antipaucity

Slashdot has a post on gamification in the workplace today.

One of the myriad replies was from a poster, gomoX, who was pushing his company’s gamified tech support tool (invgate.com/en/service-desk/gamification). I’m all for product placement and pushing when it’s relevant (and here it most certainly was), but I don’t like the general concepts in that particular tool.

gomoX started well, too:

Bad system:
* 10 points for solving a ticket
* 1 point por replying to a ticket
* 4 points for chipping into another tech’s tickets (allegedly to help out)
* -20 points for reopened ticket
* -100 points for SLA missed

but then goes into describing (and then having shredded by many responders) their “Good system”:

* 1 point for solving a ticket
* 15, 10, 0, -10, -20 points for 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1-star customer ratings on those tickets
* -100 points for SLA missed
* 200 points bonus for doing 10 5-star tickets in a row
* 1000 points bonus for doing those 10 5-star tickets in a row in less than one hour

It even starts to become fun! And if you plug gamification throughout the whole system, even this (taken from a “Knowledge Week” quest that lasted through a specific week in an InvGate Service Desk instance):
* 10 points for creating a Knowledge Base article
* 15, 10, 0, -10, -20 points for 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1-star customer ratings on those articles
* 20 points for having the article you created used by other techs to solve a ticket
* 50 points for having the article you created used by customers to figure out the ticket themselves

I’ve written in the past about support organizations, and have a guide on effective support cases available, too. And I stand by my previous assertions that “gaming” and the metrics mindset are a Bad Thing™ – when they’re the BASIS of management reviews, promotions, etc.

The big problem with the InvGate concept is stated so cheerfully, I had to read it twice:

You get a performance metric in the amount of points an agent gathered during a period of X … It even has a “ka-ching” sound effect when you get points!

Seriously? a ‘”ka-ching” sound effect’? Who does this encourage? Certainly not any of the professionals I’ve ever worked with!

Maybe there are groups for which this would work – but none that I would want to deal with over anything important or business critical.

There are ways in which gentle, informal “competition” can be a Good Thing™ … but those are few and far between in the professional environment of support work.

^{_{A friend of mine pointed me at a [potentially] NSFW site with “badges” you can earn that was pretty funny (excluding the cussing).}}

Dave Winer had an interesting take on the recent Twitter-NYPD flare-up.

Personally, the thought of any government organization demanding records without a warrant is abhorrent.

However, since the entire point of Twitter is to make your tweets public … then what is there to subpoena? They’re all out there – visible to the world… Unless the user has deleted them (and, from my understanding, they are “real” deletes (unlike facebook “deletes” which may or may not go anywhere)).

So, NYPD – why are you not just looking at the tweets that are available publicly? Why are you trying to demand data that may or may not exist, and without a warrant?

Lastly, to Mr Winer’s comment that “the government has no business investing taxpayer dollars in private companies”: there’s a couple big problems therein. First, since it was in reference to the Library of Congress, we should make sure that in addition to not “investing” in archiving tweets, they also not invest in archiving books, journals, newspapers, etc – after all, those are also coming from “private companies”. Second, if the government shouldn’t be investing taxpayer dollars in private companies, then where, exactly, do you propose the “government” get what it needs to operate? By fiat? By dictatorial claim? No – those aren’t good public relations moves. The government needs to obtain the services and goods it needs to continue its functions from private industry (or we need to abandon this whole ‘capitalism’ thing and go for a pure central economy wherein all produced goods and services are provided by the government).

Tax Day in the US is “late” this year because the 15th of April was a Sunday.

I was able to prepare and file my taxes early-ish (January) thanks to a proactive employer who got our W2s out quickly.

Every month I look at my pay stub, and am appalled at how much the various governmental agencies claim is “theirs” of MY worked-for pay:

• 11.3% – Federal
• 4.7%  - State
• 3.8% – Social Security
• 2.3% – Lexington-Fayette
• 1.3% – Medicare
• .5% – Fayette County
• 23.9% total taxes claimed

And it’s only that “low” because I participate in (completely legal) programs to reduce my taxable income (401(k), FSA, etc which reduce my taxable income by about 12%).

We have not yet added-in the state and local sales taxes that are claimed, nor the federal, state, and local fuel taxes (over and above sales taxes in most states). Currently I am not a home owner, but when that eventually changes, I’ll be paying property taxes – a fee to the city/county for the privilege of living there!

Of my take-home pay, if I spend $2000 per month on “stuff” (groceries, eating out, gas, shopping, whatever), about 7% of that is going to the tax coffers of the county and state (and maybe city, depending on where you live). 7% of $2000 is $131 (or if you want to add 7% on top of the $2000, it’s an additional $140).

I am a proponent of pay-as-you-go – in all areas of life: if I want to make use of something that belongs to someone else, or that is maintained by the “people” (eg roads), I do not at all mind paying for that opportunity.

However, I despise double-dipping and multiple-paying on the same service/product. A prime example is the concept of a toll road: if the road is owned/operated by the “government” (which is really the people, but with a delegated responsibility to maintain the facilities), it makes sense to me that it should cost something to have to take care of that road. However, if the government wants to charge a toll for a road, then it must eliminate the fuel tax that every driver pays: by charging a toll and a fuel tax, drivers have double-paid for the privilege of using the road.

Double-dipping affects all consumers in every other purchase they make as well because corporations are charged taxes on their income, and since businesses are in business to make money, they have to cover that cost from somewhere, which means it comes from their customers.

Several years ago I wrote a paper on implementing a flat tax in the United States. In the intervening years, I have become convinced that the premise on which I wrote that paper is not the best (ie, taxing income), but that it was a solid start in the Right Direction™.

What needs to be done instead is far simpler, and would in the process also eliminate the need for most of the IRS, and give substantially more power directly to the people over the direction their government takes.

Abandon the concept of an income tax entirely.

Eliminate taxation on gifts (including estates). Eliminate the “special” Medicare and Social Security taxes.

Implement a flat sales (or “consumption”) tax on all non-food purchases in the country.

One of the beauties of the sales tax is that everyone pays it – whether you are “rich” or “poor”, it is equally, and fairly applied to all – and it’s shown every day on transactions around the country: you buy a $20000 car, you pay $1400 in sales tax. You buy a $40000 car, you pay $2800 in sales tax. That’s a simple, easy-to-understand model, and one that everyone can follow straightforwardly.

According to Wikipedia, in 2007 total tax receipts (income, employment, corporate, excise, gift, estate) to the Federal government was just under $2.7 trillion. That’s trillion – with a “t”. According to this site, total personal income in the US in 2010 was $12.3 trillion (in 2007 it was $11.9 trillion)^*.

IF every American who earned an income paid a flat tax on that income (with no deductions, no special categories, no “loopholes”, etc) of 23%, that would *completely* cover the tax receipts of the Federal government. That would be a simple solution – if it wasn’t for what one of my favorite entertainers said:

The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has. –Will Rogers

Let’s end that lying now.

In 2011, the US spent $10.9 trillion. Subtract out non-durable goods for the moment (a quick way to distinguish food out of the mix, though I’m sure people didn’t spend $2.5 trillion on food^{^}). That brings us down to $8.4 trillion.If every person who bought something new in the US paid a sales tax of 37%, that would more than cover the tax receipts of the Federal government. With the far more probable $0.5 trillion spent on food at home, that gives $10.4 trillion spent. A sales tax rate of %26 would cover the Federal tax receipts.

Businesses already collect sales tax. Collecting a different rate is simple.

If the “average” citizen saw that on top of his $10 meal at Applebee’s he needed to pay $2.60 in taxes, it might help him budget better. It’s certainly more transparent – and easier to track.

Yes, it would put all kinds of tax attorneys, accountants, and the like out of work – but it would also mean that folks wouldn’t have to spend hundreds of millions and billions of dollars per year to worry about their taxes: pay when you buy. It’s really that simple.

Eliminate the overt, unnecessary complexity of our tax code, and make it the simplest to understand and comply-with in the world.

Oh, and make the US an enviable target for corporations wanting to headquarter/operate here: no taxes on business income would be a clarion call to start/operate here.

^{*_{See bea.gov/newsreleases/national/pi/2012/pdf/pi0212.pdf for more recent numbers}
^_{according to creditloan.com/infographics/how-the-average-consumer-spends-their-paycheck, the average 2.5 person household spends $3750 per year on food at home (untaxable in my plan); there are 325 million people in the US; that’s 130 million households and $487.5 billion (just under $0.5 trillion)}}

Following-up a recent post on copyrights, I want to share some further thoughts I have on the topic, and about patents, too.

First of all, the concept of a copyright is meant to protect the author from others unduly benefiting from their work. One obvious conclusion to make from that statement is that after the author ceases to live, they can no longer claim to receive any benefit from their work. I know I certainly wouldn’t care about royalties after I die.

Second, only individuals or their proxies should be allowed to claim copyright over a work. By proxy, I would include work created for a company in the context of something sold and/or shared publicly.

My proposed fix for copyright law would be to cap copyrights at 25 years, or the life of the author – whichever is shorter. If something is written for a corporation, the copyright could be retained either by the author(s) or the company, but it will expire no more than 25 years after it has been written (this would cover the case of one of the authors being tragically lost due to illness or accident). Knowledge grows when information is spread. The more people have access to information, the more applications of it can be made. And, overall, knowledge is a Good Thing™!

With regards to patents, I think there are many broken aspects of the current system: not the least of which is that non-physical “things” can be patented (algorithms, software, etc). While not an inherently bad thing to be able to protect a proprietary process or method for accomplishing work, the fact of the matter with regards to modern society (speed/quality of communication, the ability to analyze data, etc) is that whether you patent your process for accepting multiple inputs at once to a program or not, someone will be able to [nearly] instantly copy what you did.

My first fix to the patent system would be to cap patent life at 10 years from the date of issuance, and 15 years from the date of filing (honestly, if it take more than 5 years to get it issued, your competitors have already caught and exceeded you). I would also preclude the ability to extend the life of a patent through any means – innovate more if you want, but you cannot extend the life of a patent past its expiration.

My second fix will be to ban the ability to patent software. It would not be just to apply a new law to old thinking, so extant software patents would not be affected beyond the ability to extend their life.

My third fix would be to ban security orders being placed on a patent (as the NSA has been known to do with regards to encryption algorithms). No one – private individual, corporation, or government agency – should be allowed to “preview” patent applications and attempt to get the blocked or hidden.

My final fix to patents would come with streamlining the application and approve-or-deny process. The USPTO is overwhelmed with applications. Some of this comes from companies trying to file exceptionally-broad applications just to see what they can get away with (“I know! We’ll patent the process of processing patents!” – or some other silliness). Some of this comes from inadequately-informed patent officers – there is no possible way every patent officer can possibly know about all the fields that patents are asked-for and -about! There needs to be an improvement in the general population of the patent office, whereby more skilled/knowledgeable/talented people are put in place to review patents (not saying they don’t have talented people now, but that needs to be increased).

Lastly – and this would related to copyrights, trademarks, and patents – a public database of all current patents and trademarks should be made available. That database should also show all expired patents and trademarks. And, for those authors who have chosen to register their copyright with the USPTO, a database of authors, their work(s), and the copyright date (and, by calculation, its expiry) should be visible.

ars technica has a great article on some short-term, easy-to-implement fixes to the current copyright fiasco in the United States.

I have a bevy of thoughts on this myself, but not quite enough time today to write them down.

If you ever install or setup something that someone else will have to maintain, please, please, please follow as close as possible the vendor’s typical installation process.

And whether you go “standard” or not, please, please, please document everything you do!

Those of us who will come after you will be intensely grateful for your brief efforts to ease our jobs!

At various stages in my career, I have traveled extensively - yet never even thought of “gaming” the expense reproting system the way it has been recently reported by CNN.

Being terminated over charging a movie to your room? Seems harsh (getting the $9.95 back from the employee would seem to be easier) – but breaking the rule is breaking the rule.

Being terminated over buying gum? Ok, so I WOULD terminate somebody over that … but I hate the stuff

But it’s repulsive, revolting, and wrong
chewing and chewing all day long
The way that a cow does*

There are a host of ways listed in the article – that I find truly shocking – to cheat on expense reports: blank receipts? buying gifts and then selling them on eBay? double-billing? Wow. The sheer effort taken by some people to cheat is astonishing!

Where I work now has a corporate credit card issued to every traveling employee. The only time we submit non-AmEx charges is if a place doesn’t accept AmEx: it’s just way easier to use the corporate card than it is to try to give all the supporting documentation of a personal card. Plus, there’s the benefit that it’s not my personal limit that is being affected if a customer delays in paying a bill.

Everyone that works where I do now also follows the expense guidelines we have – don’t exceed the IRS per diem rate for your region (on average). If you want to eat someplace nice for dinner – that’s fine. Just eat someplace less expensive the next day. Sticking within the rules isn’t that hard … so why would you want to try to evade them and end up with employment history issues like termination on your record?

It’s not news that the Itanium processor is doomed in its current incarnations. Microsoft has dropped support, as has Red Hat – meaning only HP supports it with an active platform in the US (with HPUX).

The Itanim should have been Intel’s chance to totally walk away with the processor market – but they blew it by totally breaking x86 compatibility, and not in a good way: their bungle allowed AMD to develop the x86-64 extensions that are now ubiquitous – even on Intel’s own processors (though they call them EMD64).

With the multi-core industry in full swing, Intel has a chance to make the Itanium relevant once again – package it along side x86-64 cores in a new CPU, a la IBM’s Cell processor.

With Microsoft now looking to branch Windows onto ARM with Windows 8, the x86 architecture is no longer the only [major] game in town.

If Intel were to co-package the Itanium and x86 cores on one chip, or at least in one package, they could start to reap the benefits of both worlds – keep the high-end, “mission critical” market they have that lives on HPUX (though “mission critical” and “HPUX” don’t jive in my head), and bring into that realm the x86 world.

Hey, it’s a thought.

A friend of mine recently pointed me at the newspaper-associated blog of a “recent Appalachian State University graduate and now a freelance reporter for The Charlotte Observer”.

Ms Penland seems like a nice person – but her writing is not at all what I would expect for a blog associated with a newspaper – it is far more like a personal journal of a teenager than a professional blog of a reporter.

I’m all for personal voice showing-up in folks’ writing (it certainly does on all of the blogs I follow – and on the ones I write ) – but when you’re writing reviews for a newspaper, it would seem like you’d try to be a bit more … professional in your writing.

Besides the myriad grammar errors (I know – we all have them, but certainly some proofreading should be done to catch things like “was is“), it seems she has a routine dislike for “chains” – and yet visits many. She also refers to her boyfriend in many of her reviews: a perfectly fine thing to do in passing, but she ends up making some of them more about him than about the place they went.

As a “recent graduate”, I wouldn’t necessarily expect Brittany’s writing to be on par with, say, Malcolm Gladwell, but I would expect it to be at the level of, well, a college graduate. (I have seen some collegiate writing that appalled me when I was in school – writing submitted by 4th year English Majors that looked like it was pulled from a 6th grade student’s portfolio: but those folks don’t [typically] get hired by newspapers… do they?)

I hope Ms Penland’s writing improves dramatically through her “freelance” association with the Observer, but I also hope that the Observer doesn’t have too many folks like her writing in association with them: it reflects poorly on their editorial staff and hiring practices if they do.

I rarely have good reason to complain about hotels, restaurants, etc.

This is one of those rare occasions. And it was made worse because my wife had to go through it, too

The following is the message I sent to the general manager of the Fishers IN Staybridge Suites location on Tuesday 19 July 2011 (after sending it to the corporate customer service department):

Our stay at the Staybridge Suites in Fishers IN has been horrible so far.

The facilities have been adequate, but the service has been appalling. Shortly after checking-in on the 18th, my wife was hit in the head by a stray thrown basketball while walking through the parking lot to walk our small dog. While walking our dog, she was also shouted-at by some of the teens staying at the hotel. After reporting this to the front desk, nothing was done – no apology was given, or was any attempt made to control the myriad teens running amok through and around the hotel.

The teen group has been out of control every time we have seen them, except at breakfast: taking-over the pool area, screaming, shouting, horseplaying, throwing basketballs out of the court (and hitting cars), making loud a ruckus after 10p last night in the common area (which could be heard completely down the hall and in every room facing over the great room).

Hotel staff have been unwilling or unable to control the behavior of the teens, and their apparent attempts to contact the chaperons and coaches have gone unheeded: the chaperons have been nowhere to be found (contrary to posted rules), and have done nothing to control the unruly children either.

At 1030p Monday evening, my wife went to the front desk to ask for extra pillows. The front desk lady indicated they would be sent up to our room “shortly”. At midnight, I went down and asked where they were: not only had housekeeping not brought anything up to our room, they had not been contacted even though there is a radio at the desk for such purposes. I waited an addition 12 minutes for someone in housekeeping to find a couple spare pillows and bring them to the desk so I could take them upstairs.

As I mentioned earlier, we are traveling with a small dog (a 2.5 year old Shih Tzu). The pet rules at Staybridge, vs any of the other ICH brands) are excessively stringent. An option is given at check-in as to whether daily housekeeping checks will be done either between 9a and 2p or after 5:30p. We selected the after 5:30p option. At 12:20p today, housekeeping knocked on our door. After being told to “wait just a moment”, they knocked again, and were told again “wait just a moment”. Then they opened the door WITHOUT INDICATING WHO THEY WERE until after the door was partially open. My wife was in the room by herself enjoying a TV show, and this behavior is unacceptable. After being shown that our housekeeping contract shows no one should come before 5:30p, they insisted on attending to the room anyway, and two maids came in, reset the sheets and replaced the towels, then left. If this is the daily housekeeping that is “required” for suites with pets, I shudder to think what “housekeeping” is done typically.

The behavior and attitude of the staff at this location is truly unbelievable for *any* hotel, let alone one in this price range. I travel extensively for business, and stay at hotels 2-4 times per month just for work. This is my first (and I expect my last) experience staying at a Staybridge Suites location. I have stayed at Candlewoods several times in CT and here in IN (just last week down one exit from the Staybridge). Candlewood has always been eagerly attentive to guest needs and requests, has a far more lenient pet policy, and is less expensive than Staybridge. We only selected to stay at a different location this week due to the Candlewood being sold out. We should have stayed the full week on the other side of town at a Candlewood to avoid this horrible experience with Staybridge.

It has been over a year (with hotel stays near weekly for much of that time) since having even a mediocre experience at any hotel – let alone such an egregious example of not caring and not trying on the part of hotel staff – and I am extremely disappointed with the Staybridge in Fishers.

His response to this message was NOT to call me at my cell phone number given on the day of the report (which the manager on duty (a sales coordinator) said he would do prior to my sending of the initial email), but rather to call my room the next morning (Wednesday) – after I had gone to work.

Hello, Mr Miller

My wife called and relayed the conversation you had with her this morning.

We will definitely contact you if anything else comes up and/or we need anything else during our stay.

If you have further questions or need to contact us, please call me at [redacted]

In the intervening days, nothing has been done beyond comp’ing us for the first night’s stay: which is a nice gesture, but doesn’t really do anything for me as this is a business trip (though I am sure my customer will appreciate the discount). The message I sent to Gary Miller today:

Mr Miller

While the noise from the rowdy teens has disappeared (I am guessing from not having seen them the past couple days that they left), housekeeping has been atrocious during our stay. Referring back to my initial email (which you have still not replied to outside of a call to my room on Wednesday morning when I was not available, in contradiction to what Kim Ilagon said you would do by calling my contact number she took down (and that has been on each of the emails I have sent you) or the contact number on my reservation), a “light touch service” is supposed to be mandatory every day in every room, with some form of more extended service if there is a pet in the suite. As you know, Tuesday’s housekeeping visit occurred over 5 hours before they were supposed to come to the room. That service visit was a mere “light touch” – replacing towels, emptying wastebaskets, and straightening the bed.

On Wednesday there was no housekeeping visit at all, and I was forced near the end of the evening to go ask for new towels at the front desk myself. Likewise on Thursday: no housekeeping visit occurred – and we again had to get new towels on our own.

Over the intervening days since Tuesday, the wastebaskets in our room have filled from day-to-day items – with no visit or way of getting housekeeping to take care of the room.

Additional cleanliness problems:

• There is a cup of beer on the windowsill at the end of the hall by room 201 that has been there since before we checked in
• The tray we used to bring breakfast up to our room was set outside our door yesterday – by lunchtime it had not been collected, so we moved it to the windowsill as well; it had still not been picked-up by when I left for work this morning
• Myriad soaked towels were on the floor of the pool last night for over 90 minutes with no one using them or coming to take care of them (my wife and I were swimming by ourselves for that duration)
• Trash bags have been left in stairwells for over a day before being collected

I appreciate the token you gave of comp’ing us for our first night – but as I am traveling on business, that doesn’t really “do anything” for myself or my wife (though my customer will be happy to have saved a night’s cost).

Last night I went to the front desk to ask if it might be possible to do a late checkout, which the staff member told me was not an issue, and wrote down that we would be checking-out at 2p. Today housekeeping came by at about 1215 to do a service on the room, and were surprised my wife was still in the room.

90 minutes later the front desk called my wife asking if we were going to extend our stay – the woman at the front desk had not bothered to read any of the comments/notes left for her from the night before.

Communication at this hotel amongst the staff is atrocious. I have copied this message back to corporate customer service as well (as I did the first message to you).

Contact information for this hotel:

Front desk: 317.577.9500

General Manager: Gary Miller gmiller@imd1.com