Earthlink revolves around poo.

http://www.youdecideonline.com/youdecide_home.htm

Anyone whos seen the new Earthlink ads on TV knows what I am talking about. "Who deserves a new office?" or "Who gets a company car?". I for one, am furious.

For those of you who don't know, I worked at Earthlink from August of 2001 until February of 2004. I loved it there. We were like a family, we had a lot of fun, it was just an overall great place to work. That started to change in the beginning of 2003, when Earthlink announced that they would be outsourcing all of their dialup tech support. Earthlink has always outsourced, just not on this scale. The Natomas office where I started closed and we moved to Roseville, no big deal. The feeling of family was starting to leave, however, things seemed to be getting darker. Our higher-ups assured us that they had no intention of outsourcing our high speed products like DSL/cable/satellite, that these postions were secure. What a crock. In January of 2004, right after the new year starts, we get the news: Earthlink would be outsourcing all of their phone based support, email and live chat as well. We had essentially six or seven weeks until everything went bye-bye.

Overseas outsourcing is getting very popular. Dell did it. Dell went from number one in customer support to number two, maybe even further down; Apple, whose call centers are stateside, rose to the top. Dell aknowledged their mistake and bought back tech support to the states. Basically, what a company gains by outsourcing is money. It is cheaper to send support overseas than keep it here. I guess there is a fine line to be aware of, that is, how much your customer base can stand talking to someone whose first language is not English. Not that I am racist, not that I am a xenophobe, but I believe that it is incredibly important that you and the person on the other end of the phone have an understanding with one another for it to work. We were told that if Earthlink kept their call centers in the US of A, within a year the company could fold. So it was in the company's best intrest to save money by sending support elsewhere. It was hard for us to accept, but we all moved on with our lives. I wouldn't trade anything for my time with the company, the people I worked with were awesome.

Which brings me up to date on the rant I had going. What. The. Fuck. "Who gets a company car?" "We did such a good job on scamblocker please reward our efforts!". What about the THOUSANDS of call center employees who were let go because of money problems? Is Earthlink saying now it has money, it is going to reward the few employees they kept? I find the whole thing insensitive and downright immoral. A scant year later Earthlink is in the clear, so select few get new offices and cars.

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