A former colleague, Keith Dawson, was the editor at Call Center Magazine for years. Sadly, Call Center Magazine fell victim to digital fever and died, but I still remember the phrase Keith coined: Super Empowered Angry Customers.

Super Empowered Angry Customers describes the shift in power that has taken place with the popularity of blogs, video sites such as YouTube, and websites such as “______CompanySucks.com” Companies have always claimed to listen to customers, but in practice many companies have routinely ignored many customers — and when this happened customers had little option beyond taking their business elsewhere.

Now they can take their business elsewhere AND cause a public relations disaster for the company that disappointed them. This has completely changed the dynamic between customers and companies, shifting the balance of power toward the customer to a never-before-seen degree.

So how shall we use our power, people? Will we use it for good or for evil? Every customer is not always right, and not every complaint is justified. It can be a very good thing to have more power, yet history is full of lessons about power being abused. Let’s try to use our power for good.

After years of the presidential campaign, I finally got to vote today. And one of the benefits of living in a small town is that I did not have to wait in line, even though all over the country there are record numbers of voters turning out and long lines are being reported.

Now we wait another 12 hours or so…

This was the highlight of the ceremony at the Phillies’ World Series championship parade. Despite a several second delay by the broadcast networks, none of them bleeped it out, and so ended up issuing apologies afterward. It got the biggest cheer of the day from the crowd and may go down as the best speech ever.

I watched the Phillies win game three of the World Series last night and this morning, sort of. It started so late (10pm ET) that I kept falling asleep on the couch. And Comcast committed an unforgivable sin by providing the worst signal I have ever endured: the picture kept freezing, the sound would disappear, and finally the feed died altogether for 25 minutes (so I read, this morning, because I fell asleep waiting for my view of the game to resume). I missed both Utley and Howard’s home runs. Shame on you, Comcast!

Luckily, I woke up in time (at almost 2am) to see the Phillies bat in the ninth inning, though I saw none of J.C. Romero’s shutdown of the Rays in their half of the ninth. It was great to see Bruntlett sneak across home plate on Ruiz’s feeble hit down the line. I smiled wearliy and went to bed, and when I eventually woke up this morning I couldn’t quite remember at first if I watched the game or dreamed about it.

Luckily it was a good dream.

White Americans are not remotely the bigots the G.O.P. would have us believe. Just because a campaign trades in racism doesn’t mean that the country is racist.

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I enjoyed this confessional article, Facebook in a Crowd. Hal Neidzviecki writes about having 700 Facebook friends at the same time that the number of his in-person friends is declining. So, he decided to have a party for his Facebook friends so he could meet them in person. Read the article to learn what happened

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You have to check this out! Be sure to click all around, including several times on all doors, but don’t click on the red phone!

http://www.palinaspresident.us/

I feel I am getting back to my primitive roots. I am learning to use fire to keep warm, just as human beings learned to do so many thousands of years ago. I am trying to heat my house with wood as much as possible this year. Since I work from home, it’s not really much trouble to get up now and then to put another log in the wood stove.

In fact, the image of Bob Cratchit keeps coming to mind, when I notice that my hands are cold and debate whether it’s time for another log or not. Don’t want to waste my wood (it’s quite pricey, in fact), but I need to be comfortable to work effectively, too. I can bundle up in layers, sure, but gloves don’t work with keyboards.

I don’t have the best stove, either. It’s certainly not airtight, so it’s not as efficient as it should be. I’m learning how to regulate the temperature with it. At first I roasted the place by putting too many logs in. They just burn hotter, but not any longer. Better to stick with just a couple of logs and keep adding another when the fire dies down enough. I only have to light the fire once, in the morning, and after that I just keep adding logs when needed and the embers start the flames up.

the D-Con you stored under the kitchen sink is gone. I had two packages of D-Con still in the box under the sink, but when I went to get them out I found that mice had chewed through the box and eaten all of the poison.

Boy, that stuff must really smell and taste good to them.  As my landlord says, the weather is turning colder and the mice are seeing my little cottage as awfully cozy.

Sarah Palin does have a sense of humor, that’s for sure.

This one’s even funnier…