trash or rubbish on the
street corner. As a member of your community, you figure you will call
the city and have them pick up the piles of garbage. When you call 311,
which is NYC's help line, instead of helping report the unsafe
condition, you get a recording that assures you that you will get
ticketed if the trash is found on your property, rather than getting the
sanitation department to get out there and pick up the trash. Pickup up
trash is a loser for the City of New York. They make no money picking
up the trash.
Someone in the City of New York has decided that when someone is calling
to complain about illegal dumping on the streets of this fair city, that
they are calling to either
A) learn if illegal dumping is legal in the City of New York
or
B) are calling as a property owner to have the sanitation department
come and write them a ticket up to $20,000 because someone is illegally
dumping on their property and they can't control it on their own.
The problem scales up with the MTA and the subway. For over 20 years
the MTA has increasingly reduced the presence of workers in the train
system, first by removing token booth workers, and automating fare
controls. Now the system has added those little call boxes on the
platforms and added digital information systems. Getting a hold of a
person to file a complaint to when they train is 20 minutes late has
become virtually impossible. Figuring out that is happening on the
platform when things go awry is left to the one human contact that the
MTA hasn't yet been able to eliminate, the train conductor.
Unfortunately the MTA train conductor doesn't know a damn thing. The
MTA doesn't communicate with them what is happening. There is no
teamwork or collaboration with the MTA. There is just the abuse of its
riders. And when things are going wrong and the public is venting, the
MTA conductors don't like it one bit.
You have to laugh when the MTA says if you see something say
something... TO WHO? If a rider is sick, or an unsafe condition is
discovered, to WHOM should you talk to. These platforms are empty.
And it is getting worst. Whenever a company claims that they are making
communications more automated and efficient, you can bet that means that
they are installing artificial intelligence and computer systems
designed from the ground up to deflect communications and abuse the end
user.
Cablevision is a primary example. It take over 30 minutes to transverse
the logic path to a question or problem before it finally gets you to, a
not a person to solve your problem, but a dead end message which all but
says that they don't care about your problem but you might be able to
fix it in the prescribed way, that that they are aware of an issue in
your area and the problem has been dispatched and can be expected to be
fixed within the next 72 hours.
If you do finally get a real person, often they can solve your problem
in a few moment. All the time it took to get to that person was your
time, and they will waste your time to their delight since they are not
being billed for your time.
In fact, the primary use of artificial intelligence at this point is to
collect data on you and to deflect angry end users. Some of the best at
this is when your doctor calls the benefits management company to get
the insurance company to pay their debts debt or approve life saving
procedures. And this is now creeping to the patients as well.
ConEd, the electric company, now puts you into infinite phone loops to
get someone to answer a billing question, or even to pay the bill.
Try calling the Governors office or the Mayor.
Filing for unemployment, boy that is about as frustrating as anything
one can experience. There is simply nobody there any longer to answer
any questions.
And the king of kings in this abuse is facebook. No one can lie to you,
mislead you and abuse your data and privacy as much as facebook.
As the leading venue for communications at this time, and lets all pray
that changes, facebook has recently decided that they can not allow you
to be a member without access to your cellphone and with the use of SMS.
When unexpectedly locked out of my facebook account recently, they
insisted that I have to give them my cellphone number and because they
say, for MY security, they need send a code from them to the phone in
order to continue with my account. Email is not good enough.
This is a very dangerous thing. People need to understand that when you
use a service like facebook for your communications, business, and
connections, they have 100% ownership of all that data and can lock you
out of it at any time for any reason and you have no recourse.
When trying to handle a problem, such as this lockout that involved them
insisting that I have to own a cellphoone, and that I have to give them
my cellphone data, they have no personnel for tech support. One can not
contact facebook. You can not callt hem or email them. All
communications with them end up consumed by their AI's which are
watching over the site, collecting data and they then point you to an
FAQ that is useless, but that is it.
Confronted with a problem on facebook, regardless of the urgency, they
have no responsibility to either you, a user, or the public at large.
They don't even have a train conductor to vent at.
So where does that leave the public? We are at a very dangerous place
where human on human interactions are being stripped from us, and top
down policy is being made to abuse us and where we increasingly have no
recourse. In the 1930's, people were so angry at banks that Dillinger
became a folk hero. The future will have none of that.
Meanwhile, we do not accept this cop-out by employees of corporations
who are put on the front lines in order to create a protective bunker
from management. Each of us, as individuals, are responsible for our
behaviors, even within the context of our jobs in a larger organization.
When you go to work and put on that uniform, that badge, and collect
that paycheck, you represent that organization and its behaviors on the
whole.
While you might not be jailed for fraud committed by upper management,
or maybe you should be if you were aware of it and didn't report it, you
still can not skirt the collective responsibility of that organizations
behaviors and policies to the public. Whether you can or can not
individually affect a company policy is irrelevant. The corporation has
channels for communication. The public will still rightfully protest
abuses and responsibilities to you in your role as a representative of
your employer, regardless if you are a bank teller, a grocery store
clerk, a conductor on a train, or the guy who sweeps the floors. And I
expect you to bring those complaints to decision makers, to get on the
phone and find out what is happening, to convey communications, and to
get through to management until problems are solved, and solutions are
found and until abuses of the public end.
If you don't like that then quit your job. You are going to be replaced
by an ATM or an artificial intelligence ANYWAY.
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive
http://www.coinhangout.com - coins!
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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