Indian Call Centers

Christian Science Monitor writes a brief essay regarding call centers based in India.

While I agree with some of her points, I take issue with the dim view of treatment of the call center workers.? As an American in India, it is somewhat difficult to keep things in perspective at times.? There is so much that is different, it is difficult to keep a perspective of how much has improved recently.

In fact, I imagine that if you interviewed a number of American call center workers, their gripes wouldn't be that much different from their Indian counterparts.? I have spent some time observing both American and India call centers, albeit mostly smaller/medium companies, and sadly there is a certain “sweat shop” mentality to both.? However, it is all relative.? Yes, Indian call center workers work long hours and face stiff competition from peers, but they are also highly motivated because most alternative jobs are far worse.

Kind of like in my youth, when I decided at a young age that I preferred to do “thought” labor far more so than “physical” labor.? While I greatly admire my father's work ethic, physically and mentally, I had no desire to have to work as hard as he did to survive.? I imagine that these thoughts, perhaps greatly amplified, go through these Indian call center workers, as well..

As I said… work conditions are relative, within reason.? Quality of life is realative, also.? My bet is, perception of overall quality of life in India is on an upward slope.

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What is this Net Neutrality thing?

Basically, greed runs rampant and this is nothing more than a profit grab by the large ISP’s. Let’s roll this back a bit…. In the early 90’s, Internet access was delivered to the end-user by small, home-grown ISP’s via dial-up modem. Before that, BBS users consumed vast amounts of hours on their Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS).

Even then, the Telco’s were bitching about how a small percentage of users were consuming a large percentage of services…yet all paid the same roughly the same for their POTS. In other words, the grandmother down the street who makes 2-3 calls a week to her daughter across town, pays the same “rate” for local dial-tone access as I did. And, I was on my phone probably 18-20 hours a day, solid, accessing other BBS’s and connecting to the Internet/BITNET.

Hey, wait a second here. That seems totally unfair! Grandma should pay less.. and thus “Local Measured Service” was being waved around. Well, let’s think about this a bit deeper…

Telephone companies are required to provide service in remote areas, that are very expensive to connect and maintain. Yet, those people pay roughly the same tariffed rate as those in the city, where it can be much cheaper to connect and maintain. If the telco’s were not regulated in this manner, and allowed to charge based directly on cost to connect an area into their switch/network, these remote areas couldn’t afford to have telephone service or internet access.

In other words, while it may seem unfair in the grandma analogy, it is just how it should work from a 30,000ft regulatory view. Raise your hand, if you believe telco’s provide high-speed communications to remote locations, because it makes them feel all warm and fuzzy? Exactly…

Don’t get me wrong, I understand why the large ISP’s are wanting to do this..it would allow them to increase their profits with no additional infrastructure investment. However, it certainly isn’t right, and it certainly is not good for the consumer.

Equal access is a term that is often tossed around in the Telco world, and roughly applies in the Net Neutrality debate. Without equal access to all content providers, ISP’s will be able to “bundle” their own offerings, and split the internet into large AOL-ish fiefdom’s…with throttled bottlenecks between each other. No more high speed sharing between users connected through disparate ISP’s. Want to use iTunes to purchase your music and video? Sorry, Comcast has an exclusive agreement with Napster…and Comcast is the ONLY option on your block for cable modems. You are shit out of luck.

For years, ISP’s have hidden behind the common carrier term when it comes to delivering content… now it is time for them to behave like one, even though it isn’t in their favor. ISP/Telco’s shouldn’t be allowed to change the rules now that the rules they have used to their benefit in the past, are now throttling their profits.

Throughly confused? Read more on the Net Neutrality debate by Tim Berners-Lee on ars technica.

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Getting Things Done (GTD): Inbox Zero

find out more.

Reducing the amount of clutter in my email inbox was something that took me a bit longer to adopt.? However, for the past few weeks, I've managed to keep my work and personal email inboxes under one page of unanswered email.? What a difference!?

I have traditionally used my inbox as a type of loose “ToDo” list.? However, more often than not, items would become stale before done, and would sit for weeks (months?) until I finally got around to deleting them.? Not to mention how SLOW my email client was, as IMAP synced up those hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of messages.

Now?? I have 7 email messages in my work inbox and 3 in my personal gmail account…? How does it feel?? Great!?

Find out more about how and why to keep your inbox from overflowing.? It is worth the effort..

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Ultimate (yet strange) Desktop Setups

Top Ten list of ultimate, yet strange, desktop setups.

For those of you that know me, you know how much I value my desktop space and monitor spanning..?

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Usability, iTunes and my music

Apple should incorporate some of the social/community networking tools we’ve become addicted to, including del.icio.us, Digg! and Flickr, into the underpinnings of iTunes.

[image - iTunes Music Collection and ratings]

Imagine being able to free tag your own folksonomy within your collection. Rate not only the songs themselves, but the artists, albums and genre’s. Mix this in with the Smart Folder concept, and you have some powerful organization and sorting tools for your ever growing music collection.

So how about it Apple? Free tagging support, with some social musical bookmarking built-in, similar to your play lists on the iTMS currently. The ability to freely rate many different categories and allow more freedom for end-user hierarchies. Anyone? Google?

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