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icarusGot an email from my Dad:
"The bones of my neck look like Sylvester Pussycat's tail after he's stuck his tongue in a light socket. X-rays don't lie, I saw it myself today.
Rheumatologist Michael Blackmkore comments, "Oh my god, look at that!" Not much of a bedside manner, but then there was no bed, just an office, a light box and the x-ray prints.
I have degenerative disc disease and some form of arthritis in my neck that makes bone spurs form all over the vertebrae, and the spaces between them shrink so the nerves don't have room to be there anymore. Nerves get nervous under these conditions and send out pain signals to the brain. You can bribe the brain with drugs not to respond, but like junkies everywhere the brain goes to the highest bidder. When the drugs wear off the nerves are right there kicking the pain gong and you're off again. It's a mess.
The x-rays are dated Jan '03 but I chose not to ask why the doctor had only just looked at them today. The important thing is I got his attention finally by sending him a well-composed letter describing life with pain and asking him what the future looked like for me. He doesn't know. He's ordering up a series of blood tests, CT scans and MRI's to determine the
exact nature of my problem and what the indicated treatment would be. If it's Osteo, that is, wear and tear, arthritis all he can do is pain management and fusion surgery to immobilize the bad joints. If it's Soriatic there are still drug treatments that may work.
The doctor points to a particularly ugly spot on the ray and I locate it with my finger on my neck. Yep, that's a painful spot, okay. And those spurs would explain that snapping sound when I move my head?
By the end of the interview, which was rushed because the doctor was running behind schedule, I felt a bit queasy. Got a feeling this is only the beginning.
Advice? If you have any inkling, the barest hint of any skeletal issue, back pain, pronnation in the arches, ...deal with it now. Don't go through this."
~*~*~
Any ideas, anyone?
"The bones of my neck look like Sylvester Pussycat's tail after he's stuck his tongue in a light socket. X-rays don't lie, I saw it myself today.
Rheumatologist Michael Blackmkore comments, "Oh my god, look at that!" Not much of a bedside manner, but then there was no bed, just an office, a light box and the x-ray prints.
I have degenerative disc disease and some form of arthritis in my neck that makes bone spurs form all over the vertebrae, and the spaces between them shrink so the nerves don't have room to be there anymore. Nerves get nervous under these conditions and send out pain signals to the brain. You can bribe the brain with drugs not to respond, but like junkies everywhere the brain goes to the highest bidder. When the drugs wear off the nerves are right there kicking the pain gong and you're off again. It's a mess.
The x-rays are dated Jan '03 but I chose not to ask why the doctor had only just looked at them today. The important thing is I got his attention finally by sending him a well-composed letter describing life with pain and asking him what the future looked like for me. He doesn't know. He's ordering up a series of blood tests, CT scans and MRI's to determine the
exact nature of my problem and what the indicated treatment would be. If it's Osteo, that is, wear and tear, arthritis all he can do is pain management and fusion surgery to immobilize the bad joints. If it's Soriatic there are still drug treatments that may work.
The doctor points to a particularly ugly spot on the ray and I locate it with my finger on my neck. Yep, that's a painful spot, okay. And those spurs would explain that snapping sound when I move my head?
By the end of the interview, which was rushed because the doctor was running behind schedule, I felt a bit queasy. Got a feeling this is only the beginning.
Advice? If you have any inkling, the barest hint of any skeletal issue, back pain, pronnation in the arches, ...deal with it now. Don't go through this."
~*~*~
Any ideas, anyone?
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no subject
Date: 2004-03-19 11:02 am (UTC)IBM, Earthlink, GE have all moved their call centers and tech support to India, and that's only the beginning. Smaller companies have done it as well with less fanfare.
Businesses have to stay competitive and when so many have cheaper labor costs overseas in the same industry, they begin to undercut those who keep their manufacturing in the US. This either forces the cost of labor down in the US -- or forces the manufacturer to ship jobs overseas.
Because of the politics involved, jobs are shipped quietly in a non-competitive manner. Most employees are not given the option to compete with these foreign employees. The American work force is better educated and better trained and could make a solid case, if there's a choice between losing your job and having to accept less. I realize this is Labor Industry sacrilege of course.
There's also the work ethic issue.
While the Korean and Japanese work ethic is something to be admired, I've lived in India, and the only jobs that I'd ship there are the ones where you want the efficiency of your employees doing as little as possible. My experience with Earthlink's new Indian call center bears this out - the Americans would put me on hold and come back with answers to my questions. The Indian call center just parrots what they read on the screen and says "I'm sorry, we can't help you." When you complain they add "We're very sorry we can't help you."
In India I saw employees just get up and leave when there was a blip in the power grid, shutting down businesses for the entire afternoon when the power was only out for an hour or so. People would work for six months, and then spend the next six months living off what they made, hanging out. They could have worked the full year, but 'why?' they say.
It's a completely different attitude. The Indian IBM employees created a different image for US firms, but that's because they were flown to the US and worked in the US first (IBM in Rockville, Maryland and elsewhere). The people you hire directly out of the Indian labor pool grow up with an Indian work ethic.
But once a company has gone through the trouble of finding an outsourcing company and working out the infrastructure, those jobs are gone.
I'm an employee and I do understand it quite well, though it's true the costs of workmans comp and health insurance are much steeper than most employees know. It's a sand-in-the-shoe issue. The make or break is when you can't compete, or when you have to keep profit margins at 12% during a recession to hold the stock price together.
Icarus
no subject
Date: 2004-03-19 11:14 am (UTC)It is just a real shame that they did take the jobs to India...but saving pennies now sometimes will cost you $$$$ later.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-19 01:36 pm (UTC)You're right, it's going to cost in the long run.
Call centers I think will do well in India, because the goal is to get people off the phone. But tech support is going to be a problem because no kid fresh out of college knows very much.
Anything that involves secret or secure information (such as one firm that sends our medical records and social security records over to India) well, we're in for a rude shock. When I was in India people regularly paid the police to look the other way on Americans staying with "secure" refugees, or illegally tapping into the power grid. The police just did the rounds to collect their bribes. Having social security numbers, the basis for US passports anywhere near Pakistani extremists in this stew of corruption is just too stupid for words.
There are small businesses who subcontract out certain services to India instead of having them in-house or having a US-based firm do it. For small businesses it's almost always a matter of subcontracting rather than packing up and moving, which takes a huge $$$ outlay.
I helped a friend start a small business, I worked in the production end while she did the R&D and another person did the sales. Went for four years. It's a completely different world.
Since we were technically a 501(c)3 organization that didn't have any employees yet (we had a work force but they were strictly volunteer) we weren't hampered by the workman's comp, etc. The drawback was that volunteers were unreliable in the extreme and I was constantly retraining new people. Our ability to ship suffered as a result.
We had a solid customer base and were in Sharper Image, but reliability was a problem. We needed to reduce production time to move to a paid staff, which needed new equipment. We had an expert in from GM to help us modernize, but we never had the capital to make the shift.
The business plan imploded on personality issues. Heh. Small business have personality issues where the corporations have "politics." But it's pretty much the same.
The fact that the small businesses don't plan to move gives me some hope.
Icarus
no subject
Date: 2004-03-19 11:00 pm (UTC)And I will never move my business overseas because the people who do work for me are either people who have a disability or family. And I am completely open to more people who want to come work for me. Hell, I can't keep up with what I do have currently going. I am constantly hiring but I need super responsible and dependable people. I am having a very hard time finding that.