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Scott Jones

He's downright desperate.


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They're fighting to get in here. Suddenly everyone wants to be singled out as a dope. Scott Jones of ChaCha more than the rest.

Scott is downright desperate. 'I'm a monkey goddammit! Let me in!' OK dude if you insist. For you certainly qualify.

Rarely have startups been run so terribly, so unprofessionally, with VCs and CEOs with illusions of grandeur surrounded by so many bleating idiots tasked with responsibility for the technological.

Rarely can one see a startup bounce back and forth in such a ridiculous - laughable - fashion.

But while onlookers laugh others suffer. That's the crime of airheads like Scott Jones and his friends. They're idiots - and idiots can often hurt others.

And right now Scott Jones is hurting a lot of people.

Deep Throats

The editors of The Technological have been in contact with several staff at ChaCha for nearly a year now. Stories stream in, some more interesting, more scary than the next. The editors get a steady stream of the questions levied to ChaCha guides.

They're precious beyond words and show we can all relax about the future of the people of North America.

One would wish Scott Jones was just half as intelligent and considerate as the dopes he caters to on his silly network startup.

MTM

And now, after all the gaffes he's already been convicted of, Scott goes one step further. In the spirit of the worldwide recession he's introduced his own type of MTM to his organisation. Basically he's going to put those single mothers back on formula again - he's going to see they can't afford to eat anything else either.

The minimum wage in the US is currently just over $6 per hour; ChaCha guides can perhaps better that; but no one's ever claimed $6 per hour will pay the bills.

Scott's new well thought out plan will halve that figure.

Outsourced

The 'switchboard operators' and the 'guides' aren't the only remote workers in Scott's organisation. He also has a third party supervising company. Or two. Or three. Rumour has it they might be situated in India but that's not likely. But whoever they are Scott's not telling.

These 'supervisors' go in and monitor the traffic at ChaCha. They pick out 'conversations' at random. They then take their sweet time double-checking the responses the single moms worked frenetically to get in record time so they can afford more diapers.

Should they find the answer given is not 'adequate' they mark down the response.

The good guides - those consistently given a rating of 95% - get paid twice as much as the rest. $0.20. Those who fall short of 95% get only half that. $0.10.

This is a cute system. Sally in Seattle who sits afternoons at an Internet café with her baby in a pram works hard all month and keeps a rating of 96%. Then suddenly an unknown person pokes into one of her answers - to sophisticated questions like 'what side of my tummy is my baby resting on' - and decides it's just not good enough.

Single mom sees her pay for the month cut in half just like that.

Wow Factor

And that's how it used to work. Now it gets even better. For Scott Jones has decided that 'good enough answers' that used to rate 100% shall now only rate 70% - way below the $0.20 mark. To get a 100% rating today the guides must provide answers to these stupid questions the supervisors claim have a 'wow factor': to make $0.20 you suddenly have to do the impossible.

And while it is possible to give any dumb question a 'wow factor' answer it takes time - and the single moms are working under hysterical time constraints as it is and the tweenies waiting for answers to their questions aren't going to hang about forever.

And even a 'wow factor' answer can't be more than 130 characters.

Scott Jones has essentially halved his payroll. And that seems to be his goal. All the while his network is still shambolic, the people running it amongst the most inept in the business.

The single moms can quit at any time and go somewhere else for that formula money but they've invested too much time and blood and sweat and tears honing their skills at their current assignment. They see the outages and other issues mount up and now they get hit by this too. They feel desperate and justifiably so.

Jeff Bezos: if you're reading then figure out some way to get out from under this clown, this monkey. He's a loser and anybody can see that. And what's worse: he's hurting people.

Reorganisation starts at the top.

See Also
The Technological: ChaCha

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