Customer Service

A Tale of H1B Workers in Dallas‏

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This H1B American worker replacement program for multi-national megacorporations is getting real. It isn’t limited to the IT industry workers and Disney actors training their own H1B visa replacements any more. It is now hitting the American health care industry in the skilled medical technician level, many of whom are college educated American citizen minorities, at least here in Dallas.

I just saw the local CVS pharmacy I use replace several college educated, Black Female, Hispanic female and Hispanic male Pharmacists, with Indian H1B workers last week.

The reason this sticks out in my wife went to pick up a changed 30-to-90 day prescription of mine for which the CVS Pharmacy has insufficient meds. A typical case of Indian “IT help desk hell” occurred with two people with incomplete knowledge of the issues of my meds, with the H1B worker trying to get 90 days of prescription price from my wife for 30 days of meds. No transaction happened.

I can only wonder what a seventy something retired senior trying to get his or her meds are dealing with this corporate H1B visa imposed communication problem?

And I also wonder about all those minority med-techs I see replaced here in Dallas are dealing with this?

The same way white male 40-to-50 something White male electrical engineers have in Silicon Valley for the last 15 years? The corporate versus middle class politics of this are poisonous in this Presidential season.

Consider the implications for the Black vote for Trump in Nov 2016. Trump’s Florida polls show him with _40_%_ of the below $25,000 a year black males over his plan to close the Mexican border with a wall. If Trump gets the same 1-in-5 vote that Richard Nixon got in 1972 with Obama’s 2008 and 2012 turn out percentages, he will take at least 45 states in the electoral college.

This is the electoral power of a real “closed borders” Presidential candidate.

And the corporate K-Street political contributor class behind both political parties still doesn’t see it coming.

Passing It On – I – The Pedagogical

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Some comments here criticized lectures. I doubt that medium is as central as the comments imply. Few who teach skills depend only or even mainly on lectures. Lecturing itself has been marginalized. The passion for “critical thinking” is a theoretic good, but, naturally, pedagogical studies emphasize method over content, new & theoretical over traditional. But, I would argue, lectures are designed to clarify content & connections, to model critical thinking. They are useful. (I’m not getting into content the understandable complaints about that are topics for another day.)

Not surprisingly, my defense is defensive. I lectured. Apparently I conveyed passion but could also elicit boredom. For some, that love made a bad class bearable, for others, it was meaningful. Most bubbled in positive but not extraordinary evaluations. Probably some felt I was nattering on, then socked it to them on the test. And lectures let minds drift. But I lectured.

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Technology and Mass Transit

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I have not seen a formal study of the impact of technology on mass transit but I believe that it has made it profoundly more valuable and useful. And I accidentally participated in an experiment that partially proved this statement in the inverse.

In Chicago they have a CTA “bus tracker” that tells you when a particular bus will arrive at your stop. Or you can program it so that you can see all the buses from various routes that are coming past your stop (this is useful because in Chicago you can often take many different routes that go to the same place over shorter distances). It works on your phone and many of the newer stops have the bus tracker programmed into the canopy so you don’t even need to look it up on your phone.

Sadly enough most days rather than looking up the street for buses I check the bus tracker. I can usually get from my condo down the elevator and past the lobby in 2-3 minutes so 4 minutes is the cut off time. One morning I looked and I thought I had missed the bus entirely because the next one was ten minutes away on my phone. However, instead of just trudging off, I looked up, and a bus was right there!

I got on the bus and it was completely empty! Not a soul was on the bus. While it was a nice day, usually this bus line was crowded during rush hour, often so crowded that I don’t even bother getting on because I have to stand right in the front past the yellow line where you aren’t supposed to stand and then get on and off with every stop (to let people on and off) until the crowd thins out.

The driver was totally bewildered too. I sat with her up front and I guess they had changed the bus she was driving to this route (from another route) and they hadn’t updated bus tracker. I said that because she didn’t show up on my bus tracker. Thus no one was on the bus – because if it wasn’t on bus tracker, it didn’t exist.

I am sure that the River North area is one of the most technologically sophisticated areas of the city and probably in other parts of town people just wait at the bus stop for the bus to show up. But in River North – everyone has been trained to use bus tracker and rely on it and they wouldn’t contemplate a bus existing that wasn’t on bus tracker.

For me, the bus tracker has made the Chicago bus go from something marginally useful to a highly useful way to get around town. When I lived in Bucktown we used to wait for the #50 Damen bus and 3 of 4 times we’d give up and grab a cab after waiting 15-20 minutes and the 4th time 2-3 buses would show up in a big bunch full of angry riders. If you took the bus you weren’t happy about it; it was an unreliable and slow way to get around.

However, bus tracker is very reliable and now you have visibility of what is coming and you can plan ahead so that you are whiling away your day standing outside in the rain or snow waiting in vain for a bus that seems like it will never come. I don’t have statistics but I would bet that bus tracker increases utilization of assets for the CTA and has become a known and reliable method of transportation for those that give it a chance.

Cross posted at LITGM

The Question at Hand

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I read of this particular school-administered survey the other morning on one of the news websites which form my morning reading, in lieu of the local newspaper which I gave up some years ago upon realizing two things; practically every non-local story they printed I had already read on-line through various sources some days before appearing on the (rapidly diminishing) pages of the San Antonio Express News, and when it came to opinion columnists and cartoonists, most of the local offerings were … pathetic. Seriously when I could read the best and most incisive opinion bloggers like Wretchard at Belmont Club and Victor Davis Hanson why would I bother to read a dead-tree version of whatever lame establishment national columnist had offered a cheap rate to the SA Express-News?

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Dear Microsoft, Google and Other Retail Software Developers…

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[Update: These ideas apply to Web pages as well.]

A few suggestions from a mere user:

-Stop using script-based popup menus. Go back to old-style Microsoft-standard (c. 2003) clickable nested menus emanating from a static menu bar, with standard headings (FILE, EDIT, etc.) plus the unique headings needed for each piece of software. If you are using script menus as a workaround for complexity you should redesign your user interface. If you are using script menus for any other reason you should stop.

-Knock it off with the icons. Use text buttons instead. The point of software it to economize on human effort, not to appear stylish. A trash-can icon is probably OK, but much more than that and users are forced to waste time mouse-hovering over your icons or (worse) looking things up in the online help.

-Hire focus groups of 75-85 year-old occasional computer users and turn them loose on your products. They may not understand the fine points but they will tell you quickly if your products have any gross UI deficiencies that people like you who use software all day may be overlooking.

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