its rare when news puts a smile on yer face

[headbrace]

Because, ultimately, the majority of the people working in these shops are not the morally-neutral mercenaries that you make them out to be. Most of them will work there because that is where the work is.

Everyone does have a choice as to where they work, providing there are actually any jobs to support them. But more often than not, there aren't enough jobs for that, otherwise lots of people wouldn't be doing the jobs that they do. Look at MG Rover- I'm sure a large number of them would have rather not worked for a company that has, for a long time, been rather shaky. However, they did because that is where the work was. Now with their demise, by your logic, they can merely jump ship and go and work at another car company. This assumes that there is another similar industry nearby that will take up the extra market at the same rates and with the same need for staffing. As in MG Rover, this is hardly the case, given the amount of automation and importing that is done.

A little empathy is always nice on a wet Friday morn.

[Nick]

Regardless of whatever the your view on someone else's morals, would you really have no sympathy for someone now at risk of having themselves and their family made homeless, purely because they sold poorly built PCs in the manner they were ordered to do?

Have a read of the Time Independant Employee Forum... you'll soon see that the employees think they've been conned as much as the customer think they've been conned.

[wedge22]

You do seem to be a bit harsh really with your judgement of everyone in the Time company. Plus you say all car salesmen are pushy, I think not my friend.

[Swafe]

if they chose to work for a company which preys on under-educated members of public in order to push a bigger profit, then I have *NO* sympathy for them. in fact, I would even go as far as to suggest they deserve it. you wouldnt feel sorry if someone who'd been conning money off elderly people got sent to jail, so why is this any different?

Geez man, if they choose to work for a company that wants to exploit them? some people dont have a choice in where they want to work, my mate works at the job center, he hates it, with a passion, he only still works there though as its hassel for him to get a new job, hes young and has fairly useless qualifications despite being quite a bright young lad. If he could, he'd be out of there like a shot but it was the only job he got offered in a 4 month period so he had to snap up what he could get. They dont exploit him, but you could argue Time and Tiny didnt exploit their workers, if there paid over minimum wage and there happy to do the job, I dont see the problem.

And whats with the conning money off elderly people line ? Sure there PCs are exspensive, but there prebuilt and come with windows, etc, all installed, after parts labour, they probably dont make as much as you'd like to think, IIRC there prices were always better than PC world anyway.

[Moby-Dick]

a pushy salesman with no morals means you'll fit in perfectly in lots of lines of work - car salesman springs immediately to mind,

oh Zak's just going to love that.

Any more sweeping generalisations to round the week off with ?

[shiato storm]

this is old news...and much as I felt that tiny/time were utter 'time wasters' its not good for those who lost their jobs. the fault lies higher up the chain, the people your or i would have interacted with would have had no knowledge of what was coming or what to do about it if they did...
if you work at somewhere like this...pcworld? i hope you're bosses are reading into this and realise you need better trained staff, more realistic prices and decent after-care. for what time, and pcworld, offer we can all get better on-line.

[shiato storm]

Geez man, if they choose to work for a company that wants to exploit them? some people dont have a choice in where they want to work, my mate works at the job center, he hates it, with a passion, he only still works there though as its hassel for him to get a new job, hes young and has fairly useless qualifications despite being quite a bright young lad. If he could, he'd be out of there like a shot but it was the only job he got offered in a 4 month period so he had to snap up what he could get.

Hi, I'm jeff and I'm a Henchman for Dr. Evil.
I know he gets bad press but he's really a nice guy once you get to know him...


...

[Mike Fishcake]

5lab - ever get the feeling you're outnumbered?

I loathe Tiny machines as well (didnt realise there wre other people that injured themselves on the cases, thought it was just me being accident prone ), but it's not fair to suggest that most of the employees are there because they subscribe to the corporate ethics of their company; they were there because it was a job. They were employed by a company that made PCs which just weren't very good, it's not like they shot fluffy little kittens for a living.

I don't like pressured sales techniques, but I also can't imagine that a lot of the employees liked trying to pressurise people either. They *had* to do it to hit sales tagets, not because they maliciously wanted to milk people out of their cash.

[Tomahawk]

I heard about this about a week ago (from my Nan! lol..) but yeah it seems like they won't really be missed.

I used to hate the fact they glued the components in the machine so that if you ever fancied doing an upgrade yourself, you couldn't! (without ripping half the motherboard out with it!)..

I never bought one, but have been given a few of my mates old ones.

Obviously it's a shame about the job side of things as 1,600 jobs is alot of people suddenly becoming unemployed, and this is no laughing matter as mentioned. But the way they went about selling their products was also a bit mischievious as it meant if people wanted to upgrade they had to buy another desktop machine from them!

[skuzgib]

What an utterly callous and uncalled for first post.

[Jonny]

I'm with Skuzgib. The loss of employees is the sad fact, and if you're going to rip it out of Tiny, don't do it now.
Still, mistake made eh? Just think before you post...

[5lab]

i stick behind my first post. i feel no sorrow what-so-ever for the employees, and i dont, personally, see the difference between the way their company did buisness and what con-men do. the employees would have known what the company did, and how they treated their customers, and working for that company makes you responsible in some ways. if you were an accountant for a large villan/mob attitude, you wouldnt expect sympathy if your boss got nailed and you lost your job, would you?

[TiG]

5lab, while i can respect you for holding to your opinion, in this case i feel you are simply well off the general consenus of forum opinion. I joined a company which went bust after 11 weeks of joining. There was a huge hole in the finances, I joined the company in good faith, and didn't know what was going on behind the scenes. I was gutted and i'd moved to take the job and was left with huge expenses. No-one knows where the money went. But £400K is still unaccounted for... So i would say you could lump me into that category of working for a less than savoury character.

The way the sales team sell or the managers run the company, should have NO bearing on the way the build team work, or the accountants work, or the admin staff, or anyone else. They just doing their jobs. Its the bosses that don't necessarily deserve sympathy, its the staff that do.

Its like you saying that you should work for ethical companies only.... You know how small that list is?. I would imagine that would be sub 1% of the companies in existance. Microsoft for example, Gates started MS up in less than an ethical way, MS keeps getting done by anti competition laws. Should all the MS employees quit?. Of course not, why, because MS are one of the best employeers with one of the highest employee happyness ratings. So i don't see how you can slate Time/Tiny without pretty much wanting everyone to quit their positions.

Maybe you'll see it different if you get made redundant yourself. Have bills to pay, and have no money coming in, and didn't get a months pay your were owed.

Even that missing of the pay for the month is enough for people to lose their homes etc.

I think you need to think through what your attitude suggests. As most people have had people go through redundancy and its generally a very unpleasent thing to experience and your attitude towards it simply because you don't like the company sucks.

TiG

[nichomach]

Time and Tiny didn't con people out of their cash. They just provided poorly made PCs at very very low prices. I don't hold any brief for the companies, especially since, like a lot of techies, I've had to sweep up their mess (in my case since before their WAS a Time, and the machines were Mitac Time Machines). Frankly, their being out of business will probably reduce my workload.

That said, the poor quality of the machines and the lack of adequate support wasn't the fault of the lowly péons working for them, it was the fault of the company's management on the one hand and of the customers who didn't take (slightly more) money elsewhere and buy decent machines on the other. What, you think the people working assembling the damned things got to select the power supplies or the graphics cards?

They didn't mis-describe their machines, people got what they paid for; a cheap piece of **** with poor service. If they'd gone to a decent company in the first place they'd have got decent machines with decent service, but no. Of course they didn't. Because they didn't see the value of paying for good quality components and good service. Until things went wrong. That doesn't make the people who worked for Time criminals (unlike the mob accountant), just people working for a company making not very good machines. Frankly, I'm glad to see the back of the companies, but I'm still sorry for the employees who are now out of a job.

[Stewart]

oh Zak's just going to love that.

Any more sweeping generalisations to round the week off with ?

The melting point of Uranium is always 1132 °C

[Dougal]

The melting point of Uranium is always 1132 °C

Learnt from trying to make a nuclear reactor.

Atom bomb my arse