The pet peeve thread

[chasfh]

2 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

For me the fundamental criteria is whether the person would be a 'tipped' employee under FLSA. So that dovetails with the owner/employee distinction which is why I said I agreed in principle. Looking for exceptions was more a Socratic diversion to the effect that most 'rules' end up less than foolproof. I'll also note the SO also follows the 'don't tip the owner at the Salon' paradigm.

My wife tips the owner of her salon because she did my wife's hair while an employee at another salon, and my wife followed her to her new place. I'm sure that happens to customers all the time.

[Tigeraholic1]

Bathroom doors. Why is there not a law that all public restroom doors have to open via push from the inside only? When I use a restroom that has paper towels I will dry my hands and use the paper towel to grab the handle to open and then pitch into the waste basket. But, when there are only air dryers you are forced to grip and pull the poop covered handle after you wash and dry your hands. Makes no sense to me.

Edited April 3 by Tigeraholic1

[CMRivdogs]

Listening to fake violinist is local market parking lot. My wife ran into the store for a few items and we had dog in tow.

I was really tempted to offer him a gig tonight just to see his reaction.

[chasfh]

1 hour ago, CMRivdogs said:

Listening to fake violinist is local market parking lot. My wife ran into the store for a few items and we had dog in tow.

I was really tempted to offer him a gig tonight just to see his reaction.

Now I’m curious as to how “fake violinist” actually works.

[CMRivdogs]

They stand on the edge of the parking lot, violin, amp (battery powered), music usually provided by a recording, probably on a thumb drive, and they fake it.

The music was continuous and too perfect (classical) to be anything else. His sign says he's a real violinist trying to feed his family. I get it, better than your standard pan handler, but if he's that good.... 

 

[gehringer_2]

We were at Stratford in Canada one weekend a couple of years ago and prior to the play at the corner of one of the parking lots there was a young girl, with her mother standing guard, and she dove into a Bach violin concerto re-arranged as a solo piece. The most impressive bit of busking I've ever heard. I'd have to guess she was there more to impress someone in the generally 'artsy' crowd hoping for a connection than for the direct financial value.

[chasfh]

On 4/6/2024 at 3:03 PM, CMRivdogs said:

They stand on the edge of the parking lot, violin, amp (battery powered), music usually provided by a recording, probably on a thumb drive, and they fake it.

The music was continuous and too perfect (classical) to be anything else. His sign says he's a real violinist trying to feed his family. I get it, better than your standard pan handler, but if he's that good.... 

 

Jerry Seinfeld hosted something in 1990 called Spy Magazine’s How to be Famous, which is a hilarious but at least semi-serious examination of how people become famous and maintain their fame. Rule #1 was “Have talent”, which he demonstrates doesn’t always work by showing a concert violinist plying her trade on a subway platform.

 

[chasfh]

Like everyone else, I sometimes have bad consumer experiences. I would love to feed back to these companies about these experiences, but too frequently I can't find any way to contact them to let them know.

That's bad enough, but to me it's even worse when you get a survey invitation from these companies, and you're thinking, great, now I can tell them about the poor experience I just had with them. But too often these surveys are short (two or three or four questions) where every question asks you to rate their attributes on a scale, and there is no text box in which you can provide specific feedback about your experience, or even about general things they could improve upon. They're all scale of 0 to 10 questions. Seems clear to me they are using this data to compensate or punish employees, or to publicize how much customers love their business. In short, it is not at all a meaningful feedback mechanism. It's a marketing and/or employee management tool.

I've developed a shorthand for determining whether the survey I'm being invited to is of this type: if the very first question they ask you is, "Would you recommend [Our Company] to your friends and relatives?", or something along those lines, I bail. Because then it's clear to me they only seeking numbers they can leverage or promote.

Edited April 17 by chasfh

[ewsieg]

For several years, I worked on a team where my customers would email their request to us and that would create a ticket for us.  We were the last team in my company (large telecommunications company) that a customer could reach us via email, versus having to call into one of our call centers or open a request/ticket online.  

As such, the email would eventually get shared on reddit or some other forum and we'd get someone that found the email address and would reach out to us for stuff not related at all to our role.  For instance some kid on reddit didn't understand how to read a traceroute and found our email address.  We'd get complaints that we were the cause of their World of Warcraft being slow.  Some of them would share information which either didn't show any issue at all, or showed trouble before they even left their home network.  

Management decided to have all of our tickets send out surveys and it went bad.  Nearly 100% of our bad survey responses were these non customer complaints that shouldn't have had our info anyway.  Mgmt was furious and of course never took the time to understand this, just harped on us to 'fix the numbers'.  

We eventually found out if we closed a ticket a certain way, a survey wouldn't get sent out.  Add in the fact we had so many repeat customers we asked a few of them to fill out a survey monthly and soon enough we were consistently the best rated team.  Absolutely nothing changed in terms of the service we were providing, yet mgmt touted it as a huge improvement that they drove.  Gotta love corporate America.

[oblong]

I don't think the purpose of any corporate based customer service is anything other than to justify/promote themselves rather than improve service.

It may not be for outside consumption but some manager has it on his objectives so they write the survey in a way so they get a good score.  And in many of those cases the person/process being measured has control or impact on the issue that caused the concern in the first place, so they phrase the questions to keep it narrowed to their little world.  Think of a gate agent for an airline getting screamed at because a flight was delayed/cancelled due to weather, pilot rules, etc.  That agent can't do anything about it.  So a survey on them won't address those issues.

[gehringer_2]

36 minutes ago, ewsieg said:

Absolutely nothing changed in terms of the service we were providing, yet mgmt touted it as a huge improvement that they drove.  Gotta love corporate America.

Bad metrics, bad outcomes. ChemE's used to get tasked with doing most of the cost accounting around their units because no-one else would understood how and I've seen bad cost accounting systems sink profitable enterprises. Too many managers never learn to bring the same kind of skepticism to data placed in front of them that engineers have to learn about data put in front of them (though many Engr fail that test as well).

Edited April 18 by gehringer_2

[chasfh]

Being gaslit by corporate America absolutely drives me out of my mind. The worst thing in the world someone can do is pretend something is one way when I and everyone else can absolutely see that it’s the other way. But then, there are things in which you know you’re being gaslit but you can’t absolutely prove it. Here are two fast examples:

• Any company you call and the AI-or-recorded voice says, “Please listen carefully as our menu options have recently changed.” No, they haven’t. You’ve had this same message for several years and your menu options have never changed even once.
• My car dealer’s recorded voice answers with, “Thank you for calling [car dealership’s name]. Our receptionist is currently assisting other callers …”. No they aren’t. Two reasons I know this: (1) I haven’t seen a receptionist at your dealership for almost ten years; (2) I got this same message when I called it once at 500am.

[oblong]

I bet in those cases nobody knows how to change the messages. The person who did retired in 2009.  They don’t hear it so it’s not on anybody’s radar.  
 

in the case of the menu options you that’s just their way to get you to pay attention. 
 

What drives me up a wall is when they ask you to verbally speak what your issue is. It infuriates me.  What they will hear is “Jesus Christ:..” or “oh dammit not this **** again..” or “what the ****…” followed by me mashing 0 repeatedly.  

[gehringer_2]

18 minutes ago, chasfh said:

Being gaslit by corporate America absolutely drives me out of my mind. The worst thing in the world someone can do is pretend something is one way when I and everyone else can absolutely see that it’s the other way. But then, there are things in which you know you’re being gaslit but you can’t absolutely prove it. Here are two fast examples:

• Any company you call and the AI-or-recorded voice says, “Please listen carefully as our menu options have recently changed.” No, they haven’t. You’ve had this same message for several years and your menu options have never changed even once.
• My car dealer’s recorded voice answers with, “Thank you for calling [car dealership’s name]. Our receptionist is currently assisting other callers …”. No they aren’t. Two reasons I know this: (1) I haven’t seen a receptionist at your dealership for almost ten years; (2) I got this same message when I called it once at 500am.

++++

I used to work at a small research arm of a medium small manufacturer. The owner kept his offices at apart from the factory where our lab facility was and we reported directly to him. I was sitting in his office one day talking to him and he placed a call back the plant for something and got the hold with music, which the plant manager had had installed without telling the boss. The boss was not amused. It was turned off that day. Small victory in a losing battle.

Edited April 20 by gehringer_2

[chasfh]

1 hour ago, gehringer_2 said:

++++

I used to work at a small research arm of a medium small manufacturer. The owner kept his offices at apart from the factory where our lab facility was and we reported directly to him. I was sitting in his office one day talking to him and he placed a call back the plant for something and got the hold with music, which the plant manager had had installed without telling the boss. The boss was not amused. It was turned off that day. Small victory in a losing battle.

There's another peeve of mine: when you are left on hold and, instead of a steady stream of bad muzak—which I can take because I can keep working through it—you instead get a voice interrupting every 20 seconds reminding you that your call is very important so please continue to hold; or, worse, a promotional announcement trying to sell you some upgrade or different service the company you're calling has on offer. AT&T is famous for that ****. I can't work through that because the talking interrupts my chain of thought.

(That's also a reason I can listen only to instrumentals while I am working, as long as I don't know the song, so I tend to play cool jazz or chamber music or lo-fi or stuff like that, because both song with lyrics and songs I already know distract me.) 

[oblong]

I saw a meme that they should set up a party line where everyone in hold can talk to each other while waiting 

[Tigeraholic1]

To add on the previous tipping discussion. Is this the same idea as the beer purchase at a game?

 

 

 

[Shades of Deivi Cruz]

13 hours ago, Tigeraholic1 said:

To add on the previous tipping discussion. Is this the same idea as the beer purchase at a game?

 

 

 

Is that a KMart lunch counter?

Related-ish, there was a lunch counter at the Sears store I worked at when I was young, and it low-key slapped. 

[Shades of Deivi Cruz]

Yes, I used "low-key slapped" on purpose AND I used it correctly. LOL!