OT:Favor needed

[Bill Vermillion]

In the last exciting episode of the filePro saga, 
Fairlight was heard to say:" 
if: Fri, Jan 21 18:40  
then: nm = Fairlight 
if:
then: show nm < "said:"  
Fairlight said: 

> You'll never BELIEVE what Bill Vermillion said here...:

> > That's why he's called a "mystery shopper".

> Well not only was it pointed out to me, but I "got it" on my
> own after actually sleeping. A record 5.5hrs...up from 3 the
> day before! :) And the crowd goes wild...

It was meant to be a play on your sentence where you said
"you didn't have a clue" - that was the 'mystery' part I was
refering to.

> > I usually get 'mystery salespeople' and some times they have to
> > repeat something a few time to be able extract a clue - English not
> > being their native language :-)

> You get as good as "not native language"? I don't mind that so
> much. It's when you call tech support somewhere and get someone
> with English as a 27th language and they haven't supplied
> you with a nice, finely honed knife to cut through this
> unintelligible accent they have that I tend to get annoyed.

But that is not true of all off-shore tech support.  A couple of
years ago one of the TV nitwor.. er networks had a story on an
large Indian support house.  All people there spoke English - or
more accurately English as it is spoken in America - and with the
appropriate regionalism.  Calls from different areas of the US were
directed to specific support people so that if you called the the
mid-west your support person had a mid-western style of speaking.

They also showed some segments from the schooling they were given
for learning to speak 'merican as a native would.

> I wonder how much of that support is actually -routed-
> overseas, and how many are immigrants working domestically.
> Personally, I'd like to see a www.stopoutsourcingnow.org take
> the topic straight to the government via petitions, requesting
> stiff penalties and disincentives for companies that do
> outsource abroad. It's killing our economy--and not just in IT.

It's a little late for that if you are serious about it.
And trying to keep everyting within our shores - being an insular
nation and not getting involved with others was one of the things
that helped to lead to global war of the '40s where over
25 million died.

It has been going on for far longer than most have imagined.

It has been about 20 years since Citicorp moved from NYC to 
South Dakota.  They could not get people to work late night in the
city.  Then they also opened up support around the world - not just
in India.  They had it set up so that 9-5 calls were routed to US
support and outside the normal US business hours they were routed
to an area of the world where the workers were on 9-5 local time.

It makes a lot of sense as workers of that type are easier to find
than those who like to work at 3AM.

In two out-of-US-support hour calls to Cisco - both with failing
routers [actually same router 4 years apart and I think there was a
design problem] - I did have a hard time understand the support
person.  It was 4AM EST and I was routed to Cisco in Belgium
and the accent was a bit hard to understand.

Early this past fall - when a 7120 decided to just fall over about
about 130am - I went and restarted it - and it quit again about 45
minutes later.  My partner went and restarted it and stayed with it
until I could reconfigure a FreeBSD machine as a temporary router.

This time the Cicso support was from Australia.

But we are rapidly become a global community with borders only
dealing with political affairs - while economic considerations mean
that borders essentially disappear.

One reason that many things started being made elsewhere was the
strong resistance to automation in factories - as it was seen that
machines would replace people in factories.  Now the factories are
totally empty for some products.

China is the place to watch and almost all electronics goods seem
to come from there.  And more than a few people are going to be
surprised next year when Cadillac opens its second plant in China,
as up to now they all come from one factory.  It's far cheaper to
make large items near the point of consumption as shipping is
expensive.

One of my old filePro customers ordered a huge grinder - and it was
coming from Russia.  Later they found one that cost more in England
and bought that instead as the shipping from England was so much
cheaper than shipping the other from Russia.  Old machines like
that can last 100 years and this one looked like it was approaching
that age.

I saw cracks in the floor where it was rolled into position over
the 6" and 12" floor to the new 24" concrete floor they poured for
it.   It was 80 tons and looked like they started with a 12 to
14 foot square piece of cast iron and then cut away anything that
didn't look like a grinder.    I wound up re-working the FP code
for a complete BOMP as they had bought one division from another FP
customer I had that dated to 1983.

We effectively now live in one huge city 25,000 miles in diameter.
The only thing that slows down the trade is when the ratio
of the dollar to <foreign-currency> changes to the point where it's
not economical.   My shipment from Amazon UK last spring was a bit
pricey, but now with the exchange rate as it is England is almost
out of the picture.

And shipping is amazing.  I got a shipment from Maylasia that 
arrived 38 hours after I sent email confirmation.  Shipping
cost was $9.95.   That's even cheaper than Priority Mail.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com