A television expose of the work place

[Victoria J]

A friend of my mothers has just had her work place be the subject of a television expose. I thought it was an interesting thing to share because the whole thing has been so weird.

She works for local government. I don't want to be more specific really. Other than to say that it is difficult job which unfortunately some people do not do well. This woman is not one of those people - she is dedicated and very good at her job.

They didn't get to see the program before it went out. So they (and we) watched it terrified.

In fact she was hardly in it - and didn't personally look bad. She job shares a managers job and the OTHER person made a fool of themselves. The program kind of pretended that the fool was the only manager.

Not only did she not say anything stupid or incriminating but she was suspicious of the "journalist' and tried to warn others. she told her manager she believed he was secretly filming them, and was told she was paranoid.

She warned people to be careful of what they said in front of him -but this apparently didn't help the idiot other-manager.

The program couldn't decide whether it wanted to make staff look bad, or the system. Its probably career ending for the idiot manager-but she is due to retire in a few months.

But the higher ups being idiots they are threatening to discipline everyone, close the office etc. They are bringing in extra managers when they refused to do this when they begged about being short staffed. The program attempted to expose that the job wasn't being done - but how does closing the office help ?!

My mother's friend has resigned. Pretty much against everyone's advice as we believe it makes her look like she's done something wrong - but she can't cope with the stress. And the pain it is causing her team.

They'll pay the idiot to sit at home until she retires. They'll probably pay my mother's friend the 3 months instead of letting her work her notice period. If they continue to attempt to discipline people on the basis of a highly edited and partial program regardless of what they actually said or did in it they'll end up with some other pay outs I imagine.

But they couldn't pay to staff the place properly in the first place.

I just can't get over how horrible the whole thing was. I believe I'm good at my job, and I care about it and the client's - but I know I could be made to look very bad with some selective editing and some of the things I say in private to colleagues. And that some of the less than appropriate things I (we) say is what gets us through the day.

It seems such a huge and horrible betrayal from a "colleague" too.

I have been joking at work trying to stir up suspicious about our newest worker, but luckily I think we don't have the profile necessary for it (and most people don't really know what we do).

It's not something you think of as happening to people you actually know - and it's been pretty revealing to hear about some of the very misleading things they did to make the program look worse.

Victoria J

ETA - I have just experienced the future. No more little cat feet typing gibberish on the keyboard, I am using a laptop that converts to a tablet and little kitty feet just walked across the touch screen and reset the size of all my web pages.

[That Guy]

Could be worse, I work for a state government and they constantly hammer in all the things not to do.

Unfortuantly this only lasts until someone complains either to the media or whoever the minister is at the time, then you get to watch the place bend over backwards to help the poor abused customer.

[fireheart]

Not surprisingly, every second week, A Current Affair here in Ausland (think Hard Copy) does an "expose" about some practice of my workplace or our competitors workplaces. They try to paint them off as "shoddy" when really, there are no laws being broken-we don't deceive customers AT ALL, people just don't bother to read.
Thankfully the TV cameras haven't come into my store specifically. But instead we end up getting about 20,000 customers asking us about shoddy practices that we supposedly do.

Among the list of stuff that competitor and my company supposedly do:

-Water down our meat. (that's a huge hell no, that was actually tested on ACA and our meat came up fine.)
-Rip customers off with loyalty programs (there are some good things that come out of them)
-Bait and switch (humungous hell no)
-Charges customers to shop. (for the skijillionth time, ITS YOUR BANK!)
-Refuses to hire people from various ethnic groups or people with disabilities. (Definite no, all of the disabled staff come through a program that we run and my workplace has quite a few people with ethnic backgrounds)
-Water down our petrol (I think we all know that one)

[Darkforge]

I work at a place with an outgoing call centre and we've caught journalists applying for jobs before.

Easiest way to tell if its a journalist? Well the average age of people that apply for cold calling call centre jobs is around 18. If someone over 30 applies then 9/10 times its a set up.

We were even in an expose once where I was caught on film "lying" to a customer. I wouldn't mind but it was bullshit. I got "caught" saying "The regulators say I'm not allowed to use the word "Cheapest" to describe these prices, as some people complained it was misleading, but what i can tell you is that I believe that this is good value for money and should save you money" (please note that I emphasised the italic text when i originally said it - and yes the regulators have banned us from saying the word "cheap" as it can be misleading) which is a perfectly valid and legally correct thing to say.

I wouldn't mind but out of the call centres in our industry we are one of the few that actually do things by the book and follow the law. heck you wouldn't believe how many complaints we get about other call centres dirty tactics.