Michaewa

Given that there is a greater incidence of telecommuting as well as educated, low cost labor around the world, would it be possible to hold 2, 5, 10 or more jobs and not work at any of them?

It would work like this…Find a job where you can work remotely nearly 100% of the time. Ideally the work would be fairly autonomous in nature - recieve assignment, complete assigment, submit assignment without excessive back and forth. As soon as you establish a job, you outsource it. Even if you have to pay 60% or more of your wage to the person actually doing your job, you are scalable. Once you outsource one, you apply for and get another one.

It would be a truly interesting experience to have 5 full time jobs, make 200% (after expenses but before taxes) of a normal salary, but only have to work in a supervisory capacity (to the extent your outsourcers were not as intelligent or detail oriented as you were).

Recipe, anyone? I was at the 2006 GABF a few weeks ago and tried a sample of this brew from Dogfish Head. It was quite tasty, and not cloying as it sounds. From reading the blurb at the brewery’s website, it sounds like it is made with at least some measure of tea in place of the water. I’m thinking somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-3 gallons, but I’m a little nervous that it would taste like the tea at the Cheesecake Factory.

In other news, the reason I haven’t been here in months? I got a job.

The working man is a sucka.

Interesting article about a commencement speech given by John McCain at New School.

Students booed, turned their backs and held up banners saying “Our commencement is not your platform.”

I think it is great for interesting and dynamic people to speak at a commencement ceremony, but it feels so dirty when it is so obviously a campaign stop. Even worse is the fact that he planned to give the same speech at three different schools, so students had time to prepare rebuttals to his remarks before he even made them.

I would love to see someone who had a thorough understanding of student uprising against the Vietnam war compare reactions to today’s students against a government leading a similar campaign in a very unpopular war.

2008 will be an interesting year indeed.

I have stepped into the ring several times with Sprint (together with Nextel, apparently) over the past year or so. The root cause was a questionable practice by one of their in-store associates upon the purchase of a new Treo 650 for my wife. It breaks down like this (It’s legal to own it, it’s legal to carry it…wait, different topic).

For Christmas I bought her the phone, but since she uses the phone number (MIN, for all you outsiders) for business, I didn’t think it would be sage to switch it out from under her and have her customers calling into a gift-wrapped box under the tree. The associate says the simplest way to handle it is to set up a ‘dummy’ number, assign it to the new phone, then after the cat is out of the bag she has it switched back over. Sounds simple enough, right?

Admittedly I am less than dilligent about checking the bill, as it is charged auto-magically to my credit card each month, but when I did check it almost a year later I saw that the ‘dummy’ phone number was incurring a service charge every month. Not a huge figure, but irritating all the same.

I call in and let them know about it and they assure me it was a mistake, and they’ll take care of it right away.

Fast forward to April of this year, I’m calculating expenses for taxes, and I notice it is still being charged. I call in again (very cranky - remember, I’m doing my taxes) and grandstand about mail fraud (a trick I learned by reading The Firm), cancelling my account, etc. etc.

The guy then has the nerve to tell me they’ll be happy to cancel it, but there will be a $150 cancellation fee. To start with, that is complete bullshit anyway, but the fact that they swindled me into the line and that it had never had a single call placed made me even more furious. Fast forward about 30 minutes of me being on hold while he talks to his supervisor and he finally relents and agrees to cancel it with no charge AND to credit me for all the ahem…fraudulent charges.

I relented and returned to my taxes, feeling at peace with the world.

Today Jill is filing her expense report, and notices our bill is nearly $175 more than it should have been. I immediately picked up the phone and called customer care (on speed dial by now) and lost my mind. They had charged me a cancellation fee of $150 and tacked on tax of over $20.

So now they claim to have removed that fee as well, but color me skeptical. As a parting shot, I told the CSR that they had to do *something* to compensate me for all the time I had spent on the phone and mental anguish, otherwise I would soon be sporting a ‘Can you hear me now’ visor.

After another fake ‘check with the supervisor’ pause, she grants me a $25 courtesy credit. Somehow I feel less than satisfied.

So please, if you have Sprint service, call up with a fake concern and demand a ‘courtesy credit’ or you will start shopping for a new carrier. Does a company that charges you to stop using their service deserve to be treated any differently?

I just read a disturbing article about the diamond industry - my friend Deets once said that the most accurate way to describe the DeBeers organization was a ‘cartel’ but I thought that was more influenced by his recently paying a great deal for jewlery.

I suppose if you have access to a resource that not many others do, you will go to great lengths to protect your interest. DeBeers has done so in such a masterful way as to enlist consumers like me into their web of deceit - I would have had serious reservations about buying a similar engagement ring that cost 1/2 as much - i.e. ‘What is wrong with it?’ or ‘Does this mean I don’t love her as much?’

I remember taking some comfort in the fact that although the price I paid for ‘my’ engagement ring was exorbitant, it came with an appraisal ensuring me that it was already worth significantly more than I had paid. Of course you can never envision a scenario in which you would sell it, but it was a reassuring thought.

[link to Paul Phillips post]

Great series of photos outlining how the process ’should’ work. In the past 7 or so years I’ve never seen one follow this process…whose fault is that?

There was a moment that stands out in my memory as a turning point, a time when I realized that after all that I had been through that working at the ‘old standby’ job just wasn’t going to cut it anymore.

I had rejoined the company I worked for right out of College (University for you non-Americans) and been back for just a few weeks. I was on my first new project, eagerly anticipating the challenges that awaited me. After about three days of being consistently underwhelmed by my new ‘boss‘ there was a break in the case and I learned I would attend a meeting in which several key decision makers would be present.

I arrived at the hotel where the meeting was to take place, took my seat and waited for the action to begin. As the obligitory ‘around the room’ introductions (Your name, who you work for, what team you are on) began to take place, my turn was rapidly approaching when I noticed a note being pushed toward me across the table. A little confused, I quickly scanned the note, whose contents I dutifully quote here:

Andy Michaels
Accenture
IT PMO

A moment later I heard myself uttering those exact same words.

To this day I try to figure out his intentions. I’m pretty open minded, so I could definitely forgive the fact that I’ve only been on the team for a few days, and he was trying to help me out, thinking I could have spaced when it came time to parrot back the name of the team I was working on. But the company I had worked for for half a decade? My name?!? Well, I’ve been to one world fair, a picnic, and a rodeo, and that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard come over a set of earphones.

I have been organically growing my little web design / development (mostly development) business over the past few years, and there is one thing that continually nags at me. When working with clients who lack a strategy of their own, they will invariably look to their (much, much larger and incomparably more successful) competition for ideas. 90% of the time they can offer no justification for why they want to do it, and don’t even know if it will work within their existing processes, but dammit Home Depot does it, so should we!

Part of me finds this infuriating, and a lot of times when I get requests for quote that say simply “how much for a site like www.originality.com” I will respond with “somewhere in the neighborhood of $15,000 US.” But the more I think about it, these jackasses may be on to something. When you lack intelligence and foresight, and you know you lack intelligence in foresight, maybe it is better to play follow the leader even if you haven’t a clue where you’re going.

After all, they are much more likely to be successful if they copycat a strategy that has been thought out, invested in, and tuned rather than something they pull out of their ass.