The Internet Not for Old People 607
Alien54 writes to tell us the Daily Mail is reporting that if you want an internet connection and you are over 70 you may be in for a surprise. From the article: "After walking the Great Wall of China and making plans for a trip to Russia, Shirley Greening-Jackson thought signing up for a new internet service would be a doddle. But the young man behind the counter had other ideas. He said she was barred - because she was too old."
I've been here too long... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Somebody has decided when you turn 70 you lose a lot of your mind. I find this is ridiculous."
This lady is obviously intelligent, she spelt rediculous correctly...
People should have to pass a test to get on the internet, it should consist of lots of to/too there/their/they're type questions and only if passed you get access (I would have years of my life back because I would fail it)
I wonder if it can be retroactively applied though and if it was, would slashdot have managed 1 million user accounts?
Having said all that, the guy who rejected her should get reprimanded for his actions, if a person is competent enough to go into a store and is prepared to go through the motions of ordering they should be supplied the product. Its not like she was an anonymous web packet arriving with credit card information and an order.
Another idea (Score:4, Insightful)
I little shallow (Score:3, Insightful)
Well... (Score:1, Insightful)
The ISP was legally covering their asses, and last time I checked a free market economy allowed a company to decide with whom they'd like to do business (short of random anti-discriminatory acts the US has set, but I don't believe age is a protected factor).
Maybe she should just sign up with another company that's happy to have her business, rather than waste time being an attention whore over a minor issue.
Re:I've been here too long... (Score:1, Insightful)
It was me that spelt it wrong to try to make the point.
Obviously I fail it on multiple layers.
[NO CARRIER]
Re:Done b/c of complaints (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Done b/c of complaints (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe if you need a "younger" person with you to read the fine print in the contract, maybe the problem isn't with being over 70, maybe the problem is too much fine print.
Re:Done b/c of complaints (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I little shallow (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Done b/c of complaints (Score:3, Insightful)
As for technical ... the world moves on .. there are people in their 70s who were programmers in the 1960's. How old are Kernigan and Richie? (IBM's expert witnesses) they are older than me and Bill Gates anyway!
Damn right e-mail is for oldies. The youngsters can use skateboards to visit their friends :-)
Re:I've been here too long... (Score:3, Insightful)
(although I can't imagine someone like her would have got it wrong)
Re:Another idea (Score:5, Insightful)
You haven't quite thought this through. As median cognitive ability goes up as a result of all this shooting, more and more people will drop under the 120 IQ line until we finally end up killing everybody.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a reason there are anti-discrimination laws in the US, and yes, age IS one of the protected factors. So we discriminate against people at the younger end of the spectrum... thousands of years of experience show that younger than a certain age, people tend not to behave responsibly. Are there exceptions? Of course!
This isn't a "minor issue", this is turning the most experienced, and often wisest segment of our population into second class citizens. Look at the average ages of our Supreme Court Justices. Now tell me that they can't handle signing up "all on their own" for a damn cell-phone because they might get "confused," because it's so darn "complicated."
Speaking for everyone over 30, BITE ME.
m-
why would HE be reprimanded? (Score:5, Insightful)
Thats like getting mad at the cashier because your Big Mac went up 20 cents. I assure you he doesn;t set policy.
Re:Well... (Score:2, Insightful)
So that makes it all ok!
Maybe she should just sign up with another company that's happy to have her business, rather than waste time being an attention whore over a minor issue.
She did the right thing, IMO. This was such a pissing-off action by the ISP that quietly running off to another company would not have made Carphone Warehouse suffer some like they needed to.
Re:Seems fair. (Score:3, Insightful)
Believe me, i tried.
Re:Another idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Another idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Another idea (Score:3, Insightful)
That presumes that this would be an iterative process.
A one-time date-based test would do nicely.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
And this is new? In the western world, we take the most experienced, and often wisest segment of our population and throw them into rest homes because we're too damned lazy/selfish to take care of them ourselves. This is just the continuing of a trend... in our culture, the elderly are considered a useless, incompetant burden on the young. It should be amusing to see how we handle the baby-boomers as they enter their 70s and 80s...
Re:I've been here too long... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're just mad because you'd fail the test.
Re:Having RTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
> difficult getting some (not ALL) of the elderly customers to understand
> what exactly they were wanting to sign up for.
How tedious of those old fogies to actually want to understand what they are contracting for! Much easier to deal with young suckers who will sign anything at all without reading it, isn't it?
Re:why would HE be reprimanded? (Score:5, Insightful)
He's a representative of the company. Even if he doesn't personally set the policy, that doesn't make him any less legitimate a target of one's anger. I have friends who feel the incessant need to explain to cashiers are other service reps, "I understand you're just doing your job, but..." That's silly.
Companies hire these kinds of people specifically for the purpose of you getting mad at them so that, if they're lucky, you won't do something that might bother the higher-ups. So feel free to cuss and fuss to your heart's content, that's what they're there for. (And yes, I used to be one of them, and until very recently, part of my job involved appeasing angry people.)
Of course, by the same logic, one should also realize that other than as a cathartic release, fussing and cussing at these people doesn't do any good, because like I said, part of their job is to make sure your ranting ends with them and doesn't bother the people-in-charge. If you do want to make a difference, you'll have to figure out some way to go around these paid bullet-takers to get to the people who actually can make some sort of difference. If they get bothered enough, believe me, the policy will change.
At my job, when people did go over my head or otherwise around me and my boss got bothered, guess what. Whoever's problem that was suddenly became my top priority, whether it was legitimate or not. And if someone went over my boss's head or otherwise went around him, well, I'll leave it to you to imagine just how much attention the problem got.
In an ideal world, if you fuss and cuss at the lowly service rep, what he should do is report to his manager that this customer is very mad and feels like this is a very important problem. If his manager gets enough of these types of complaints, he'd report it to his boss, and it would eventually propagate to someone who sees a pattern of people getting very angry at the service reps, which impacts the company's bottom line, and would make a change. Unfortunately in today's corporate society, what happens more often than not is that the service rep's feedback isn't seen as the constructive feedback that it is, and the rep gets fired for making a stink instead of just keeping his damn mouth shut, so the service reps just sit on these types of problems instead.
A couple of years later, when the company's stock price has tanked because everyone has figured out what lousy customer service they have, the board of directors sits around in a meeting scratching their heads over why things are going so badly, and they end up laying a bunch of people off, thinking that somehow solves their problem.
*shrug* Welcome to the corporate world at work!
Screwed either way... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you don't sell contracts to old people who may not understand - then people are going to complain you are discriminating against old people.
Sorry, you can't have it both ways. You can't give certain members of the public special protection, without taking away some of their rights. You must either treat old people as total equals to young people, or you must treat them like children. If you want to "protect" seniors as a group under the assumption that they are more easily taken advantage of, there is no way you can treat them as fully responsible adults. The two are mutually exclusive.
I think we have reached the point in society where no-matter what you do, how you act, or how honestly you are trying to do the right thing, people are going to be perpetually outraged and trying to destroy you.
Re:Seems fair. (Score:3, Insightful)
And the same just can't be true of some under 25-something. I wouldn't trust any of my (4) nephews to setup their own cable routers and home networks, even though they were all born with keyboards in their hands. Exposure to technology doesn't imply cluefulness. Your statement is ageist.
Re:Seems fair. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Another idea (Score:3, Insightful)
But, we are all so open-minded freedom-loving democratic people in the western world, that we would never use government licencing or regulation to supress dissenting political beliefs. No one would ever dream of doing such a thing!
Re:Done b/c of complaints (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm only 35 but I can actually remember when eg. phone contracts just had a monthly fee and a per minute charge that varied with distance - concepts which are intuitively understandable. Whereas nowadays the typical ad for a phone contract features a price and then at least 10 sub-clauses along the lines of "price only valid between 10pm and 2am if you still have bonus points left and the moon is full and only if you sign up for the next 10 years". Most *young* people I know, though, won't complain because they think that's "normal" and they want the product ASAP and don't want to think too much about it.
Now, maybe I'm an old fart (seeing as I seem to be talking about the "good old times" already) but I think it's high time that this kind of advertising and contracts were forbidden. It's happened before, too, in the banking sector. Can't remember where I read it but apparently it used to be that banks pushed their products like that. After a while it was forbidden and banks now are required to show the effective annual premium and stuff has become understandable again.
Re:why would HE be reprimanded? (Score:5, Insightful)
Gotcha.
Re:why would HE be reprimanded? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I agree! (Score:3, Insightful)
You've never been told that. What you've been told is that your rates are higher because people in your demographic have higher average claims per customer than do other groups.
You haven't, but other people your age have had disproportionally more. Insurance companies are very competitive, and if one could underwrite the youth market at a substantial discount and still make a profit, they would. The fact that none have says a lot.
Re:why would HE be reprimanded? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:why would HE be reprimanded? (Score:3, Insightful)
Shout and swear as was implied. NO.
Re:Damned if you do, damned if you don't (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:why would HE be reprimanded? (Score:3, Insightful)
Precisely! If you are unwilling to be a representative of the company, find another job!
I was in Best Buy last week. It was my first time I've ever been in one. And because of my experience, will probably be the last as well. I was given very poor service by the "representative" in the computer section. No need to go into how bad his service was, because the kicker was the cashier at the front counter. I told her about the bad service, and she smiled and said, "here's a complaint form to fill out."
I dont' want to fill out a freaking form! I want to TELL you about the bad service. Because I thought you might care about it. There was no one else in line, so it wasn't like I was holding anything up. If you don't care enough about your customers to spend thirty seconds listening to one, then I hope your stock tanks!
"We're sorry you aren't happy. Have a nice day. Please come again."
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
That doesn't imply a lack of intelligence. A lot of the judiciary is pretty old and can handle legal issues that are far more complex than what it takes to operate a computer.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well maybe Mrs. 75 year old should 'blame the people in her age group for not understanding contracts so well', hmm? Wasn't the point that that was a stupid assumption because people are individuals and not necessarily all the same as their 'group'?
If you have a better way of judging relative risk, start your own insurance company, or just submit your proposal as an application for the Nobel prize for economics. It'll be a shoe-in.
How about ONLY using an individual's personal actions as a factor in determining the charge?
We get cheaper insurance because, gee, we don't fuck up as much.
Then you don't get to sign up for this service because, gee, your age group is too retarded. Oh, was that another dumb rampant generalization?
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it's much more discriminatory because you get to choose whether you live in a flood plain, but not your age or gender.
Discriminatory would be barring them insurance just because they are young.
It would also be charging them, as an individual, more or less because of certain of their demographics.
Re:why would HE be reprimanded? (Score:5, Insightful)
For that matter, all you get out of talking about policy with peon-level clerks is maybe some sympathetic "uh huhs" and "okays" but the policy won't change and the best they can do is fetch a manager to make an exception in your case--this probably won't happen if you're rude about it. Most of the time, regardless of how calm you remain, all you'll do is hold the clerk up while lines build, other work piles up, and he has to stand there, all smiles, pretending he really, really cares why you think you should be exempt from the policies that are set well over his head.
Seriously, if you're angry enough to make some high school girl behind the register cry over your abuse, take it to the manager. You can even ask to see the manager in your scariest, angriest voice if it makes you feel better about yourself. A store manager may have the power to help you, if they want to, and they're probably seasoned enough to take a little abuse--tell you to fuck off when you well deserve it.
This shit is why I miss washing dishes. The only customers I hated then were the ones with gum.
Re:Another idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:why would HE be reprimanded? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:2, Insightful)
Seems fair? NO it doesn't (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you saying that only elderly people can be technological lunkheads? I've run into plenty of people whose microwave oven clocks are still flashing 12:00. If you want to have a restriction aimed at keeping the ill-informed and "unsuited" away from the internet, then maybe the store should administer a technology test to every applicant. That would make way more sense than some arbitrary cutoff based on age. Which is still damning the idea with faint praise.
Re:why would HE be reprimanded? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, I work in customer services/internet helpdesk, I'm college educated (I'm posting on /., guess my major, here's a hint: it wasn't creative writing..) and I deal with assholes like you all the time. Where I work I'd estimate that at least 70% of the bottom-rung underpaid drones are in the same situation as me, they didn't know the right people and there aren't enough IT/CE jobs for all of us so we got stuck enforcing corporate policies.
Here is my advice for those of you running into some customer services rep who is just enforcing corporate policy: Don't be an asshole! Chances are that this person is just working there because there weren't any real jobs and hates the absurd and crazy rules as much as you do. Most of the time we are genuinely trying to help but our hands are tied by the rules, and you getting pissed off is not a problem for us compared to losing our jobs for going against company policy.
/Mikael
I can see where he's coming from (Score:3, Insightful)
That's what this is about, in a nutshell.
There is a load of clueless morons on the 'net, also causing support calls (and, trust me, the most inane you can imagine), but they at least swallow the whole online crap (because they're too ignorant and unwilling to figure out how to toy with it 'til you get it for free (and legally so)). They cost, but they also make you money. So that's "acceptable".
They are, though, the real problem of the 'net. Not old people. Old people don't download spyware loaded screensavers, they don't start any junk sent to them just 'cause it's labeled "free pr0n", they are usually very cautious and few of them actually cause a real problem to the 'net as a whole. Only to their provider with their calls.
Unfortunately, that's who they need to connect.
not in the US (Score:2, Insightful)
From what? The over-70 folks are still legally competent until declared otherwise by a court of law.
and last time I checked a free market economy allowed a company to decide with whom they'd like to do business
You are very much mistaken. Not only is discrimination based on age specifically illegal in many countries (including the US), who can do business with whom is indeed subject to many legal regulations. A free market economy is not the same as anarchy.
Re:I've been here too long... (Score:4, Insightful)
I've got a Better Punishment (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:why would HE be reprimanded? (Score:2, Insightful)
You are one amazing corporate apologist. You've been able to turn "arbitrarily fucked with" into "a self-esteem problem" in one sentence and not even one of the other responders has questioned it. Bravo! I think you have excellent potential for a job in Washington as a lobbyist.
Re:why would HE be reprimanded? (Score:3, Insightful)
I would like to speak to your manager.
Don't take out your anger on the little guy, aim it at the right person. And besides, who says that you have to be angry about it. I think people are getting much to adversarial.
It's in the Daily Mail. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:why would HE be reprimanded? (Score:3, Insightful)
And I hope that other people will show you as much sympathy as you show them, when you are weak and need it. Maybe that will teach you a little lesson about the nature of evil and why embracing it is not such a good idea after all.
Re:why would HE be reprimanded? (Score:2, Insightful)
For the record, I'm always nice to low-level staff. The closest I come to being mad at them is to day, "Ok, I understand you can't fix this. Can you just put me in touch with whoever you'd call if I were furious and ranting?"
But people working those front like jobs are not prisoners. They picked a job, pursued it, and willingly turn up every day. They have control over the situation, too.
If you are making money by treating people poorly (hello, telemarketers!), do not fool yourself into thinking that you aren't responsible for your actions just because somebody else takes most of the money. That just makes you a jerk and a chump.
Re:why would HE be reprimanded? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's accurate only as long as people like you keep justifying the behavior of people who support systems like that.
Back before spam became a fact of life, I spent a lot of time tracking down individual spammers and getting them banned. I ended up talking to a number of them, and you know what? It was never their fault, not really. It was just that they really needed the money, or that they had a quota to meet, or the baby was on the way, or they just had to have that new car, or they were just doing what their boss told them. They were just a tragic victim of circumstances, boo hoo.
That's bullshit. We all have circumstances. We all can be ethical in an imaginary perfect world. What really matters is what you do in the face of real life. And that real life will always include assholes who will pay you to to help them be assholes.
Large, faceless, asshole corporations are, historically, a relatively new thing. My bet is that they have passed their peak. Rather than helping to prop them up, why not help speed their fall?
Re:why would HE be reprimanded? (Score:3, Insightful)
What the parent is talking about however, more or less, is that those in charge of these corporations are the ones being abusive - only in an inderect and backwards way, they know there customers are going to be pissed, and they place pawns between themselves and those very customers - consequently, abusing those pawns.
I would take it a step further and say that CS is not about support anymore (other than convenient/automated support), it's more of a buffer zone. I can't remember the last time I had the *default* customer support that didn't make things worse one way or the other, the only time anything gets resolved is with specific departments or management.
Back when I was a kid, there used to be a saying, something stupid about the customer always being right - I don't think anyone has anything close to that modo anymore, more along the lines of "the customer is always wrong and try to pursude them to our way of thinking..."
Re:why would HE be reprimanded? (Score:2, Insightful)
I see. You view the people you talk to as assholes.
Where I work I'd estimate that at least 70% of the bottom-rung underpaid drones are in the same situation as me, they didn't know the right people and there aren't enough IT/CE jobs for all of us so we got stuck enforcing corporate policies.
There are plenty of real jobs, just not for people with attitudes like yours.
Excellent Suggestion! (Score:2, Insightful)