We do the mute/swear trick all the time.
I hate it when companies make it a pain in the ass to cancel stuff. Having to call them is complete bullshit, especially if you have to talk to some guy in India who cant speak English for shit.
On that subject, India is where tons of IT jobs are going, not just end user tech support stuff. I work for a decent sized business software company and we get rid of US staff and hire offshore Indian staff quite frequently, and there is no end in site to this practice either. This not just for call center tech support stuff but also for coding (the majority of the jobs) and interal admin posts.
Upper management loves these guys because on paper they are ideal employees. They ‘work’ a lot of hours, they say yes to any request no matter how far fetched or impossible the task or their track record of meeting/missing deadlines and to top it off, their salaries are on average about 20% of what they pay people in the US.
Management also thinks the quality of their work and service is good, despite the fact that customers who interact with them complain about them nonstop, and so do the coders and admins that have to work with them on various projects/issues.
olaf
E&B cancellation is easy as pie, in the your account section on ea.com,
update the billing address:
Street Address 1: 123 INvalid Address Lane
Street Address 2: Dont bill me I cancelled
It bounces, and E&B cancels it for you!
takes 2 seconds.
“Management also thinks the quality of their work and service is good, despite the fact that customers who interact with them complain about them nonstop, and so do the coders and admins that have to work with them on various projects/issues.”
Unfortunately, crappy customer service is becoming the norm. We’re going to be conditioned to it soon, if not already.
I’m not surprised India is moving forward in IT. Was it on QT3 where I first read about Dr. Mitra’s “Minimally Invasive Education” project?
http://www.niitholeinthewall.com/Paper1.htm
ian
It’s not only IT jobs. Engineering design contractors for the petrochemical industries are beginning to rely on offshore offices to keep bids low.
One of the main reasons that India is so attractive is that their public education system and government are conducted entirely in English (artifact of British colonial rule). They are the only large, cheap, and literate English-speaking workforce in the world.
Thank God for those awful British imperialists, eh?
Yeah, there’s a billion of them, they all speak english and are generally very well educated. Plus, way cheaper. Hard to say no to that.