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Lexis Nexis employment verification – Hire AMERICANS

Posted by on Jun 16th, 2011 in business, Featured | 0 comments

Had a phone call yesterday. It was a woman, not sure where she was from, but she did sound like some Indian tech support people I have spoken with in the past. She was obviously stumbling through a script, I could barely hear her and she said she was verifying something. 99 times out of 100 these are sales calls, so I politely told her I wasn’t interested and hung up.

A few minutes ago I got a call from the same number. Didn’t bother to answer it this time. Listened to the voice mail and could barely make it out. The call was quiet, the accent was bad (male this time) but I barely made out the name of an ex-employee and the Lexis Nexis name. After 8 listens I finally deciphered the call back number. I always liked this employee and wanted to help, so I called the number back.

Again, a different person with an Indian accent. I told him I was returning a call, and he asked for the verification number (like it was on me to figure out what he wanted). I said I couldn’t understand the voicemail, but I knew the person’s name. He finally figured it out, had generally poor phone skills, but the employment was verified.

I share this for one reason. If you are using Employment Verification through Lexis Nexis, this was my experience. If I hadn’t liked this person I wouldn’t have jumped through any hoops to figure out who was calling, how to call them back and what they wanted. These people must be from the worst call center on the planet, I talked to three of them and none were easy to understand. Likewise, if you have applied for a job and there are any issues with employment verification, it could be because somebody was using this service and your old boss was too busy to monkey with them.

Amber Branson coaches basketball team 24 hours after having baby

Posted by on Mar 5th, 2011 in Featured, Humor, Inspiration | 0 comments

This one is for my sister who blathers on continuously about how hard it is to have a baby. Amber Branson, coach of the Lipan Texas Indian’s girls basketball team, helped her girls win a state playoff semi-final game less than 24 hours after giving birth.

Watch the video here

Hundreds gather to protest Global Warming

Posted by on Feb 2nd, 2011 in Featured, Humor, Stupid Global Warming | 0 comments

That’s why Yellow Makes Me Sad I Think…

Posted by on Nov 16th, 2010 in Crazy Marketing, Featured, Humor | 0 comments

This may be the best commercial ever

Removing smartquotes from text in Linux

Posted by on May 11th, 2009 in Featured, html, Tech, Vim | 0 comments

When converting documents from customer word format to html it seems inevitable that there will be extra characters provided by Microsoft Word. Unfortunately this expanded character set, which includes Smart Quotes, is not supported by many web browsers and email clients, so we have to go through and clean all of this out of our html files.

I normally use vim to edit all html files, and I have finally found a reliable method of locating these ‘bad characters’ in vim.

The process consists of two steps:

1) Make sure the ‘file encoding’ is 8-bit

:setlocal fenc=latin1

2) Use the 8g8 command in Normal mode (see “help 8g8″)

This process allows the bad characters to be identified and converted to utf-8 characters that can be displayed in all web browsers and email clients. If anyone out there has a better/easier way of doing this, please let me know.