@squireparty wrote:
@LisaSTL wrote:
Have you tried a different browser or any of things JAS suggested? I just registered with the company using Chrome and am negotiating the site right now.
I've been using Chrome the whole time I've encountered this issue but I will try Firefox right now and this if this makes a difference. Came back to add - nope. Still getting the Service Unavailable message from Firefox. It's not that big a deal, really. Worst case scenario is that I don't get reimbursed and I don't get the $13 payment for the shop and I'm out of some time. I just came back from three weeks in Bangkok and six days in Hong Kong and a very interesting two days in Yangon, Myanmar. Point is that I have had some exposure to Buddhism and working on destressing my life and I've finally learned here - the worst that can happen is that I walk away. At least I've still had the good meal and no real harm has been done.......and my blood pressure has not risen and I have not gotten into that ugly personality so many Americans (and other Westerners, too, to be fair) adopt in a bid to survive. To wind up, this is no big deal, really. I was just asking a question in my original post and was fully ready to calmly walk away with a small loss. Life will not end.
I was with you until you reached the Westerner comment because I believe in attacking a problem and not attacking people. Effective philosophy is "Let's trouble shoot the problem so everyone can be successful and we can improve processes." In other words, find out what is causing it and fix it whether it's a technical problem, scammers, economic hardships, or interference from a foreign or alien source, aka internet invasion.
I don't agree with the generallization about Westerners, and I have to disagree that no real harm is being done if people are not paid for their honest and hard work. It is a harm. And It should stop no matter what the level of the loss large or small. Many who do this work can not afford to lose compensation or time to any of those factors. That's the bottom line.
Unfortunately one of the problems with this kind of research is so few people in scheduling, editing, and admin in so called "mystery shopping" companies are willing to deal honestly and directly with an identified problem, or even a question. You can count the number of competent, honest players out of hundreds in the field on two hands. Most of them wish to deny or hide problems, shift their responsibility, blame the field staff, and walk away with someone else's bread and butter without accounting.
Many don't have the skills to run a company, or even to perform their job descriptions as schedulers, editors, or admins. Many don't want a level playing field when it comes to the front line work that real-world researchers do with boots on the ground. They want to ocntrol and dictate, not work as a team. It's worse than the Bad News Bears. It's the Bad News Surveyers who can't communicate or coordinate, or catch the fly ball. So it's more of a piranah tank than a team or an organizational psychology. It is piggish behavior and it is a form of anonymous cyber-power tripping because they have the power buttons, your money, your time, and your work product. They have people telling them they can schedule and edit and take your assignments or your work product as they please. You are not sitting face-to-face with anyone who is a scammer or a cheat, and they or third parites could be across the country or across the globe.
Once you hit the send button, you can't call it back. It's a wing and prayer that parties on the other end are honest, decent people who meet their obligations reliably. When there is a problem, they have you enrolled in a Mega-View tracking system in Sassie's "Plus Platform" and can attempt to cut you off across the platform by your email address or other identifiers for calling them out on their ugly dishonest or irresponsible behavior in denying compensation to researchers for their time and expense, and slandering or libeling their reputation. Or so they think.
Eventually there is a true accounting, but now they think they can yank your chain and get away with it or threaten you and your next of kin if you speak out or pursue remedy and resolution. That's the bully for you. That's the anonymous internet aggression. Blame the blameless and try to whammy your associations. That's why they "phish" for so much personal information. The sad fact is most of the time, their cowardly bash-and-dominate society couldn't communicate effectively to solve a problem to save their souls. Sociopaths with computer technology in hand is just an extension.
Things don't work that way in an honest society, a fair society, or among competent, good-faith actors in a successful operation.
What has been widely acknowledged here is not nice to those, as you have mentioned, who are working 20 hours a day and frazzled trying to earn a living wage on below-minimum-wage offerings from those dodging fair labor practice, labor law generally, and ducking social conscience while they cause impoverishment.
It's ironic because dominance and greed-based actions and deceptive practices to effect gain cause impoverishment. They cause break down of trust, of effective communication, and destroy potentially successful relationships. Their actions cause a hostile and paranoid work environment. Their exploitative beahvior is their own death knell. It is bad-faith actors who then tend to be the ones who complain the most about the very poverty they have engendered. They create downward spiraling economics and can't figure out they're the ones who are doing it. Undercutting causes a downward spiral. Dodging minimum wage and refusing to pay living wage causes a downward spiral. You pay less, people spend less. People spend less, you earn less. You earn less, you handicap your own margins and it goes around and around on the downward momentum. They would soon have everyone living the peasant life off of the land, or selling them a bill of goods for an unreal existence where everyone lives in imaginary mansions of thought like good little unreal soldiers of the immaterial world. No one wants that kind of undue influence by alien and foreign bad faith actors or domestic ones for that matter.
You mention foreign attitudes. "Those Americans who built with their blood, sweat and tears should not have so much," does not really ring true. The same dirt, green grass, sun and water are just about everywhere on every continent. If they're not where you are, you can get to viable areas easily on every major continent on the globe. Everyone can nail two boards together, lay bricks and mortar, and plant a garden to be successful where they stand if they wish to be builders and not destroyers of others rights, privileges, and possessions. Yet there are those who would invade, illegal aliens, domination addicts, competition junkies, warmongering types, who work harder to steal than to build within their own boundaries and borders.
Some of it is culturally based and comes out of cultures who are communist and anti-market or anti-business. Some of it is a twisted foreign cultural logic that says, Everyone deserves a living. Therefore I am entttled to steal what other people have worked to produce." They violate their own rationales. If everyone deserves equal rights, then stealing is not ever right. They publish it and confess it. They say they steal because the system is not fair. But I don't buy it. You have to be a responsible person no matter what. The former tend to work really hard at scamming, stealing, taking from others what is rightfully theirs, and rarely work hard at building, creating, or solving problems without all the ways of lying and deceit involved. Personally, I want nothing to do with them, but the internet sometimes puts people in contact with undesirable situations and people. Then there are on the other end of the spectrum, the anti-monetary success, anti-ownership, anti-American attitudes. You have the abused rat syndrome in the experimental lab colony as well. It's a gateway to global conflict, cultural clashes, plain nonsense in some cases. It's not all productivity tools and success. I wish it were.
But whatever the root and proximal causes of this widespread mystery shopping dysfunction, or malfunction, and maladaptive pattern of internet behavior in that context, to say survival mode is a Western thing is really where I have to disagree. It's a universal thing. The quintessential book of how to be deceptive in one's relationships to others (which is to self destruct as a being and a society) in order to effect war came out of the Eastern philosophies, not Western. Western philosophies are honesty, integrity, and morality based for the most part. And I'm sure you'll recall that it was Eastern, Asian actors who bombed Pearl Harbor, and so on, and so on. So, no culture has offered any monuments to historical perfection, and Buddhism has offered an alienating, dehumanizing, nihilistic, vitiating reduction to mere existence or the black nirvana of non-existence, so I wouldn't say it has much to recommend it as peaceable things go either unless you consider indifference of a malignant and amoral sort to be peaceable. If you've been exposed to Buddhism, I guess you've heard the expression, too, "If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha." Don't take anything to be the ultimate authority just because it is the opposite of something you dislike. Old Eastern addage: "The enemy of my enemy is not my friend."
I think I've said all I have to say. This will probably be the last thing I post here. If I ever did post again, no one would want to read it most likely.