Friday Post - Your services are no longer needed

Heads will roll

While the good news fairies of Wall Street would have you believe that everything is just hunky dory the truth is it's not. In order to make bottom lines look better and keep stock shares high companies have resorted to buy backs, asset sell offs and finally layoffs. The guise of the latter being the company is restructuring in order to meet global demand or some such other BS explanation. That's become very easy to do given the lack of ethics and the new corporate vulture capitalism. Also quite easy given the rise of investment groups who could care less about a product or process as long as it makes their shareholders money. Then there's the hedge funds that bet on a company's failure, but that's another story. Everywhere you look there's layoffs. Microsoft, Caterpillar, the banks, insurance companies all laying off to tighten balance sheets and make some CEO look like a winner at the shareholders meeting.

Customer service or no service as some call it - Seems those boiler rooms in India have finally come back home to roost. Note the southern drawl in the operators' voice. It's a good bet these people aren't working full time or get anything more than minimum wage and in southern states that isn't even the federal level (look it up). The "technicians" who do come out to your home mostly look like high school dropouts and just hope your problem isn't too complex or the old trouble shooter will have to be called in for a follow up visit. Once had a cable "technician" come out and install a cable box backwards. Resident 12 year old figured it out and fixed it. And good luck trying to change service. That's a guarantee for a sales pitch to a pricier package complete with features you'll never use. Forget trying to understand a remote, it takes a NASA engineer with an advanced degree to figure that one out when all you want to do is turn the damn thing on. And if all these smart cars and smart phones and smart this and that are so smart how come they keep failing? Machines do not necessarily need to talk to each other. My refrigerator, dishwasher, water heater, and stove have done quite well without having to talk to anybody. And it's an open invitation to hackers. We've already seen it in planes and cars. It's apparent there's no system that can't be hacked one way or another. So maybe it's time to simplify life and go back at least to some of the old ways. We just might be better off for it. 

bank fail later…
Two bank fails this past week one in WA. and one in GA.