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fuck-customers · 1 year

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Things I have explained to my parents when they start getting mad over small things as customers.

- the cashier scanning your groceries is not being careless or bad at her job, this store times the cashiers so she is clearly trying to stay on time and not get in trouble. This blew their minds that someone would be timed at a "no skill" job (their words not mine)

- the drive thru employee is not trying to be rude or annoying by greeting you too soon: they are required to greet you within a few seconds of your car setting off the sensor.

- the employees at this retail store are not trying to be pushy: they are required to greet you within a few seconds of you entering the store

- the cashier is required to ask you every single question they ask. And they hate it more than you do.

- the cashier is not dumb or "doesn't know how to X" because they had to call a manager for it. Every place I've worked for the past 5 years has been rolling back what employees are authorized to do, and they HAVE to call a manager. They know exactly how to do the thing, they are not allowed to and the computer likely will require a managers code to unlock that function. This confused them.

- the cashier knows the line is long, you don't need to tell them that. If they could call up another cashier they would have already.

- and a more work/life balance related one: my dad scheduled a family thing and assumed i could get the time off. What shocked him was that 1. It wasn't paid time off, and 2. It was denied, so I couldn't come til after work and thus was late. He has worked a job with generous PTO and accrued vacation days that schedules 6 months ahead for the past nearly 30 years. He absolutely was horrified to find out that I have to ask permission for unpaid time off and still couldn't be approved.

- funny followup to my dad's shock: I had been at my most recent job nearly a year and he was asking why they haven't promoted me yet. I was thrown off because why would they. He apparently assumed that since i 1. Showed up on time/early to every shift. 2. Had received positive verbal feedback wrt my performance from managers. And 3. Hadn't quit. That they would automatically start to move me up the ladder. It hurt my heart to shatter his wholesome view of how workplaces work now.

I feel like much of this is common knowledge for all of us, and yet my parents and many customers who haven't worked in the service industry in the past 10-20 years have no idea how this stuff works now.

On the positive side, my parents have slowly been becoming more patient with service workers, and complain to managers or anecdotally much less often. Baby steps!

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foone · 4 months

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Have you heard about the Polish Train company, Newag, and the bullshit it turns out they got up to?

So, the regional rail operator Koleje Dolnośląskie bought some Newag Impuls back in 2016 . In late 2021, some of them need to have major maintenance done, as they've been in service a while. So the company SPS (Serwis Pojazdów Szynowych) gets the contract to fix them. They basically take the train apart, replace a bunch of it, following all the rules in the documentation Newag gave them, and... it won't move. The train says everything is fine, the brakes are off, there's plenty of power, but you push the throttle up and it won't move.

SPS spends a while trying to figure out what the fuck is wrong, with no luck. So they hire some hackers from the Polish security group Dragon Sector. Dragon Sector figures out how to get into the code of the computer system that runs the train, and OH MY GOD.

So it turns out there's a secret train-lock system. If it's on, the train won't move. This will be triggered in some situations you might think are normal: the clocks are wrong, the serial numbers of the various parts have changed, and a firmware mismatch between the main computer and the power system. Now, the fact that it makes sense to not run the train in these situations until someone can check it? that doesn't extend to the fact the train uses a SECRET lock system, rather than just popping up an error message telling you what's wrong. There's also the problem that while these are all potential error problems, they can't be cleared by anyone with the technical manuals, which are supposed to cover everything about how to run these trains. Only Newag themselves can reset this system.

Which, you know, keeps SPS from properly fixing them. Only Newag can fix them now, but not because SPS lacks any technical ability, but because Newag sabotaged their own trains. But don't worry: it gets worse.

So now that Dragon Sector knows what's happening, they get to look at other trains. It turns out the trains aren't all running the same software, and there are other tricks in there.

One of them is a "how long has the train been stopped?" check. If the train hasn't hit 60 km/h in 10 days, the train locks itself and won't move until Newag can clear it. So, like, if a train is ever out of service, like it's going to a repair place... it'll break itself. Unless the repair place is owned by Newag.

But two of the trains go further: See, these trains have GPS built in, right? You may be able to guess where this is going...

THEY JUST MAKE THE TRAIN CHECK IF IT IS PARKED AT THEIR COMPETITORS' REPAIR YARD AND BREAK ITSELF IF IT WAS.

The sheer audacity of this move. This is frighteningly bullshit anti-competition self-sabotage.

This has, obviously, made some parts of the Polish government to start investigating this. Newag may be (and hopefully will be) in a lot of trouble.

For more info, there's a great video of a presentation by the three people from Dragon Sector who did the hacking, which was presented at the 37th Chaos Communication Congress in Germany.

Ars Technica also has an article on it, but it predates the presentation so it doesn't have some of the later details.

Anyway, the good news is that in the end the hackers at Dragon Sector were able to unlock most of the trains: A few had additional trickery that they didn't want to hack around, because it might break the train's certification. For the others, they discovered undocumented "cheat codes" in the software that they could use to bypass the secret lockouts... presumably the same ones that Newag would have used when they "repaired" trains.

#trains are blameless holy creatures #computer security #reverse engineering

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end-otw-racism · 1 year

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End OTW Racism: A Call To Action

A fan protest against the lack of action from the OTW on addressing issues of harassment and racism on AO3 and within the organization

This is a Call To Action for Fans of Color and Allies

AO3 has acknowledged that they have a harassment & racism problem that its parent organization, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), needs to address. Currently, people can use AO3 to harass others through fanworks, comments, and tags. Just a few examples include: racist Untamed “spitefic” that used anti-Indigenous slurs and was written specifically to lash out at fans of color; a Transformer fic that used its Black-coded character to reenact George Floyd’s murder in July 2020; someone naming a fandom scholar who criticized their Nazi omegaverse fic in the tags of the fic specifically to incite harassment to the scholar; writers using racial slurs against commenters who pointed out racism in their hockey fic; and so much more.

In June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, the OTW committed to addressing these issues. It has been nearly three years and they have not yet implemented any of the changes they promised, other than a blocking/muting tool that was already in development before 2020. We need to hold the OTW accountable to their own promises. (See the section further down on “Why Are We Doing This” for even more detail.)

As fans, together, we are powerful. We are organizing to protest the lack of action on promises made by the Organization for Transformative works to deal with issues of racism and harassment on their platform, Archive of Our Own.

We call on fans to do any or all of the following actions any time between May 17 to 31, 2023 to send a message to AO3 and OTW that we will hold them to their promises.

On AO3

Change the title of ten (or more!) of your most recent or most popular fanworks to include ‘End Racism in the OTW’ in the beginning, and provide a link to this post in your summary or first/top creator’s note

Post a new fanwork any time between May 17th to 31st with “End Racism in the OTW” either as the title or at the beginning of the title. The fanwork does not have to be long - it can be a 100-word fic, a quick sketch, a podfic of a ficlet, a 20-second vid/edit, a short piece of meta, etc. In the summary or first/top creator’s note, provide a link to this post

If updating any WIPs with a new chapter, add ‘End Racism in the OTW’ to the title and provide a link back to this post in your summary or first/top author’s note

Update your AO3 icon using the profile pic graphic in our Social Media Toolkit

Plan to maintain these changes until May 31, 2023, or longer if you wish

Send a message to the OTW asking for an update on their 2020 commitments!

For Readers: leave encouraging comments on fanworks with the "End Racism in the OTW" title to show your support of this initiative.

On tumblr

Reblog this Call to Action with the tag #End OTW Racism

Update your profile pics and banners using the graphics in our Social Media Toolkit

Follow this account for updates and signal boost our posts

On Twitter

Follow @/EndOTWRacism (remove the backslash) and signal boost our pinned tweet

Update your profile pics and banners using our graphics, and change your display name to include #EndOTWRacism

Use sample tweets and graphics from our Social Media Toolkit to tweet about your fanworks, and use the hashtag #EndOTWRacism

Help us make this a long-term campaign - sign up to help with other anti-racism projects and future actions!

What Do We Want?

Since their June 2020 statement, OTW has been working on updating their Terms of Service (TOS) to address racist and bigoted harassment, but with little transparency and only the vaguest of updates. It has been three years since their commitment to this update - we want to see the results of their work implemented in the next 6-12 months. Their TOS updates and complementary policies should include:

Harassment policies that can be regularly updated to address both on-site harassment and off-site coordinated harassment of AO3 users, with updated protocols for the Policy & Abuse Team to ensure consistent and informed resolutions of abuse claims

A content policy on abusive (extremely racist and extremely bigoted) content; by abusive, we are talking about fanworks that are intentionally used to spread hate and harassment, not those that accidentally invoke racist or other bigoted stereotypes

These points are not particularly new and are not our own innovation; please refer to Stitch's article written over two years ago, asking for several of these very things.

OTW has also already committed to various process-based actions for longer-term works towards centering antiracism, including hiring a Diversity Consultant. The last update that OTW published said that the consultant would be hired within the next five years (after already having had three years to work on it since their original commitment). That is not soon enough. We want to see the following process-based actions implemented:

Hiring a Diversity Consultant within the next 3-6 months

Committing to a policy of transparency on this topic, with quarterly updates on the progress of these projects including challenges and their plan for overcoming those challenges. These quarterly updates should be published on OTW News page and newsletters, not solely discussed in Board meetings

Why Are We Doing This?

16 years ago, Astolat famously published her manifesto calling for a fandom Archive of One’s Own. In that time, AO3 has grown to be a central pillar of fandom, likely far outstripping its founders’ original vision. It is more than just an archive now; it is a central hub of the modern fannish experience. AO3 and the OTW must continue to grow and evolve with fandom over time to remain a healthy and functioning pillar of fandom. To that end, there are several areas in which the organization, as it admits itself, is lacking.

In June 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd protests and the uprising of the Black Lives Matter Movement, The OTW published a “This Week in Fandom” referencing the works of Dr. Rukmini Pande and Stitch, among others in which they discussed ‘making change for a better society’ through ‘conversations about race and racism’. In response, Dr. Pande and Stitch submitted a letter to the OTW calling for a more formal public statement than an offhand reference in a News Roundup that only served to call for thoughts and discussion without any indication the organization intended to do anything, policy wise, to address the issues being raised.

Eventually, the organization did remove the references to the works of Dr. Pande and Stitch and then made an official statement on the issue of racism within the organization and AO3. In it, they identified several things they would be prioritizing to combat harassment and benefit users. Some of those have been implemented (notably those that were already under development). However as of this writing, little else has been done especially in regards to:

Improving admin tools for the Policy & Abuse team

Reassessing the current mandatory archive warnings with the possibility of implementing others

And, most importantly, reviewing the Terms of Service (TOS) to allow the Policy & Abuse team to address harassment that is currently not covered by the existing TOS

By their own admission, the current tools and policies of the OTW are not sufficient to deal with issues of harassment and racism.

Several people who were involved in the founding of the OTW, including previous OTW Board members and staff on the original OTW Content Policy Committee, acknowledge that the founding of the OTW in 2008 and early board iterations failed us as a fandom by not doing enough, and by not even considering the way racism is perpetuated in fannish spaces, despite a long history of racism in fandom.

It has been nearly three years since the original commitment by the organization with little visible, measurable progress on these three crucial issues and a complete lack of transparency on where they are in regards to even beginning to deal with these issues. In fact, in Q&As, it was heavily implied by a member of the board that those calling for OTW to deal with issues of racism (which OTW had already acknowledged as a problem!) were not really fans but outside agitators.

This has cast significant doubt on the organization's sincerity and commitment to their stated goals, and on their position as leaders of a central fan tent-pole. Fans of color are not outsiders. They are right here, members of our community, and they are being harassed and targeted and driven out while space and platforms are being given to racists.

We, as fans of color and our allies, find the current state of fandom and current actions (and lack thereof) unacceptable. Fandom is our space, all of ours. We, as a fandom, have a right to a racism-free space and have a duty to our fellow fans to create that space. Unlike so much of the world, this is a space we can control and make better. It is a space we must make better. To read even more about this movement, visit our FAQs.

#fandom #ao3 #otw #EndOTWRacism #End OTW Racism #racism in fandom #organization for transformative works #archive of our own #antiracism #otw board

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personalblog85744 · 1 year

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The Best USA Phone Number Lists

#In order to make sure that your customers can reach you no matter where they are #you should consider purchasing a USA phone number list. This will allow you to have a presence in every area code in the country.#There are many benefits to having a USA phone number list. First #it will allow you to have a local presence in every area code. This can be beneficial for both customer service and marketing purposes. Sec #it can save you money on long distance charges. If you have customers in multiple area codes #you can route their calls to your local number and save on long distance charges.#USA phone number lists are an essential tool for any business that wants to be able to reach its customers no matter where they are. With a #you can have a local presence in every area code #which can save you money and improve your customer service.#1. The Best Phone Number Lists in the USA #There are a few things to keep in mind when you are looking for the best phone number lists in the USA. First #you want to make sure that the list is accurate. There are a lot of lists out there that are outdated or that have inaccurate information.#you want to make sure that the list is comprehensive. There are a lot of lists that only have a few thousand numbers #which is not enough for most purposes. Third #you want to make sure that the list is affordable. There are a lot of lists that are very expensive #which can be a barrier to entry for many people. Fourth #you want to make sure that the list is easy to use. There are a lot of lists that are difficult to navigate or that have a lot of complicat #you want to make sure that the list is updated regularly. There are a lot of lists that are only updated once a year or less #which can make it difficult to keep up with changes.#The best phone number lists in the USA are those that are accurate #comprehensive #affordable #easy to use #and updated regularly.#2. How to Get a Phone Number List in the USA #There are plenty of reasons why you might need a phone number list in the USA. Perhaps you're a marketing company wanting to reach new cust #or maybe you're trying to reconnect with old friends. Regardless of your reasons #there are a few methods you can use to get a USA phone number list.#One way to get a list is to purchase it from a marketing or lead generation company. These lists usually contain public information that's #such as phone books

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felassan · 7 months

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Source: posted to Twitter just now by Jon Renish [link]

Transcript:

"Terminated BioWare Employees Sue for Better Severance On August 23 of this year, Edmonton video game studio BioWare ULC terminated 50 employees without cause. In most recent court cases of termination without cause, Alberta Courts have awarded at least one month of severance pay per year of service, with the full value of all benefits included; the severance that BioWare offered to these employees was significantly less than this amount. Several of those ex-employees attempted to negotiate with BioWare for adequate severance, but BioWare refused to increase its severance amounts. Seven employees, with an average of 14 years at BioWare, have refused to accept BioWare's low offers, and have filed a Statement of Claim with Alberta's Court of King's Bench, requesting fair severance pay and including a request for punitive damages for what they say is unreasonably poor treatment by BioWare. "In light of the numerous recent industry layoffs and the fact that BioWare's NDAs prevent us from showing any of our recent work on Dragon Age: Dreadwolf in our portfolios, we are very concerned about the difficulty many of us will have finding work as the holiday season approaches," said one of the terminated employees, "While we remain supportive of the game we worked so hard on, and of our colleagues continuing that work, we are struggling to understand why BioWare is shortchanging us in this challenging time." R. Alex Kennedy, counsel for the seven employees, says that even in cases where BioWare has contracts that discuss termination, BioWare may have included illegal provisions: "There are many situations where employers include termination provisions that are not enforced by the Courts," he said, "and I think we see that in this case too. BioWare attempted to reduce its obligation to these employees well below what the courts typically award, including by eliminating benefits from its termination pay - that appears to be contrary to the Employment Standards Code." In Kennedy's opinion, these employees deserve generous severance pay: "These people are artists and creators who have worked very hard and for a very long time in a difficult industry, producing big profits for their employer. Their termination without cause en masse like this calls for a response. Employers here can terminate anyone at any time without cause, but with that right comes a responsibility to the people they put in that situation.""

#bioware #dragon age: dreadwolf #dragon age 4 #the dread wolf rises #da4 #dragon age #mass effect #next mass effect #long post #longpost #mj best of

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