Isegoria

If you’ve ever had a sketchy teenager show up on your doorstep selling magazines, then you might have wondered about the details of the business. For Youths, a Grim Tour on Magazine Crews:

Up at 7 a.m., typical crews start the day with a sales meeting where they rehearse their pitches. “We’re selling magazines to earn points in a contest to win a trip abroad” is the standard and sometimes fictitious spiel. Around 9 a.m., the crews pile into vans to be dropped off at the day’s territory. They switch neighborhoods every several hours and often work as late as 10 p.m.

“You work hard during the day, but you also party pretty hard at night,” said Stephanie Blake, 23, who wrote an e-mail message in November to Earlene Williams at Parent Watch because she said she wanted to tell the positive side of the work.

While she and others used methamphetamine, Ms. Blake said it was mostly marijuana, alcohol and sex that filled the nights.
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For two years starting in February 2004, Mr. Simpson, a stocky former high school lacrosse player from Newburgh, N.Y., worked on several crews as an “enforcer.” His job, he said, was to beat crew members upon a manager’s request.

If sellers missed quota regularly or complained about the job, Mr. Simpson, 23, said he hit them while in their room or when they were alone in the van. On more than 30 occasions, he estimated, he and several other enforcers drew blood. In three instances, ambulances were called, he said. Dealing with the police was not a problem.

“You have one kid saying he was jumped and 20 others plus two managers saying he stole something or broke into a room and assaulted a girl,” Mr. Simpson said. “Who do you think the cops are going to believe?”

Daivet McClinton, 23, an enforcer who worked with Mr. Simpson, said talking in front of others about wanting to quit invited the worst beatings.

Joel Spolsky offers up his seven steps to remarkable customer service, starting with this first step: fix everything two ways:

Almost every tech support problem has two solutions. The superficial and immediate solution is just to solve the customer’s problem. But when you think a little harder you can usually find a deeper solution: a way to prevent this particular problem from ever happening again.
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We treat each tech support call like the NTSB treats airliner crashes. Every time a plane crashes, they send out investigators, figure out what happened, and then figure out a new policy to prevent that particular problem from ever happening again. It’s worked so well for aviation safety that the very, very rare airliner crashes we still get in the US are always very unusual, one-off situations.

This has two implications.

One: it’s crucial that tech support have access to the development team. This means that you can’t outsource tech support: they have to be right there at the same street address as the developers, with a way to get things fixed. Many software companies still think that it’s “economical” to run tech support in Bangalore or the Philippines, or to outsource it to another company altogether. Yes, the cost of a single incident might be $10 instead of $50, but you’re going to have to pay $10 again and again.

Years ago I read about an interesting workout routine. If I recall correctly, it was brought back from Japan by shootfighter Bart Vale.

The idea is simple. Grab an ordinary deck of playing cards, and assign each suit an exercise — e.g. hearts are push-ups, diamonds are squats, clubs are sit-ups, and spades are jumping jacks. Then, draw a card, and do that many of that exercise — e.g. 7? means seven sit-ups. Face cards might mean 10 reps, or 15, or whatever. Go through the deck as quickly as possible.

What I did not realize was that the public would pay $18.95 plus shipping and handling for a custom FitDeck with printed exercises on the cards. Evidently former Navy SEAL Phil Black reported sales of $4.7 million last year with this totally stupid online business idea.