Three asides while we wait (and wait and wait) to hear about the fate of our treadmill:
1) My wife has weighed in on her blog regarding the Sears treadmill saga. She focuses on accountability failures and the larger context of worker/management relations:
If we ever do get a treadmill from Sears after the weeks of waiting, getting up early to wait some more, being woken up early just to be reminded that we are still waiting, it’s pretty likely that we will get another robocall asking us how the delivery went (unless it is easier for Sears folk to disable follow-up calls than reminder calls that tell us we’re still waiting). And here is what is to me the worst part of all this. The people we can manage to speak to are limited by the scripts they are required to follow – they have almost no agency in any of this by design. The only people we may be asked to evaluate in any of this are the people who perform the scripts and not the people who write them. The people without power are made accountable rather than the people with power. But if you only choose to ask customers how they were treated by the script-followers you won’t get real feedback about the consumer experience. The systems may be designed that way on purpose, but if that is so it’s a pretty sad state of affairs.
2) I had a brilliant idea. Why don’t the Sears bot and the folks from Independent Voter Research just call each other?
3) The Sears bot only called once this morning, just after 8:00am. Was it something I said? Can I say it again?
[Next installment: Sears Feels the Power of the Press]
Previously:
Sears’s robot calls every morning — including Yom Kippur — at 8:04 and 8:34. There doesn’t seem to be a way to stop it. 
