Author: rfhurley

 

Outsourced Call Centers Return, To U.S. Homes

by Carolyn Beeler, National Public Radio
August 25, 2010

Maureen Quigley-Hogan is the next generation of call center worker. Wearing pink slippers and sitting at her desk in her home office in Virginia, she takes a call from a woman in New Jersey who has a question about her credit card bill.

Quigley-Hogan was unemployed for 10 years because she couldn’t hold down a traditional job, she says. She has rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia, a disease that causes severe fatigue.

“It was hard to get to a job,” Quigley-Hogan says. “The idea of going through a regular schedule of getting up and getting ready for work, I would be exhausted.”

She worked in customer service for more than 20 years, so two years ago, she was thrilled to land this job where she can work from home.

Rethinking Overseas Outsourcing

For years, Americans have had their phone calls about credit card bills and broken cell phones handled by people in the Philippines or India. But American firms are starting to bring call centers back to the U.S. — and this time around, they are hiring more people to work in their own homes.

Ten years ago, it made a lot of sense to outsource these jobs overseas. But that’s changing. Increasingly, companies that want to outsource their customer service jobs are happy with these domestic arrangements.

High inflation and double-digit annual raises in some sectors are pushing up the cost of labor in India. At the same time wages in the U.S. are falling and companies are rethinking the trade-offs associated with outsourcing.

Full story at NPR

I’m not sure whether it’s really a good thing when these kinds of pieces seems (or actually DO) write themselves.

and be sure not to miss:

Apu explains why he is leaving Springfield to return to his home to India

India, once considered as the preferred destination by many US companies to get their jobs done might not be a considered a hotspot by them anymore, courtesy various protectionist moves in the US like pressurising local firms to stop outsourcing of jobs overseas, ending tax breaks for firms that sent jobs abroad, encouraging local hiring etc…

 

 

What luck. Possibly the first “Greek House” photograph I ever took, and it turns out to be the one that headlined the student paper during Rush Week. (I’m still having problems getting the hang of my camera at this point)

 

Also sort of segues into my little thematic juxtaposition of Fraternities with “Party Time City.”

But let’s let the students themselves tell their own little sordid story: …

Sorority in good standing after completing probation

Sigma Kappa was officially reinstated by Chico State as a recognized student organization on Feb. 2, after a suspension in spring 2009.

On Feb. 18, 2009, then 18-year-old Bethany Dixon was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning, according to a Feb. 26, 2009, article in The Orion. Dixon had been attending a Sigma Kappa event prior to drinking at a house across from the Bell Memorial Union.

On March 11, 2009, a letter was sent to Sigma Kappa’s Chico chapter withdrawing university recognition, said Rick Rees, director of the student activities office. Other stipulations included the release of all new members recruited during spring 2009 and removing the letters from the chapter house. The university worked closely with the sorority’s national headquarters to review the situation and decide what measures to take, he said.

The sorority’s headquarters placed the Chico chapter on probation in March 2009 as well, said Jordan Duffie Bentlage, director of collegiate services for Sigma Kappa, in an e-mail interview. The headquarters did not suspend the chapter.

In January 2010, the chapter requested to become a recognized student organization, she said. Sigma Kappa was reinstated because they had completed all the conditions the university and their headquarters had required of them, said Connie Huyck, adviser and coordinator for Greek life. This means that they are now a chapter in good standing with Sigma Kappa, a fully recognized student organization with Chico State and a voting member of the Panhellenic Council.

The chapter had to do training, educational programs, reorganization within the chapter and a recommitment to the sorority’s values, Huyck said. Sigma Kappa was also not allowed to recruit new members through the formal Panhellenic process in spring and fall 2009, she said. All organizations have problems, Rees said. “If you have an organization that doesn’t have any problems, somebody’s fooling themselves,” he said. “They recognized that this was an opportunity, not just a punishment, for this group to try to make itself better.”

Rudro Roy can be reached at [email protected]

and don’t dare miss…

Porno stains Greek image

I’m starting another photo album— don’t know quite what to name it yet. The first two are different shots of the same subject. No images were harmed by Photoshop in the posting of this album (so far…). I’d like people to check in to let me know which they like better, because I’m going to take one of them down.

 

Gratuitous screenshots of various speed-dial images.

 

All original images are available under the “Photos” tab (somewhere), or in one of my Opera Group albums listed down the page on the right.

And like everything else on this site, all images are licensed under Creative Commons.

Pictures of art, objets d’Art (somebody please correct my French here), and indiscriminate overuse of Photoshop™ filters…

(I need a section on myOpera to post entries as “Bad Artist”…)

btw… ALWAYS ask permission before you photograph somebody’s artwork, in this case the Art Car you see before you..

This is from the same batch as my previous post, taken much earlier in the day. People keep telling me to post without editing in Photoshop (in all honesty, I’m much more at home in Photoshop than navigating the little menus & knobbies on a camera), and this one looked OK in terms of color & focus, and the white-balance readings checked out OK in Bridge– so I figured I could post it, as-is. So without further doodoo ado…

(click HERE or on the, um, thumbnail below for the original image, in all it’s humungous excessive-megapixel glory):

 

I hope I don’t mislead anyone into thinking I’ll be doing much of this anytime soon. The lens distortion is frighteningly evident in many of my other shots, the color- & white-balance is uneven and, compared to other places I’ve lived, this place isn’t terribly scenic, nor do I have a whole lot of extra time on my hands to “develop” my photos.

See Zephrine? I can do it too! :rolleyes:

 

 

SALINA, KS—Local man Scott Gentries told reporters Wednesday that his deliberately limited grasp of Islamic history and culture was still more than sufficient to shape his views of the entire Muslim world.

Gentries, 48, said he had absolutely no interest in exposing himself to further knowledge of Islamic civilization or putting his sweeping opinions into a broader context of any kind, and confirmed he was “perfectly happy” to make a handful of emotionally charged words the basis of his mistrust toward all members of the world’s second-largest religion.

…

“I learned all that really matters about the Muslim faith on 9/11,” Gentries said in reference to the terrorist attacks on the United States undertaken by 19 of Islam’s approximately 1.6 billion practitioners. “What more do I need to know to stigmatize Muslims everywhere as inherently violent radicals?”

“All Muslims are at war with America, and I will resist any attempt to challenge that assertion with potentially illuminating facts,” said Gentries, who threatened to leave the room if presented with the number of Muslims who live peacefully in the United States, serve in the country’s armed forces, or were victims themselves of the 9/11 attacks. “Period.”

Over the past decade, Gentries said he has taken pains to avoid personal interactions or media that might have the potential to compromise his point of view. He told reporters that the closest he had come to confronting a contrary standpoint was tuning in to the first few seconds of an interview with a moderate Muslim cleric before hastily turning off the television.

“I almost gave in and listened to that guy defend Islam with words I didn’t want to hear,” Gentries said. “But then I remembered how much easier it is to live in a world of black-and-white in which I can assign the label of ‘other’ to someone and use him as a vessel for all my fears and insecurities.”

The rest of the article on The Onion

also, in a side note:

Texas Vows To Reclaim Title Of Most Regressive State From Arizona

AUSTIN, TX—Following a series of embarrassingly backward laws recently enacted in Arizona, Texas governor Rick Perry pledged Wednesday to do everything in his power to reestablish his state as the most regressive in the nation. “I commend Arizona for its commitment to exceedingly draconian social policies, but [Arizona Governor] Jan Brewer should know that we still have some real doozies up our sleeve,” said Perry, referring to Arizona’s passage of the strictest immigration law in recent U.S. history, as well as its measures allowing concealed weapons to be carried without a permit and banning ethnic studies programs in public schools. “Don’t forget, we just put an ultraconservative stamp on our educational curriculum that’s going to affect the textbooks the whole country uses, and I’m still the only governor nutso enough to float secession. Mark my words, we’ll be back and more fucked up than ever!” Sources close to Perry said that Texas may soon start storing undocumented migrant workers in dog cages while courts decide their immigration status, though Arizona plans to counter with a giant cannon that will be used to shoot anyone with a skin tone darker than ochre who crosses the border from Mexico.