LOL! Same here. I worked for Yellow Pages for a while. Same story, the more calls you answered and the quicker you were on the phone, the more bonuses you got.
My first job in IT was as a helpdesk worker to federal government customers. Because of the whole outsourcing money grab, not only did we have performance bonuses that did not align with reality, our management didn't give a toss because the company got paid by fed govt based on the same numbers.
One of our number one stats was FOFC (fixed on first call). It's a measure of how many issues were fixed on the first call to the helpdesk. It works like this - let's say person A (Jon) got a call from a customer and believed with all sincerity (hah!) that it was fixed, he could tick "FOFC" and get the good stats.
Now if this customer called back and got person B (Me), I couldn't take that stat as they had already called once, even if I resolved the problem.
So person A devised a brilliant scheme. The majority of computer problems experienced by public servants are fixed with a reboot, as many would know. A good helpdesker seldom asks someone to do that straight up as it's very disruptive and some digging around can often find the root cause and fix the problem, not the symptom.
Person A would answer every call with a warm greeting, check that this was the first call the customer had made, tell them to reboot (regardless of problem), hang up and tick the box.
40% of the time the customer would never call back. The other 60%, they would, and person B would deal with irate caller and fix the problem.
Person A was hailed as a hero, and person B was tormented by the pain of thousands of public servants. Life sucks sometimes!
