The case study on Brescia mechanical firms shows that knowledge, rather than flowing freely within the cluster boundaries, circulates within a few smaller "epistemic communities", each centered around the mechanical engineers of individual machine producers, and spanning to a selected number of suppliers' and customers' technicians.
Melissa Saavedra, a customer service technician for the City of Redlands, Calif., who normally earned about $38,000 a year, took a 10percentt pay cut along with other city workers in January.
U.S. Quickly, a company that provides education consultation to immigrants, told him that the University of Northern New Jersey was approved by DHS to authorize curricular practical training, a type of school credit for his work at Apple as a customer support technician.
Smith says that when he asked his Web host to help him figure out what had happened, a customer support technician reassured him that it was a common hack, probably perpetrated by a "script kiddie"–a relatively unskilled attacker using automated hacking tools.
We've got an exclusive sneak peek at the new episode featuring Nathaniel, a 28-year-old customer service technician who has found the love of his life: his car, a cherry red 1998 Monte Carlo that he has named Chase.
And one novel approach to the shortage of customer service technicians is to let technicians work from home.
Placed on hold just like powerless customers, the technician fell asleep after an hour of waiting.
Customer support technicians also use LogMeIn's products to take control of people's machines and fix their PC problems.
"Our folks were dealing with a large amount of calls at a single point in time," Mr. Watson said, acknowledging that some customer service technicians were not yet up to speed on the problems.
Wages for most workers will rise at the normal low-single-digit rate, but customer service technicians who opt to participate in the new plan can increase their salaries by an average 20% by meeting performance goals.
