Business

A friend invited me to yet another social networking site. Now I’m on MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn, Doostang, Gather, and probably a few others I can’t remember off the top of my head.

So when is enough enough, already? Simply filling out all those online profiles could be a full-time job. I’m beseiged with invitations, and I’m dutifully beseiging all my friends with invitations, but to what end?

Next month, I’m launching a podcast with the goal of making it into the iTunes top 100. That will be the real test. I’m going to see if all these much-vaunted networks (my network now includes more people than currently live on the face of the planet) can actually produce a tangible result and get people to go download my podcast. … or are they all just another form of mental masturbation, an excuse not to get on and actually have a life, but rather sit nearly motionless in front of a computer pretending that my virtual community actually has 5% the value, depth, and community of a real, satisfying life.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Today’s project: apply for a “Get travel points” American Express card and cancel my generic American Express card. The whole experience was an eye-opener. But apparently only to me. It points to a company gone sadly wrong, and even worse, a culture dissolving.

The company’s losing it

Twenty years ago, Amex was famous for customer service. No longer. They still think so. They said five times during my call that their goal was to provide “world class customer service.” They should have stopped telling me and done it instead. Every new person and computer they transferred me to made me verify my card# and security info. Huh? Can’t their computers transfer the info? Maybe not. After all, IT is notoriously hard.

But the people stuff isn’t. All told, they made me sit through ten minutes (no exaggeration) of disclaimers and policy disclosures to apply for a card I already had, even after I asked them to stop. At least the rep read it in a monotone so fast it was almost gibberish (wish I could say she was trying to be humorous. Nope. She was just robotic.) Then they wouldn’t let me cancel the old card without another ten minutes of trying to convince me not to cancel. Bizarre, since I was just switching cards. Even after telling her several times I was in a hurry and wished to cancel, she had to go through her whole script. World class customer service? Hardly. They have a long way to go to make it to “mediocre,” much less anything approaching “world class.”

America is losing it

Amex’s incompetence was nothing compared to the underlying policies, however. Their underlying policies are atrocious, but what’s even worse is that we don’t even blink when we hear them. And that’s what’s really scary.

Halfway through my Application Drone’s procedural monologue, she mentioned that if I stop payment, the interest rate jumps to over 30%. Huh? How does that make sense? I’m in severe financial trouble. I can’t make my credit card payments. So their solution is to hike the interest rate to an unbelievably usurious level, this guaranteeing I’ll never be able to catch up on by debt and will simply fall into financial ruin.

Do they think the high interest rates will deter overspending? Absurd. Credit card companies partner with merchants to spend billions on ads convincing people to spend on their credit cards. The average American is financially illiterate when it comes to debt (see: Credit Card Debt, Housing Bubble, etc.). Does Amex think a footnote mentioning “prime plus 21%” will create financial responsibility in someone who watches a thousand ads daily, telling them that credit card spending is “priceless”? Right. Pull the other one. So banks can’t believe that usury serves the Greater Good of deterring overspending.

Maybe they think if they immediately up what’s owed to them, they’ll get more of the estate when their customer declares bankruptcy. Maybe, but we’re talking about average Americans. There won’t be much to divide. Besides, immediately putting someone further in debt at their first financial squeeze in anticipation of feeding off their carcass seems … distasteful.

What I don’t understand, and I really don’t understand it, is the utter lack of compassion. If a friend were in a tough situation, my first impulse would be to help them. To be there, to counsel them, to do what I could to help them pick up their lives and go on. And yes, I’d do that even if their problems were a result of their own bad decisions. That’s what it means to help someone. As a company, there’s no reason to put the screws to someone in trouble. But as a culture, we’ve come to the place where the worse off someone is, the more we jump in to grab the last few drops of blood (after all, it’s not like they have the money to defend themselves).

Who do we want to be?

Michael Moore asks in “Sicko” if we’ve become a nation without compassion. He suggests that when it comes to health care, the answer is “Yes.” I suggest when it comes to business, the answer is also “Yes.” I ask myself, “is this a world I would be proud to help create?” the answer is a resounding “No.” So-called Progress just isn’t worth it to me. iPhones, the Internet, HDTV… at the end of the day, those things just don’t replace living in a community that lifts us all up. No amount of “twittering” on my iPhone will ever replace caring. We’ve created an economy whose values oppose us, rather than nurture us. And in a head-on battle, I fear the winner will be the economy.

Oh, man. I saw a query on PR newswire asking for experts on Job Dangers of MySpace. You see, your future employer is watching. That drunken picture of you will soon destroy your career. You’ll be broken at age 21. Defeat. Loss. Despair. You’ll end up in a gutter, covered in your own filth, drunkenly belching unspeakable gasses as your last few brain cells think, “If only I hadn’t posted that picture…”

I’m not sure who’s the stupid one here: the journalist? the companies? It’s certainly not the teenagers.

This is reality.

Look, people, MySpace, Friendster, Twitter, and the online world are here. They just are. And people post things that historically (pre-2003) would rarely have been shared publicly. That doesn’t mean they weren’t going on, only that we didn’t discuss them. Remember divorce, pre-marital sex, etc.? Once illegal, immoral, and hush-hush, now characters on TV lie in bed, steamy from orgasm, deciding whether to exchange first names. You can blame it on the secular humanists, or an erosion of values (whose? the conservative-owned media like FOX that produces and airs the stuff? that’s a fun twist!), but actually, the market—that’s us viewers—knows it’s real life, accepts it, and likes to watch.

This is irrelevant.

Any employer screening candidates based on a teenager’s MySpace page deserves to fail as more and more creative, capable, talented people go elsewhere. If you ran any business of 5 or more people and fired anyone who had ever done something foolish, you’d be working alone in a room. Until you re-read your own diary, that is, at which time you’d fire yourself. Chill out, people.

Employers think, “dumb teenage stunt means this person won’t be able to perform as an employee.” Hogwash. Racy MySpace pages don’t even show a lack of judgment, frankly. They show teenage judgment. What do you expect? Of course their judgment is different from adults. That’s why we call them “teenagers,” don’t let them drive without a permit, and won’t let them enter legally binding contracts until they’re 18. And they eventually grow up, developing skills, judgment, etc. Einstein failed classes in high school. Fortunately, some folks were willing to look past the teenager to see the adult.

And by the way, HR departments that think a 19-year-old’s drunken birthday party has anything to do with their ability to perform on the job are flat-out wrong. I’ve never heard of any study that showed that college partying, webcamming, or exhibitionist picture exchange affected job skills one iota (except the ability to market alcoholic beverages, in which case that background is a “plus”). If you are hiring a financial analyst, his goofy sophomore pictures are simply irrelevant. His financial analyst abilities and ability to behave at work are all that matters.

This is the future.

The piece that gets me the most is when all these self-righteous adults declare “These kids don’t know how the world works.” Au contraire. These adults don’t know how the world works. Teenagers do dumb things and these days, they put those things on web sites. That is how the world works. In ten years, the MySpace crowd will be at the hiring table. They’ll remember their public erotic escapades, foolish road trips, and bathroom barf pictures. They’ll remember the silly stuff all their friends did, too. And they’ll know, from first-hand experience, that having a public MySpace page is just part of being a 21st century teenager.

Maybe once they’re the hiring managers, they will ding anyone who doesn’t have a MySpace page. After all, someone who won’t show their full selves probably can’t be trusted. If a person pretends they’ve never done anything foolish, they’re obviously lying. And would someone of the MySpace generation really want to hire an aging liar? I don’t think so.

So relax, already, and enjoy your new employee, knowing that behind her prim-and-proper exterior lurks someone you really want planning your next holiday. Because unless she’s doing a lousy job at work, you’re free to ignore her MySpace page, even as she’s free to ignore your extra-marital affair. And yes, everyone knows about it, but they let you run your own life, and judge your work performance based on your merits.