Outsourced

I'm looking forward to the new TV series Outsourced.

No reviews are available, but the premise is promising, don't you think?

Last week, I spent 30 minutes on hold trying to contact a helpdesk (which had been outsourced) to fix my company PC. The tech took remote control of my computer, made several changes which I'm sure would be ineffective, and told me my PC was fixed.

It wasn't.

Not one to beat my head against the same wall twice, I searched Microsoft's online knowledge base, found the fix (with review from folks who had applied it), applied the change myself, and it worked. Elapsed time: 5 minutes.

I wonder how many times outsourced functions fail, how much time they consume doing so, how much time people spend fixing the problem themselves rather than doing their own work, and how the metrics which govern outsourcing mask all of these facts ...

It promises to be a good show.