After my post about people stealing cable boxes and cable companies trying to bill people for boxes that were destroyed in a fire, several people asked me about other cases of this type. During my time as the accounts receivable and collections officer for the cable company I saw a lot of these, including a surprising number of people who didn’t actually steal their decoder box so much as just leave it in an empty apartment when they moved out, somehow believing that we would magically or psychically receive notice of the abandoned unit and come to pick it up. Why exactly this was – and why these people could not manage to read the section in their contract where it specified that they had to either CALL US on the telephone to arrange pickup or BRING the cable box to our office to turn it in – remains a mystery to me, but most of these people did eventually pay up once they realized what a $250 charge for a stolen piece of merchandise was doing to their credit rating. One man actually threatened me over the telephone when a $750 charge on his credit report blocked his purchase of a $2.5 million home a year or so later (he’d walked off with three cable boxes and never considered returning them). In hindsight, being arrested for making terroristic threats (we recorded those phone calls) probably didn’t impress his bank, either…
As bad as that was, I think the customers who had managed to destroy their cable box and then demanded a replacement – at no cost to them, of course – were even worse. We had a couple that had been immersed in water (I’m still not sure how), a number of units that had been dropped, stepped on, struck with various objects, or in one memorable case, run over with a car, and a large collection that various users had tried to “fix” – ostensibly to correct some picture quality problem or other, but more likely to get one or more premium channels without paying for them. The one that stands out in my memory, though, was the box that was returned with a three-inch hole melted through the plastic housing, straight through the main circuit board, and down into the metal base plate. When our field technician inquired, the customer admitted she had placed a large, lighted candle onto the top of the box. She got positively indignant when we told her she was going to have to pay for the replacement…
Now, I’ve spent a lot of time in customer service roles; I spent nearly four years in cable television alone. But despite that and subsequent experience, plus a master’s degree in business and almost half of a doctorate in management, I’m still unable to fathom why the customer believed that the damage to this decoder unit wasn’t her fault and that the costs should be shouldered by the company. Certainly, nowhere in her contract did either party specify that a cable box was – or should be – able to function as a candlestick or an ashtray; nor did this customer attempt to deny that she had willfully lighted the candle and set it on top of the box. But she was still refusing to pay – and threatening legal action of her own against the company – when the destruction of her credit nearly resulted in her car being repossessed, her being evicted from her apartment, and her being fired from her job…
I’ve seen a lot of cases of bad customer service in my time, and I’ve seen a lot of asinine behavior on the part of customers over the years – but this one wins. I think the lesson here for all of us is, try not to be that customer. And the lesson for business managers is that customers like this one are out there, so make sure that your customer service reps are equipped to deal with cases like these, and that your supervisors and managers are prepared to back them up. Because sooner or later your company is going to run across this customer – or someone very much like her…
Monday, February 28, 2011
Sunday, February 27, 2011
The Ethics of Collections
I've spent some time as a collections officer myself, and I know that of all of the parts of a company's General Administration functions, it's always going to be collections that are the farthest into the grey area. But with the onset of our current recession and the general decay of civility in these United States I'm starting to worry about both the way this formerly honorable profession is being practiced, and the rather silly ways the general public seems to think about it. When the story surfaced in January about a cancer patient whose insurance company dropped him because a clerical error shorted one of his monthly payments by 2 cents (they say he had three months to make it up and refused; he says they never mentioned the shortage) I realized that it's time we all took a closer look at the subject...
If you've ever received a collections letter - and in particular, if you've ever become aware of a debt because of a collections letter with no previous notice received - you already know that we've entered an era of particularly ugly business dealings. Any shortage will do, and in many cases we've seen a tendency to trash people's credit and ask questions later. This is particularly upsetting in the case where there isn't any insurance or other third-party relationship involved; the company has simply decided to lower the boom on a customer without regard for future business they might receive from that customer or the damage to their public image as a result of hurting that customer. As a business analyst and a management scholar I must confess that such practices offend me in a professional sense; it's a small-minded, bureaucratic, rules-are-more-important-than-thinking act of nonsense that damages the company, destroys jobs as well as lives, and takes value away from the stockholders (who, let us remember, actually own the company). If I were the CEO I would fire anyone responsible for such practices - and, in fact, it would be my job to do so as the agent of the stockholders (as noted above). But, unfortunately, the issue isn't that simple...
In any business that isn't strictly cash-and-carry (which is most of them, these days) there are going to be some people who will use your billing cycle as an unofficial loan provider, intentionally delaying payment until the last moment. If you don't charge interest on accounts receivable (and most businesses don't) there is no real penalty for delaying payment to 90 days (or whatever your cutoff is for sending people to collections), and every day they don't give you the funds is one day they can earn interest on those funds for themselves. Unfortunately, those accounts don't look any different from any other account, and neither do the people connected with them; there's no way to know who is a scam artist you should go after with a vengeance and who is an innocent customer having a clerical error whom you should cut a break - and even if there was, doing do would be asinine from a legal standpoint. The only way to prosecute any such case successfully is to treat every one of them the same way - and that means coming down hard on people who missed 2 cents because of a clerical error...
So how should an intelligent company handle these issues? Individual review of every case by thoughtful and caring case managers is impossible when we start talking about thousands or millions of cases, unless we want to dramatically raise our prices and lose all of our customers (thus destroying our stockholders' equity), but damaging people over a 2-cent oversight makes us look like idiots, gets public opinion against us, and loses customers (thus also destroying stockholder equity). By the same token, risking someone's life or health or even peace of mind over pocket change isn't ethically correct - but neither is bankrupting the people who have invested their money in our company because we don't do our stated duty and insist on payment for products or services we've provided. So how do we split that difference; how do we manage to be tough but fair when we know for a certainty that our clientele includes honest people who make honest mistakes, scam artists who are more than willing to destroy us for their own purposes, and the occasional person who has just made a potentially lethal clerical error because they were distracted by life-threatening illness and/or the resultant crushing depression?
It's worth thinking about...
If you've ever received a collections letter - and in particular, if you've ever become aware of a debt because of a collections letter with no previous notice received - you already know that we've entered an era of particularly ugly business dealings. Any shortage will do, and in many cases we've seen a tendency to trash people's credit and ask questions later. This is particularly upsetting in the case where there isn't any insurance or other third-party relationship involved; the company has simply decided to lower the boom on a customer without regard for future business they might receive from that customer or the damage to their public image as a result of hurting that customer. As a business analyst and a management scholar I must confess that such practices offend me in a professional sense; it's a small-minded, bureaucratic, rules-are-more-important-than-thinking act of nonsense that damages the company, destroys jobs as well as lives, and takes value away from the stockholders (who, let us remember, actually own the company). If I were the CEO I would fire anyone responsible for such practices - and, in fact, it would be my job to do so as the agent of the stockholders (as noted above). But, unfortunately, the issue isn't that simple...
In any business that isn't strictly cash-and-carry (which is most of them, these days) there are going to be some people who will use your billing cycle as an unofficial loan provider, intentionally delaying payment until the last moment. If you don't charge interest on accounts receivable (and most businesses don't) there is no real penalty for delaying payment to 90 days (or whatever your cutoff is for sending people to collections), and every day they don't give you the funds is one day they can earn interest on those funds for themselves. Unfortunately, those accounts don't look any different from any other account, and neither do the people connected with them; there's no way to know who is a scam artist you should go after with a vengeance and who is an innocent customer having a clerical error whom you should cut a break - and even if there was, doing do would be asinine from a legal standpoint. The only way to prosecute any such case successfully is to treat every one of them the same way - and that means coming down hard on people who missed 2 cents because of a clerical error...
So how should an intelligent company handle these issues? Individual review of every case by thoughtful and caring case managers is impossible when we start talking about thousands or millions of cases, unless we want to dramatically raise our prices and lose all of our customers (thus destroying our stockholders' equity), but damaging people over a 2-cent oversight makes us look like idiots, gets public opinion against us, and loses customers (thus also destroying stockholder equity). By the same token, risking someone's life or health or even peace of mind over pocket change isn't ethically correct - but neither is bankrupting the people who have invested their money in our company because we don't do our stated duty and insist on payment for products or services we've provided. So how do we split that difference; how do we manage to be tough but fair when we know for a certainty that our clientele includes honest people who make honest mistakes, scam artists who are more than willing to destroy us for their own purposes, and the occasional person who has just made a potentially lethal clerical error because they were distracted by life-threatening illness and/or the resultant crushing depression?
It's worth thinking about...
Saturday, February 26, 2011
The Grad School Diaries: Rapids Ahead
If touring a school during the application process is the bend in the River of Time that leads into the Graduate School stretch of the river, then job talks must surely be the rapids that signal the end of the passage and the bend leading to your next stop. It’s a short address – usually 60 to 90 minutes, depending on the discipline and the department – during which an active job seeker can tell the assembled faculty (and whoever else had time to show up) about the research he or she is doing, the broader implications of that research and its importance to the field, and possibly even how that research draws from or is related to work already being done by members of the department. In some cases, people will attempt to address a major part of the field that is not represented by anyone currently on the faculty, while in others people will attempt to recruit new scholars who will be able to work collaboratively with the existing faculty…
Of course, there are persistent rumors of other schools considering other factors, such as number of publications, amount of grant money you control, teaching expertise, or reputation in the field, but most of the doctoral students dismiss such ideas as mere fantasy – and irrelevant in any case. We are months or years away from such performances ourselves (most likely three years in my case), and our attendance at such events is more a matter of learning our profession and being polite to our visitors than anything else. The faculty will ask our opinions, of course, and will probably listen to them, if only to get a wider perspective on how the job talks were received. But the simple fact is that all of us are here only for a short while, whereas our faculty will have to live with whoever they hire for a six-year tenure cycle at the very least, and possibly for the rest of their lives (if the newly appointed Assistant Professors are granted tenure)…
Due to scheduling conflicts (I am teaching in the mornings this semester, and I’ve got several after-work commitments) I was only able to attend two of the six job talks held this fall, and only one of the evening receptions held for the visitors giving the talks. Still, it was an interesting experience, and I find myself wondering how well I will do, three or four years into the future, when I’m out in the world doing these. Not that I have a problem with public speaking, of course; I’ve been teaching and presenting results to groups of clients for years now, and this past year I’ve been teaching at MSU itself. And I’ve had more job interviews, both as an applicant and as an interviewer, than most people ever will, due to my hopscotch career path and some of the rather odd things I’ve done for a living. But this process seems less like an interview, or even an audition, and more like a chess game where you can’t see the board and no one will tell you the rules – and I’m going to be a dark horse regardless…
I’m older than any of the candidates giving job talks this semester by a decade or so; the more experienced applicants who will be presenting over the winter are closer to my age, but still younger than I am. I’m less mathematically oriented, and possess much less training in statistics or research methods, than anyone in the applicant pool, and that isn’t likely to change much when I’m on the other side of the table. I’m still going to be older, less capable, more qualitative and less quantitative, and more oriented towards the practice of management than the study of management than our department (or any others like it) would be willing to even consider. And, to be honest with you and myself, I don’t believe that I care…
I didn’t take on this oddball quest to compete with the best and the brightest – many of whom are on this journey with me; our doctoral corps is one of the best – anymore than I did it for prestige, fame, or adulation. This is an opportunity to find out what I’m really made of, and if I am especially lucky, to find out a few things I’ve always wanted to know and help train the next generation of both managers and management scholars. It may be that my contributions to the field will be small; it may be that I will never measure up to the applicants we’re watching give their job talks today, let alone the august personages who will evaluate them. But I expect to leave the field just a little bit better than it was when I found it, and more than that no man can ever really ask…
Always assuming I can make it through the rapids, of course…
Of course, there are persistent rumors of other schools considering other factors, such as number of publications, amount of grant money you control, teaching expertise, or reputation in the field, but most of the doctoral students dismiss such ideas as mere fantasy – and irrelevant in any case. We are months or years away from such performances ourselves (most likely three years in my case), and our attendance at such events is more a matter of learning our profession and being polite to our visitors than anything else. The faculty will ask our opinions, of course, and will probably listen to them, if only to get a wider perspective on how the job talks were received. But the simple fact is that all of us are here only for a short while, whereas our faculty will have to live with whoever they hire for a six-year tenure cycle at the very least, and possibly for the rest of their lives (if the newly appointed Assistant Professors are granted tenure)…
Due to scheduling conflicts (I am teaching in the mornings this semester, and I’ve got several after-work commitments) I was only able to attend two of the six job talks held this fall, and only one of the evening receptions held for the visitors giving the talks. Still, it was an interesting experience, and I find myself wondering how well I will do, three or four years into the future, when I’m out in the world doing these. Not that I have a problem with public speaking, of course; I’ve been teaching and presenting results to groups of clients for years now, and this past year I’ve been teaching at MSU itself. And I’ve had more job interviews, both as an applicant and as an interviewer, than most people ever will, due to my hopscotch career path and some of the rather odd things I’ve done for a living. But this process seems less like an interview, or even an audition, and more like a chess game where you can’t see the board and no one will tell you the rules – and I’m going to be a dark horse regardless…
I’m older than any of the candidates giving job talks this semester by a decade or so; the more experienced applicants who will be presenting over the winter are closer to my age, but still younger than I am. I’m less mathematically oriented, and possess much less training in statistics or research methods, than anyone in the applicant pool, and that isn’t likely to change much when I’m on the other side of the table. I’m still going to be older, less capable, more qualitative and less quantitative, and more oriented towards the practice of management than the study of management than our department (or any others like it) would be willing to even consider. And, to be honest with you and myself, I don’t believe that I care…
I didn’t take on this oddball quest to compete with the best and the brightest – many of whom are on this journey with me; our doctoral corps is one of the best – anymore than I did it for prestige, fame, or adulation. This is an opportunity to find out what I’m really made of, and if I am especially lucky, to find out a few things I’ve always wanted to know and help train the next generation of both managers and management scholars. It may be that my contributions to the field will be small; it may be that I will never measure up to the applicants we’re watching give their job talks today, let alone the august personages who will evaluate them. But I expect to leave the field just a little bit better than it was when I found it, and more than that no man can ever really ask…
Always assuming I can make it through the rapids, of course…
Friday, February 25, 2011
The Enemy Within
As some of you already know, I’ve been teaching a class on strategic management issues for the University for the past few years, and one of the things we cover is how to look for threats in your environment. The competition is the most obvious factor, assuming you have any direct competitors, but one also needs to keep an eye on things like suppliers and vendors, growing or declining demographic groups, government regulations, evolving technology, and so on. We also touch on threats – or weaknesses, at least – that originate within the company, including things that it doesn’t do well, difficulty in obtaining capital, supply chain and logistics issues, accounting and operations problems, customer service and the like. However, after reading a story that came out of Orlando today, I’m starting to think I should include “employees who are trying to destroy you” on the list of threats – or weaknesses, at least…
You can pick up the original story from the Orlando Sentinel site if you want, but what happened was that the company which makes the popular “Whack A Mole” games for children discovered that one of their employees was building a software fault that would make all of their machines fail after 50 to 500 random plays. In the short run, this would make the programmer indispensible to the company, and thus protect him from being fired or downsized, but in the long run he appears to have been planning to start his own company and sell customers who had purchased one of the “defective” machines a software module that would eliminate the fault. The scheme might even have worked – if he hadn’t started bragging about it…
At first glance, it seems like a bolt from out of a clear blue sky – any company could have saboteurs on the payroll – but given that the penalties for being caught include losing your job, losing your career, and being charged with a felony that carries a 15-year jail term, it’s not something we usually need to worry about as managers. Except that when you read the details of the case, it turns out that the employee was being paid as a contractor until the company bullied him into becoming a regular employee, whereupon he started writing the booby-trapped code and making plans to go into business for himself full-time. We can only speculate on whether the change in employment status included a loss of pay, freedom, or favorable working conditions, but it’s hard to imagine anyone going to this much trouble to screw over an employer that had given him or her a BETTER employment package…
Now, I don’t mean to suggest that the employee’s actions are defensible, regardless of how the company had treated him in the past; what I am suggesting is that they were predictable – or should have been. One can never be certain, of course, but an alert management team should have some idea of whether their employees are happy and satisfied with their compensation and working conditions, and they should definitely keep an eye on anyone they have forced to undergo this sort of radical change. At the very least, they should have caught on when the software failures first began to appear. The unfortunate truth is that employee sabotage is rare, but it’s hardly impossible, which makes it a genuine threat to any business. You can contain it by working closely with your employees, maintaining good relationships with any who are in critical jobs, and instituting incentive programs (and employee ownership programs where applicable) that make it worthwhile for every employee to enforce quality control measures and guard against sabotage. But ignoring the possibility is like putting a bag over your head and dancing in traffic…
Maybe I will update those lesson plans…
You can pick up the original story from the Orlando Sentinel site if you want, but what happened was that the company which makes the popular “Whack A Mole” games for children discovered that one of their employees was building a software fault that would make all of their machines fail after 50 to 500 random plays. In the short run, this would make the programmer indispensible to the company, and thus protect him from being fired or downsized, but in the long run he appears to have been planning to start his own company and sell customers who had purchased one of the “defective” machines a software module that would eliminate the fault. The scheme might even have worked – if he hadn’t started bragging about it…
At first glance, it seems like a bolt from out of a clear blue sky – any company could have saboteurs on the payroll – but given that the penalties for being caught include losing your job, losing your career, and being charged with a felony that carries a 15-year jail term, it’s not something we usually need to worry about as managers. Except that when you read the details of the case, it turns out that the employee was being paid as a contractor until the company bullied him into becoming a regular employee, whereupon he started writing the booby-trapped code and making plans to go into business for himself full-time. We can only speculate on whether the change in employment status included a loss of pay, freedom, or favorable working conditions, but it’s hard to imagine anyone going to this much trouble to screw over an employer that had given him or her a BETTER employment package…
Now, I don’t mean to suggest that the employee’s actions are defensible, regardless of how the company had treated him in the past; what I am suggesting is that they were predictable – or should have been. One can never be certain, of course, but an alert management team should have some idea of whether their employees are happy and satisfied with their compensation and working conditions, and they should definitely keep an eye on anyone they have forced to undergo this sort of radical change. At the very least, they should have caught on when the software failures first began to appear. The unfortunate truth is that employee sabotage is rare, but it’s hardly impossible, which makes it a genuine threat to any business. You can contain it by working closely with your employees, maintaining good relationships with any who are in critical jobs, and instituting incentive programs (and employee ownership programs where applicable) that make it worthwhile for every employee to enforce quality control measures and guard against sabotage. But ignoring the possibility is like putting a bag over your head and dancing in traffic…
Maybe I will update those lesson plans…
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Everything Must Go!
I was reading a notice on the Consumerist website the other day about the Borders Books chain closing down a bunch of their locations and having “liquidation sales” to get rid of the remaining inventory – and fixtures, and anything else – at those locations. As you might expect from the source, the post was full of complaints about liquidation sales and the shady practices associated with them, and I found myself reflecting back over years to the first few times I had encountered such sales, and bumped into such practices. Looking at the whole issue now, with the perspective of a middle-aged business scholar, I’m not sure what I find more upsetting: the fact that nothing seems to have changed, or the closely related fact that people still fall for these tactics…
First of all, consider the nature of the transactions going on in such sales. If the company is actually going out of business they have no motivation to care what their customers think about them; they’re not going to be here next week. If the company itself is still around they may have hired a liquidation company to sell off everything in the locations being closed, and glean whatever revenue they can in the process. Liquidators also don’t care what the consumer thinks about them, because they aren’t going to be around next week (by then they will have packed up their lurid yellow-and-black banner signs and moved on to their next client). In either case, there is no motivation to provide customer service, be polite to the customer, or even worry about the condition of the products being sold; just slap a sticker that says “No Returns/All Sales Final/Sold As-Is” on everything and let the buyer beware…
Then there’s the pricing issue. Many companies choose to jack up their prices before taking the huge discounts proclaimed by the banners out front, so that even with the “80% Off! Everything Must Go!” sales being offered, you’re still being charged more for the orphaned merchandise without guarantee or warranty. I recall one such sale at a store near our house where some products I had been looking at for around $200 were “On Sale” for $289 dollars during the “Going Out of Business” sale – and were later marked up to $329. The motivation here is obvious – every penny you can squeeze out of the customers will either placate your creditors or increase the amount you will salvage from the bankruptcy and walk away with, and there’s no reason to worry about what your customers will think, since they won’t be your customers next week anyway. Some companies will actually bring in additional merchandise (including things the store never carried when it was in business) to sell on these terms, just so they can stretch out a little more revenue…
Why anyone still falls for these tactics remains an open question. Certainly anyone with a web-enabled phone should be able to check prices on the spot and determine what is actually a bargain and what is a scam. Similarly, most people should be able to grasp that paying thousands of dollars for something without a warranty or any way to return it (in some cases, without even being allowed to look inside the package before you buy it!) isn’t functionally any different from buying something off the back of a truck – except that you can’t be charged for receiving stolen property OR turn in the sellers to the police if the thing you bought turns out to be a brick in an otherwise empty box. In fact, if you sign an invoice that gives away all of your legal recourse, there isn’t anything you’re going to be able to do about it; that’s what “no recourse” means!
It has often been said that it isn’t possible to cheat an honest man. I have not found this to be true; just because someone is honest that doesn’t mean that they aren’t also naïve, credulous, or stupid. However, it has frequently been my observation that it generally isn’t necessary to cheat an honest man, since any community will be filled with a sufficient number of greedy, larcenous, unethical fools to accomplish almost any practical purpose. It’s entirely possible to find a good bargain during the liquidation of a company, just as it is entirely possible to win at cards; I’ve done both on occasion, and probably will again. But it’s also true that the world is full of predators, and the only way to avoid becoming prey is to stop acting like prey…
First of all, consider the nature of the transactions going on in such sales. If the company is actually going out of business they have no motivation to care what their customers think about them; they’re not going to be here next week. If the company itself is still around they may have hired a liquidation company to sell off everything in the locations being closed, and glean whatever revenue they can in the process. Liquidators also don’t care what the consumer thinks about them, because they aren’t going to be around next week (by then they will have packed up their lurid yellow-and-black banner signs and moved on to their next client). In either case, there is no motivation to provide customer service, be polite to the customer, or even worry about the condition of the products being sold; just slap a sticker that says “No Returns/All Sales Final/Sold As-Is” on everything and let the buyer beware…
Then there’s the pricing issue. Many companies choose to jack up their prices before taking the huge discounts proclaimed by the banners out front, so that even with the “80% Off! Everything Must Go!” sales being offered, you’re still being charged more for the orphaned merchandise without guarantee or warranty. I recall one such sale at a store near our house where some products I had been looking at for around $200 were “On Sale” for $289 dollars during the “Going Out of Business” sale – and were later marked up to $329. The motivation here is obvious – every penny you can squeeze out of the customers will either placate your creditors or increase the amount you will salvage from the bankruptcy and walk away with, and there’s no reason to worry about what your customers will think, since they won’t be your customers next week anyway. Some companies will actually bring in additional merchandise (including things the store never carried when it was in business) to sell on these terms, just so they can stretch out a little more revenue…
Why anyone still falls for these tactics remains an open question. Certainly anyone with a web-enabled phone should be able to check prices on the spot and determine what is actually a bargain and what is a scam. Similarly, most people should be able to grasp that paying thousands of dollars for something without a warranty or any way to return it (in some cases, without even being allowed to look inside the package before you buy it!) isn’t functionally any different from buying something off the back of a truck – except that you can’t be charged for receiving stolen property OR turn in the sellers to the police if the thing you bought turns out to be a brick in an otherwise empty box. In fact, if you sign an invoice that gives away all of your legal recourse, there isn’t anything you’re going to be able to do about it; that’s what “no recourse” means!
It has often been said that it isn’t possible to cheat an honest man. I have not found this to be true; just because someone is honest that doesn’t mean that they aren’t also naïve, credulous, or stupid. However, it has frequently been my observation that it generally isn’t necessary to cheat an honest man, since any community will be filled with a sufficient number of greedy, larcenous, unethical fools to accomplish almost any practical purpose. It’s entirely possible to find a good bargain during the liquidation of a company, just as it is entirely possible to win at cards; I’ve done both on occasion, and probably will again. But it’s also true that the world is full of predators, and the only way to avoid becoming prey is to stop acting like prey…
Monday, February 21, 2011
Have a Heart
It has been almost 17 years since I left the cable television industry, during which time the technology involved has changed beyond recognition not just once, but several times. In the early 1990s broadband service was still under development, but we knew it was coming; 18-inch microwave dishes and the satellites to supply them were being tested by Hughes Satellite Systems and cable companies were upgrading their systems to fiber optic equipment that would allow them to carry high-speed Internet connections in addition to a vastly increased number of cable channels. The company I worked for used 18Mhz microwave signals to provide service to large apartment complexes within line-of-sight from our download site, and then distributed the signal to any residents who wanted to pay for it using an encrypted signal and decoder boxes – the much-maligned “cable boxes” to limit unauthorized use. Of course, these methods were always of limited utility; some people managed to steal the signal anyway, and a surprising number of people also tried to steal the cable boxes…
The thing to keep in mind here is that despite what most cable customers (and apparently nearly all thieves) at the time believed, most cable decoder systems weren’t actually decryption computers stuffed full of secret codes that would resolve a collection of distorted snow into a clear picture. What they were was an electronic switchbox that would descramble those signals when instructed to do so by the master computer in our control room – no control instructions, no pictures; not even broadcast channels would be visible. To get these instructions, the box needed to be authorized to do so by a member of the company with the correct security codes – quite frequently me, as it happens. Stealing the box, hooking it up in a location not authorized to have it, or worse still hooking it up to another cable system would be completely useless – but that didn’t keep people from trying it several hundred times each year…
Now, in fairness, a lot of those people weren’t actually trying to steal our decoder boxes; a lot of them just absent-mindedly packed up the boxes when they moved, and didn’t bother to return them until I sent their account to collections for the amount of the cable box (and generally their unpaid bills). It’s just that there would have been no way for me to tell the difference from our offices, and no contractual reason for me to care. But when there were extenuating circumstances I would always do my best to help. Customers who had been robbed, for example, I would usually excuse (assuming they could produce an actual police report about the theft), and I let the man who was bringing his cable box in to the office to return it when his car was hit by a drunk driver and destroyed off the hook, although it helped that he brought in the police report, insurance report, and the remains of the decoder box with him. Thus I was very disappointed in the cable company in this story from the Morning Call site , who appear to have completely dropped the ball following a tragic fire and gas explosion…
In this particular case, RCN Cable was attempting to charge a family that had just lost their home in a gas explosion for their missing cable boxes. The customers were offering to document the loss, and the event had been all over the local news anyway, but the zombies running the call center wouldn’t budge off of regular procedures or let them speak to anyone of higher authority. In this case I don’t have to extrapolate (or guess) what the right thing to do was; I’ve done that exact job, and I know what the right thing to do was: document everything, let the accountants write off the equipment loss on the corporation’s tax returns, and let the customer off the hook with our blessings and best wishes. Instead we’ve all be treated to a teachable moment about how the ability to think – or at least escalate a call to someone who can – is more important than blind adherence to general rules. Unless you want your company slammed on the local television news, yelled at by the mayor of your city, and mocked by millions of scruffy bloggers all over the Internet, have a heart – or at least have someone on call who has one during business hours…
The thing to keep in mind here is that despite what most cable customers (and apparently nearly all thieves) at the time believed, most cable decoder systems weren’t actually decryption computers stuffed full of secret codes that would resolve a collection of distorted snow into a clear picture. What they were was an electronic switchbox that would descramble those signals when instructed to do so by the master computer in our control room – no control instructions, no pictures; not even broadcast channels would be visible. To get these instructions, the box needed to be authorized to do so by a member of the company with the correct security codes – quite frequently me, as it happens. Stealing the box, hooking it up in a location not authorized to have it, or worse still hooking it up to another cable system would be completely useless – but that didn’t keep people from trying it several hundred times each year…
Now, in fairness, a lot of those people weren’t actually trying to steal our decoder boxes; a lot of them just absent-mindedly packed up the boxes when they moved, and didn’t bother to return them until I sent their account to collections for the amount of the cable box (and generally their unpaid bills). It’s just that there would have been no way for me to tell the difference from our offices, and no contractual reason for me to care. But when there were extenuating circumstances I would always do my best to help. Customers who had been robbed, for example, I would usually excuse (assuming they could produce an actual police report about the theft), and I let the man who was bringing his cable box in to the office to return it when his car was hit by a drunk driver and destroyed off the hook, although it helped that he brought in the police report, insurance report, and the remains of the decoder box with him. Thus I was very disappointed in the cable company in this story from the Morning Call site , who appear to have completely dropped the ball following a tragic fire and gas explosion…
In this particular case, RCN Cable was attempting to charge a family that had just lost their home in a gas explosion for their missing cable boxes. The customers were offering to document the loss, and the event had been all over the local news anyway, but the zombies running the call center wouldn’t budge off of regular procedures or let them speak to anyone of higher authority. In this case I don’t have to extrapolate (or guess) what the right thing to do was; I’ve done that exact job, and I know what the right thing to do was: document everything, let the accountants write off the equipment loss on the corporation’s tax returns, and let the customer off the hook with our blessings and best wishes. Instead we’ve all be treated to a teachable moment about how the ability to think – or at least escalate a call to someone who can – is more important than blind adherence to general rules. Unless you want your company slammed on the local television news, yelled at by the mayor of your city, and mocked by millions of scruffy bloggers all over the Internet, have a heart – or at least have someone on call who has one during business hours…
Sunday, February 20, 2011
The Ethics of Free Speech
Ever since the massacre in Tucson earlier this year the airwaves (and Internet channels) have been jammed with people debating whether the rather militant rhetoric of the past two years had anything to do with the shooting. Even granted that the shooter was a deranged lunatic, and might just as easily have shot someone because his dog told him to or because he wanted to impress some actress he had never met, much of the man’s blathering were right out of the right-wing talk-radio playbook, and there is no denying that he shot someone that people on the far Right wanted shot. The people who have been spreading that kind of talk are claiming they had nothing to do with this, and railing at the people on the left for trying to make political capital out of a tragedy. Meanwhile, I’m wondering where the right to free speech and the right to make money on inflammatory speech end and the crime of inciting violence begins – and who should get to decide that question…
First off, there’s no avoiding a great American tradition of intemperate political rhetoric, going back to the Revolutionary War. There is also no denying that if millions of people didn’t agree with those conservative sentiments, they wouldn’t tune in to listen to them or show up to see them, and all of these far-right pundits would be doing something else for a living. And, as business people, we have to acknowledge that radio and television stations (and the occasional live meeting venue) making money off of Tea Party functions and the like is good for the economy, provides value to whoever owns the channels/venues, creates jobs, and so on. But if there is a real, non-zero chance that by advocating for armed insurrection, or “Second Amendment remedies,” as one Tea Party candidate called them during the last election, will result in actual bloodshed, can we permit such events to continue?
By the same token, there isn’t much difference between banning a specific political agenda because you don’t believe it is safe, and banning the same speech because you don’t like it. Even the most fair-minded people in the world applying the most pragmatic and apolitical standards imaginable are still only human, and will have a difficult time avoiding some personal opinion bias in those circumstances. There is also the issue of underserved and underrepresented communities – people who will never get to air their political positions unless the right to free speech is extended to every member of our society, whether we like (or agree with) their positions or not. But if a group of people is using the civil right of freedom of expression to advocate (or even influence) the oppression, persecution or destruction of members of our society, can we afford to allow such speech to continue?
Which brings me to the obvious business connection: If you are the owner of a radio station, a television station, an assembly hall, or a print publication, does your obligation to your various stakeholders (the people who work for you, the people who sell you your paper and ink, all of the people in the community who make a living providing services to those industries, etc.) outweigh your ethical responsibility to the people who may be hurt if harmful speech is broadcast? Or does your responsibility to those in harm’s way mean that you must turn away business that you need to remain solvent, pay your employees, and help to keep your community afloat? Does it matter that refusing to print or broadcast such speech MAY have negative consequences for some unknown and abstract victim at some random future point, while the failure of your business WILL cause definite amounts of human suffering right now? Or does only the principle matter – and if so, which one?
It’s worth thinking about…
First off, there’s no avoiding a great American tradition of intemperate political rhetoric, going back to the Revolutionary War. There is also no denying that if millions of people didn’t agree with those conservative sentiments, they wouldn’t tune in to listen to them or show up to see them, and all of these far-right pundits would be doing something else for a living. And, as business people, we have to acknowledge that radio and television stations (and the occasional live meeting venue) making money off of Tea Party functions and the like is good for the economy, provides value to whoever owns the channels/venues, creates jobs, and so on. But if there is a real, non-zero chance that by advocating for armed insurrection, or “Second Amendment remedies,” as one Tea Party candidate called them during the last election, will result in actual bloodshed, can we permit such events to continue?
By the same token, there isn’t much difference between banning a specific political agenda because you don’t believe it is safe, and banning the same speech because you don’t like it. Even the most fair-minded people in the world applying the most pragmatic and apolitical standards imaginable are still only human, and will have a difficult time avoiding some personal opinion bias in those circumstances. There is also the issue of underserved and underrepresented communities – people who will never get to air their political positions unless the right to free speech is extended to every member of our society, whether we like (or agree with) their positions or not. But if a group of people is using the civil right of freedom of expression to advocate (or even influence) the oppression, persecution or destruction of members of our society, can we afford to allow such speech to continue?
Which brings me to the obvious business connection: If you are the owner of a radio station, a television station, an assembly hall, or a print publication, does your obligation to your various stakeholders (the people who work for you, the people who sell you your paper and ink, all of the people in the community who make a living providing services to those industries, etc.) outweigh your ethical responsibility to the people who may be hurt if harmful speech is broadcast? Or does your responsibility to those in harm’s way mean that you must turn away business that you need to remain solvent, pay your employees, and help to keep your community afloat? Does it matter that refusing to print or broadcast such speech MAY have negative consequences for some unknown and abstract victim at some random future point, while the failure of your business WILL cause definite amounts of human suffering right now? Or does only the principle matter – and if so, which one?
It’s worth thinking about…
Saturday, February 19, 2011
The Grad School Diaries: Long Day’s Journey Into Night
East Lansing, Michigan, is connected to the Detroit airport by a bus service called the “Michigan Flyer,” which runs between the two locations with stops in Jackson and Ann Arbor several times each day. It’s significantly cheaper than leaving your car in the long-term parking lot in Detroit, and has the added advantage of not having to leave you car somewhere that car thieves know you won’t be coming back to for several days, but it also has the drawback of making you wait until the next flyer departure before you can go home. Which is what I’m doing now; my flight from Los Angeles got in at 8:00 and the next flyer isn’t until 10:30. Even worse, as it turns out, is that all of the food service locations in the Detroit airport shut down at 8:00; by the time I got out onto the concourse there was no chance of getting anything to eat, let alone finding somewhere to camp out and wait for the bus…
Fortunately for me there’s a waiting area (you couldn’t quite dignify it enough to call it a waiting room) just inside the building from the bus stop area, and it’s deserted this time of night. I was able to grab a bench across from the vending machines to throw my bags on, and I’m sitting here munching on stuffers without any aesthetic, social, moral or nutritionally redeeming features and a bottle of pop. It’s possible that the wrappers would be better for you than the food items, but at least they taste good, and they’ll keep me from getting the shakes or having to eat the specialized diabetic food bars in my luggage before I get back to Lansing. And there’s no denying that I could probably use a moment for quiet reflection…
Union Station in Los Angeles was exactly as I remembered it, down to the absurd parking arrangements and the art deco mission-style architecture. Getting my wife and our daughter checked in went smoothly for once; so did my check-in at LAX the following morning. And, in fairness, I have to say that the flight back was no more miserable than such passages normally are. But my awareness of the past few days has mostly been of being vaguely uncomfortable the whole time; the way you feel when you can’t get comfortable sitting down or lying down. Meeting friends in Long Beach for dinner at one of the places we used to go often when we lived nearby; saying goodbye to my father and stepmother and leaving the house I grew up in; sitting around the all-too-familiar terminal at LAX; even the airplane itself have felt vaguely off. Perhaps my discomfort isn’t really physical…
Steinbeck, among others, wrote about a feeling of wellness that one gets when all is right with the world – or as much of it as you are personally responsible for. To the extent that you can have such a feeling in a seldom-used waiting room on the parking level of an airport – or, for that matter, in an airplane, a borrowed car, a beloved place that is no longer your home, or the house that never really was (despite living there 14 years) – I don’t have it now. As an accomplished strategist and better than fair tactician (whatever one might think of my abilities as a strategy scholar, which is a very different thing), I’ve got the self-awareness to know when my knowledge is incomplete and my understanding of the tactical picture is dangerously weak. And at the moment, the only thing I know for sure is that there’s trouble coming, and I can’t stop it…
I don’t know if my wife and I can overcome the alienation that has come between us, and get back to good. I don’t know if the powers that be will let me finish the doctoral program, or if they’ll use any number of things to make my position untenable and try to run me off. I don’t know if I can ever return to the city I still think of as “home,” or if I will get the chance to find a new one, somewhere out there in America. I’m twelve hours into this sixteen-hour trip back to where I live, and eighteen months into the five-year quest to get the letters P, H and D added to the end of my name. Will I find my way back into the light? Is there one more time in the sun for me, and if I can reach it, will I have the sense to stay put this time? Will I get the love of my life back, or will this always be between us? Is this [expletives deleted] bus EVER going to arrive and carry me off into the darkness? As usual, I’ve got no answers; just a cold and lonely journey as a long day passes into night…
Fortunately for me there’s a waiting area (you couldn’t quite dignify it enough to call it a waiting room) just inside the building from the bus stop area, and it’s deserted this time of night. I was able to grab a bench across from the vending machines to throw my bags on, and I’m sitting here munching on stuffers without any aesthetic, social, moral or nutritionally redeeming features and a bottle of pop. It’s possible that the wrappers would be better for you than the food items, but at least they taste good, and they’ll keep me from getting the shakes or having to eat the specialized diabetic food bars in my luggage before I get back to Lansing. And there’s no denying that I could probably use a moment for quiet reflection…
Union Station in Los Angeles was exactly as I remembered it, down to the absurd parking arrangements and the art deco mission-style architecture. Getting my wife and our daughter checked in went smoothly for once; so did my check-in at LAX the following morning. And, in fairness, I have to say that the flight back was no more miserable than such passages normally are. But my awareness of the past few days has mostly been of being vaguely uncomfortable the whole time; the way you feel when you can’t get comfortable sitting down or lying down. Meeting friends in Long Beach for dinner at one of the places we used to go often when we lived nearby; saying goodbye to my father and stepmother and leaving the house I grew up in; sitting around the all-too-familiar terminal at LAX; even the airplane itself have felt vaguely off. Perhaps my discomfort isn’t really physical…
Steinbeck, among others, wrote about a feeling of wellness that one gets when all is right with the world – or as much of it as you are personally responsible for. To the extent that you can have such a feeling in a seldom-used waiting room on the parking level of an airport – or, for that matter, in an airplane, a borrowed car, a beloved place that is no longer your home, or the house that never really was (despite living there 14 years) – I don’t have it now. As an accomplished strategist and better than fair tactician (whatever one might think of my abilities as a strategy scholar, which is a very different thing), I’ve got the self-awareness to know when my knowledge is incomplete and my understanding of the tactical picture is dangerously weak. And at the moment, the only thing I know for sure is that there’s trouble coming, and I can’t stop it…
I don’t know if my wife and I can overcome the alienation that has come between us, and get back to good. I don’t know if the powers that be will let me finish the doctoral program, or if they’ll use any number of things to make my position untenable and try to run me off. I don’t know if I can ever return to the city I still think of as “home,” or if I will get the chance to find a new one, somewhere out there in America. I’m twelve hours into this sixteen-hour trip back to where I live, and eighteen months into the five-year quest to get the letters P, H and D added to the end of my name. Will I find my way back into the light? Is there one more time in the sun for me, and if I can reach it, will I have the sense to stay put this time? Will I get the love of my life back, or will this always be between us? Is this [expletives deleted] bus EVER going to arrive and carry me off into the darkness? As usual, I’ve got no answers; just a cold and lonely journey as a long day passes into night…
Friday, February 18, 2011
The Trouble with Outsourcing
I was reading Michael Hiltzik’s column in the Los Angeles Times business section the other day, and nodding along with his contention that the problem with outsourcing – having various parts of your product or service built/performed by lower-cost workers or subcontractors overseas – is that people keep treating it like a moral issue, when it occurred to me that this is a lot like saying that the problem with the Pacific is that it is wet, or that the problem with the Sun is that it’s a huge ball of radioactive fire. Hiltzik contends that it is obviously immoral to abandon “loyal” American workers and attempt to gain cost savings by having the work done elsewhere in the world; I contend that like most matters of morality, the question isn’t quite as black and white as he’s making it out to be. Moreover, I have to say that the key points he’s making would apply to ANY subcontractor relationship, foreign or domestic – and any company that behaves in the fashion described would be in for just as much trouble…
If you don’t have access to the Times where you live (or don’t want to bother tracking down the article in their archives) you can pick it up here if you’d like. The original article contends that argues over the morality of outsourcing are obscuring the fact that it is frequently difficult, time-consuming and expensive to outsource parts of a major manufacturing process. In the case of Boeing, the company being profiled, the least profitable and most problematic part of building an airplane is the final assembly process – and that was the one part Boeing had elected to keep in-house. Mistakes, problems, compatibility and tolerance mistakes made overseas would all have to be corrected by Boeing at their own cost during final assembly, and if a subcontractor fails them or refuses to correct the manufacturing mistakes, the company has no choice but to take back that part of the process and make the requisite parts themselves – incurring still further costs and delays. This is why the 787 Dreamliner project is so far behind schedule and so far over budget, for example. But while these conclusions are obviously correct, I’m not sure they completely address the issue…
As previously noted, there is no point in mice deciding that cats should wear bells if the cats are of another opinion. Similarly, there is no point in remaining loyal to your home-town workforce if you then go out of business, bankrupting your stockholders and destroying the careers of all of your personnel (not just the ones affected by the outsourcing) because your labor costs make it impossible to produce an equivalent product at a competitive price. If Mr. Hiltzik is right (and he generally is), the problem with the Dreamliner project isn’t just that Boeing outsourced the primary components of the aircraft, but that they did so in a strategically foolish and contractually idiotic fashion. Outsourcing parts of this product line may have lowered the company’s profits, destroyed their production schedule, and tarnished their reputation, but all of those things would have happened if they’d outsourced those jobs to South Carolina, San Antonio or Sacramento, just as surely as sending them overseas did…
Now, I don’t want to downplay the moral aspects of outsourcing. But the fact is that while the 787 has more parts and components that are made overseas than any other Boeing product, a full 30% of the aircraft, that’s still a lower percentage than the amounts of most ostensibly American-made cars, for example. Whether we like it or not, international business and off-shore manufacturing are here to stay, and the real question is becoming whether we can keep the company in business, provide good jobs for at least some of our workforce, and generate enough return on investment to keep our ownership from withdrawing their capital support for the company under these conditions. Sending jobs overseas may be morally wrong, but destroying our company so that we can remain morally pure is not a better choice. The problem in this case is that Boeing appears to be doing both at once…
If you don’t have access to the Times where you live (or don’t want to bother tracking down the article in their archives) you can pick it up here if you’d like. The original article contends that argues over the morality of outsourcing are obscuring the fact that it is frequently difficult, time-consuming and expensive to outsource parts of a major manufacturing process. In the case of Boeing, the company being profiled, the least profitable and most problematic part of building an airplane is the final assembly process – and that was the one part Boeing had elected to keep in-house. Mistakes, problems, compatibility and tolerance mistakes made overseas would all have to be corrected by Boeing at their own cost during final assembly, and if a subcontractor fails them or refuses to correct the manufacturing mistakes, the company has no choice but to take back that part of the process and make the requisite parts themselves – incurring still further costs and delays. This is why the 787 Dreamliner project is so far behind schedule and so far over budget, for example. But while these conclusions are obviously correct, I’m not sure they completely address the issue…
As previously noted, there is no point in mice deciding that cats should wear bells if the cats are of another opinion. Similarly, there is no point in remaining loyal to your home-town workforce if you then go out of business, bankrupting your stockholders and destroying the careers of all of your personnel (not just the ones affected by the outsourcing) because your labor costs make it impossible to produce an equivalent product at a competitive price. If Mr. Hiltzik is right (and he generally is), the problem with the Dreamliner project isn’t just that Boeing outsourced the primary components of the aircraft, but that they did so in a strategically foolish and contractually idiotic fashion. Outsourcing parts of this product line may have lowered the company’s profits, destroyed their production schedule, and tarnished their reputation, but all of those things would have happened if they’d outsourced those jobs to South Carolina, San Antonio or Sacramento, just as surely as sending them overseas did…
Now, I don’t want to downplay the moral aspects of outsourcing. But the fact is that while the 787 has more parts and components that are made overseas than any other Boeing product, a full 30% of the aircraft, that’s still a lower percentage than the amounts of most ostensibly American-made cars, for example. Whether we like it or not, international business and off-shore manufacturing are here to stay, and the real question is becoming whether we can keep the company in business, provide good jobs for at least some of our workforce, and generate enough return on investment to keep our ownership from withdrawing their capital support for the company under these conditions. Sending jobs overseas may be morally wrong, but destroying our company so that we can remain morally pure is not a better choice. The problem in this case is that Boeing appears to be doing both at once…
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Zombie Traffic Cameras
Given the huge uptick in references to zombies in popular culture that we’ve been seeing over the past few years, it wasn’t all that surprising that they should start turning up in other aspects of our lives, such as civic government and law enforcement. Indeed, many local bureaucracies in the United States already appear to be staffed by the walking dead – or at least by brain-dead individuals who are more interested in eating your brain than they are in actually doing any work. Thus, it was more with a sense of resignation than any form of panic that I regarded the news story out of Baltimore about thousands of people receiving red-light camera citations signed by an officer who appears to have been dead for at least two years now. Unfortunately, the City of Baltimore, in a blatant act of discrimination against Life-Impaired Americans, is claiming that the whole situation is merely a clerical error…
You can pick up the original story from the local TV news site if you want to, but the details of the case suggest that at least 1,000 (and possibly twice that many, according to the guys over at Autoblog ) red-light camera citations have been sent out by the City with their certification “signed” electronically by a police officer who has been dead for some time. This would, of course, render the citations invalid in any court, since this type of traffic ticket requires that a live officer oversee the robotic camera’s decision – since a computer can’t really make decisions, it can only act on the commands programmed into it. Facing the possible loss of as much as $800,000 in driver-harassment revenue, the City is scrambling to prove that the citations were reviewed by a living officer who simply failed to change the automatic signature in the computer – but we know the truth, don’t we?
I make no secret of my dislike for these systems – and I hated them even before one accused me of a traffic maneuver that would have gotten me flattened by oncoming traffic if I had actually done what the computer says I did. The law requires a live officer take responsibility for issuing the citations partly to keep cash-hungry municipalities from charging every possible motorist with every possible infraction, whether they are guilty or not, and partly because the Six Amendment requires that any criminal defendant be “ confronted with the witnesses against him” – and a computer can’t testify in court. Thousands (and possibly millions) of people accused by such systems would tell you that no one is really checking the pictures; they’re just rubber-stamping the citations and mailing them in mass – a position supported by the facts of this case…
Now, in fairness, it is possible that the officer in this case was diligently checking over all of these red-light camera pictures right up until the time of his death. If they have active, functional zombies in Baltimore, it’s even possible that the officer in question is still checking over each new day’s supply of pictures to make sure they are clear evidence of traffic infractions before going off in search of brains to eat for dinner. But even if this story is more than just an excuse for riffing off zombie jokes at the expense of Baltimore, it illustrates one of the most irritating aspects of the entire issue: If the people who are supposedly monitoring these citations can not be bothered to update a signature box in order to prevent their city from losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue and keep their police department from looking like a bunch of brain-dead buffoons, how diligent in reviewing the pictures are they being in the first place?
I realize that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were not carved in stone, and that the Founding Fathers did intend for us to be able to update them through the Amendment system as needed. I’m just saying that if we’re going to give up our Constitutional rights to due process, it should be for something more important than allowing a city government to make money by putting the screws to drivers while thumbing their noses at the court system…
You can pick up the original story from the local TV news site if you want to, but the details of the case suggest that at least 1,000 (and possibly twice that many, according to the guys over at Autoblog ) red-light camera citations have been sent out by the City with their certification “signed” electronically by a police officer who has been dead for some time. This would, of course, render the citations invalid in any court, since this type of traffic ticket requires that a live officer oversee the robotic camera’s decision – since a computer can’t really make decisions, it can only act on the commands programmed into it. Facing the possible loss of as much as $800,000 in driver-harassment revenue, the City is scrambling to prove that the citations were reviewed by a living officer who simply failed to change the automatic signature in the computer – but we know the truth, don’t we?
I make no secret of my dislike for these systems – and I hated them even before one accused me of a traffic maneuver that would have gotten me flattened by oncoming traffic if I had actually done what the computer says I did. The law requires a live officer take responsibility for issuing the citations partly to keep cash-hungry municipalities from charging every possible motorist with every possible infraction, whether they are guilty or not, and partly because the Six Amendment requires that any criminal defendant be “ confronted with the witnesses against him” – and a computer can’t testify in court. Thousands (and possibly millions) of people accused by such systems would tell you that no one is really checking the pictures; they’re just rubber-stamping the citations and mailing them in mass – a position supported by the facts of this case…
Now, in fairness, it is possible that the officer in this case was diligently checking over all of these red-light camera pictures right up until the time of his death. If they have active, functional zombies in Baltimore, it’s even possible that the officer in question is still checking over each new day’s supply of pictures to make sure they are clear evidence of traffic infractions before going off in search of brains to eat for dinner. But even if this story is more than just an excuse for riffing off zombie jokes at the expense of Baltimore, it illustrates one of the most irritating aspects of the entire issue: If the people who are supposedly monitoring these citations can not be bothered to update a signature box in order to prevent their city from losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue and keep their police department from looking like a bunch of brain-dead buffoons, how diligent in reviewing the pictures are they being in the first place?
I realize that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were not carved in stone, and that the Founding Fathers did intend for us to be able to update them through the Amendment system as needed. I’m just saying that if we’re going to give up our Constitutional rights to due process, it should be for something more important than allowing a city government to make money by putting the screws to drivers while thumbing their noses at the court system…
Monday, February 14, 2011
The Etiquette of Valentine’s Day
It’s the most wonderful time of the year for anyone who owns a florist business or a candy shop – or any retail operation that sells greeting cards – and the Internet is buzzing with horrible stories about people who bought the wrong gift for their significant other, forgot to buy a gift for their significant other, or just don’t have a significant other. I found the story about how 13% of all single women buy themselves flowers for the occasion to be an eye-opener; so was the story about the guy who got dumped for sending his would-be girlfriend a teddy bear at work (apparently, it was embarrassing and much too public a declaration) and the one about the guy who produced a big bale of fail by sending the object of his affections a bouquet of cookies for V-Day (apparently she had an eating disorder he’d never found out about, and freaked out upon getting the package). But it got me thinking about the etiquette of the situation – and what the proper behavior should really be…
To begin with, I have to ask if it would be better to try and fail or chicken out altogether? Granted, both of the cases featured above involve large amounts of crazy, either because the women are over-reacting to relatively harmless gifts (it’s possible to get much more personal than these examples) or because the men are complete strangers/bare acquaintances who are attempting to buy themselves relationships. But you can find hundreds (if not thousands) of similar cases online, ranging from the absurd to the heart-breaking, and you could easily find examples to support either side of this argument. Men are likely to face anger and rejection for gift attempts that are too large or too small; too public or not public enough; too serious or too corny; too romantic or not romantic enough; too expensive or too cheap. On the other hand, woman can face negative reactions just by purchasing something at all, and there certainly aren’t any socially-accepted defaults for men the way there are for women (e.g. flowers or jewelry). This may account for the fact that while women purchase two-thirds of the actual Valentine’s cards, men are more than twice as likely to purchase gifts for the occasion…
Then there’s the question about what to buy for your valentine, assuming you’re going to. I’ve blogged about this topic for several years now, so I won’t bore you by repeating those discussions, but any of the above referenced stories tend to indicate that even if you think what you are buying is perfectly appropriate, your significant other may not. I would point out that unlike Christmas or birthdays there is no social expectation of present exchanges for this holiday, which should eliminate the giving of anything truly unpleasant or hateful (so far there don’t appear to be “hate mail” valentines outside of the funny pages), which should make it easier to appreciate the thought behind the gift. On the other hand, if one partner spends weeks researching, shopping, purchasing and preparing and the other just offers to cook dinner (or other personal services) on the spur of the moment, it’s going to be hard for the more engaged partner to keep from feeling disappointed, no matter how much he or she appreciates the services offered…
I make no claims at being a philosopher or a deep thinker or anything other than a close observer of humanity, but I can’t help thinking all of these people are focusing too much on the existence of the question and ignoring the one important thing about the answer. If you are not alone today; if you have someone with whom you want to spend this extremely minor holiday; if you are loved and love someone else sufficiently that the observance of a lover’s festival has any real meaning for you in the first place, then you are already blessed – and presents given or received are just details…
Happy Valentines Day, everyone. Enjoy it if you can…
To begin with, I have to ask if it would be better to try and fail or chicken out altogether? Granted, both of the cases featured above involve large amounts of crazy, either because the women are over-reacting to relatively harmless gifts (it’s possible to get much more personal than these examples) or because the men are complete strangers/bare acquaintances who are attempting to buy themselves relationships. But you can find hundreds (if not thousands) of similar cases online, ranging from the absurd to the heart-breaking, and you could easily find examples to support either side of this argument. Men are likely to face anger and rejection for gift attempts that are too large or too small; too public or not public enough; too serious or too corny; too romantic or not romantic enough; too expensive or too cheap. On the other hand, woman can face negative reactions just by purchasing something at all, and there certainly aren’t any socially-accepted defaults for men the way there are for women (e.g. flowers or jewelry). This may account for the fact that while women purchase two-thirds of the actual Valentine’s cards, men are more than twice as likely to purchase gifts for the occasion…
Then there’s the question about what to buy for your valentine, assuming you’re going to. I’ve blogged about this topic for several years now, so I won’t bore you by repeating those discussions, but any of the above referenced stories tend to indicate that even if you think what you are buying is perfectly appropriate, your significant other may not. I would point out that unlike Christmas or birthdays there is no social expectation of present exchanges for this holiday, which should eliminate the giving of anything truly unpleasant or hateful (so far there don’t appear to be “hate mail” valentines outside of the funny pages), which should make it easier to appreciate the thought behind the gift. On the other hand, if one partner spends weeks researching, shopping, purchasing and preparing and the other just offers to cook dinner (or other personal services) on the spur of the moment, it’s going to be hard for the more engaged partner to keep from feeling disappointed, no matter how much he or she appreciates the services offered…
I make no claims at being a philosopher or a deep thinker or anything other than a close observer of humanity, but I can’t help thinking all of these people are focusing too much on the existence of the question and ignoring the one important thing about the answer. If you are not alone today; if you have someone with whom you want to spend this extremely minor holiday; if you are loved and love someone else sufficiently that the observance of a lover’s festival has any real meaning for you in the first place, then you are already blessed – and presents given or received are just details…
Happy Valentines Day, everyone. Enjoy it if you can…
Sunday, February 13, 2011
The Ethics of Red Tape
Here’s a slippery slope argument of exactly the sort that make me grateful it isn’t my responsibility to sort out slippery slope questions: Earlier this year, the City of Houston shut down a local couple’s ongoing program to feed the homeless people in downtown, on the grounds that they didn’t have a permit to prepare food for public consumption. Like most major cities in the US, Houston had a variety of health codes intended to ensure that anyone making and selling food is using sanitary equipment and utensils, proper refrigeration temperatures, food that hasn’t gone bad and so on. Of necessity, this same standard is applied to school cafeterias, company lunchrooms, and any other food service operation, including those of a charity or non-profit nature. History shows us that without such laws, people can and will offer unsafe food products for sale, and charities will almost certainly offer free food of a dubious nature from time to time. Unfortunately, this same set of ordinances does apply to a grass-roots meals program…
You can read the original story here if you want to, but the basic gist of the story is that a young couple in Houston was gathering and preparing enough meals for 60 to 120 people each night for over a year before the City government got wind of it and forced them to stop, on the grounds that the food was not prepared in a certified facility, they didn’t have a certified food manager in charge, and similar issues. The meals program didn’t have any of these things because it wasn’t an all-up soup kitchen or rescue mission; just a couple of people who already ran a non-profit group doing youth outreach who had decided to distribute some leftover food that various people and businesses had made available. They’re currently working on linking up with a non-profit group or friendly business that does have the appropriate permits, and may eventually be able to resume operations, but I think the underlying question is still worth taking a moment to consider…
No one is saying that food service operations should not be overseen by the appropriate government agencies, or that non-profit groups should be exempted from those standards for food safety. The potential for abuse on the for-profit side alone is unthinkable (e.g. companies using donations of questionable food products to gain tax benefits), and the idea of well-meaning but unqualified volunteers accidentally causing harm through the distribution of unsafe food is nearly as bad. Yet, by the same token, telling people that they can’t take leftover food donated by a restaurant at closing time and give it to people who are hungry seems heartless – especially when we consider that anything worth salvaging will probably be removed from the garbage and eaten by the same people later anyway. There are also liability issues involved, as anyone harmed in this way could potentially sue whoever they imagine has wronged them, including the city for allowing an unregulated food operation to continue in the first place…
So how should the city resolve this question? Should they allow the meals program to continue, or stand firm on their regulations? Could they find a way to certify the food providers in our story as qualified to gauge the safety or quality of food offerings (assuming they actual are qualified to do that), or require the people involved to indemnify the city as blameless (e.g. you can’t sue them) where acceptance or use of these food items is involved? Could any of the other non-profit groups that already attempt to feed and shelter homeless people provide this program with the facilities and support they need to get their permits? Or would it be better for all parties involved if our good Samaritans just gave their support (and food, where applicable) to an established charity with a certified kitchen and food manager already in place?
It’s worth thinking about…
You can read the original story here if you want to, but the basic gist of the story is that a young couple in Houston was gathering and preparing enough meals for 60 to 120 people each night for over a year before the City government got wind of it and forced them to stop, on the grounds that the food was not prepared in a certified facility, they didn’t have a certified food manager in charge, and similar issues. The meals program didn’t have any of these things because it wasn’t an all-up soup kitchen or rescue mission; just a couple of people who already ran a non-profit group doing youth outreach who had decided to distribute some leftover food that various people and businesses had made available. They’re currently working on linking up with a non-profit group or friendly business that does have the appropriate permits, and may eventually be able to resume operations, but I think the underlying question is still worth taking a moment to consider…
No one is saying that food service operations should not be overseen by the appropriate government agencies, or that non-profit groups should be exempted from those standards for food safety. The potential for abuse on the for-profit side alone is unthinkable (e.g. companies using donations of questionable food products to gain tax benefits), and the idea of well-meaning but unqualified volunteers accidentally causing harm through the distribution of unsafe food is nearly as bad. Yet, by the same token, telling people that they can’t take leftover food donated by a restaurant at closing time and give it to people who are hungry seems heartless – especially when we consider that anything worth salvaging will probably be removed from the garbage and eaten by the same people later anyway. There are also liability issues involved, as anyone harmed in this way could potentially sue whoever they imagine has wronged them, including the city for allowing an unregulated food operation to continue in the first place…
So how should the city resolve this question? Should they allow the meals program to continue, or stand firm on their regulations? Could they find a way to certify the food providers in our story as qualified to gauge the safety or quality of food offerings (assuming they actual are qualified to do that), or require the people involved to indemnify the city as blameless (e.g. you can’t sue them) where acceptance or use of these food items is involved? Could any of the other non-profit groups that already attempt to feed and shelter homeless people provide this program with the facilities and support they need to get their permits? Or would it be better for all parties involved if our good Samaritans just gave their support (and food, where applicable) to an established charity with a certified kitchen and food manager already in place?
It’s worth thinking about…
Saturday, February 12, 2011
The Grad School Diaries: Return to Southbay
There’s a strange sense of déjà-vu as I walk to the end of the pier and stare off into the distance, at the sweep of the coastline and the great city beyond. It has been barely two months since a recurring dream about this place made me realize how much I miss it – and then made me question my fragile sanity, as the visions would not leave me alone. But this isn’t how I wanted to come back to the Southbay. Tops on my list would have been completing the doctorate and getting my dream job somehow within driving distance of this place (a good trick, since none of the universities within that radius is likely to want me); a near second would be winning the lottery and retiring to these shores to write my little stories, never caring if they would sell or not. Failing those outcomes, I would have wished for a job somewhere reasonably close by, with enough time off and enough pay to make regular visits to our old haunts feasible, and a retirement plan generous enough to make our permanent return possible in a couple of decades. Instead, what I’ve got is more of an intermission between the acts of an ongoing drama…
After more than a week in the High Desert, time has caught up with us and we are preparing to leave California for the return to East Lansing. My wife isn’t ready to handle a six-hour transition back to our regular lives, so she and our daughter will be taking the train from LA to Chicago, staying overnight, and then catching the train to Lansing. I’ll fly home a day later, but arrive a day before they do; trading comfort for speed and time to decompress for time to prepare for my classes this coming week. I could go on the train trip – and I would, if I thought it would help; – but perhaps the time together (and without any other parts of the world intruding) will do her more good. Still, there is an odd sense of déjà-vu about that as well…
The last time my wife and our daughter took off on a train trip together was August of 2004; our daughter was leaving for college and my wife decided that the two of them would travel by train from Los Angeles to Atlanta, since this would be a diverting adventure and also allow them to transport more luggage than one could practically take on an airplane. As chronicled elsewhere, the simple three-day voyage began almost 20 hours late and ran rapidly downhill from there, eventually requiring me to fly into El Paso, Texas and drive the remaining 1,400 miles to Atlanta, hauling the luggage along in a rental car. I’m not that superstitious most of the time, and given the experiences we have survived over the past few weeks, the idea of trusting my family to the inconsistencies of our country’s passenger rail system just doesn’t seem like that big a deal. Whatever is bothering me today, it’s not that. Maybe it’s the difference in how we’re reacting to the Southbay…
For, try as I might to see it any other way, the truth is that this place is just as I remembered it from my dream, and no less magical than I remember it while awake – at least, to me. For my wife, everything changed 12 days ago; she would rather leave this city and all of the reminders of her life here and the people she has lost, and never return. East Lansing has become a place of trial and challenge for me; even if I should succeed, I don’t know if I could ever really be at peace there. For my wife it has become a refuge; a place with no bad memories, and no painful reminders. I don’t know if she will ever want to leave it; and even if she does, there is no place in this world she wants to go less than the place where part of my soul resides. And that, I regret to say, is only the beginning…
In a time and a place where I have already taken on a challenge that has beaten better minds than mine, I am now facing the near-certainty of conflicts that have destroyed stronger souls than mine, as well. How do I go on from here? How do you keep going when none of the fixed points in your world are there any longer; when the pole-star of your personal heavens has left you, and you can’t say if you will ever see her light again? All of the jests about life-and-death struggles and trials from which I may not return no longer seem funny; the question of whether I will ever come here again just “got real” as our younger brethren say. So before we pass on, to dinner with friends, meetings and partings with family, and vistas of strange and hostile places, let’s pause to say goodbye to the Southbay, and look upon its beauty one last time…
After more than a week in the High Desert, time has caught up with us and we are preparing to leave California for the return to East Lansing. My wife isn’t ready to handle a six-hour transition back to our regular lives, so she and our daughter will be taking the train from LA to Chicago, staying overnight, and then catching the train to Lansing. I’ll fly home a day later, but arrive a day before they do; trading comfort for speed and time to decompress for time to prepare for my classes this coming week. I could go on the train trip – and I would, if I thought it would help; – but perhaps the time together (and without any other parts of the world intruding) will do her more good. Still, there is an odd sense of déjà-vu about that as well…
The last time my wife and our daughter took off on a train trip together was August of 2004; our daughter was leaving for college and my wife decided that the two of them would travel by train from Los Angeles to Atlanta, since this would be a diverting adventure and also allow them to transport more luggage than one could practically take on an airplane. As chronicled elsewhere, the simple three-day voyage began almost 20 hours late and ran rapidly downhill from there, eventually requiring me to fly into El Paso, Texas and drive the remaining 1,400 miles to Atlanta, hauling the luggage along in a rental car. I’m not that superstitious most of the time, and given the experiences we have survived over the past few weeks, the idea of trusting my family to the inconsistencies of our country’s passenger rail system just doesn’t seem like that big a deal. Whatever is bothering me today, it’s not that. Maybe it’s the difference in how we’re reacting to the Southbay…
For, try as I might to see it any other way, the truth is that this place is just as I remembered it from my dream, and no less magical than I remember it while awake – at least, to me. For my wife, everything changed 12 days ago; she would rather leave this city and all of the reminders of her life here and the people she has lost, and never return. East Lansing has become a place of trial and challenge for me; even if I should succeed, I don’t know if I could ever really be at peace there. For my wife it has become a refuge; a place with no bad memories, and no painful reminders. I don’t know if she will ever want to leave it; and even if she does, there is no place in this world she wants to go less than the place where part of my soul resides. And that, I regret to say, is only the beginning…
In a time and a place where I have already taken on a challenge that has beaten better minds than mine, I am now facing the near-certainty of conflicts that have destroyed stronger souls than mine, as well. How do I go on from here? How do you keep going when none of the fixed points in your world are there any longer; when the pole-star of your personal heavens has left you, and you can’t say if you will ever see her light again? All of the jests about life-and-death struggles and trials from which I may not return no longer seem funny; the question of whether I will ever come here again just “got real” as our younger brethren say. So before we pass on, to dinner with friends, meetings and partings with family, and vistas of strange and hostile places, let’s pause to say goodbye to the Southbay, and look upon its beauty one last time…
You’re Making This Too Easy
If you’ve spent any amount of time reading this blog (which is kind of a far-fetched assumption, I realize, but stay with me) you’ve probably realized that I spend a lot of my time writing about business failures. This is partly because Institutional Failure was one of my research interests long before I ever realized I would go back to graduate school and research anything, but it’s mostly because this sort of story makes for interesting and snarky blog posts. Of course, if you really want to you can find something to sneer at in most business operations, because we (the observers) are working from the perfect knowledge of hindsight, whereas the people running the companies had only the imperfect knowledge of the moment when they made their decisions. That said, I still think the latest pet-related screw-up on the part of Delta Airlines has moved from petty theft into felony cruelty to animals territory…
You can find the original story here if you want to, but the facts of the case are clear enough. A customer paid Delta the required fees to have a hairless kitten (it’s a breed of cat that, as you’d probably guess, doesn’t have hair) shipped from Utah to Connecticut last week. The flight went smoothly enough, but after the plane landed the baggage handlers took over 50 minutes to offload the kitten – and the cargo hold of an airplane isn’t heated once the craft lands; neither are the baggage carts or the back end of baggage claim. As a result, an animal that has no protection from the cold (it’s hairless, remember) was left exposed to 7 degree temperatures for nearly an hour and eventually died from hypothermia…
Now, I don’t believe the owner is at fault here; when you pay someone to ship live animals for you there is a reasonable expectation that they will still be in that condition when they arrive. I don’t know if criminal charges against the baggage people would stick either, although if I were the district attorney responsible for that airport I would definitely be in the middle of finding out right now. And as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m not sure the owner will be able to bring suit in civil court, either, although if I was an attorney admitted to the Connecticut Bar, I’d take the case just to find out. But even if there are no criminal or civil repercussions of this action, it’s still one of the most completely bloody stupid things I’ve ever seen, and it’s going to make things worse for the airline every time a scruffy blogger picks up the story and decides to mock them – which doesn’t seem to be ending anytime soon, given the post you are currently reading…
You see, the problem is that air travel has become a commodity product. There was a time when people would select their airline out of brand loyalty, claiming that TWA had the most comfortable aircraft, while National Airlines had the best cabin crews, Pan-Am had the most International experience, and Western Airlines had the best food and Hughes Air West had the best prices (if nothing else in particular). But all of those airlines have long since gone into the dumpster of history, and most people today are choosing their tickets by price, convenience, or frequent flyer programs – unless they need to transport an animal or are easily offended by stories like the one today, in which case they will avoid Delta like the plague…
The simple fact is, Delta can not afford to keep alienating large groups of the general public with this sort of screw-up. Even people who don’t like cats (and there are a LOT of people out there who DO like cats, very much) are going to look askance at this sort of thing; after all, if they can’t even take care of a kitten for a few hours, what are they going to do to your belongings during such a flight? Delta can not win against low-cost fliers like Southwest Airlines in a commodity market, and the more episodes like this one they produce, the harder it will be for them to maintain parity at the same price level. Which is good for Southwest, Greyhound and Amtrak, but bad for bloggers like me…
The truth is, I work hard at finding these stories and mocking them for the entertainment and edification of my readers (assuming I have readers), and sometimes I hesitate to even write about stories like this one – because they’re making it too easy…
You can find the original story here if you want to, but the facts of the case are clear enough. A customer paid Delta the required fees to have a hairless kitten (it’s a breed of cat that, as you’d probably guess, doesn’t have hair) shipped from Utah to Connecticut last week. The flight went smoothly enough, but after the plane landed the baggage handlers took over 50 minutes to offload the kitten – and the cargo hold of an airplane isn’t heated once the craft lands; neither are the baggage carts or the back end of baggage claim. As a result, an animal that has no protection from the cold (it’s hairless, remember) was left exposed to 7 degree temperatures for nearly an hour and eventually died from hypothermia…
Now, I don’t believe the owner is at fault here; when you pay someone to ship live animals for you there is a reasonable expectation that they will still be in that condition when they arrive. I don’t know if criminal charges against the baggage people would stick either, although if I were the district attorney responsible for that airport I would definitely be in the middle of finding out right now. And as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m not sure the owner will be able to bring suit in civil court, either, although if I was an attorney admitted to the Connecticut Bar, I’d take the case just to find out. But even if there are no criminal or civil repercussions of this action, it’s still one of the most completely bloody stupid things I’ve ever seen, and it’s going to make things worse for the airline every time a scruffy blogger picks up the story and decides to mock them – which doesn’t seem to be ending anytime soon, given the post you are currently reading…
You see, the problem is that air travel has become a commodity product. There was a time when people would select their airline out of brand loyalty, claiming that TWA had the most comfortable aircraft, while National Airlines had the best cabin crews, Pan-Am had the most International experience, and Western Airlines had the best food and Hughes Air West had the best prices (if nothing else in particular). But all of those airlines have long since gone into the dumpster of history, and most people today are choosing their tickets by price, convenience, or frequent flyer programs – unless they need to transport an animal or are easily offended by stories like the one today, in which case they will avoid Delta like the plague…
The simple fact is, Delta can not afford to keep alienating large groups of the general public with this sort of screw-up. Even people who don’t like cats (and there are a LOT of people out there who DO like cats, very much) are going to look askance at this sort of thing; after all, if they can’t even take care of a kitten for a few hours, what are they going to do to your belongings during such a flight? Delta can not win against low-cost fliers like Southwest Airlines in a commodity market, and the more episodes like this one they produce, the harder it will be for them to maintain parity at the same price level. Which is good for Southwest, Greyhound and Amtrak, but bad for bloggers like me…
The truth is, I work hard at finding these stories and mocking them for the entertainment and edification of my readers (assuming I have readers), and sometimes I hesitate to even write about stories like this one – because they’re making it too easy…
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Homicidal Chicken
It was with great concern, perhaps ever consternation, that I viewed the news story with the headline: “Armed Rooster Kills California Man” on the MSNBC website today. I know very little about biology, and even less about agriculture, genetic engineering, or animal husbandry, but from what I had been lead to understand about chickens, their normal behaviors do not include using tools, wielding weapons, or attacking humans. I suppose it might be possible for a chicken to grasp a weapon in one of its claws, but if the weapon were a gun, how would the bird pull the trigger? If it raised its other claw to the trigger guard it would fall down. And if the weapon were a knife, the chicken would then have to chase down its victim while hopping on one foot, which doesn’t seem practical if the victim is a human (who could presumable run away). It would be different for a bird which can fly (it could simply take wing with the gun in one claw and fire it with the other), but a chicken would find it difficult to stay aloft long enough to get off a shot…
Of course, this assumes a standard-issue meat-animal type of chicken. If we are talking about an anthropomorphic chicken of the sort you’d expect to find in a Warner Brothers cartoon, that could be quite different. One can almost picture platoons of six-foot tall white roosters with arms instead of wings, all dressed in military uniforms and wielding rifles, as they seek vengeance for thousands of years of wrongs, real, imagined and animated. Their battle-cry could be “Why did the human cross the road?” or “Eat this, Colonel!” Of course, they’d probably spook at the sight of mashed potatoes or dumplings, and they’d get positively snippy at the mention of gravy…
Alternately, we might imagine that some mad scientist who also happens to be a practicing vegan had created a genetically-engineered Battle Chicken, designed specifically to take bloody revenge on those who question why a chicken would want to cross a road in the first place – or maintain those “Why did the chicken cross the road?” joke sites. Given a sufficiently large number of such chickens – and enough chicken feed – an unscrupulous individual would have a real chance of taking over the world. Unless the United States and the other major military powers of the world were able to pool their efforts and develop an anti-chicken machine gun (preferably something with a rotisserie and barbeque function) it might be the end of the world as we know it…
Fortunately, upon reading the actual story much became clear. The chicken in question hadn’t armed itself; it was a fighting rooster and had been fitted with small razor blades attached to its feet in preparation for a cockfight. And the human victim hadn’t been shot, or had his throat slit, or even been chased down by a feathered minion of vengeance and cut to pieces; he was a participant in a cockfighting ring who had been slashed by one of the birds at a fighting event, and then avoided seeking medical attention in the hopes of also avoiding arrest and prosecution for his participation in an illegal sport. Far from being a flying nemesis, the chicken was just doing what millions of years of evolution had already programmed it to do when the fight was interrupted by the arrival of sheriff’s deputies and the bird had to vent its frustration on one of its hapless handlers…
So, other than comic relief, why am I calling your attention to such a story in a business blog? Because as comically misleading as this headline was, you can find far more outrageous things posted online almost any day of the week – and if you don’t read carefully, fact-check from multiple sources, and maintain a healthy skepticism, you’re likely to find yourself investing in a massive anti-poultry mortar for you back yard and a 12-gigawatt self-targeting laser on the roof to drive back the invading horde of battle chickens (or something equally silly) sooner or later…
Of course, this assumes a standard-issue meat-animal type of chicken. If we are talking about an anthropomorphic chicken of the sort you’d expect to find in a Warner Brothers cartoon, that could be quite different. One can almost picture platoons of six-foot tall white roosters with arms instead of wings, all dressed in military uniforms and wielding rifles, as they seek vengeance for thousands of years of wrongs, real, imagined and animated. Their battle-cry could be “Why did the human cross the road?” or “Eat this, Colonel!” Of course, they’d probably spook at the sight of mashed potatoes or dumplings, and they’d get positively snippy at the mention of gravy…
Alternately, we might imagine that some mad scientist who also happens to be a practicing vegan had created a genetically-engineered Battle Chicken, designed specifically to take bloody revenge on those who question why a chicken would want to cross a road in the first place – or maintain those “Why did the chicken cross the road?” joke sites. Given a sufficiently large number of such chickens – and enough chicken feed – an unscrupulous individual would have a real chance of taking over the world. Unless the United States and the other major military powers of the world were able to pool their efforts and develop an anti-chicken machine gun (preferably something with a rotisserie and barbeque function) it might be the end of the world as we know it…
Fortunately, upon reading the actual story much became clear. The chicken in question hadn’t armed itself; it was a fighting rooster and had been fitted with small razor blades attached to its feet in preparation for a cockfight. And the human victim hadn’t been shot, or had his throat slit, or even been chased down by a feathered minion of vengeance and cut to pieces; he was a participant in a cockfighting ring who had been slashed by one of the birds at a fighting event, and then avoided seeking medical attention in the hopes of also avoiding arrest and prosecution for his participation in an illegal sport. Far from being a flying nemesis, the chicken was just doing what millions of years of evolution had already programmed it to do when the fight was interrupted by the arrival of sheriff’s deputies and the bird had to vent its frustration on one of its hapless handlers…
So, other than comic relief, why am I calling your attention to such a story in a business blog? Because as comically misleading as this headline was, you can find far more outrageous things posted online almost any day of the week – and if you don’t read carefully, fact-check from multiple sources, and maintain a healthy skepticism, you’re likely to find yourself investing in a massive anti-poultry mortar for you back yard and a 12-gigawatt self-targeting laser on the roof to drive back the invading horde of battle chickens (or something equally silly) sooner or later…
Monday, February 7, 2011
Our National Disgrace
From time to time you will find some grumpy old blogger going on about some lapse that he or she feels is the latest embarrassment to these United States – almost always something of which the writer disapproves, and which most of the rest of the country either does not care about or (in extreme cases) has never even thought about. Probably the most tragic of these are the ones that involve religion or politics, since the chance of getting even the majority of our population to agree with you are almost zero. I try to avoid this sort of post, partly because there is no way I’m going to convince anybody of anything, and partly because this is a business blog, which means that most of us here don’t really care if something is a national disgrace or not, as long as the company responsible for it is providing a good return on investment for its stockholders. But in a case that popped up this week where someone is suing Nutella for calling itself a “healthy” and “nutritious” food is enough to make anyone slightly embarrassed on behalf of his or her countrymen (and –women)…
The story as recounted for us by Canada’s Globe and Mail online site tells the story of a woman who has filed a claim against the makers of the chocolaty spread, claiming that the advertising that claims that this product is part of a nutritious breakfast when combined with other healthy foods is somehow fraudulent. It’s important to note that under US law, the Nutella packages have to include the amount of sugar, fat, sodium, and so on that the product contains, and the plaintiff in this case is not claiming any violations of that law. It’s also important to note that many other products (including some breakfast cereals and breakfast pastries) also contain large amounts of sugar and fat and also claim to be part of “this nutritious breakfast” in a picture that generally contains toast, orange juice, milk, and occasionally eggs, bacon and fruit as well…
I can’t decide what would be worse: whether the person in our story is sufficiently ignorant to have never even considered the fat or sugar content of literally hundreds of other products marketed as breakfast foods, or if the entire case is simply an attempt to screw money out of a firm with supposedly deep pockets for her own enrichment. On the one hand, it would be depressing to think that we live in a nation full of people who would consider extorting money from an otherwise harmless company simply because they can. On the other hand, it would be sad to think that we live among people who can’t grasp basic ideas like sweet breakfast foods being commonly popular, chocolate spread having sugar in it, or the use of something sweet to make dry toast (or anything else without an inherently interesting flavor) more appealing being common practice. Certainly jams and jellies (which also have large amounts of sugar in them) have been marketed as breakfast foods for centuries, without any noticeable ill effects…
Now, I don’t want to suggest that people shouldn’t have the right to sue for correction of wrongs they feel are being done, or to recover damages that someone has inflicted upon them; such actions fulfill a necessary role in our society and help keep some people honest who otherwise might not be. But in this case it’s hard to see what damage the Nutella people are doing to anybody who is sufficiently literate to read a product label, or what harm using the product could possible have done to the plaintiff or her family. I don’t know if this action began with ignorance or greed, but either way, they’re not making the rest of us look very good right now…
The story as recounted for us by Canada’s Globe and Mail online site tells the story of a woman who has filed a claim against the makers of the chocolaty spread, claiming that the advertising that claims that this product is part of a nutritious breakfast when combined with other healthy foods is somehow fraudulent. It’s important to note that under US law, the Nutella packages have to include the amount of sugar, fat, sodium, and so on that the product contains, and the plaintiff in this case is not claiming any violations of that law. It’s also important to note that many other products (including some breakfast cereals and breakfast pastries) also contain large amounts of sugar and fat and also claim to be part of “this nutritious breakfast” in a picture that generally contains toast, orange juice, milk, and occasionally eggs, bacon and fruit as well…
I can’t decide what would be worse: whether the person in our story is sufficiently ignorant to have never even considered the fat or sugar content of literally hundreds of other products marketed as breakfast foods, or if the entire case is simply an attempt to screw money out of a firm with supposedly deep pockets for her own enrichment. On the one hand, it would be depressing to think that we live in a nation full of people who would consider extorting money from an otherwise harmless company simply because they can. On the other hand, it would be sad to think that we live among people who can’t grasp basic ideas like sweet breakfast foods being commonly popular, chocolate spread having sugar in it, or the use of something sweet to make dry toast (or anything else without an inherently interesting flavor) more appealing being common practice. Certainly jams and jellies (which also have large amounts of sugar in them) have been marketed as breakfast foods for centuries, without any noticeable ill effects…
Now, I don’t want to suggest that people shouldn’t have the right to sue for correction of wrongs they feel are being done, or to recover damages that someone has inflicted upon them; such actions fulfill a necessary role in our society and help keep some people honest who otherwise might not be. But in this case it’s hard to see what damage the Nutella people are doing to anybody who is sufficiently literate to read a product label, or what harm using the product could possible have done to the plaintiff or her family. I don’t know if this action began with ignorance or greed, but either way, they’re not making the rest of us look very good right now…
Sunday, February 6, 2011
The Ethics of Quid Pro Quo
A few weeks back I brought you the story of a man in Texas who has donated a significant amount of money to the private high school he attended with the understanding that his own son would be admitted to the school. It’s not unusual for private schools to solicit donations from alumni, and from parents of current students, on the principle that if the school becomes more prestigious, you automatically benefit from having graduated from it successfully – or your offspring does. But it’s generally considered ethically questionable to either solicit donations in return for admitting a future student, or to accept such a deal if offered; the ideal of only admitting the best possible candidates (and only accepting positions and honors you have actually earned) lies at the heart of the system. Certainly, the prestige of any educational institution will decline if it becomes common knowledge that you can buy your way into the place, and the prestige of an individual will decline if it becomes common knowledge that he or she paid for his or her academic achievements rather than earning them. The real question is whether this process is also inherently wrong…
Consider, for example, the case of a small institution which admits 100 students each year. If you like, you can imagine that the 100 students are divided into groups of 20 for the purpose of any particular class. Under such conditions, it would be difficult to argue with any conviction that the addition of a 101st student would in any way lower the quality of education received by the students. In fact, if the extra student’s credentials are reasonable (if not actually superior) there shouldn’t be any noticeable effect on the others. Now suppose that that one extra student is present because his or her parents contributed badly needed operating funds (and the others did not); is that wrong? You could argue that the extra teaching capacity (if you actually have it) would be better spent on a more deserving student, but would that really be better than having the extra funds – which theoretically benefits all of the other students as well?
If we take this argument to its extreme, we could legitimately ask if it would be better to have 101 students and a new library (or a new field house, or an entire new campus, if you like) or 100 students with no library or other inadequate facilities? Are we really best serving the needs of the remaining students by guarding the moral and ethical purity of our admissions process but denying them the use of new facilities, new equipment, or new opportunities? Does that answer change if we have 400 students and 1 extra who is only present because of his or her parents’ generosity? How about if we are a university of 40,000 students? Does our answer change if the “extra” student proves worthy of our institution, graduates valedictorian, and goes on to a career so illustrious that it actually raises the prestige of our institution just to claim that individual as one of our alumni?
No one is suggesting that actual degrees – or diplomas, in the case of high schools – are or should be for sale, despite the fact that rumors persist that they are sometimes given in exchange for athletic performance or very large donations. But assuming that an institution has the capacity to admit an additional student, and that the individual is subsequently able to handle the expectations of the institution and graduate honorably, is it actually wrong for the school to accept a donation in return for admitting that student in the first place?
It’s worth thinking about…
Consider, for example, the case of a small institution which admits 100 students each year. If you like, you can imagine that the 100 students are divided into groups of 20 for the purpose of any particular class. Under such conditions, it would be difficult to argue with any conviction that the addition of a 101st student would in any way lower the quality of education received by the students. In fact, if the extra student’s credentials are reasonable (if not actually superior) there shouldn’t be any noticeable effect on the others. Now suppose that that one extra student is present because his or her parents contributed badly needed operating funds (and the others did not); is that wrong? You could argue that the extra teaching capacity (if you actually have it) would be better spent on a more deserving student, but would that really be better than having the extra funds – which theoretically benefits all of the other students as well?
If we take this argument to its extreme, we could legitimately ask if it would be better to have 101 students and a new library (or a new field house, or an entire new campus, if you like) or 100 students with no library or other inadequate facilities? Are we really best serving the needs of the remaining students by guarding the moral and ethical purity of our admissions process but denying them the use of new facilities, new equipment, or new opportunities? Does that answer change if we have 400 students and 1 extra who is only present because of his or her parents’ generosity? How about if we are a university of 40,000 students? Does our answer change if the “extra” student proves worthy of our institution, graduates valedictorian, and goes on to a career so illustrious that it actually raises the prestige of our institution just to claim that individual as one of our alumni?
No one is suggesting that actual degrees – or diplomas, in the case of high schools – are or should be for sale, despite the fact that rumors persist that they are sometimes given in exchange for athletic performance or very large donations. But assuming that an institution has the capacity to admit an additional student, and that the individual is subsequently able to handle the expectations of the institution and graduate honorably, is it actually wrong for the school to accept a donation in return for admitting that student in the first place?
It’s worth thinking about…
Saturday, February 5, 2011
The Grad School Diaries: High Desert Airshow
I’d never seen a Thunderbolt fly before today. There aren’t a lot of examples of the Republic Aircraft P-47 left in flying condition; there aren’t a lot of them left at all, in fact. Unlike the Corsair and the Mustang, which had long careers in the Korean War and various foreign air arms, the T-Bolt’s role was filled by the newer jet-powered types within just a few years, and the huge airplane (the largest single-seat, single-engine type ever built at that time) was rapidly phased out of service…
But today there’s one warming up its engine about 30 feet from where I’m standing…
It’s a perfect fall day in Apple Valley, California, and we’ve come to the community’s tiny (but well-run) general aviation airport for the local airshow. There aren’t that many show-worthy aircraft based here, but fortunately the Planes of Fame Museum is just down the road in Chino, California, and they have flown a few prize specimens up here for the occasion. I’ve seen most of the warbirds before; the Corsair and Hellcat in several museums (including the Air Zoo ); the Mustang and B-25 Mitchell in flight and on the ground; the P-40 Warhawk at least twice; but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a P-47 in person, and I’ve definitely never seen one (or the P-40 or Hellcat, for that matter) actually take off and fly…
The Hellcat and Corsair take flight together, and they make a fascinating contrast; the Corsair is one of the most graceful and agile aircraft of that period, while the Hellcat is a squat, solid, pugnacious product of the company affectionately known as the “Grumman Iron Works” by the pilots who flew their designs. The Corsair was designed to fly rings around much lighter enemy machines (and quite frequently did), while the Hellcat was designed to smash the competition and blast them out of the way, with the structural integrity to make maneuvers that would tear the wings off a lighter airplane (like a Japanese Zero), and the armor to shrug off hits it received in return. But they both fly beautifully, even sixty-five years later…
A few minutes later it was time for the land-based fighters to have their turn; the under-rated P-40 Warhawk, the elegant P-51 Mustang, and the massive P-47 Thunderbolt. The Warhawk lacked the high-altitude performance required for a successful dogfighter, but down on the deck they did just fine, and in the close air-support role they gave invaluable service in all theaters of the war (especially North Africa and China). The Mustang was the superlative fighter and interceptor of the era; the perfect marriage of the famous Rolls-Royce Merlin engine (which also powered the Spitfire) and one of the best airframes ever built in North America (or anywhere else). The Thunderbolt had massive power and even more massive firepower; nearly as good a pure dogfighter as the Mustang, it was also one of the deadliest ground-attack platforms in history. Armed with a combination of heavy machine guns, 5-inch (125mm) tube-launched rockets and gravity bombs of 1,000 pounds or more, it was definitely bad news for any ground forces unlucky enough to be in its path…
We stand near the flight line for a while and watch the different warbirds wheel around in the sky. There are a lot of other interesting aircraft on display here, too, including an excellent example of the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber (the type used by the Doolittle raid on Tokyo) and the Predator drones so extravagantly hated in Afghanistan. I’ve never seen one of the drones in person before; you could walk up and touch this one if you wanted to. But for me it’s the flying demonstrations that will stay with me when everything else fades. These airplanes are 65 years old now, and they won’t last forever anymore than we will. Future generations may never have the chance to see Mustangs, T-Bolts, Warhawks, Corsairs and Hellcats soar and swoop through the brilliant blue of a High Desert sky…
I’m grateful to have seen this show – even if I could wish it came under happier circumstances. But perhaps that’s the point of this whole episode. It is not given to us to choose what we will see, or when things will happen; the world goes on around us and it does not care how we feel about it. All we can do, as we walk down this lonely road, is to remember to stop and watch the Thunderbolts fly when we are given the chance…
But today there’s one warming up its engine about 30 feet from where I’m standing…
It’s a perfect fall day in Apple Valley, California, and we’ve come to the community’s tiny (but well-run) general aviation airport for the local airshow. There aren’t that many show-worthy aircraft based here, but fortunately the Planes of Fame Museum is just down the road in Chino, California, and they have flown a few prize specimens up here for the occasion. I’ve seen most of the warbirds before; the Corsair and Hellcat in several museums (including the Air Zoo ); the Mustang and B-25 Mitchell in flight and on the ground; the P-40 Warhawk at least twice; but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a P-47 in person, and I’ve definitely never seen one (or the P-40 or Hellcat, for that matter) actually take off and fly…
The Hellcat and Corsair take flight together, and they make a fascinating contrast; the Corsair is one of the most graceful and agile aircraft of that period, while the Hellcat is a squat, solid, pugnacious product of the company affectionately known as the “Grumman Iron Works” by the pilots who flew their designs. The Corsair was designed to fly rings around much lighter enemy machines (and quite frequently did), while the Hellcat was designed to smash the competition and blast them out of the way, with the structural integrity to make maneuvers that would tear the wings off a lighter airplane (like a Japanese Zero), and the armor to shrug off hits it received in return. But they both fly beautifully, even sixty-five years later…
A few minutes later it was time for the land-based fighters to have their turn; the under-rated P-40 Warhawk, the elegant P-51 Mustang, and the massive P-47 Thunderbolt. The Warhawk lacked the high-altitude performance required for a successful dogfighter, but down on the deck they did just fine, and in the close air-support role they gave invaluable service in all theaters of the war (especially North Africa and China). The Mustang was the superlative fighter and interceptor of the era; the perfect marriage of the famous Rolls-Royce Merlin engine (which also powered the Spitfire) and one of the best airframes ever built in North America (or anywhere else). The Thunderbolt had massive power and even more massive firepower; nearly as good a pure dogfighter as the Mustang, it was also one of the deadliest ground-attack platforms in history. Armed with a combination of heavy machine guns, 5-inch (125mm) tube-launched rockets and gravity bombs of 1,000 pounds or more, it was definitely bad news for any ground forces unlucky enough to be in its path…
We stand near the flight line for a while and watch the different warbirds wheel around in the sky. There are a lot of other interesting aircraft on display here, too, including an excellent example of the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber (the type used by the Doolittle raid on Tokyo) and the Predator drones so extravagantly hated in Afghanistan. I’ve never seen one of the drones in person before; you could walk up and touch this one if you wanted to. But for me it’s the flying demonstrations that will stay with me when everything else fades. These airplanes are 65 years old now, and they won’t last forever anymore than we will. Future generations may never have the chance to see Mustangs, T-Bolts, Warhawks, Corsairs and Hellcats soar and swoop through the brilliant blue of a High Desert sky…
I’m grateful to have seen this show – even if I could wish it came under happier circumstances. But perhaps that’s the point of this whole episode. It is not given to us to choose what we will see, or when things will happen; the world goes on around us and it does not care how we feel about it. All we can do, as we walk down this lonely road, is to remember to stop and watch the Thunderbolts fly when we are given the chance…
Friday, February 4, 2011
Legalize Cats!
Over the years we’ve heard a few news stories and the occasional television segment that make it clear that people in Japan are much fonder of cats than you might expect if all you know about that country is business-related. Last year we had the tale of the cat who became stationmaster of an otherwise automated train station, and this year we have the story about neko cafes (cat cafes) which seem to be catching on in Tokyo – unless the CNN Travel site is being hoodwinked by fake news generated to see just how gullible we Westerners really are again…
If the story is true, however, it would appear that people in Japan are shelling out the equivalent of about $12 USD per hour for an otherwise typical coffee house experience – which is to say, a clean, well-lighted place where one can sit, read, write, blog, converse with friends, consume food and drink, and have other forms of social interaction. The difference in this case being that the neko café also supplies cats – ordinary house cats, according to the pictures – which will lounge around with you while you do this. The concept certainly isn’t that strange – we’ve all encountered bookstores with a store cat, and I’ve seen several other businesses with a resident feline or two – but the idea of just socializing with cats present (and paying for the opportunity) may seem a little odd to our Western sensibilities. On the other hand, if you live in a densely-populated city where it is difficult to get permission to keep a cat of your own in an apartment, perhaps this idea makes sense – especially if the domestic cat has a special place in your culture…
I’m not sure this business model would work in this country; Americans aren’t good about paying for space to park themselves in the first place, and having cats in a food service establishment could cause problems with various health agencies. If you could get around the regulatory issues, and the obvious health and safety issues, I can’t help thinking it would be fun, though. You’d need enough staff people to make sure that none of your customers were harassing the cats – or being harassed by the cats – in the course of their visit, and you’d have to find some way of dealing with the feeding, dander, and sanitary issues associated with cats, but a lot of people would probably like the idea of having a friendly cat join them for a drink. Alternately, I suppose, you could try the same concept with other types of animal, if you (or your customers) aren’t cat fanciers…
To get a good mixture of animals, and keep them supplied with medical care and proper grooming, one possible option might be a joint venture with a pet store. Or perhaps you could consider working with a local shelter or rescue organization; they’d supply the animals and someone to look after them during operating hours, and in return they’d have a regular supply of people who might want a pet, or want to contribute to a rescue organization or shelter. If you or they had a problem doing this sort of thing every day you could have “cat days” or “dog days” or dedicated adopt-an-animal days; if you can work out the aforementioned health agency problems you could even allow people to bring their own animals in with them…
Now, the truth is, I don’t know if any of this would work, or if it would all just be a big, hairy (literally!) mess. What I do know is that with the proliferation of coffee houses, if you want to open a new one in your community, you’re going to need something that will cut through the clutter and distinguish your operation from all of the others – and resident cats might do that. The same goes for any other overcrowded business segment. I’m not saying that cats would get you noticed, let alone bring in an extra $12 per hour per customer; I’m just saying that if you don’t find some way of making your business stand out from the competition, you’re going to have much larger problems than someone who doesn’t especially like cats finding a hairball in their shoe…
If the story is true, however, it would appear that people in Japan are shelling out the equivalent of about $12 USD per hour for an otherwise typical coffee house experience – which is to say, a clean, well-lighted place where one can sit, read, write, blog, converse with friends, consume food and drink, and have other forms of social interaction. The difference in this case being that the neko café also supplies cats – ordinary house cats, according to the pictures – which will lounge around with you while you do this. The concept certainly isn’t that strange – we’ve all encountered bookstores with a store cat, and I’ve seen several other businesses with a resident feline or two – but the idea of just socializing with cats present (and paying for the opportunity) may seem a little odd to our Western sensibilities. On the other hand, if you live in a densely-populated city where it is difficult to get permission to keep a cat of your own in an apartment, perhaps this idea makes sense – especially if the domestic cat has a special place in your culture…
I’m not sure this business model would work in this country; Americans aren’t good about paying for space to park themselves in the first place, and having cats in a food service establishment could cause problems with various health agencies. If you could get around the regulatory issues, and the obvious health and safety issues, I can’t help thinking it would be fun, though. You’d need enough staff people to make sure that none of your customers were harassing the cats – or being harassed by the cats – in the course of their visit, and you’d have to find some way of dealing with the feeding, dander, and sanitary issues associated with cats, but a lot of people would probably like the idea of having a friendly cat join them for a drink. Alternately, I suppose, you could try the same concept with other types of animal, if you (or your customers) aren’t cat fanciers…
To get a good mixture of animals, and keep them supplied with medical care and proper grooming, one possible option might be a joint venture with a pet store. Or perhaps you could consider working with a local shelter or rescue organization; they’d supply the animals and someone to look after them during operating hours, and in return they’d have a regular supply of people who might want a pet, or want to contribute to a rescue organization or shelter. If you or they had a problem doing this sort of thing every day you could have “cat days” or “dog days” or dedicated adopt-an-animal days; if you can work out the aforementioned health agency problems you could even allow people to bring their own animals in with them…
Now, the truth is, I don’t know if any of this would work, or if it would all just be a big, hairy (literally!) mess. What I do know is that with the proliferation of coffee houses, if you want to open a new one in your community, you’re going to need something that will cut through the clutter and distinguish your operation from all of the others – and resident cats might do that. The same goes for any other overcrowded business segment. I’m not saying that cats would get you noticed, let alone bring in an extra $12 per hour per customer; I’m just saying that if you don’t find some way of making your business stand out from the competition, you’re going to have much larger problems than someone who doesn’t especially like cats finding a hairball in their shoe…
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Figures Don’t Lie…
Normally I wouldn’t be paying much attention to an Internet pay-site acquiring the rights to a free site, or to anything that has been taken off of the free site since its acquisition, but in this case the acquiring site is one of the big dating sites (Match.com) and the deleted material was a blog post explaining a why you should never pay for a dating site that used to appear on the “OK Cupid” free site. Since this type of Internet business has come up on the blog a few times in the past month, I decided to take a look at the argument that the founder of the free site was making. It turns out that there are some interesting numbers here…
To begin with, consider the claim that these sites have tens of millions of customers. In one case, one of the big companies claims they have 20 million of them, but if you divide their gross income for the last year by the amount they charge per customer and take into account their own figures for turnover every 6.5 months, they can’t have more than about 750,000 paying customers at any one time – or about 1/30th of the total. You read that correctly; 96.25% of their accounts are going to be inactive (and therefore unable to respond to your attempts to contact them) at any give time. Even worse, if you’re a man sending messages to an active account, you have about a 30% chance of getting a response (which is huge, compared with most advertising, for example). If only one out of every thirty messages you send actually goes to a live account, that means that you can expect to get 1 response for every 100 messages you send. Which, in turn, means that to get any significant number of responses you need to send hundreds or even thousands of messages, which means you’re going to have to make them impersonal form letters which are even less likely to get a response…
But even worse, according to the author, is that according to census figures and one of the dating sites’ own success claims, you are more than 12 times more likely to get married if you don’t belong to this site than if you do. Which is to say that the group of single people in the US who don’t belong to this online dating site account for a percentage of all marriages that is 12 plus times larger (relative to their numbers) than the percentage that belong to this one site and get married. It’s not a true correlation, since those figures don’t account for all of the competing dating sites, old-fashioned services that don’t work over the Internet, professional matchmakers, and so on. Still, it is kind of a disturbing thought – and it’s rather unpleasant to think that one of the biggest pay-sites just bought one of their free competitors and took these warnings about pay-sites down…
Now, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with Internet dating sites as such; I’m not even saying there’s anything wrong with ones you pay for. The two biggest sites claim to be responsible for about 5,000 marriages and about 86,000 marriages a year, respectively, and it would be difficult to say that those 91,000 people didn’t get value for their money. If we assume that at least twice that many people at least got dates or other enjoyable experiences out of their investment, that would mean as many as 300,000 happy customers, which isn’t bad – unless you happen to be one of the 39,700,000 people who paid their $600 and got absolutely nothing because all of the people they tried to connect with were “ghosts,” as the inactive accounts are called...
Twenty years ago in Los Angeles I worked with some people who belonged to one of the pre-Internet dating services, paying $3,000 a year for public mixers and the occasional “personal” introduction – and back then, that was a lot of money. No one I knew ever got a date using the service, but it hardly mattered; even though they knew the odds, there was always the chance that they might end up being one of the 3.75% and not one of the 96.25%, and that was enough to keep them coming back month after month. Modern dating sites can claim that they are selling something other than hope (and a rather forlorn hope, at that) if they want to, but just remember the old saying: “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure…”
To begin with, consider the claim that these sites have tens of millions of customers. In one case, one of the big companies claims they have 20 million of them, but if you divide their gross income for the last year by the amount they charge per customer and take into account their own figures for turnover every 6.5 months, they can’t have more than about 750,000 paying customers at any one time – or about 1/30th of the total. You read that correctly; 96.25% of their accounts are going to be inactive (and therefore unable to respond to your attempts to contact them) at any give time. Even worse, if you’re a man sending messages to an active account, you have about a 30% chance of getting a response (which is huge, compared with most advertising, for example). If only one out of every thirty messages you send actually goes to a live account, that means that you can expect to get 1 response for every 100 messages you send. Which, in turn, means that to get any significant number of responses you need to send hundreds or even thousands of messages, which means you’re going to have to make them impersonal form letters which are even less likely to get a response…
But even worse, according to the author, is that according to census figures and one of the dating sites’ own success claims, you are more than 12 times more likely to get married if you don’t belong to this site than if you do. Which is to say that the group of single people in the US who don’t belong to this online dating site account for a percentage of all marriages that is 12 plus times larger (relative to their numbers) than the percentage that belong to this one site and get married. It’s not a true correlation, since those figures don’t account for all of the competing dating sites, old-fashioned services that don’t work over the Internet, professional matchmakers, and so on. Still, it is kind of a disturbing thought – and it’s rather unpleasant to think that one of the biggest pay-sites just bought one of their free competitors and took these warnings about pay-sites down…
Now, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with Internet dating sites as such; I’m not even saying there’s anything wrong with ones you pay for. The two biggest sites claim to be responsible for about 5,000 marriages and about 86,000 marriages a year, respectively, and it would be difficult to say that those 91,000 people didn’t get value for their money. If we assume that at least twice that many people at least got dates or other enjoyable experiences out of their investment, that would mean as many as 300,000 happy customers, which isn’t bad – unless you happen to be one of the 39,700,000 people who paid their $600 and got absolutely nothing because all of the people they tried to connect with were “ghosts,” as the inactive accounts are called...
Twenty years ago in Los Angeles I worked with some people who belonged to one of the pre-Internet dating services, paying $3,000 a year for public mixers and the occasional “personal” introduction – and back then, that was a lot of money. No one I knew ever got a date using the service, but it hardly mattered; even though they knew the odds, there was always the chance that they might end up being one of the 3.75% and not one of the 96.25%, and that was enough to keep them coming back month after month. Modern dating sites can claim that they are selling something other than hope (and a rather forlorn hope, at that) if they want to, but just remember the old saying: “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure…”
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