Oh... And a day's worth of RDP traffic is well, well over 25mb. We have a number of lawyers running standard office apps (web browsing is banned on the terminal server, so apps like outlook, acrobat, word, etc). At least 250mb a day of traffic for each user. 25mb a day? Funny.

And a 17" laptop.

[vehiclehitech.com]

All sitting on an awesome $12 desk from staples clearance.

Then again, probably not.

USPS will also pick up priority mail from your home for free. Just mentioning this in case a shipping rape apologist chooses to pipe in with a "but I have to drive to the post office and gas is so expensive omg!11!" comment.
Linky
https://carrierpickup.usps.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/CarrierPickup.woa

/has a few issues with bullshit shipping fees.

Lemon laws vary between states - and the laws in some states suck major ass. Louisiana requires 4 repairs to fix the exact same issue (which never happens because the dealer will claim it is actually another issue, etc) or a vehicle to be 90 days at the dealership getting fixed.
Anyone who thinks crying "lemon law" will get a new xbox is a bit too optimistic.

FIRSTBORN DRAGON -
Microsoft has the most messed up phone system ever. The process involves calling in, being put on hold, waiting for a tier 1 agent to create a case, take billing info if necessary, then being put back on hold to get to the actual agent. Sort of awkward, sure, but this is the kicker:
Even though agents were available, calls would still be on hold for 10-30 minutes between the time the person stoped talking the the tier 1 agent and the time you picked up. Add the 2 hold times together and you had people on hold during that call for 45 minutes sometimes before they got to you.
Damn odd. And I've personally experienced this myself while on the phone with a customer because "internal" transfers had to go through the tier 1 agent.

Let's go through a few points.

4. re: "it is pretty hard to fail the test"

True - but some people working at call centers aren't exactly brilliant. Others are drunk, hungover or high since most call centers do not drug test and substance abuse goes pretty much unchecked. I recall one call center where people would smoke up in their cars during breaks, lunch, etc.
There are also serious financial incentives to have your employees pass the test (see below).

3. Supervisors... It depends. Most of the call centers I've been at have a form of "leads" - although I've worked mainly the technical side. I've seen some people been promoted quickly, but it usually isn't "any joe off the floor" - although sometimes an "any joe off the floor" assigned to "call time duty" - where they get to walk around and harass people who are on a call longer than 10 minutes, etc.
All sorts of BS happens in the customer service side. I worked for a cellular phone company for a very short while where people would be transferred to "supervisor" / your friend in order to antagonize the customer - most of the time though, it was too busy and the calls got transferred out somewhere (retention was a favorite since it never really came back to us).
Oh… And some call centers "don't have" supervisors - like GM's customer assistance line - yeah, you might get a "manager", but that "manager" makes $9 an hour and can't do any more for you than anyone else on the floor. We had "supervisors", but they basically approved hours and had no contact with the customers and very little current knowledge.

2. AHT (average handle time) and service level were, hands down, the most important metrics to meet. If the call center didn't meet service level (answer x% of calls in y minutes), they were "fined" - the call center would have money (thousands of dollars) taken out of their "gross" pay. I've been working when supervisors basically went "oh shit" and walked through cubes pressing the release button (i.e. hanging up on the customer) because there were too many calls in queue and the service level was too low.
They could also log onto an ex-employees extension and hit "ready" then "release" a bunch of times. On certain contracts, they would routinely do this to clear the queue so we could go home.

1. Comcast "escalation" will take you from tier 1 to tier 2, but above that, you're really out of luck. Tier 1 agents are useless and are probably the biggest problem with their tech support. I've seen them send customers to tier 2 that don't even have internet service with Comcast. I've seen t2 agents find out that the t1 agent didn't actually do any troubleshooting with the customer and just pasted in some canned script into the call log.
I've seen good t2 agents stand up and walk out because of tier one agents.

"The below part"
I have a couple examples of shenanigans with training…
In the last call center I worked at - support for Vista - the entire class (except for me, but that's not surprising since most people had no computer experience) failed a weekly "pass or you're fired" exam - management fudged the results to make everything look peachy (otherwise they would lose 2 weeks of pay for 20 people). Our "teacher" was an Indian who thought radio waves couldn't travel through a vacuum and that hard drives actually had a bunch of small "cylinders" inside them (instead of platters). Future problems were dealt with by repeating the exams until people passed.

In another case, when our site lost a contract, we had mandatory training between calls.
Dell thought the techs were actually getting training and paid a ton of money for something they didn't receive.
The call center basically double billed xxxx and Dell.
When it came time to take the dell tests, everything was "open everything" - co-workers, books, employees that were in the dell queue, etc.

"Training" has been handled unethically (to say the least) in every single call center I've worked at - I'd even go and say that there were several cases that were clearly fraudulent.
Here's how it happened - frequently, the outsourcee (dell, etc) would pay the outsourcer (stream, livebridge, sitel, sutherland, etc) a set amount for each employee that trained and passed "the final test". This set amount would be well above (usually more than double) what the outsourcer paid the employee - and the outsourcer had no responsibility besides throwing a bunch of people in a classroom and providing an instructor. Maybe some old computers if the Dell or whoever paid extra for a computerized classroom.

Since the outsourcee never got a list of terminated employees, you could fill training classes with employees, fire them as soon as they completed training and laugh as you raked in the dough.
All this, while spending basically nothing for the trainees except their wages, which they were already making 100% on. Because of fast turnover, the outsourcer wouldn't have any liability in terms of health insurance or anything like that. They also didn't have to shell out anything for unemployment claims either since nobody remained employed for long enough to qualify for benefits.

One particular case of fraud had the call center training 6 classes at the same time. Training took 3 weeks and they had 2 classes of ~30 people graduating a week.
Fresh agents would be placed on the floor, told to meet unrealistic metrics or be fired. And the call center would fire most of those employees in the first week.
I suppose you could read this as the call center taking extreme advantage of their client's policies, but there seems something awfully scummy about the whole thing when you do it for 2 months.
When you consider that they were getting $60,000 a week ($9/hr * 40hrs * 3 weeks * 30 people *2 classes) and the call center floor was almost full (~50 phones available for the 180 people in training plus the 60 that hit the floor that week - the numbers work out because there were different shifts, days off, but the call center could not of have had close to 240 people working on the available PCs)
I don't recall one instance in 6 years of experience where the client caught on and put an end to it. I suppose having to admit your company is getting screwed by the people you hired wouldn't be the ideal path for career advancement, but switching isn't an easy process either.

And you wonder why companies don't really save any money when they outsource...