Re: Are the days of the showpiece NOC office display gone forever?

[Allen Kitchen <allenmckinleykitchen () gmail com>]

Can't resist two comments:

For those who might otherwise wonder, "Flapper" has no connection to the US
Roaring Twenties, but was a concept pioneered by Jonathan Swift in
"Gulliver's Travels" particular to the land of Laputa (NOT to be confused
with Lilliput, with which many are familiar..) - where certain people are
so self-important that they are accompanied at all times by a dedicated
servant who, when in the opinion of the servant the master would benefit by
awareness of ome event or situation, would (gently) cudgel the master with
a bladder of dried peas or pebbles, either on the ears or the eyes, so that
the master's attention would be drawn from their intense interior
environment to something occurring in the mundane world. (In my opinion,
this was Swift's most trenchant critique of civil society.)

For the second comment - no discussion of a flapper bypass system is
complete without:
https://xkcd.com/806
Oh, have I often wished...

Blessings..

..Allen









Allen M. Kitchen
404 Franklin Street, Butler PA 16001
412-295-7763 (cell; text OK 24x7)
allenmckinleykitchen () gmail com


On Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 12:12 PM Keith Medcalf <kmedcalf () dessus com> wrote:

> On Tuesday, 22 December, 2020 22:42, Wayne Bouchard wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 02:58:32PM +1000, Robert Brockway wrote:
> > > On Thu, 17 Dec 2020, Tom Beecher wrote:
>
> > > If the last 50 years has shown us anything it is that humans and
> > > computers working together can achieve far more than either in
> > > isolation.
>
> > And if the last 15 years has shown us anything, it is that when you
> > can't get past the auto-attendant and talk to a real human, and if
> > that person can't talk to you like a person instead of reading scripts
> > at you, your stress levels go way up as does your desire to break
> > things. Automation in customer service (or excessive emphasis on
> > procedures) is a really nice way of taking a five minute problem and
> > turning it into an hour long ordeal.
>
> The correct term of art for these humans that execute "scripts" when
> answering inquiries is "flapper".  Often there are multiple layers of
> "flapper" before one can communicate with someone who has any clue what
> they (or you) are speaking about.  This is deliberate in an attempt to
> cull the wheat from the chaff of the support calls because 99.9999999%
> of callers are "chaff" and do not have a problem that is worthy of
> attention by someone who knows what they are doing.
>
> Many organizations which employ "flappers" have "flapper bypass systems"
> in place in which there are either "magical incantations" or perhaps an
> entry in the CRM system that identifies the probability that a caller is
> "wheat" vs "chaff" so that the multi-level flapper system can be
> bypassed.
>
> There are even a few organizations which do not employ flappers at all
> -- though they are few and far between.
>
> If an organization does not have a functional "flapper bypass system"
> then usually the most effective system to bypass multiple layers of
> flappers is what is called the "shit principle".  The "shit principle"
> states that shit works best when flowing downhill and therefore the most
> effective "flapper bypass" is to direct the problem to the higest level
> executive in the organization with the least probability of being able
> to address the issue.  That person will simply direct an under-thing to
> "take care of this and have them stop bothering me" which will result in
> you immediately having the issue resolved by a competent individual.
>
> Organizations without other functional "flapper bypass" procedures
> usually have a huge organization dedicated to addressing issues raised
> through the "shit principle" since this is, in reality, their chosen
> "flapper bypass" system.
>
> --
> Be decisive.  Make a decision, right or wrong.  The road of life is
> paved with flat squirrels who could not make a decision.