I worked for a small(er) cable company 15 years ago, in their community Television department. We covered city council meetings, parades, had several shows about life in Cleveland etc. It has changed ownerships a few times, and is now Time Warner, and I stopped in not to long ago to see if I still knew anybody who worked there.
The entire community TV department had been replaced by more call center lackeys answering angry phone calls, and what was more interesting was the main reception area where people could pay their bills has the customer service reps behind bulletproof glass, and there was an armed guard sitting in there.
If you are doing such bad job servicing your customers needs that you feel you have to protect your employees from customers so angry they might start shooting up the place, maybe, just maybe, you might want to try and improve your customer service a bit...
One of the most touching things I ever had on Xbox Live was when I received a message I from a friend who always seemed to be on, but not in the previous 2 weeks. The message was from his mother thanking me, and everyone on his friends list for being his friend and telling us he had passed away. She continued to tell us he had Downs Syndrome, and at 21 years of age had passed away from complications of it. She told us that we, his virtual friends were the only friends he really seemed to have, because we didn't know about, or judge him because of his condition.
Would this system have deprived him of the one joy he had in his life because he couldn't run the hundred meter dash, or didn't match up with some other physical standard?
A few years ago I was working in television as a video editor. I bought Final Cut to do some side projects on, to make my demo DVD as professional as possible while looking for another job, and because I was used to working with pro tools.
Now I'm a software developer, I make maybe 2 or 3 fun videos a year, friends weddings, highlights of hockey, and it isn't worth it to upgrade the software. There still is that pull of "I spent over $1k on that software I should make sure I can still use it, but at the same time when I look at how much more I'll need to spend on a hardware in order to still run it, I need to figure out where to cut the losses.
I thought I had justified it if I could make the entire house Mac centric, but to upgrade the netbook to the cheapest MacBook, and to buy a Mac Pro vs build a home system just doesn't justify it.
Yeah my main desktop at work is an Ubuntu machine, which runs VirtualBox whenever I need to do something which requires windows (not often). I also have an old iMac at work, but it doesn't do much but serve as an iTunes player, and doing the occasional SVN merge. I've always appreciated the OSX ui, and a few years ago bought Final Cut Pro to do some video editing as a hobby. I'd like to keep using it, but I'm caught in the Mac Hole. iMac isn't the ideal platform for it. Mac Pro is to expensive for something I'll be doing as a "hobby" I want to get my wife off of Windows, and the transition from Windows -> OSX would be just as easy/hard as the transition from Windows -> Ubuntu. Yes they aren't equal yet, but for what she'll use it for there will be close enough.
Our business in life is not to succeed but to continue to fail in high spirits. -- Robert Louis Stevenson