Training future customer service employees

As I was on hold tonight while finding yet another way to deal with something else that needed to be complaint about, I realized that although I had been told for years that "my calls may be monitored for training" etc. I had never really thought about that sentence. I am imagining my weekly rants at AT&T while I still had the will to deal with their customer service. I mean, they should have given lessons on how to be uneffective and frustrating. There is a reason they were rated among the worst multinationals. Have you ever sat on hold waiting for a representative? Since they merged with Cingular, perhaps they aren't too bad anymore. I hear the potential trainer analyzing my tricks and ploys for confronting wishy washy answers to my questions and scamming how to more effectively play with us like kittens and a ball of string.

In search of fellow advocates for consumer rights? Here are some stories of people who've been starbucked.

Sustainable Christmas

I was reading today that in my homeland, San Francisco, they started offering sustainable Christmas Trees that you can rent. How lovely is that, I mean you can't even torch it for firewood after the holidays. It is quite wasteful to buy one really. But then again, that pesky consumer fire outweighs economic logic, now doesn't it?

Flags - What they really mean

I just came across this website mentioning a Brazilian artist, Icaro Doria, working for Grande Reportagem in Lisboa. They produced a clever re-hashing of flags and meshing it with statistics about eight fundamental themes. In addition to the war in Iraq and child labor, other subjects addressed the distribution of wealth in Brazil, child mortality in Burkina Faso, the abuse of woman in Somalia, drug trafficing in Columbia, the spread of infectious diseases in Angola and energy wastage in the European Union.

It is a clever way to look at flags, with each color representing the % of people who are disadvantaged in one way or another. For example, the US: the red stripes on the flag represent those in favour of the war in Iraq, the white stripes represent those who are against it and the blue area of the flag are those who don’t know where Iraq is :) Well worth a look and a giggle to deal with the disheartening truths about our social reality on earth.