"Thus through the miracle of advanced telecommunications and wise
management is greater efficiency achieved -- by forcing a local user to submit her IT-related problems to a distant worker so it can be assigned to another local worker who may only be 75 feet away. Perhaps even someone she had lunch with earlier that very day."
This also happened with my work...though not because of outsourcing or, who knows, maybe that's a piece of it too. Anyway, when they closed our building and forced us to relocate or work at home, we basically lost local support services. I now work at home and have to handle all hardware/software support problems myself. We are also directed to use a 'service-desk/web/email' system. The few times that I tried, their response was totally non-existent or unsupportive: they didn't have the answer or they just directed me to yet another website with information about how to solve my problem. This lack of support/indirection led to a situation where my computer became totally riddled with viruses and I had to take it in to a local computer fix-it who charged me $250 to tidy everything up and restore my cpu to a pristine/secure state.
I'm about to submit that bill to my company and see if they will reimburse me. Either way, it seems like the real kicker -- oh, ever efficient market -- is that lots of people are in my shoes and increasingly so. So first the jobs go abroad ...and then these little mom-and-pop shops start mushrooming...cause you really do need the support and you need it NOW...and pretty soon local support looks like a money maker. It is true that capital profits by lowering wages, but it also profits through speedup. If offsourcing operations results in slowdown, bottlenecks, and inefficiencies, ...that loses money too ...and credibility. One of these days maybe even management will see that.
Joanna