Globalization Stinks!

I don’t think I’ve ever wrote something work related on my blog. Today’s gonna be a first ‘cause I am fed up with getting called in the middle of the night for nothing.

I get a call at 2:10H in the morning about a customer having a problem with a network router. So I get dressed, get in my car and drive for an hour to get to the customer’s site. As I get close to the site, I call the site contact to get final directions. I usually do this. It’s the middle of the night and it’s not always very easy to find a specific street address. The site contact sounds surprised when I tell him were I am. He says I am at a wrong site. I call the customer’s network control center: a big global company in a faraway place. I explain what’s goin’ on to an anonymous voice. They check the information, tell me that “their database is a mess”, apologize for the mistake and send me on my way back home.

As companies get bigger and start to work global, this is happening more often to me. Language barriers, outdate databases, crappy procedures… You name it. And call center agents don’t care about these things. They don’t even know that they’re calling someone in the middle of the night. In the end the one that gets called in the middle of the night is suffering from all these problems. He’s loosing sleep and sure as hell is getting no respect. That’s globalization for you…