Today was an eye-opener for a couple of people around me who apparently did not know that their “management style” was something that could be categorized, described and shown to be fundamentally wrong. You get a lot of that in Florida, people who think they are right without any proof because they think they can always argue their way out of anything. These types always confuse management with figuring out how somebody else can fix a problem they should be fixing themselves. Sooner or later you will run in to somebody like me who points this out and your defense amounts to arguing how lazy you really are. The worst thing you could say at such a time is that you’ve been doing it the same way for X number of years. I really, truly know how to deal with bad manager when I meet one.
Yes, I’m saying the troublemaker from last day got fired. Incompetence tends to become crystal clear when you work around someone like me. See those192 unanswered letters in the company mailbox? So does the boss. Since my mail does not go there any more, why would I check it? But sure, now that you’ve made such a fuss, let’s go through them one by one and see who they are for. Golly, all 192 for you. Glad I didn’t have to scroll through that mess to find mine again.
Now I’m going to run some complicated spreadsheet formulas. After a day of secretarial work, my brain needs to start thinking again. Computer programming is a good way to kick-start out of no-mind secretarial mode and begin using the old noggin. We also have a new database that tracks exactly what you do with your emails, every last one of them, with deadly accuracy.
I ran an ad in CA for somebody who knows the price of that Thompson VE (Vocal Eliminator). Their web page is using the old manual call-you-back trick. Do people still fall for that anymore? I’m not saying you have to print high prices on your ad and scare aware business, but at least you should tell the people who call for it. Trust me, son, that is why they are calling. You might think your sales pitch and phone smile will carry the day but you probably think you have as sense of humor as well. All salesmen think that, poor things.
Progress. I cannot do algebra as quickly on paper any more as I can using a spreadsheet. I think it is because a formula written down can only be “run” once and I’ve gotten used to using a series of formulas that show intermediate results. I think I can save the wig store a pile of money by calculating the most economical breakpoints between the tiers of surcharges. The way it is set up is complicated, so I’ll leave you alone for a while.
Wow, that was friggin’ complicated because the manufacturer mixes fixed and variable costs, but counts all the different sizes toward the total item count of each model. There is a common pattern but I don’t see it yet. To make it short, I just got 238 extra items for the same price by ordering up. This means another $7,600 retail for zero extra product cost. It also makes it worthwhile to fly another shipment across the Pacific (that turned out not to be all that expensive). A beautiful and easy hour’s work and by coincidence, that is also roughly the amount of money I spent going to cost management school. So I could figure such things out.
During the past year, I have a better understanding of DSL Internet workings that could not easily be gleaned from study alone. Have you ever tried to read a book that “explains” DSL service? (You’ll quickly wish you hadn’t bothered.) Therefore, I re-read my material. No wonder it seemed confusing and self-contradictory – it is.
The worst part about it is the terminology. One reference cutely says on page 109 that “… both the ISP and DSL circuit provider perform many individual tasks.” Those tasks are scattered in random order throughout the rest of the 342-page book, never once listing them in a simple table. That is the sort of people you find in the DSL business.
You’d think that “DSL service” is a service that provides you with DSL. Wrong. It is what the phone company (aka the ILEC or CLEC) calls the capability, not the activity. The activity is billed separately. (These abbreviations stand for Incumbent or Competitive Local Exchange Carrier which gives you an idea what you are in for.) It is one of the worst examples of “unbundling” ever pulled on the public. There are approximately 6-9 non-intuitive steps with equally confusing names that need to be completed before you actually get what you thought you were getting (an Internet connection).
Trying to figure out the rate schedule is a task because very few of the companies involved will tell you that what they advertise is just one part of the overall setup. The good news is the ILEC (what you would call the old telephone company) has learned to at least offer the entire package. One way or the other, you are paying both a circuit charge and a service charge every month. Nice people, aren’t they?
As a home single-user you would not likely encounter these difficulties. You take the modem out of the package and plug things in. It is when you try to go to the next level that the war dance begins. Start a home business. Then you discover, they sold you speed, not bandwidth. You need a router, not a modem. You pay to register your domain name, to discover it just sits there unless you pay more to use it. If you don’t, somebody else will grab it and blackmail you, and yes, that is your fault. What? You want an interactive web page, too? Now things get tricky.
