Evolutionary Throwbacks

If you look at someone hard enough, it isn't hard to find areas where that person may be behind the curve in terms of crawling out of the primordial ooze. One area I need to work on over the next ten million years or so is in adopting a human sleep pattern. I'm still hibernating, and it's almost June.

I had to work from 2-6:30 today, and you'd think even I could manage hours like that. Granted it's Sunday, but I gotta do what I gotta do. Still, I couldn't get up before like noon, and fell asleep as soon as I got back from dinner at like 7:30. I woke back up like an hour ago, and now I'm not tired enough to sleep, but too tired to do anything useful.

The trouble with this job is that it pays marginally better than Unemployment Compensation, and I can't quit the former without losing the latter. If I'm terminated, I'm likewise out of luck. Thus I need to find a way to be laid off.

Layoffs are the kind of thing that you can count on to happen when you least need it, but when you could use one, there aren't any to be found. I guess I shouldn't bemoan being employed, and I'm not; it's the terms I don't care for.

The problem I keep coming up against is the fact that I'm a technophile and a problem solver first and foremost. I tell customers the best solution for their need in an honest manner, seeing the thing from his point of view, or what his point of view would be if he knew what he were talking about. I don't push products simply because of their profit margins or other shallow incentives, because I have too much integrity for that. Coming from an aerospace environment, where developing the highest quality product is paramount compared with trivialities like cost, it's really sad to be pushing somebody else's poor excuse for technology so they get rich at the expense of my reputation.

I almost managed to get terminated Saturday by doing exactly my job. Basically, we have promotion that gives customers 20% off their second product if they buy two products, and 10% off the third through fifth if they buy more than that. So I was ringing up this woman (which is not as fun as it sounds) who was planning to come back the next day to exchange a gift she received for an upgrade, and was also buying a smaller item that day. So I said, "Oh, and if you bring your receipt from this transaction tomorrow, we can give you 20% back on this thing you're buying right now." She smiled heartily (which gave me more satisfaction than anything else I'd done on this job up until that point) and left happy.

Well, you'd've thought I'd swallowed an iPod or something by the way my manager reacted. She went off on a tirade on how she'd have to do all this paperwork to honor what I said (which was really just what the sale said), but my point was that I was simply acting in the customer's best interest. I told her that I look at everything from the customer's point of view, and she basically told me in no uncertain terms that this was heresy. I'm supposed to maximize sales in every instance, not "exploit" the terms of the sale. She further went on to say that the concept of a sale went against the way the company did business, and she found the whole thing bizzare. Apparently I went way outside my authority in tellling the customer how to save money, and that if any loopholing was to occur, the customer should initiate it. Naturally, she'd go out of her way to honor any claim like that on the part of the customer (it involves a simple return for an even exchange of the old product when buying the new one to take advantage of the sale) but said that most customers would never think of doing that. I reminded her that the terms of the promotion said nothing about the multiple purchases happening on the same day, and she acted like the ambiguity was my fault. She said that I "created issues" by "manipulating the system." As far as I'm concerned, however, I'm barely even debugging the system. (Don't even get me started on the myriad ways the company could streamline its operations by going paperless).

Where I come from, loopholes are not swept under the rug. The boundaries of any theory are where the most interesting things happen; where there are flaws there are areas for improvement. I told my manager that we were in uncharted waters, and she agreed, but was still threatening me with termination for providing excessive customer service. I tried to explain that I could not be held responsible for short-sidedness on the part of the marketing and legal people, but of course it's easier for her to shoot the messenger I guess. Customers, I'm told, don't think "the way I think," and I shouldn't help them cause trouble. Ironically, there would have been no issue at all if the customer had done everything on the same day, because of the daily update interval for our POS systems (an artifact of an ancient way of doing things from the days when communications of a few KB of text was expensive). Once again, for a company selling overpriced high-enough technology, we fall short of our purported standard by a considerable gap.

I'm kinda mad at myself for answering "Yes, for now," when she asked finally, "Are we cool?" Now I'll have to give two whole weeks' notice instead of being done with the place immediately. There's a possibility of getting commission, but it requires really milking every customer for his last nickel, including selling overhyped replacement guarantees which serve mainly to quintuple the profit margins. What's really disgusting is that they apply quotas on how many of these we sell, which encourages associates to mislead the customers and intimidate them into buying the policies. It's hilarious to watch them sell the RSGs: first they extol the virtues of the product, and when the customer decides to get one, they then try to scare them into believing the product will break several times in the first three years of operation. Since the replacement guarantees are "more important than products," there's no real incentive to make lasting devices.

Anyway, I have a couple of leads to call tomorrow, which should work out better for me. If I'm going to sell out, I need to do it for enough money to pay the bills, at the very least.

I guess I'm really not supposed to diss my employer like this, but I figure there's an amendment somewhere that lets me get away with it, and besides, if I'm going to be chewed out for helping the customer take advantage of our sale, I don't feel all that bad for venting my frustrations here as opposed to the obvious approach.