ChaCha's Quality Control Gestapo!

Hello, my name is Chris. [Hello, Chris!] I am a ChaCha guide and I am ashamed.

It is Thursday morning and today I will find out if I make the 'Top Guide' list for this week. If I do, I will continue to be paid 20 cents per search. But if I don't make the list, my pay rate will get cut in half and I will have to work twice as hard and answer twice as many queries for ChaCha to make the same amount of money that I made last week.

It is all part of ChaCha's new 'pay for performance' policy and the rules are simple: each week, a guide has to answer a minimum of 200 queries and maintain at least a 95% accuracy rating in order to make 'Top Guide' and get paid 20 cents per search. If they don't make their quota, or even if they do, but their accuracy rate falls below 95%, their pay gets cut in half and it stays that way until the guide makes Top Guide at some point in the future.

ChaCha claims their reason for the new pay policy is to 'motivate' their experienced guides, who were already making 20 cents per query, to work even harder so they can continue to make 20 cents per query. Otherwise, they will get punished by having their pay cut.

The flaw in the system is that the rules of the game aren't clear. If your quality rating does fall below 95%, you are not told how many of your answers were wrong or, more importantly, why the answers were wrong.

But that still doesn't sound too terribly difficult, you say. Well, let's pretend that you are a ChaCha guide who did not make the Top Guide list but you have decided to work your ass off, anyway, in an attempt to get back on 'the list'. We'll break it down into seconds.

Ding Dong (your Chacha bell rings alerting you to an incoming query)

You accept the query and the clock starts ticking. In the back of your mind, you know that ChaCha wants you to take no more than 2 minutes to locate the answer for the IS and present it in a factual and grammatically correct manner lest you be considered 'inefficient'. But you want to take less than 2 minutes to answer the query, anyway, because you are only making 10 cents per search! Do the math--if you take 2 minutes to answer a query, at 10 cents per query, you are making $3.00 an hour--but that's only if ChaCha's server doesn't kick you out of the program and make you start over, which happens all the time. [It takes about 5 seconds to read the query and figure out what the IS wants--total time so far, 5 seconds--tick, tick, tick]

Before you even begin searching the internet for the answer, you must read the Infoseeker's History so you can determine their location, their previous questions, etc. Now you might be tempted to skip this step to shave a few seconds off your time, but don't do it! It will count against you and your 95% quality rating. So you read the history. [tick, tick, tick--by now about 15 seconds have gone by and you are beginning to feel a bit nervous--this particular Infoseeker asks lots of questions, a good indication that he is a bored teenager or a heckler--both spell trouble.]

You pull up Google (everybody uses Google!) and search for a reliable source for the answer. For the sake of argument, let's say the IS's question was a legitimate one, not one involving the size of his balls or how many crayons would it take to fill up the Atlantic Ocean. He asks, "What is the date, time and place of the launching of the next space shuttle?"

You are relieved--that should be easy. First you check the NASA site. Crap! It's down. OK, no problem. Don't panic. You rush off to the Johnson Space Center site. You quickly scan their main page for a link to their launch schedule. But they have revamped their site and you can't find the link. The seconds are ticking [tick, tick, tick, by now you have spent 1 minute 15 seconds on this search and little beads of sweat are breaking out on your forehead.]

You are about to give up, when...thank God!...there's the link, hidden away on page 3! Ok, now, what did the IS want? Think. THINK! Oh yeah! The date, time and place of the next shuttle launch. There it is! No, wait, they haven't updated their site, after all! That's the launch schedule for 2007! How can the friggin Space Center not have updated their site! Wait--hit Control-Refresh--there it is! All you had to do was refresh the page. [tick, tick, tick--by now tears of relief are streaming down your face. Your wife comes in and asks if you would like a beer. She sees your tears. "Go away!" you yell, "I don't want you to see me like this!" As she scurries from the room, you highlight the information the IS wants and return to the answer window where you will type your answer for the IS to see---2 minutes, 30 seconds have passed. ]

You type the information you just collected into proper sentence structure remembering to correctly spell all the words. Don't forget--you are allowed to abbreviate just one word, but only if you absolutely must. You type:

"The next space shuttle is expected to launch on August 14, 2008 at 10:15 AM EST from Kennedy Space Center. "

Whew! You are glad to see that all of the information fits within the 160-character box. You are just about ready to exit when--Oh, s---! You forgot the 'magic'! ChaCha insists that you fill any space left over in your answer box with trite little ChaCha promos, so you type, "Thank you for using ChaCha!" [tick, tick, tick--By now, 2 minutes and 45 seconds have passed.]

Quick like a rabbit, you click the 'Validate' button so the ChaCha server can check that all of your text fits within the allotted space. Then you wait...and wait...and wait...and wait...while the seconds keep ticking...for ChaCha's server to validate that your answer fits in the box, even though you know damn good and well that it fits in the box because you can see that it fits right there on the screen in front of you! [tick, tick, tick, 20 more precious seconds go by while you wait for the ChaCha server. You don't dare skip this step, either, because if you do, that could also lower your quality rating.]

Finally, your validated answer pops up and you hit 'Send' to send the answer to the Infoseeker. It's over. You wipe away the tears and sweat and wait for the next query, hoping that it comes along fast because that last one took 3 minutes and 35 seconds from start to finish, and at rate, at 10 cents per search, your hourly wage just plummeted to $1.81.

But it's not over yet! That little answer still has to jump over some daunting hurtles if you are to make Top Guide next week. First, the Infoseeker gets to 'grade you'. If they don't think you were fast enough, or if they are just feeling a little cranky, they could give you a low grade which flags Quality Control to give you a black mark.

Next, your answer becomes part of the IS's history so every guide who comes after you is able to see it. But, that's OK, right? I mean, aren't we all on the same team? But the next guide who sees your answer might be pissed that they haven't made Top Guide in a couple of weeks, so they hit the 'Report this guide' button, which flags Quality Control to give you a black mark.

OK, let's say your answer gets past the cranky Infoseeker and the bitchy fellow guide and gets all the way to Quality Control. The QC intern (yes, I've heard they use interns) checks your source and scans your answer for accuracy. But, what's this? The guide forgot to put a comma between the date and the time????? Great God Almighty, give that guide a black mark!

Every Thursday, ChaCha's Quality Control posts the weekly list of 'Top Guides'. This morning, I, along with several thousand other guides, waited nervously to see if our names would be on the golden list of approximately 2,000 guides who make it. I did not make it. Even though I performed over 500 searches for ChaCha last week, somehow, 5% of my answers (or 25 questions) were defective in some way and failed to get past the Quality Control Gestapo.

In the Guide Forum, new guides who don't make 'the list' often try to be positive about it in spite of the pay cut they receive. They say things like, "It's OK, I will try even harder next week. I'll make Top Guide. I really will. You'll see!" But what they don't yet realize is that they are up against a losing battle because how can you improve when you don't know what you are doing wrong?

Feeling defeated and a little dirty, I log out of ChaCha and go look for my wife to tell her the bad news. "My pay has been cut in half," I say as I slump into her arms, "Hold me."

Next time...Survival Training For Guides!