Phone Book FAIL of the Day

Not sure what the funny part is.

That someone accidentally gave him a door hanger, but delivered the phone books anyway?
 
OMG! This is a perfect example of all that's wrong with us. Apparently AT&T knows better than we do.
 
Just by the pic you can guess, but it isn't entirely clear.

Read the article...

Says he signed up to NOT receive the yellow pages... They put the notification on his door saying he opted out... then also delivered the yellow pages they said he wouldn't get...

That is what happens when you hire min wage... You get someone in auto-pilot delivering to everyone...
 
This doesn't have anything to do with ATT, it has to do with contract labor.

ATT hires people to deliver phone books annually and they are paid on a per-book delivery basis, not by the hour etc.
When you take a route, you receive (for example) 900 phone books on a route. When you are done delivering them, you bring your list back with any indications you made (undeliverable, refused, etc). The mobile office that controls the contracting of delivery takes your list and at random calls customers (they don't say how many, I would wager less than 5 though as it takes all of 2-3 minutes), confirms delivery, and if delivery is confirmed on any number called, the contracted delivery person is paid for the route.

If the delivery person decides to ignore the request for no phone book, oh well. There is a 100% guarantee they won't get in trouble for it, because as a excluded customer, they automatically won't be called since they aren't supposed to get a book.


Yes, sadly, I have delivered a good 20,000 phone books or so in my time; I used to do it for spare cash every year for three different phone book providers.
 
My leap year sucks so far. I was hoping for something funny to lighten the mood at work since its a fiasco here today. :(
 
Well Steve thank you for the post. At least I laughed out loud at it!

...Maybe because I went to the article and saw what's under the big orange "oh you don't want our phone books anymore?". The whole "Go here on the web and see what we're doing to help the environment."

Honestly I think this is ONE book we should do a mass book burning with just to get the message, "Hi we don't want it." across.
 
That's pretty hilarious. So AT&T is admitting that they know the guy doesn't want the phone book, but AT&T insists on wasting $ on providing him with one. Well, that's vintage AT&T for you! :p
 
Loudspeaker said:
Well Steve thank you for the post. At least I laughed out loud at it!

...Maybe because I went to the article and saw what's under the big orange "oh you don't want our phone books anymore?". The whole "Go here on the web and see what we're doing to help the environment."

Honestly I think this is ONE book we should do a mass book burning with just to get the message, "Hi we don't want it." across.
Click to expand...

Or maybe because this stuff happens all the time. Still sucks though. For me they go directly to the recycle bin.
 
superbovine said:
This doesn't have anything to do with ATT, it has to do with contract labor.
Click to expand...
While I agree with your reasoning, when it comes down to it this is AT&T's problem. If they're willing to stick with shit labor that doesn't follow directions, that's a direct reflection of the parent company.
 
I elected to not receive a phone book and still received one approximately 2 months ago. Hell, I haven't had a home phone for 5 years now...
 
sfsuphysics said:
While I agree with your reasoning, when it comes down to it this is AT&T's problem. If they're willing to stick with shit labor that doesn't follow directions, that's a direct reflection of the parent company.
Click to expand...

It's a matter of them needing to move tons of paper in 7 days. With the amount of work required and the difficulty finding people willing to do it, stuff like this happens.

It isn't anything to do with compensation, it's just some asses that know they can get away with it. When ATT is contracting out a third party to provide labor, who is then contracting out the work to private operators, there is a chain of blame. Ultimately it's just greedy or lazy workers though. The pay is great (I did this with my wife and on some of the "good" routes (pay is based on volume and location/difficulty of delivery) you can make 300-400 an hour with two people working. It is very tiresome work though, and towards the end I can easily see some first-timers letting a LOT of stuff slide. You don't realize how heavy those books are until you've delivered 2000 in a day.


But yes, if ATT really cared they could control this problem... but to do so would mean either hiring their own staff to travel the country on seasonal work, or have an army of in house people double checking the contractors work, since they can't/won't double check their contracted labor efficiently enough. Neither is even remotely reasonable from a business standpoint. The reality is the entire nation gets new phone books, you can't staff every town with internal employees for this purpose that lasts one week to two weeks maximum per year. The costs would completely bury the poor problem of one person who happened to get a book they didn't want. It isn't like every person that refuses a book gets one. One guy did this time and he had a camera. There were probably others from here to there, they just didn't have cameras. This isn't something that happens to 50,000 people a year. If you wanted to make an argument for double checking work, it would be the thousands of people that are supposed to get books but don't. Every year we would find literally tons of phone books thrown into canals and in the jungle from people that would go and take a $750 load of books and delivery 100 of them and say F this and dump them, then hope the cross checking was done with names on the first two pages, etc.

I personally don't see any realistic solution that could eliminate this. The current (or last time I did this work) setup used a flagging system when problems were found (complaints on delivery, non-delivery, disposed of books, etc) so that those people could not be contracted again. Further one company was contracting financial responsibility for the books if verification failed the laborer would be responsible for the cost of the books. All great, except they only work the second time around, not for the first time hire.
 
Why do people purchase/use anything with AT&T on it. Especially at this point in the game...derps?
 
the only thing I find funny is that it came from AT&T! The same way when you asked them to stop calling you for their specials but it just wouldn't stop!
 
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