Fortunatus S. Marchbanks' Quotidian Minutiae

Which is the number of seconds I had left at the end of my timed “tools test” last week, part of the Resolver interview process.  The idea is that I sit down with whatever tools (i.e., information resources) I prefer open, and I have fifteen minutes to find the answers to all ten questions, all of which were ordinary and usual questions I can expect to be asked as a Resolver.  The one that nearly threw me was “how do you distinguish mainstream from performance Prescott processors.”  I had to leave it, go do all the others, and come back to it again.  I knew roughly where to look, but finding the exact link got me down.  Finally I fell across the reference I wanted in the knowledgebase and nailed down the answer—with, as I say, three seconds to spare.  Today Smiley and I had a mock interview, and he had some useful advice for me at the end of it.  He said I need to quit trying to balance positives and negatives and present a complete picture, and just point up the positive things, since the interview team by its nature will be looking for a reason to wash me out.  (This isn’t antagonism; they do this to every candidate.)  He also advised me that when the inevitable “what are your weaknesses” question comes along, I ought to have ready a couple of weaknesses that I’m already working on improving, rather than naming ones that are more integral and systemic (e.g., my preference for wanting to chew over a question rather than give a snap answer).  We’re going to meet again Wednesday, after I’ve had a little time to incorporate his suggestions, and give it a second go.

Other than that, today was just a busy Monday, the more so because of the backlog built up from last Friday’s holiday.  I rarely got a time when the phone wasn’t ringing the second I hit Available.

But last night was date night with Hero Woman, which always makes a day better.  I’d completely blanked out that I work every Sunday afternoon (you’d think that after two years I’d have gotten the idea) and made a date with her to go to the Blanton Museum.  This was a non-starter, since the Blanton closes at five every night except Thursday.  Instead, we went out to dinner at Romeo’s (good, as it usually is) and then prowled around West Sixth for a while, ending up at Molotov Lounge for drinks and talk.  I was surprised at how empty and how (relatively) quiet the place was, but I later decided that was because it was Sunday.  We called it an evening early, and Hero Woman drove me home, in the process scaring the pee-wadding out of herself (but not me) when she ran a red light at 12th and Lamar because she was looking at the wrong one of two signals right together.  We got home safely nonetheless.

(The phone just rang, and Hero Woman invited me to a movie night tomorrow with her and Shiny Woman to watch Main Hoon Na, which I’d never heard of before yesterday.  She says it’s over-the-top Bollywood and fun in a “kitchen-sink comedy” way.)

Mid-morning today, the Tulip’s team lead stopped me in the hall and said “hey, go tell QWatch to let you out of the queue for about thirty minutes, I want you to take this knowledge assessment for the Resolver interview process.”  I hadn’t realized he’d even had time to get my resumé, much less begin acting on it.  I’m used to the glacial pace of government-agency hiring, where it can take six to eight months to fill a position once everyone’s finished cavilling and objecting, and it’s been held up due to a budget freeze, and all the papers have been sent back at least twice to be queried.  (By which time, of course, your chosen applicant has got tired of waiting and taken a job somewhere else, so the whole process must begin again.)

The team lead sat me down in a room with my pen and a two-page paper with ten common troubleshooting situations.  The closed-book assignment was to write down details of how you’d go about troubleshooting each problem.  I only had trouble with one, a question about faint output on a color laser printer, and that because I handle one of those about once a quarter, if that often, so I was out of practice.  The others were all quite straightforward and ordinary, and I got through them in a little over half an hour.  I would have been through sooner than that, but having to write by hand instead of typing slowed me down a lot.

Results of the knowledge check won’t be released until next week when we all learn who made the cut to the interview phase.  Really, I’m not much worried about my results.  I knew the material, and knew how to go about it.  The chat client simulation and the actual interview are going to be the challenging bits.

The tarnished bonobo will laminate a submarine buttonhook at Mach 3.  Fnord.

I applied for a promotion today.  Specifically, I applied for one of the four vacant Resolver positions in our call center.  Smiley has been pushing me to “get going and apply for something already!” for some while, and today I did.  I overhauled my resume, adding in a bunch of material the better to show off my past leadership, coaching/mentoring, and managerial experience, and after a quick review Smiley took it and said, “OK, looks good.  I’ll complete the form I do to endorse it and send it along to the hiring manager.”  The hiring manager in this case is the Tulip, who knows I’m applying for this, and had nearly an hour’s sit-down with me two weeks ago to look at whether logistical issues might preclude me from being able to do the job.  (Answer, after further discussion with L:  it doesn’t, althought we may have to rearrange some responsibilities.)

I’m going to do a mock interview with my boss this coming week, and sometime after that we’ll start the real selection process.  I’ll have to take a technical and skills assessment, handle mock chats using the tool the Resolvers have to communicate with the level-1 techs, have a tag-team interview, and . . . do something else, I can’t remember what it is right now.  Barring snags in the process, the Tulip ought to have his hiring decisions made by the first of December.  On paper I look pretty good.  My weak points will probably be the interview (I’ve never interviewed well, particularly in tag-team situations) and perhaps the chat client simulation.  Or perhaps not.

This is the first time I’ve applied for any higher-level position at the Empire.  If I get it, then excellent; if not . . . other people will leave, and other jobs will open up.  I just have to be the Zen hunter again.

Wednesday and Thursday were days that I Stirred Shit Up at the Empire—in a good way.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a representative to a council where level-one floor technicians get to meet managers at the grandboss and great-grandboss levels to explain just what technical or mechanical stuff on the floor hobbles us, handicaps us, or just chaps our asses as we try to do our jobs.  Remarkably, the damned thing works.  Several policy and procedure changes in the last year that did make our lives better came from gripes and ideas first floated in tech council.

At last Tuesday morning’s breakfast meeting (hey, they even agree to feed us at these things; this week was breakfast tacos and coffee), one of the points that came up—again—was the problem of the tool we use to locate and pick our spare parts for service dispatches.  A number of the part descriptions are confusingly similar, and those similarities cause mistakes in picking parts, which cause repeat service calls, which annoy the customers and waste everyone’s time.  One big obstacle to fixing this problem is that the tool doesn’t “belong” to us, in corporate terms.  It belongs to one of the inventory management groups, which allows us to piggyback just for the ride.  The confusing part descriptions don’t bother the parts planners, it seems; they’re used to it.  It just bothers the hell out of us.

So the issue of bad or confusing part descriptions causing RDs (repeat dispatches) came up yet again, and everyone agreed it was a problem, and the same proposals were floated yet again:  build a tool of our own that presents the spares-list information in a form useful to us, or find someone high enough up the company to tell them to fix it, goddamn it, and then make the fix happen.  Both of these proposals have problems.  The first requires committing money and resources, and the second causes bad blood between operating units.

The very next morning I got another wrong-part RD.  Last week I had to order a docking-station monitor stand to replace a failed one, and when I went to the spares list, there were two nearly identical part descriptions.  In the verbose part of the description, both parts were described as monitor stands.  The hook came in the cryptic parts-planner piece of the description where a five-character string differentiated a monitor stand from a notebook system stand.  Very different items, very different function, almost identical description.  For the life of me I couldn’t figure out which one I should pick, so in the end I guessed.

I guessed wrong.  Yesterday I got an email from the customer saying, “Hey Sam, you sent us a notebook stand but we needed a monitor stand.  Will you sort this out for us?”  I swore about the goddamn lousy part descriptions in the spares list, dispatched the right one to the customer, and then sent an email to everyone who’d been at the tech council meeting, techs and managers alike.  I pasted in the two part descriptions from the spares list, explained that I’d gotten an RD hit because of it and why, and generally acted like Michael Palin in the muckrakers scene of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (“Did you see that?  That’s what I’m on about!  Did you see ’im repressin’ me?”).

This set something off.  Across eight or nine emails that morning I watched the cc: list on the replies get longer and longer as more and more managers and analysts were hauled into the process.  Finally, right before lunchtime someone from the product group wrote a completely dismissive email to the effect of “you can’t do anything about it, the description fields are too limited, somebody else will have to deal with this problem, and anyway this can’t REALLY be a problem because if it was a problem, we would have heard about it back in 2003 when this model was introduced.”  I replied, “This class of incident has been a problem since 2003 to my personal knowledge, and I’m sure it was even before that.  The difference is that hitherto level-1 technicians had no effective way to pass their concerns back up to the people with the ability to make things change.  Instead, they grumbled and swore and patched together workarounds, sharing tribal knowledge to cope with the status quo as best they could.  Now we have a conduit to make our concerns heard, we’re voicing those concerns, and you’re learning of long-extant issues that have created a significant backlog of resentment on the call center floors.”  I got a thundering silence back from him, and a back-channel email from my great-great-grandboss saying “Nice response, Sam.”

And then, and THEN!  Today about mid-morning my phone rang with a direct-dial call to my extension.  I picked up and found my great-great-great-grandboss (a vice president) on the line, congratulating me for raising all these important issues and providing good examples, and encouraging me to keep bringing them forward.  He told me he was asking (sc. ordering) some heavier hitters from the organization that owns the spares-list tool to call and talk with me directly, because he thought they needed to hear what I had to tell them.  Later in the day, another team manager on my floor came over to shake my hand.  He told me that G-G-G-Gboss had stood up on his hind legs in a big-assed meeting full of senior and area managers and preached them a sermon about me and my email, saying my case was an example of how they all needed to be doing a better job of supporting the front-line guys and if we could let this kind of problem go on for three years without fixing it, how did they think we could fix the really BIG problems when they came along?  Even later, Great-Great-Grandboss told me there’d been a squabble in email Wednesday I hadn’t seen, over who was supposed to bell the cat fix my particular part description issue, and in the end he’d had to be Zeus on Olympos and thunder “I don’t care WHO does it, but I want those descriptions fixed before day’s end or I’ll know the reason why!”

So now I’m working out the kinks of scheduling ongoing biweekly meetings with the product group to provide them front-line input from the Services organization about how what they do affects us.  That’ll probably take a run or two at it, and someone may have to go sit on the queue watch staff’s heads to keep them from howling if I have to go to meetings during the blackout period when Nobody Must Schedule Any Meetings for Any Reason Whatever so all the techs will be available on the phones.

Jesus god.  These people are listening to me.

A slate shingle camera mis-identifies the Akhoond of Swat.  Fnord.

Friday was a kinda hectic day at the Empire.  Come to think of it, the whole week was kinda hectic.  I alternated between days when I took a lot (for me) of inbound calls and days when I didn’t take many inbounds because I spent so much time doing follow-ups and email cases and case-managing problems that came up.  I wasn’t ever not busy.

And some of it I let myself in for.  Last thing this afternoon, I got a call from a Chinese woman in Georgia with an entry-level Dementor system from about two years ago.  She was a small-business segment customer, so I should have transferred her to Transactional anyhow.  She was out of warranty, so I should have transferred her to Core for troubleshooting only.  However I looked at it, it Wasn’t My Problem.  Or it shouldn’t have been.  But then she said something about “burning”—and I knew that if I transferred her, she was gonna get fobbed off and probably get screwed.

The story, when I finally untangled it from her uncertain English and her accent, was that she had turned off her system two nights before and when she did, there was a strong burning smell.  She hadn’t seen smoke or sparks, wasn’t completely sure whether it was our box or the third-party monitor that did it.  However, burning smells are still a serious thing in my business and enough of a worry, parTICularly in light of the recent and well-publicized Flaming Laptop incidents, that I didn’t want to chance leaving that computer loose in the world and maybe having it actually catch fire next time she turned it on.  The little man who lives right above my belly button told me loudly that if I transferred her to Core, they were probably going to say “not our problem” and “sucks to be you” ’cos they don’t have as much latitude to use judgement as I do.

So I didn’t punt the call.  I set up a whole-system safety capture for her Demented, which means we’ll build her a new system (probably one of the currently shipping entry-level systems) and send it to her, and she’ll send the old one back to us.  It’s all expense from our side, since the warranty was out and we’ll get back an system that’s only good for scrap, but I think it’s better I do that than chance an ugly Incident.

I only wish I could trust our other divisions to see it my way so I didn’t have to do stuff myself that shouldn’t have to be mine to do.

You must level the spinneret of the puzzled ball bearing.  Fnord.