Tomorrow is my last day

Tomorrow is my last day of feeling like I must be employed, then I am heading to Woods Hole. (That is a sentence I cannot imagine typing and, yet, there it is.)

Digital Customer Service - note to self

I am retiring in 3 days from my employment, after 6 1/2 years - truly one of the best jobs ever. I have a colleague who has been abusing the concept of "machine learning" so one of my motivations for leaving is mathematical revulsion; another is that I am old enough to collect Social Security; another is that there is such an obvious need to develop a team and systems engineering that integrate Customer Service tightly with internal production systems, that I want to be employed doing that. I had to resign to make it happen. I'll explain:

As a low level employee with no power it is hard to lead and make change, so I pulled the only lever I have: bargaining my job against them listening to the proposal. I said I was leaving unless they were willing to discuss customer service. Having little to lose, I have been more aggressive and more articulate with my managers, and the managers in general, and actually succeeded in communicating. You'd be proud of me. I passed the CEO (of our division) in the hall and asked if he had 10 minutes, he proposed my finding him later in the week but I pushed and said "your door is open but usually you are not there", ending by getting a scheduled meeting, later in the day. Got ready and found him to be more than able to hear what I was saying because he knows well what I am talking about.

I have been communicating an extremely abstract point using a diagram of our production workflow. It is a diagram that hangs in a lot of cubicles and everyone knows it. As a rhetorical device it is great. I have been waiving it around and asking: How did it get this way? Who built it?

The people who were there while the production system was being created [including the CEO] know very well that it was an incremental and collaborative effort between engineering and operations. They understand in total abstraction how you create such things. That allowed me to say that customer service must be a window into the production system that evolves. In other words the diagram not only shows what customer service needs to provide a window into; it also reminds the executives of how a complex system is developed - incrementally and collaboratively.

"Trusted News"? Google you are joking, right?

Love the "free" blogger - but let's not forget who pays for content.

I was shocked to see who Google considers trusted news sources providing "balanced points of view". The lineup: "The Hill", "Fox", "CNN", "Washington Post", "Wall Street Journal" and "NPR". An occasional "MSNBC" and once I saw a "HuffPo" article.

Has anyone actually listened to NPR lately? They are completely in the tank to corporate ideologies - about the same as the Wall Street Journal.  Apparently if Republican talking points are delivered with an east coast snobbish accent, then it makes up some sort of balance to Fox News which shares the same ideology but without the "liberal" pronunciation of words.

For example today on the subject of the latest high school mass gun murder, I saw no stories in favor of getting rid of guns. On the contrary, the NYT is busy publishing letters to the editor about how we need better mental health care for the shooters.

Really Google should specify that their new method for selecting headline stories: Trusted "conservative" mouthpieces, some of whom speak with east coast accents - balancing out the mid-western, western, and southern accents one finds in other news sources.

I am done with these guys. I'll get my news elsewhere.