Just when did we lose our ability to create technology?

So, I'm placing an order for some commodities from a company I've been dealing with since they started about 12 years ago. Placed my monthly order as usual, with one minor difference, last month they were out of one item so I ended up with an over payment of $35 on my account.

The next month rolls around and I call the company up to inquire as to why my money has not been returned and they inform me that, instead of a refund, they have issued a store credit. OK, well it would have been nice if they'd let me know, but just apply it to this month's order. "OK", the phone monkey tells me, "just place your order on line as usual and when you get to the payment page select 'store credit' as your payment method", "OK", says I and proceed with my order on line. I get to the painful part and select 'store credit' as method of payment and the site informs me that there is not enough in my account to pay for the order with no other options, like say make a partial/split payment.

Back on hold.

Holding...

Holding...

"Thank you for waiting, all of our customer service representatives are busy helping other customers, please stay on the line and the first available agent will be right with you"

Holding...

Holding...

Holding...


"Thank you for waiting, all of our customer service representatives are busy helping other customers, please stay on the line and the first available agent will be right with you"

Holding...

*makes a pot of coffee

Holding...

"hello this is Dave, how can I help you?"

"Hi, I need to finalize an order with you and I have a store credit I need to use and the web site doesn't have any option to pay the balance out of my normal account."

"Yes, it does"

"Where?"

"Just go to the payment screen and select store credit"

"I did that and it just tells me there is not enough to pay for the order"

"Select eCheck"

"There is no option here, and when I go back to the payment method screen there's no option to split the payment"

"yes, there is"

"look Dave, I'm looking at the screen right now and there is no option, when I select 'use eCheck' it takes the entire amount out of my account and there is no option to use store credit".

"yes, there is"

"No, there isn't"

You know how the rest of this goes, 45 minutes he has to create an order that, hopefully, will use up the store credit.

We all have had similar experiences and it just gets worse every quarter. I currently (and hopefully for not much longer) work for "the largest computer hardware manufacturer in the world" (that doesn't manufacture one single component any more) as the highest person that will talk to customers, and 80% of every conversation starts out with, "thank God, you speak English" and proceeds with a depressingly familiar tale of spending weeks, and sometimes months, talking to people all over the world, except the US, trying to get their issue resolved.

Our data bases will not talk to each other, our service systems will not pull accurate data from any of the databases that store required information, our 'front end application' will not tie a customer's record with that customers equipment, and the entire company has been outsourced to at least 5 different companies, none of which has any clue or care about our customers, they are only concerned with how much they can bill us every month. If the corporation declared bankruptcy tomorrow, the creditors and shareholders would find nothing to liquidate except an aging building in the Silicon Valley, we have no assets and only a tiny core of executives, a gang of lawyers, and their support staff that work for us directly (you know, employees), everything else is outsourced to somebody else

It seems that nobody (working) knows how to program anymore, they know "tools" that do the "programming". Even software development companies don't actually program any more, they use tools to make the tools that they sell to their customers, none of which work for shit. Bloated, inaccurate, and ssssssllllllllllooooooowwwwwww, they propagate themselves by only working with the apps created by their "partners", and the monstrosity in Redmond, WA is the worst.

WTF do we think is going to result from this course? Profits are up, but the number of customers steadily shrinks. Customer service has become a very bad joke and nobody seems to care, as long as it's cheap.

Help me out here, is there hope anywhere? Are we destined to be the "Idiocracy" Mike Judge envisions?

It took me four months to clear up an escrow issue with my mortgage co., whom to which my mortgage was sold with just ten days notice to myself. Complete and utter bullshit and by the way, there is no hope.

Of course it's gotten very hard to stay employed with this mentality. Nobody appreciates quality in anything anymore, and if some hack overseas development firm can promise a lower bottom line, corporate tools will eat it up. Nevermind that they end up screwed in the long run when they have to buy a shitload of proprietary garbage and pay the same developers to write the same app 4 or 5 times until they get it right. It looks good on paper when they see that initial low price.

And how dare you get all uppity, demanding a living wage for that hard earned knowledge and expertise, you are nothing but a serf and you will do what we let you.

I wish I could say you're exaggerating, but I now make less than half of what I did between 2000 and 2003.

Ultimately, regardless if you have a good or bad experience, they're still going to make more in one year than you will in a lifetime of labor. That's the way of things in capitalist countries.

reserve banking model. Selling something you do not own at a very fat profit and making up rules to legitimize it.

there's too little competition in general, and big corpocracies are taking full advantages by adding nuisance instead of adding value.

ever notice how mistakes and accidents always seem to work in the company's favor? how often are you undercharged?
they make YOU work, spend hours on the phone, just to get back up to zero. a good chunk of customers don't notice, don't care, don't bother, or just give up in frustration. in all such cases, the company makes money. they only have to pay a cheap monkey to pester you at $8/hr, less if overseas, to basically try to talk you out of taking the credit that's rightfully yours.

once upon a time, and if our economy actually functioned as they advertise capitalism to work, you could easily take your business to another company more eager to have customers, and those companies who try to chisel profits out of their customers by being pests would quickly go out of business.

but all companies do this sort of thing these days so there's no real competition.


welcome to the modern american economic system.

The idealized "capitalism" of Libertarians and similar types only works in pre-industrial and very early industrial societies. As societies became more technologically developed the benefits of larger scale in many industries led to consolidation and reduced competition, and well as powerful capitalists with so much economic power they could influence governments.

the problem really is that companies have consolidated but governments have not. american companies can play 50 states against each other so easily now. move a plant or even just sign a piece of paper and suddenly you're subject to alabama laws instead of california laws. multinationals can shift income to evade taxes or threaten to move their headquarters to another country. this gives them too much clout, so governments, even the u.s. federal government, is too weak to effectively regulate.

if governments were to consolidate to a similar extent, e.g., place more regulatory authority at something more like the continent level, then governments would have the power to actually manage the corporations rather than the other way around.

of course, that would have obvious drawbacks for other reasons, but it could restore the world economy to basic capitalism instead of basic corporatism.

"New World Order"® is inevitable so just lay back and enjoy it.

I am going through the same thing just buying a foam surfboard blank...
Amazing...

and control of resources. They think (know?) that they are the only game in town, "you want that blank? You're going to deal with us."

Computers, media, and who all knows what else.

People who are engaged on the labor end of a creative endeavor are the lowest of the low. What we understand about architecture, our vision, and how things are put together mean nothing if we aren't also the cat who's making deals and bringing in the dollars.

The way I see it, software engineers - those people who made it possible for so many jobs to be automated and human talents and judgment to count for jack shit - have a lot of karma points against them right about now. All this automating has mostly served people who are incompetent at everything except office politics.

As for your immediate problem: I'd just refuse to order online.

...where even though I'm the only guy actually doing the work, there's several layers of people profiting from it. Client hires a company, company hires a contractor, contractor subcontracts me. Everybody gets their cut and I have no idea what the end client is paying for my work. I don't really want to know.

Four companies have 50k each for four jobs. They contract out to Joey, who takes the 200k, and subcontracts to Karl, Cindy, Sarah and Dave. Karl and Dave are offered 35k each, Cindy and Sarah 30.

Joey? He pockets 70k (actually, he probably pockets way more than that) for a few meetings with each of the money guys, and phone calls to the developers.

What these cats have is social skills and the willingness to use them to get someone to do the work for them.

in essence, force people to do what they tell them.

"If you want to control a man, give him a mortgage"

I feel your pain.

Anyone that has any technical acumen appears as a "wizard" to those without the knowledge. For the last 60 years or so we have steadily increased our daily contact with machines that, to most of us, appear to be nothing less than magical. And when one of our gadgets break precious few people have the faintest idea of how to genuinely troubleshoot and repair the problem.

I'm a web developer who codes in XHTML, PHP, MySQL and has fun with Web 2.0 technologies. I've also had electronics in college and the Navy. When something breaks at my house I can generally take it apart and fix it, even if it means turning on my soldering station and making a board-level repair. A power supply went bad in one of my Macs and I simply bought a replacement part, cracked open the power supply (ignoring the sticker telling me not to) and replaced the necessary part. My wife's Elna press failed, so I took it apart, found a burnt solder trace on the circuit board and repaired it. A ten year old appliance that would have hit the landfill instead operates just fine.

I know very few people who would even attempt to repair things, mechanical or electrical. It's simply beyond them. All they can do is "trust" that someone, somewhere, knows the answer to their problem. They may spend hours in vain speaking with a tech support person in another country and all to no avail only because they have no other option: They can't DIY.

This is the world we've created and we can't go back to a more "primitive" time. (Well, we can, but it'll be a bitch.) We've chained ourselves to our technology and we suffer because of our ignorance.

Note: I wish I could do my own car repairs, though!

PS: And when a person like myself runs into trouble, the air gets really thin: Who the hell do you call now?