Everything About Business Except The Bottom Line: FunnyBusiness

Followup to Unwelcome Company & Phone Racism

Earlier in the week I was plagued with the WinFixer spyware. I started using the beta version of Microsoft's Antispyware. While it found the varmint on my system, it never seemed to get rid of it.

Then Scott Crump-- who I do not believe I have ever met-- left a comment on the post with an important link: http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/trojan.vundo.removal.tool.html

After following their directions -- you do need to do the process twice, I seem to be spyware free---for the time being. A big thank you to Scott for solving a huge problem for me this week!

That brings me to the issue of phone racism. Just a couple of hours  after I saved that post, I had an opportunity to test my new self-awareness. For the umpteenth time my Linskys wireless connection shut down. Over the past couple of days it was shutting down almost hourly.

With some trepidation I called the 800 number and started talking to Shamit. After a review of my case --- I've called a lot-- Shamit took me through the standard drill and determined that my firmware was out of date. 

As I kept myself in check, being my most patient and cordial self, I noticed that Shamit had a bit of an edge and seemed rather inpatient with me. I found that rather amusing and resisted the temptation to call him on it.

Nevertheless, Shamit determined that the problem was outdated firmware. He told me to download the newer version and said I would be in great shape.  That was around 9:00 a.m.

At 1:00 p.m. I called again. Shamit's solution had failed. This time I was connected to Argentina and Fernando. Fernando determined that Shamit had left out an important step in my wireless's rehabilitation. You have to upload the file once you download it.

Had a lively and fun conversation with Fernando. Unfortunately, the files wouldn't upload and Fernando said he was bumping me to a supervisor who would call in 15 minutes.

At 3:00 p.m. I once again called the 800 number, hoping beyond hope that I would be routed to Argentina. Not this time. Back to India.This time I got Lakshmi. She read the file. In a very polite tone I explained how disappointed I was that the supervisor didn't call me back.

At 4:05 p.m. Lakshmi had successfully helped me install the new firmware. I had been on my best behavior. I was also listening to the conversation to hear what in the past triggered my outbursts. Here's what I found.

I really dislike how often that call me Ma'am. I didn't like ma'am when I was growing up in the south and I really don't like ma'am used as a nickname for Elana. It's not even that Lakshmi uses the "term" its the frequency. of the use.Every frigging sentence. However, yesterday I went with the flow. Obviously that's on the script, that's what she's been told to say. I'll leave her alone.

At the end of the conversation Lakshmi said something no other customer service representative in India has ever said to me,

" I'm glad we were able to solve your problem and thank you for being so patient with me."

Phone Racism

What do you do when you realize you are behaving poorly simply because the people on the other line speak with a New Delhi accent?

The dichotomy is you couldn't find a more polite,pleasant person on the phone than a person based in India. 

Doesn't matter. The more polite they are; the nastier I get.

It took my 16 year- old- daughter Berit to point it out. After a grueling conversation with a tech support person who I was convinced didn't understand what I was "really"saying, Berit shared her observation of the interchange.

"You're a racist."

And so I have done some soul -searching.

My daughter is right. I definitely have a "a tone" that I use as soon as I hear the accent. It's as if "hearing" the accent causes all of my patience to evaporate and that's before I have even described my problem.

I think that qualifies as racist. But I'm a phone racist.

If I met someone from India in person, I wouldn't get the "tone". I wouldn' have any angry feelings. I wouldn't anticipate that they couldn't help me no matter what I said. I wouldn't demand that they "slow down because I can't understand a word they are saying."

Yup, I've said that. And probably worse.

My racism is situational. It's a  strictly phone -based racism.

Some friends who have the responsibility of working with their Indian based phone banks explained it to me this way, " you get angry because they don't deviate from the script. It's like talking to a robot."

And then I realized I don't just save my phone racism for the kind folks in India. I am brutal to the automated phone robots who screen your calls before putting you through to a technician. I get the same "tone"-- I absolutely despise the chipper, always pleasant robot voice that needs me to tell them the model number of my computer, my account number and the nature of my problem.

While it made me feel a little better, I am still appalled at my abhorrent behavior.

I know my anger is displaced. The person in India is just doing their job-- a job they were hired to do by an American firm that doesn't  seem to care whether their customers are abusive, rude and mean to their employees.

It's really an awful situation. The people in India deserve better. The customers deserve better. Shame on the companies that have created a system where everyone loses.

Customers lose because we are not getting the service we deserve. Employees lose because their employers are allowing them to be on the front line and take this awful verbal abuse.

By making me face my own racist behavior, my daughter has helped me realize that I need to start confronting the real source of my anger--the companies that won't spend enough to help improve the quality of service provided in their call centers.

So from now on, if I have a less than adequate phone interchange, I will write to the company. I will lodge my complaint and I will make suggestions on how they can improve their service.

One more thing. I apologize. My behavior has been completely unacceptable.

Writing for the Search

Some emails are just meant to  be shared. This from my friend Caroline -- we've been friends since college. In fact, she is the one who made sure I passed Mr. Edward's copy editing class -- thank you for doing those headlines!

Caroline ( that is not really her name) recently took a job at a marketing communications agency that is doing a lot of web work. Evidently, the last class she took on how to be an effective writer for the web was well, a bit depressing.

"You know, I’ve always thought

That the downfall of real art

Was the glue gun…

And the downfall of civilization

Is the self-flushing toilet

(is it really that hard or confusing

to pull the handle?),

And now I’ve discovered the downfall

Of literature…or at least copy writing

In the 21^st century.

I just had a lesson on how to write for search engines.

Apparently, it’s not enough to write a good story

Or product explanation for the web audience.

If you don’t use certain words and phrases

Over and over and over and over and over again,

You might as well be writing to yourself,

Because the search engines won’t pick you up

And your message will be lost in cyberanonymity.

 

Gone are the days of saying what you mean,

And in are the days of repeating yourself

To the point where you sound like the president."

Anyway, you might want to explore this one

And use it for your blog.

See how other bloggers feel about this writing requirement…

Great question. How do people feel about this? Eager to hear what you think.

NOTE: Caroline is a pseudonym.

Rejects

It's not that the company gets 1.6 million calls every month that caught my attention. It's not even the service they provide--- "humorous rejection messages." What caught my attention is the company's boast  that it is " the industry leader in humorous rejection services."

Now on the surface it might seem a bit of an overreach to call a "humorous rejection message business" an "Industry". But  Rejection Hotline doesn't make its money sending out rejection letters. It makes its money by selling the "mailing lists" of the people who either (1) sign up for a phony number or (2) make the mistake of emailing into the service and receiving a rejection email.

Here's how it works. People sign up for a phony phone number or the simply send out an email with an address that will activate an automatic "reject letter" to anyone sending an email to the address.

When you sign up for the phone number, the company captures your info and sells. When people try to send an email to your phony address, their emails are captured.

How valuable are these lists? According to an expert on a local radio program ( didn't catch her name)-- these lists fetch about  $100,000 a pop.

One would think that if Rejection Hotline was an industry leader, there would be a lot of other similar businesses in "the industry."

I found one: Papernapkin.net/Not so sure how their business is going. Their blog hasn't been updated since 2004 and they promise participants that they would "share" the emails of folks who unwittingly send an email to the phony address. I didn't find any.

If  you were to send an email at (anyname) @paamail.com  you would receive a message that starts out like this.

Subject: Nice to hear from you

Ha ha, just kidding. Actually, this is a rejection letter. The person who gave you this email address does not want to have anything to do with you.

This is probably bad news, and many people cope with bad news in phases: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Let us help you through these:

"It must be a mistake": Nope. You got an address in the form [email protected] or [email protected], right? Well, all we here at papernapkin.net do is send rejection notices. If you got this email address, it wasn't an accident. No, you've definitely been rejected.

I also founded a site called Blackmail  for $1.49 you can send a nontraceable email that promises to:

"Send anonymous,untraceable blackmail revenge email pranks."

It's sites like this that reminds me it was worth the $249 to upgrade to Microsoft Office 2003 so all my junk mail goes into an automatic junk file. Delete. Delete. Delete.

SEND ANONYMOUS UNTRACEABLE BLACKMAIL REVENGE EMAIL PRANKS. RELAX AND LET BLACKMAIL DO YOUR DIRTY WORK FOR YOU!

CHOOSE FROM AN ASSORTMENT OF OUTRAGEOUS ANIMATIONS TO ACCOMPANY YOUR BLACKMAIL. JUST TYPE AND SEND...NOTHING COULD BE EASIER! WHY TAKE ALL THAT CRUD WHEN YOU COULD BE EVENING THE ODDS?

NOW YOU CAN GET "BLACK" AT THEM AND SEND ANONYMOUS UNTRACEABLE BLACKMAIL REVENGE EMAIL PRANKS. RELAX AND LET BLACKMAIL DO YOUR DIRTY WORK FOR YOU!

CHOOSE FROM AN ASSORTMENT OF OUTRAGEOUS ANIMATIONS TO ACCOMPANY YOUR BLACKMAIL. JUST TYPE AND SEND...NOTHING COULD BE EASIER! WHY TAKE ALL THAT CRUD WHEN YOU COULD BE EVENING THE ODDS?

.

Unwelcome Company

For the past week or so WinFixer has made itself very comfy cozy on my computer. I have not been amused. Of course, my strategy was to ignore it and hoped that Norton AntiVirus would destroy it without me having to get involved.

Finally this morning I couldn't take it any more and began investigating what I would have to do to kick WinFixer out of my computer.

In case you're not aware of the interloper that goes by the alias WinFixer , it shows itself by popping up as a Internet Explorer Warning saying:

NOTICE: If your computers has errors in the registry database or file system, it could cause unpredictable or erratic behavior, freezes and crashes.  Fixing these errors can increase your computer's performance and prevent data loss. Would you like to install WinFixer 2005 to check your computer for free (Recommended)

When WinFixer invades it just pops up incessantly while you are trying to surf the net. It is a nuisance extraordinaire.

So at 5:00 AM I began the work of getting rid of WinFixer once and for all. I typed in Getting Rid of WinFixer and Google took me to a bunch of threads where techie types talked about.

I found a thread at Virtual Dr. Forums and began reading the instructions.  However once I got to this step I froze:

• Once in safe mode open the VundoFix folder and doubleclick on KillVundo.bat

• You will first be presented with a warning.
  It should look like this
  

• Quote:

VundoFix V2.1 by Atri By pressing enter you agree that you are using this at your own risk.

At this point press enter one time.

Next you will see:

Quote:

Type in the filepath as instructed by the forum staff Then Press Enter, Then F6, Then Enter Again to continue with the fix.

• At this point please type the following file path (make sure to enter it exactly as below!):
  
  
• C:\WINDOWS\system32\vturq.dll

Way too scary and complicated for my limited technical skills. It's now 6:00 A.M.

Next, I found Microsoft AntiSpyware (Beta) and decided to install. Okay, it took three times to get the software to install correctly --couldn't they have reminded me that I needed to turn off Norton when introducing a new spyware fighter to my computer?

At 7:10 A.M, after restarting and starting my computer more times that I wanted to, the spyware software says it has found virtumondo..aka WinFixer. We zap it. I'm feeling quite competent...until...

I restart my computer , try to check email.Microsoft Office won't work. I reboot. It still doesn't work. I do this three times. Finally it works .

Then I retype Winfixer in Google. The search is hijacked. Instead of Google popping up..an AOL Search page appears. It says there are not results for WinFixer.

I'm taking this as a bad sign. I know its a bad sign. I just don't know what it means. It's now 8:50 AM Central Standard Time. I don't have the energy or the desire to continue my spyhunting. My day job awaits.

The Bad Guys

Forbes.com has a must read article-- The Attack of the Blogs. The article looks at the dark side of blogging, sharing vignettes of harassment, loss revenues ,and blatant censorship.

It is a chilling account of guerrilla marketing and a reminder that insurgents--whether in real wars or business wars are changing the rules of engagement. Be sure to read the sidebars, I was particularly devastated by the story of Maureen O'Gara-- a reporter that Forbes describes as "Intrepid"

When O'Gara's story about her quest appeared in Linux Business News, an online magazine, indignant bloggers went on the attack. They said the story was unethical and demanded that the site take it down. (So much for free speech.) When the site's publisher, Sys-Con Media, refused, anonymous callers bombarded employees with obscene phone calls and e-mails.They also badgered Sys-Con's advertisers to get them to pull ads from Sys-Con sites. Hackers shut down Sys-Con's Web site for four days, robbing it of $200,000 in ad revenue.

So Sys-Con caved in, yanking the story and agreeing to forgo articles written by O'Gara. "What are my options?We have criminal people who were taking us hostage, trying to destroy my business,"says Sys-Con Chief Fuat Kircaali.

Excuse me what are your options?  You gotta be jokin. Perhaps Fuat Kircaali should take a cue from government. You don't deal with  terrorists. While there are many facets of this article that beg discussion, this sidebar is the most disturbing.

.Shame on Sys-Con .While I would never advocate hacking  anyone's website, I think the journalistic ethics at stake are huge They had an opportunity to stand up for what is right and just and they blew it.

Forbes is not shy on what strategy they would use to stop the blogging insurgency.

Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.

For equal balance the article does make this concession about the scope of the problem.

Attack blogs are but a sliver of the rapidly expanding blogosphere. A hundred thousand new blogs are created every day, more than one new blog per second, says Technorati, a firm in San Francisco that tracks the content of 20 million active blogs.

The article will make you reflect about your own business ethics,the advice you give to clients and what you would do if you became a victim of online slander.

A year ago I wrote about  such a victim--it happens to be my cousin Larry's son--Josh. The New York Times wrote about him as well. He along with several other unsuspecting high school students applied for a scholarship from the National Academy of American Scholars and found themselves victims of the websites anti-Semitic campaign.

Despite years of writing to congressmen, senators, attorney generals,a yeshiva that linked to the scholarship site and various other organizations,Larry failed in banning the organization or getting the vitriolic lies removed . 

The post in my blog did get the yeshiva to remove the organization from its scholarship link and earned me a less than flattering article in their school newspaper.

I happened upon the Forbes.com article while reading a post by Teresa Valdez Klein on Blog Business Summit. The article, Don't want an attack of the blogs? Don't Ask For One. provides a great counter balance  to the Forbes Article. In this post, Klein shares the story of a blogger who uncovered some devious on-goings by Sony and whose blog resulted in Sony having to "blink".

The good guys vs. the bad guys. Stay tuned.

Online Doodling

I'm tired. Two weeks after moving from my home/office of 13 years I still find myself drowning in boxes. Of course there is a box that I can't seem to find and that has some critical information that I need-- so in the meantime I've been gravitating to the web for some mental relief.

I found it at Storyabout == a site that offers online doodling and a thing called typedrawing which is like doodling but a bit more sophisticated and just a bunch of clever flash induced programming.

Check it out. My favorites are sixteen balls and  Hopping Inertial Typo.

The site is the creation of Hansol Huh who says "I was a singer. but I am not. but I will sing my heart again. and then I will do throw my computer away"

In the Meantime Hansol Huh is providing lots of us with great entertainment and helping me relax about the "missing box".

Urban Myth or travel alert? You decide

Checking into our hotel in Chicago for our "girls" weekend, my friend Debbie warned, "Don't leave your room key behind when you check out, they keep your credit card information on it."

Before I could express my surprise, my friend Lynne confirmed, " Our friend Denny works in the credit card industry and he told us the same thing."

I was so intrigued that I thought, "wow, I have a great topic for my blog."

Research is a wondrous thing. What I didn't know Friday afternoon is that this room key rumor has been making the rounds since 2003.  When I  Googled the subject, the first thing that popped up was a post in Computerworld blog just last September with the compelling headline Swipe Here to Steal

"Wallace, IT director at AAA Reading-Berks in Wyomissing, Penn. has been bringing a card reader with him on business trips to see what's on the magnetic strips of his hotel room access cards. To his dismay, a surprising number have contained his name and credit card information - and in unencrypted form.

What’s scary is how easy it is for even a novice to steal this information. He says he bought a $39 card reader at a local retail store and plugged it into his laptop's USB port. Now when he scans a card, the device inputs the data directly into an open Excel or Word document."

Reaction to this post fell into two camps:  It's an urban myth. It could be true. Those believing this is  an urban cite a snopes.com  article. The camp that says don't believe everything you read on snopes.com refer  to an online conversation at slashdot

What's a traveling girl supposed to do? At this point, I don't know what I think. I do know one thing though--I can stop feeling guilty every time I find one of these cards weeks later in the bottom of my purse.