DepEd drops ‘Science’ for pupils | The Manila Bulletin Newspaper Online http://ping.fm/srR4m

via — Neale Donald Walsch
It’s my thought, it’s my awareness, it’s
my observation, it’s my understanding
that people everywhere truly have the
wisdom, the insight within them to
provide answers to not just their own
daily “what should I do with my life?”
problems and challenges, but, in fact, to
the larger challenges and problems
faced by humanity as a whole. People
are not simply being asked.

James Durbin is the best that ever happened in American Idol… Watching him voted out last season is the Dumbest thing ever…

we’re enjoying all these kids doing their own thing with their versions of christmas carols… LOL!!

http://ping.fm/APFEr (Tech the Halls: 12 Christmas Decorations for Geeks)

“Hatred can be Suppressed with Reason, but You must Give in to it at times, or it will Eat You Alive…”
— JIN

http://ping.fm/gizu7 (Government releases P1.014 billion more for rural health units, hospitals)

Overrated Diveristy

Over past days, I’ve been trying to weigh in the factors I have from and with my previous and current job. The most common difference would be the people around you. I consider it a big factor as to how it affects your performance and ways you’d think about your career environment. Policies and purposes of companies are a given, unavoidable rules and missions to contribute to society in their own innovative ways, no matter how financially or morally rewarding it is.

Whatever our reasons would be that we’re doing a certain job is our drive that’s why we’ve applied for it and signed our loyalty to it. As I met and talked with new folks at work, their reasons vary from how they view their lives. My motivations would be lame for other people, while I see theirs as shallow.

There are chances where I end up thinking I’m doing things double-effort. When most of the people take things for granted, I pay attention into it quite much. Lifestyle and family, I would like to balance things from my home to my career. Give special attention to my wife and son, and focus on my work at its given time. I can’t just help, but to think of how other people takes their lifestyle for granted, screw-up other people, and still manage to do the same to some more. The sad thing about this is that they carry this through in building up (supposedly) their own family.

Throughout the past six or five years of my life, I learned to appreciate life from my work. Meeting people from different walks of life, knowing someone who is living their lives to the fullest in spite of their disabilities, went to places and learned how their culture affects how they go about society, having all these, it’s only the starting point of it all, the best part of it was to actually become a friend to these people.

With the current job, I’m learning how diversity is overrated being abused by people who likes to take advantage with how they are living their lives. Because on how they’ve watched it from other countries, movies, TV series, lame artists, they sort of create this society of a “diverse (as how they took the word and used it)” field where people can be whoever they wanna be for as long as they do their job and abide by the company’s rules. Sad but true.

Freedom is I think very different from Diversity. Being able to say, do, not caring what others do and show-off how you live to other people is different from being able to get along and understand why are others in a certain situation and have them aware of the society we currently have and how they could contribute to it rather than go-off-on-anyone’s-face-and-don’t-give-a-damn-about-it way of going about things.

Placebo

So to at least reply on the stereotyping people do to contact center jobs and its agents. Does it really make you stupid? Doing the same routines every day, having the same people call you up for almost the same concern every now and then every single day. Looking at the same user interface, system and reading the same instructions on how to go about each specific task on your monitor. On top of that you have to read the scripts to sell up something to the caller, for some agents they have to somehow convince the customer in some unlikely way of doing things just to get that close deal up in the record.

“If we think of one thing as just as it is and not look at its purpose, we may never appreciate it.”

Here’s really how it goes along with such job. I think I’d make my point when I say that no such career has no rules on it, we all know that. In fact, all we do whether at home or anywhere we’d go has rules, and we can’t do anything but abide to it, and once we get used to it, we tend to develop our own ways to follow such rules. Same as with the industry, it’s really how we see and read it in news, but it differs on how people who are in it innovate ways to make everything more productively exciting.

We all should start with how the job goes, and read everything from the manuals available. With proper logic and enough self-studies, at times probing something if it works with the tasks you do makes a lot of difference from the usual numbered movements most agents do. Yup the limit is if you just based what you do from the canned ideas companies packaged for its outlined instructions, what will happen is after few months on the said job, you’ll have to face the fact that you are not doing any progress in your job, and you might even get promoted for it, but the sad part is, you won’t be able to see things out of the box.

That’s the next idea, “Out of the box.” We really can’t deny the fact that a lot of people see such career of a contact center agent as such of a slave that they no longer hold their own time and compromise lots of things in their live in order to get their career rolling and getting that higher pay. I say it’s right, that is, if you’re thinking within the box, a narrow one. This is sad about how many people view such career. They just don’t yet realize how crucial this job is, and how it plays a huge role to the company.

“But people usually come and go to this kind of job because they soon realize it sucks.” I think what really sucks is that how this idea came about. People come and go because of how crucial the job is, and it’s quite hard if we think about how policies go with some companies. For one I may say that undeniably, any company we go, there is that one particular person that would suck, so bad, that he/she even gets promotion for it, and yeah, that sad to know. So for the come-and-go idea, it’s not really with the company, but with the attitude of the people around whether if it’s the boss or the employee.

So here’s my idea, prejudging a career upon looking at it from the outside does not make any sense or point at all to how such would even get stereotyped. I think it’s just a matter of getting yourself into it. I don’t have to explain further on this I think since the idea is already pretty obvious. Whatever job you do serves other people, and if some people think that serving a customer through a telephone line, sitting in a chair looking at an information that’s already there, pitching sales, or providing support, in the comfort of a place, and get paid for it higher than an average worker would, and still get to enjoy life throughout — it’s okay to be a named whatever if that’s how define it.

It’s not what you do that makes you a slave, it’s how you think.

Just a Beef

It has been a week of getting my hands on the actual action of a contact center. And what have I learned so far? Well, aside from IE6 really doesn’t go well with windows magnifier, adding my familiarization phase with the field, these factors really affects my performance. So I’m going to layout some facts as to what other low vision fellows and those with newbie computer skills have to look out for when doing several things in a real-time customer service arena.

First, observe the environment of the workstation you are assigned to. See if there are things you need to get use to like the time it takes to boot and the time it completely loads up everything in the windows field. I’m using a pretty fast PC for an XP operating system, so I’m good with machine. It meets at least more than the minimal requirements of the system, so I thought it would do.

Next, take a look around. See if the entire thing is updated, it really plays a lot of factor in terms of navigation and content handling in windows. If it’s not updated, you might not want to do anything about it, since IT department has their own way of implementing things. But, you can always get in touch with the guys to do something on it, but I doubt it will be done soon. Since contact center companies have an enormous network of workstations linked to each and every single one of it.

Given these things, the last thing you have to do is to load up all tools you’ll be using, but of course. So here’s where the magnifier’s having issues. As I load the web-based tool or environment we use for getting all info we need, the magnified display starts to slow down. The mouse pointer won’t go over the browser. For whatever reason, after waiting a while for the said tool to load up, the entire thing crashes.

So next tip, if certain workstation won’t work for you, transfer. But first, given that you already have raised your concerns and obtained permission to do so. Again, observe, take a look on things and load up.

So how does one with low vision carries on with daily duties in a contact center as an associate? Given the right built-in tools in an operating system, and how other people (web-developers, programmers, and IT) pays attention to accessibility, there won’t be any difficulties, supposedly. But since certain user-interface, contents and other important factor had been taken for granted in creating specific tool, not only people who have visual impairment like will have hard time understanding, and getting use to things, but also those who would like to do more.

Accessibility starts from the inside, as when I would use to do pages on websites I first take into consideration how the contents I’m doing would affect other people when they visit my page, and from there think of a way to make things more possible for us to access information in as user-friendly as possible.

Tools we use need not to be up-to-date all the time. For as long as we’re secure with the information we process and we are able to do our tasks with it, I think it won’t if we try to update them and try giving accessibility matters a try.

The most important factor here is how your company takes care of its employees. As always, I give lots of credits to the trainers and those who works really hands-on things to help out people and keep the process rolling. In spite of having hard time with the tools’ accessibility issues, having people around who’s ready to assist you for the meantime just until I get use to it, fills it out for such issues.