Recommended Reading — Mostly Women’s Rights Edition

• A Proposed Small Step For Womenkind — Buttercup @ Buttercup & Bean writes about the problem of unwanted attention from men and how the real problem is not that women are putting themselves in situations where they could become targets but that men feel that they are entitled to any “piece of female ass that shows up in their vicinity.” Excellent post.
• To iPod or not to iPod (or, See the Person!) — Colleen @ For All the World to See wonders if technology isn’t creating a society of isolation and anti-social individuals.
  

  We pass people in the grocery, on the street, at school, at work, in the car and they’re just people. The plural, the generic, the masses.

  But they aren’t. Each person is a person.

  And what a difference we would make if we saw each one of those people as a person , not as one of a mass.

  As an individual, who maybe had a bad day, woke up on the wrong side of the bed, their coffee maker didn’t work this morning, they got in a fight with their kid, they got some unexpected money, they passed a test, they finished a big project, have a headache, found out their mom has cancer, found out their wife was pregnant….

  You get the idea.

  What if we each did that, maybe not to every person we came in contact with, but made an effort to really see the person we pass on the grocery aisle or who serves us our coffee, or who takes the parking place we had our eye on? What if?

  What if we didn’t wear our iPods so as to be lost in our own little world, but instead had the earphones out of our ears, so we heard the little old lady behind us in the grocery ask for help getting something down…or we actually talked to the server who takes our order, instead of talking to them in short, one-word comments while our cell phone is pressed to our face?

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Tags: Women's Rights, iPod, technology, anti-social, outsourcing, India, IT, AIDS, JonBenet Ramsey, Bob Herbert, violence against women

3 comments See also in My Life, Geekery, Blogging & Other Blogs, The World, Featured, Women's Rights

Why Outsourcing To Foreign Countries Is Bad

Me to HP tech support: I’m going on a trip in a few weeks to the UK and I would like to be sure that when I go that I have the correct equipment to be able to plug in my HP laptop while I’m there. Is the current power supply that came with the notebook enough or do I need to purchase some converter?

Tech Support (with Indian accent): So is the problem that when you turn it on, you are not seeing anything at all?

I’m not making this up. This is exactly how the conversation went with the HP tech support. I still do not know what I need to do to use my HP Pavillion safely while in the UK at the end of the month. I tried searching their website. I was at one point told I could buy at travel kit for some $200 but no one could tell me what it would do for me — and besides, that was out of stock anyway.
Eventually I hung up while on hold for over 20 minutes after being on the phone for over an hour — 20 minutes of that was spent trying to wade through their phone system to find a human being on the other end.
All that means is now I still have to call back and do it all over again.

Tags: HP, UK, travel, England, outsourcing

Now They’re Outsourcing McDonalds

What would you say if I told you that the next time you pull up to a McDonalds or a Hardee’s drivethru to place your order, the person on the other end of that speaker could be 12 feet away or 150 miles away or a continent away?

Would you believe me?

I mean, surely computer companies aren’t the only ones who can utilize the anti-American dream of outsourcing; the promise of lower pay in sweatshop-like conditions can be the hope of any industry if well-thought out.

And fast food has found a way to join in the fun.

A call center in Santa Maria, CA, pays around 35 employees minimum wage to take orders for about 40 McDonalds as far away as Honolulu, Gulf Port,  and Gillette, Wyo.  This arrangement saves a few seconds per order.

Jon Anton, a founder of Bronco, says that the goal is “saving seconds to make millions,” because more efficient service can lead to more sales and lower labor costs. With a wireless system in a Home Depot, for example, a call-center operator might tell a customer, “You’re at Aisle D6. Let me walk you over to where you can find the 16-penny nails,” Mr. Anton said.

Efficiency is certainly the mantra at the Bronco call center, which has grown from 15 workers six months ago to 125 today. Its workers are experts in the McDonald’s menu; they are trained to be polite, to urge customers to add items to their order and, above all, to be fast. Each worker takes up to 95 orders an hour during peak times.

Customers pulling up to the drive-through menu are connected to the computer of a call-center employee using Internet calling technology. The first thing the McDonald’s customer hears is a prerecorded greeting in the voice of the employee. The order-takers’ screens include the menu and an indication of the whether it is time for breakfast or lunch at the local restaurant. A “notes” section shows if that restaurant has called in to say that it is out of a particular item.

When the customer pulls away from the menu to pay for the food and pick it up, it takes around 10 seconds for another car to pull forward. During that time, Mr. King said, his order-takers can be answering a call from a different McDonald’s where someone has already pulled up.

The remote order-takers at Bronco earn the minimum wage ($6.75 an hour in California), do not get health benefits and do not wear uniforms. Ms. Vargas, who recently finished high school, wore jeans and a baggy white sweatshirt as she took orders last week.

The call-center system allows employees to be monitored and tracked much more closely than would be possible if they were in restaurants. Mr. King’s computer screen gives him constant updates as to which workers are not meeting standards. “You’ve got to measure everything,” he said. “When fractions of seconds count, the environment needs to be controlled.” [“The Long-Distance Journey of a Fast Food Order” (The New York Times)]

Employees are subjected to constant electronic scrutiny with software tracking her productivity, speed and awareness.  A computer in the breakroom keeps employees alert as to just how many minutes they have been away from their desks.

And the order-taking is not always seamless. Often customers’ voices are faint, forcing the workers to ask for things to be repeated. During recent rainstorms in Hawaii, it was particularly hard to hear orders from there over the din.[“The Long-Distance Journey of a Fast Food Order” (The New York Times)]

Like I said above and as Jill @ Brilliant at Breakfast points out, they’re testing this outsourcing here in the States, but what’s to stop them from following the way of IT off to another country where they pay practically nothing, leaving Americans unemployed?

And you can’t tell them to get an education because those jobs are being outsourced over there too.

Tags: outsourcing, McDonalds, New York Times

Outsourcing Homeland Security

I have a good imagination and I watch more than my share of t.v. and movies. I also admit to such geeky activities as role-playing games and despite having earned the nickname “conspiracy girl” like it’s my superhero name or something, I am probably not the most paranoid of my geekier friends.

So, you can imagine that my view of what Homeland Security’s officies are like is pretty high-tech and bleak. I imagine retnal scans and fingerprinting and all sorts of trials and tribulations just to get into the coffee break room. I expect that the best of the best trained soldiers are onsite to protect whatever it is that’s going on there.

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Tags: politics, Homeland Security, outsourcing

The Outsourcing of National Security

Well, most of the regulars know, I am vehmenantly against the outsourcing of any American job overseas or to non-American companies. I just believe that that American money and American jobs should stay here in America. It’s a personal belief that no one is going to change my mind on.

Anyway, so you can imagine my feelings about this whole outsourcing of American port security to an Arab-owned company. Actually, I understand the current alarm but what gets me is that they’ve been outsourcing that for years to other countries and no one said anything until the whole Arab-owned thing came up. Suddenly it’s wrong, wrong, wrong.

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Tags: outsourcing, National Security, UAE, politics, 9/11

Reflections On Last Night’s Debate & Related Things

• Why do Congressmen get $7700 per family health insurance packages? Obviously these people have far more money than the people they represent so why are the taxpayers forced to pay this enormous amount to ensure these people when something like 5 Million or is it more are unable to afford health insurance. John Kerry mentioned this number in his promise to give everyone this option. He said that obviously those who could afford health insurance would have to pay for their own, but that those those that didn’t would get the same deal Congressmen do. I think that Congressmen are obviously wealthy enough to afford their own health insurance, why are the taxpayers are not burdoned with it.
• In response to a question regarding job loss in the United States, President Bush said that it was important to re-educate people for jobs of the 21rst century. He suggested that there would be programs at community colleges for this to happen. Fifteen years ago, careers in computers were going to be the jobs of the 21rst century. Now, IT is one of the top industries hit with unemployment in the U.S. As we watch our 21 century jobs being shipped overseas, what jobs does President Bush suggest we re-educate ourselves to do and why is it that my 4-year Bachelor of Science degree is now worthless and needs to be replaced by a community college education?
• President Bush indicated that one of the ways to cut Healthcare costs is to bring the medical sector into the 21rst century with technology. I agree with this. However, as one of my IT co-workers at the hospital pointed out, most hospitals cannot afford to go all the way to electronic medical records. In fact, the very conversion would be a complete nightmare. It would take a decade per hospital probably. And I suppose that the best way to cut costs on this is to ship the IT conversion part overseas. Though likely the consultants would be astonished at the snail’s pace and red tape dealing with a hospital requires.
• Bush refused to answer the question on whether or not he supports overturning Roe V. Wade. He even accused Kerry of wanting to purposely appoint people who he knew would not do this rather than choosing the best person for the job. However, looking at the people Bush has chosen to nominate to key positions where Pro-choice and the option for birth control could be decided and/or taken away, I think that President Bush does in fact have a lithmus test for his appointees, despite his smoke and mirrors claim.
• Kerry correctly pointed out that while “No Child Left Behind” is a good program, it is severly underfunded and this is Bush’s fault. Bush’s reply was to claim that only a liberal would say that increasing education funding by 49% is not enough. The fact is that it wasn’t enough to fund the “No Child Left Behind” Act.
• Why, oh, why, can’t people laugh with their candidate’s opponents when they make a joke? At least recognize that not everything that comes out of Bush, Chenney, Edwards, and Kerry’s mouths are to be interpreted seriously. One of my co-workers was all pissed off at her literal interpretation of something Bush joked about. I didn’t like the joke myself when I heard it last night, but I at least recognized it was a joke not to be analyzed with the regular propoganda and rhetoric.
• Neither candidate is pefect and neither is the devil. While I don’t agree with either candidate 100%, I do agree more with Kerry. I’m tired of people suggesting that a vote for Kerry is just a vote against Bush. It’s not all about Bush, you know. Some of us actually do care about the environment, pro-choice, a better world reputation, a better funded border patrol, better healthcare, better benefits for those in poverty, better paying jobs, less tax breaks for the wealthy and companies sending jobs overseas, and a balanced budget. Yes, I am pissed off at Bush too. I don’t like that he’s taken us into a war that was unnecessary at the time and that he’s not caught Osama yet. I don’t like that N. Korea and Iran actually have moved forward with their nuclear progams and that the number of terrorists is on the rise. I really don’t care for the deficit. Everyone says that Clinton didn’t do anything he promised either but truth be told, one of the things I liked about him when he first ran was that he had a plan to balance the budget and get us out of debt and then once elected, he did it. We had a surplus when he left which was earmarked to help us with the social security issue but that money is gone and now we are in the largest debt ever.I fear for this country. I really do. I am terrified that no matter who wins we will remain divided and that some sort of rioting will occur. I imagine the worst. Obviously something isn’t working with our two party system. I don’t know how to fix it though.

Tags: politics, 2004 election, health insurance, Congress, jobs of the 21rst century, George W. Bush, John Kerry, Women's Rights, outsourcing

On Politics and Arm-chair Politicians

Talking politics is a quick way to make friends and enemies these days. Personally, I have tried not to discuss politics or religion in my journals or with my friends “back home”. For the most part I discovered that some people tend to take both subjects way too personally and feel the fanatical need to convert everyone they know to the “right” way of thinking which is of course always their way. Some of my friends “back home” had a penchant for getting into loud, angry, pissing matches over politics, religion, and sometimes even books and movies and while I enjoy a good debate, I don’t like shouting matches or banging my head against a wall.

For the most part, many people either make up their minds and cling to those opinions no matter what the facts or opinions of others or they do as their parents or spouses do and believe what their parents or spouses believe. Sometimes both options play a part. Unfortunately many people never let exeriences or newly learned facts to change their opinions; they cling to the belief that they are right despite everything.

Some of my friends “back home” are like that which is why I don’t allow such topics on the mailing list we all use to keep track of each other. People become too easily offended, emails fly back and forth because people are offended or they want to force others to see things their way. It’s all very unpleasant and sad.

I like to keep an open-mind. I won’t say that I don’t think I’m right. I just admit that I could be wrong. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me. In fact, my opinions on many things have changed over the last 33 years. Things I believed in with all my heart when I was a teenager have proven themselves not true or have become questionable as my experiences and new facts have reared their ugly heads. I may still be a bit naive. I may still not understand every facet of everything going on in the world, but at the very least I have an open-mind and I accept when I’m wrong and I find talking, debating with others either strengthens my beliefs or changes them.

I think it’s a sign of a mature individual…though I don’t know that I’m all that mature or that I’m even mentally healthy at times.

So, I’ve come to enjoy in my new life the ability to have mature, adult conversations about politics with people here and people I’ve met online — people who don’t just shout rhetoric back and forth and people who have a clue not only about what is going on in the world but don’t believe everything they hear or read.

So, here is my political stance for those of you who are interested:

• I have voted for every President who has been in office since I started voting at 18 years old — I’m 33 now.
• I have been registered as a Republican, a Democrat, and an Independent at various times in my life. Currently, I am registered as a Democrat though 3 months ago I was an Independent.
• I have never believed that we should invade Iraq. I never thought they had weapons of mass destruction last year. I can’t believe the Bush Administration keeps insisting that is why were are there. I don’t know why other countries who do indeed have weapons of mass destruction have been left to their own devices. I believe we were lied to and if we weren’t lied to then the Bush Administration can’t admit they made an error in judgement and I don’t know which is worse.
• I was for invading Afghanistan but very disappointed that Bush didn’t finish the job.
• I am offended that Bush doesn’t think the outsourcing of American jobs to other countries is an issue. The companies might be saving money but they aren’t passing along that savings to the unemployed masses.
• I am offended that Bush’s administration thinks that the 1.25 million jobs they “created” in the last few months should quell the rising voices when the jobs that have been created are not equivallent in skill or money to the ones that millions of Americans have lost over the last 4 years.
• I am horrified that Bush wants to change the law to keep Americans who love each other from any kind of union, whether you call it a marriage or not, and the rights and benefits such a union should have.
• I am against abortion but believe it’s not my place to tell anyone they can’t have one for whatever reason.
• I am against the draft.
• I am against any merge of church and state and yet Bush’s administration is constantly dragging religion into their politics.
• Bush’s administration scares the hell out of me. I really believe they are out of control and believe that they are too powerful to be ruled by the laws, standards, and beliefs they hold everyone else to.
• It scares me to talk to people who still believe there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It scares me to listen to people who swear by every word that comes out of Bush’s mouth.
• It scares me that people still think there was a connection between Sadaam and 9/11. I never thought there was and it makes me sick to think that propaganda was used and so widely believed.
• It scares me that people don’t realize that some of those prisoners in those Iraqi prisons were innocent bystanders who were arrested by accident, tortured and humiliated, and even killed. People were killed in inhumane and compassionless ways and yet we are justified because other people that look like them caused 9/11 and other people who look like them have been killing hostages in the Middle East — ironically, the terrorists weren’t in Iraq before we arrived and opened the door but their presence now is used as a reason why we invaded…
• I am afraid of the Homeland Security and the Big Brother concept that it is.
• I am afraid that the terrorists have won by causing us to step closer to losing the freedoms they hate us for.

Tags: politics, dysfunctional drama, George W. Bush, outsourcing, Afghanistan, Gay Rights, abortion, pro-choice, WMD, innocent, detainees, Homeland Security, Terrorists

My High Horse

I forgot to mention that a recruiter I spoke with several months ago recently called me on my cell phone. She had originally contacted me about the job in Alabama but I was already interviewing for that position. Anyway, apparently the position is still open and she had thought I was the best qualified fit for that position and wondered why I wasn’t there already…I told her that they had indeed made an offer and then recinded it and wouldn’t say why. She was surprised. Maybe that’ll make her think twice before sending in a recruit in the future. I mean, who wants to work hard to place someone only to have them accept a job there and then have the job taken away? I mean, really it would look bad for the hospital and the recruiter.

I know that job wasn’t right for me. I kind of knew when I took it but I just wanted to work.

I’m not too sure about the job I took. I know it’s the kind of work I had hoped to do. I’m not sure it’s everything I dreamed of. I’m certainly not sure that I’ll be the miracle worker here that I was back in the day at the “other” place.

I have spoken to a few people from back “there”. Things just seem to get more and more frustrating and sad from the front line there. The good innovative people are either leaving because they’re frustrated with how they are being managed and how restrictive the job is or they’re being forced to leave because their creativity and inquisitiveness gets in the way of people who just want to do work and get paid and go home. And when I hear about what management is up to there, I really believe that management just sabatogues itself and makes more busy work for itself and it’s underlings. I don’t know if they do it on purpose — though I do believe that I was sabatogued and on purpose. I feel like a lot of the decisions they make are anti-productive and certainly not in the best interests of the department or the employees there. I think that they are in over their heads and are desperately trying to keep afloat by pushing others down into the quicksand to try to crawl up.

The people who were there during the outsourcing aren’t exactly being included in the work on the conversion from the old system to the new one and most of them seem to feel resentful that no one seems to be telling them anything. What happens when the conversion is finished and none of the current employees have any knowledge about how to work with it or how to fill the same roles they had with the old system now that that system has been replaced?

Meanwhile, shortly after I got here, I recieved a copy of a proposal to review and give my opinion on. One of the consulting firms, that I am familiar with from the outsourcing selection process prior to the six month extra-scary nightmare, was paid a lot to write a proposal to convert one of the interface engines which has not been supported for the last 3 years to a “new and improved” interface engine that is not eLink/WebLink/eWebIt/whatever-Eclipsys-is-calling-it-this-week. This site uses two interface engines. Rather than do like the old hospital (OH) and convert everything from OpenHub (Eclipsys’ version of SeeBeyond’s old Datagate) to eLink/WebLink/eWebIt/whatever-Eclipsys-is-calling-it-this-week when Eclipsys insisted because it was no longer going to be supported, the New Hospital (NH) just started creating new interfaces on the new engine, which means that there are two interface engines here and that’s not even the most complicated part of it. There is an Eclipsys out-of-date, but still supported, mainframe based HIS system which currently no longer has ordering or medical records in it. Ordering is done through Eclipsys’ Sunrise Clinical Manager (SCM) and Medical Records is handled through Sunrise Record Manager (SRM). Meds are ordered through SCM but processing is done in the HIS and then dispenced through PYXIS and a robot of some sort for Nursing. E.D. has it’s own application, so does Lab, Radiology, Transcription, Dietary, Radiation Therapy, the television system, and a plethora of others. Some of these just get ADT (Admission/Discharge/Transfer) information out of the HIS (and even that’s complicated because medical records are actually created in SRM and some systems only want the first 8 digits and some want 13 and some want the 13 broken into two fields for medical record number and account/visit number — and don’t get me started on merging accounts) and some applications actually get orders and order process messages from SCM, process the orders (Which involves sending status messages back to SCM), and send results (again back to SCM and also SRM). Some interfaces through OpenHub are just tunnels of information from the eLink/WebLink/eWebIt/whatever-Eclipsys-is-calling-it-this-week engine that has already processed and translated the message but the receiving application will only speak to one engine and the ADT was already going through OpenHub.

Anyway, so the proposal is for this consultanting group to do several things:

• Convert OpenHub to SeeBeyond’s new eGate (which actually isn’t getting great reviews compared to Cloverleaf and ironically the horribly designed eLink/WebLink/eWebIt/whatever-Eclipsys-is-calling-it-this-week).
• Teach IT some methodology that will help us get our work done faster.
• Write 5 interfaces in eGate — this will be done by a team of employees in India — this consulting groups swears they don’t support outsourcing to India; instead these Indians are full-time employees that they acquired when the bought out another business.

I have a few issues with the proposal, naturally. First of all, my experience with consultants hasn’t been sterling. I’m going to ignore my outsourced experience which was a nightmare in itself. However, for the most part, groups of consultants that come in to get some particular project done generally come rushing in stirring everything up, get the employees that are already there to do all the work and then take the credit. I experienced that with the Y2K project first when they came in for 9 months to make sure everything was compliant, sat at our desks and had us do the work and they documented it. They weren’t even there by mid-Decemeber and I was the one sitting in the computer chair at 12:15am typing madly at my keyboard while the VP of Info Systems stood behind me eating snacks someone had brought in. For the most part, this pattern continued with other projects consultants were brought in to do. My one good experience was witha lone consulant and she wasn’t even that great — she taught me some stuff and definitely got the project rolling, but she was long gone before real headway was done.

The truth is that most consulants don’t have to spend 12 months going to meetings while the hospital staff tries to figure out what they really want out of this application they bought without consulting IT and without understanding how it really works or without knowing that the demo was really a non-working version of a possible future edition of the application and what they were buying can’t really do all the flashy things they’ve been promised. What consulants want (in fact, what all interface integration specialists want) is to be given two sets of specs, one set from each application being interfaced) and to sit down and code the the thing up. Really, if all the decisions were made before the interface specialist was ever brought into the mix, if all of the decisions were made before a project manager starting demanding things that can’t be done before a computer illiterate doctor or nurse or administrator actually makes a process decision, if all of that could happen ahead of time, then coding would maybe take a day or two and testing would take a week or two and wah-la! But it doesn’t work that way. So I have real doubt that this methodology they are toting like a wild-eyed motivational speaker in an informercial will work in a real hospital environment. The methodology would have to be taught to the whole hospital, not just to IT. For the most part, IT is rarely the real hold-up. I admit that we were the real hold-up back at OH when we were trying to build the bi-directional ADT interface for the new patient access/registration front end to the HIS, but our slowness was due to lack of support from both vendors and a complete lack of understanding on how to make the systems talk so that everything seemed seamless, especially since at that time no other hospital had succeeded in making the same interface work correctly.

O.K. The Five Interfaces. It was interesting how each time they were mentioned, the description got less general and more restrictive. We have, according to the documentation and thankfully for job security, a backlog of 100 interaces to be completed here at NH. Now of these, I don’t know how many are ADT but for the most part, ADT is the easiest interface to do because basically every external system requires some variant of an ADT interface and basically you just clone an existing, similar one, take out the stuff you don’t need and put in the stuff you do that wasn’t there. So, the consulting group went from saying they would do 5 interfaces to 5 priority, non-complex ADT interfaces within a couple of pages. I think, and the other interface folk here agree, that if they are going to show us their methodology, they should show us how to use it on something challenging, something we don’t know how to do.

And having the work done in India is a big issue with me. It’s one of my political issues for this coming Presidential election. I have a real problem outsourcing work out of the country (not just to India but anywhere) and taking jobs away from Americans. It’s even more close to my heart since in the last few years most of the jobs being outsourced are IT jobs. I just can’t see how this supports our economy in any way. I mean, O.K., the company gets the work done cheeper, but the service or product is to be sold in the U.S. If people are out of work because their jobs were given to people out of the country, then they cannot afford to pay for these services or products and then what does it matter that it’s getting made cheaper and sold at the same price when no one can afford to buy it?

In the last 3 years, all of the computer geeks in my immediate social circle were out of work anywhere from a few weeks to 18 months. At least 3 of us were replaced by less qualified, lower-paid individuals.

I just cannot support the idea of outsourcing to India, particularly when it’s work I could be doing right here rather easily, and I don’t know that I’d be all that excited even if they offered to do 5 of the really difficult, complex interfaces — particularly since one of us would still be doing all the work since I doubt anyone is going to commute from Bangalore to Maine for a weekly meeting to discuss the specs, needs, and issues.

However, though all of the interface geeks here agree this whole proposal is a bad thing, it has come down from high above that it is most likely going to happen. My new boss and one of the interface geeks is going to a meeting with the IT VP next week to discuss it and we’ve basically been told to give our opions with suggestions on how to make slight changes in the proposal to benefit us in the best way — like making them do 5 non-ADT interfaces and adding in education on how to use the new interface engine — yeah, bet you hadn’t noticed that there was nothing in the proposal on teaching the old employees how to use the new system so they can keep their jobs…

Tags: outsourcing