Your customer service rep may also be a federal inmate.

While surfing MSNBC new today I came across an interesting news article that talked about how the Federal government uses inmates to staff government agencies call centers and also contracts these inmates out to private companies for their sales, service, and marketing call centers.  This is a double edge sword for me because as thrilled as I am about not have to spend the majority of my customer service call trying to over come language and dialect barriers with someone who is located on the other side of the world.  I’m not exactly thrilled about inmate 12345 having my personal information either.   I mean lets be honest inmate 12345 isn’t doing time in a federal prison because he didn’t pay his parking tickets.  I wonder if Madoff works in one of these call centers.  It’s kind of creepy to know that the next time you call a business’ customer service center you could be handing your name, date of birth, phone number, etc. over to a someone who’s doing time for fraud, identity theft, or worse.  And what’s really crazy about the whole thing is these inmates are doing a job while incarcerate that if or when they are released from federal custody they probably won’t be hired for due to their felony conviction(s).