jrtom

http://verizonmath.com/transcript.htm

Just _reading_ through this transcript gave me flashbacks to incredibly painful conversations I've had with some of my math (and CS) students.

And this isn't calculus...it's not discrete mathematics...it sure as hell isn't amortized complexity analysis, which admittedly can be a bit of a pain...it's not even algebra. It's ARITHMETIC. On MONEY. (Plus about the simplest case of unit analysis that one could ask for.) Units of currency, anecdotally at least, are the units that you do math problems in if you want people to have the best chance of getting the answer right, because almost everyone deals with money enough that they feel comfortable with it (sometimes more comfortable than if no units are used).

(For the record, I got to this through another article(http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2007/11/16/damning-video-verizo.html) which provides evidence that almost no one at Verizon gets this right.)

GAAAAH.

I have never been so happy that I am no longer a Verizon customer. Having read this, I'm not sure that I could resist the impulse to ask them about their data rate costs the next time I had to call their customer service line.

invest in companies with good records of customer service:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/17/howto_beat_the_stock.html

There are all sorts of things wrong with this if you're in the mood to pick nits, certainly--the fact that a company has good customer service doesn't mean that they're not evil in other ways, for instance, not even getting into questions of whether investing in the stock market makes any sense whatsoever. (Different rant.)

But if you're going to invest and have minimal time to investigate corporate practices, this strategy might be worth considering. Plus it's at least somewhat good news...in that it may give companies more reason to invest in _themselves_ in this area.