Interesting Links for 15-08-2014

[andrewducker]

• Engineers turns metal into glass
  (tags: metal glass engineering )
• Hospital replaces heart valve - and place sit outside the heart
  (tags: heart surgery )
• Should holiday email be deleted?
  (tags: email work holidays )
• The British Library's exhibition on British comics has some odd omissions
  (tags: comics history uk )
• Want EE to answer your customer

Comments

[bart_calendar]

Free.fr, my internet and phone company, while wonderful in many ways (and much better than Orange/France Telecom)charge per minute for all customer service calls for any reason.

[andrewducker]

I don't mind a low standard charge - but charging _extra_ to jump the queue basically gives them a reason to put one rubbish person on the standard queue and everyone else on the premium one. If they're doing that, they should just charge in the first place.

[bart_calendar]

Fair point.

I just hate having to pay them money when their router blows out.

[andrewducker]

Oh, I agree. I don't _like_ people charging for support for their services - you're making customers pay because your services aren't working for them.

But if you're going to, then a free queue and a pay queue is just dishonest gouging.

[tobyaw]

I don’t get the holiday-email-deletion thing. One could make the same argument that phone messages and letters received during a holiday should be destroyed.

Maybe some people attach any importance to emails that they receive, so this is saying that a different medium should be used for important communications. In which case why bother having work email at all?

[andrewducker]

"One could make the same argument that phone messages and letters received during a holiday should be destroyed."

I think they're talking about internal ones - not ones from the outside world. You wouldn't delete a customer's email/letter/phone call, but then in any large company those shouldn't be going to the email address of a person anyway.

Basically, external emails should go to customerservices@bigco.com (or a range thereof) and then into work queues for customer services reps to deal with or pass to internal work queues (which shouldn't be _kept_ in email, although there may be email notifications).

So we're talking about deleting internal emails - ones from your coworkers asking questions, etc. And if you've been off for two weeks chances are that those have been dealt with by someone else. Unless you're a key-person dependency, in which case your boss should be soundly reprimanded for allowing that to happen.

[tobyaw]

I don’t think there can be as distinct a separation between internal and external communication as you suggest; certainly not for small- or medium-sized organisations

[andrewducker]

Big financial company here, using internal work queues for _everything_. When a customer request comes in it's scanned, and put onto a queue for the type of processing it corresponds with (i.e. what kind of investment/policy), and then someone from the correct team will pick it up and deal with it, updating the work item until it's marked as "complete", at which point it's archived for posterity.

The idea of only having one person who could deal with a query is pretty much unheard of here - what would happen to the company if they were hit by a bus? Or left for a new job? Or went off on maternity leave?

Sure, we're not replaceable cogs, but we _always_ have multiple people in place to deal with things.

And my invites come in to my calendar no matter what - they're not really dealt with in the same way as my normal email.

I agree it's different at small/medium companies. They don't have the scale to deal with operations like that.

[bart_calendar]

My god those football people are dumb.

Vine footage is really fucking short. It doesn't replace an entire game. What it actually does is get people excited about the sport itself - making it more likely for people to watch the next game.

In other words, they are using copyright laws to try to clamp down on free advertising.

What a bunch of fucking idiots.

[andrewducker]

It does seem bizarre.

But then apparently The Sun is paying a _fortune_ to get the rights to put the goals on its online service. Just the goals. i.e., exactly those same clips.

I assume that football is so incredibly dull to most people that they only want to see about 20 seconds of each match...

[bart_calendar]

It is the most boring game ever.

They should make the field half the size so that people actually score regularly.

[andrewducker]

Change the sacred game of football?

Inconceivable!

[manintheboat]

I was in a sensory dep tank for an hour. It was really cool. YOu sort of waking dream the whole time.

[andrewducker]

I've just discovered that there's one in Edinburgh, but it gets pretty mediocre reviews. Bah!

New words added to dictionaries

[spacelem]

"Adorbs"? How about "boak".

Re: New words added to dictionaries

[andrewducker]

Yup:
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/boke?q=boak