It dawned on me a while ago that the reason why I talk so much about relationships, the workplace and other kinds of social things is because I am very curious about why people interact with each other the way they do, and I personally want to find ways of improving our interactions. Probably the biggest way to do it, outside of reprogramming everyone through the media, is through customer service.
I came back a while ago from a small trip to Crystal Palace, which was where I used to work over a year ago. I had stopped near Tulse Hill to pick some items up from a fellow Freecycler (by the way, thank you again), and eventually decided to pay Gipsy Hill a little visit.
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I’ve been told the original version of this post didn’t make any sense, and I was a little disoriented when I first wrote it. So here’s a rewrite!
Terminator (even though someone insisted on calling it The Terminator when it was released) was a groundbreaking movie, and Terminator 2: Judgement Day is, in my book, the greatest movie of all time. (We don’t talk about the other movies around here). Both films were perfect for the time they were released, as they gave the view pause for thought about what could happen in the not-so-distant future, if technology was to progress as it did.
But we don’t have to live in fear of a possible uprising of killer cyborgs, and being reduced to slaves: we already have a bunch of machines disguised as humans running the planet, and the funny thing is we only have to look around ourselves to see them.
It’s something that becomes more apparent the more one spends time around people: we are being turned into a race of automatons. Not literally of course, but it seems that people are increasingly being treated – and acting like – machines.
Let me try to explain how I came to this conclusion…
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Someone at Tesco customer services is going to get a tongue-lashing over the customer service I received on Sunday, when my grocery order came through. Considering I’d paid £6 for the privilege, I did not deserve the BS that happened. It was so shocking that I almost asked the guy if he was eastern European. (Lord, I apologise ^_^*)
But that’s not what I’m here to talk about today. What I’m going to talk about right now is what happened before the fact, on the Tesco web site.
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Today’s absolute howler comes from the people behind the Parcelforce web site, who could use a lesson in site usability.
Basically I was given the task of paying customs charges on a very expensive item, for someone unable to do anything themselves. Somewhere along the line a member of staff brushed against the parcel, which warrants a charge of £13 on top of VAT.
So I get to a page, where I’m to select a delivery date. Saturday deliveries incur an extra £12 for some unknown reason, so that’s out. I decide to go with Sunday, and I get this:
Can you spot the two things wrong here?
First of all, why is Parcelforce offering a Sunday option, if they don’t deliver on Sundays? From both a common sense and a usability perspective, I shouldn’t be able to select Sundays.
Note my spelling of Sundays, which is the correct plural form. Who the f*** wrote the copy for that prompt? I’m guessing someone who spent too much time behind a bicycle shed, and not enough time in a classroom, when they were young.
I brought this to everybody’s attention because it follows on a little about my post on managers: if an employee made this kind of mistake in an average company, they would have been taken into a corner and verbally lashed, if not fired, or both. A manager had to have committed this sin.
As I’ve said in a previous post, the recession and the negative connotations of business is a result of inefficiency at the top of the hierarchy. There is no bigger indicator of this than in the IT industry, and particularly when it comes to anything web-related. (I can say that because I’ve spent over five years in said industry.)
As I tell anyone when they press me about my job, managers (in particular) have been the bane of my existence. Managers in the IT industry effectively act as a layer between the hard-working front line (the developers and designers) and the upper levels (the people who appear to not do very much). The strange thing is, in the IT industry there are usually far more of these managers than there are workers. There are managers for everything from accounts and projects to monitoring the amount of espresso beans left in the cupboard.
All of these managers have one thing in common – they know dick all about the Internet. They don’t know how to build or design web sites, or even what the purpose of a web site is. A lot of the time, they don’t even know how to manage. One wonders how the hell they’ve managed to land – or keep – their jobs. (There are some that know how to manage, but every time I’ve met one, they’ve left the respective company not long afterwards.)
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