Why yes, I HAVE been run halfway into the ground recently

And your point is??

Both yesterday and today the phones would not quit ringing.  Everyone was back from the holidays, everyone wanted his computer fixed, and everyone wanted it NOW.  No sooner did I put myself into “Available” status than I had a call on the line.  At one point we had forty calls stacked up in queue, which is scary bad when you’re guaranteeing that ninety percent of all incoming calls will be answered within two minutes, as we do.

And it seemed like the calls I got were the sticky ones:  the ones that no matter what you try, you can’t shake ’em loose.  I spent half the day—four hours total—across two calls with the same guy who had a portable on which he’d installed a networking driver at the recommendation of a software vendor.  That, as he found out, was a BIIIG mistake.  It clobbered his networking so badly that he couldn’t connect to anything at all.  I wasted the best part of two hours trying to find a fix, uninstalling bits and pieces, applying Windows service packs, running Windows repair installations.  No good; nothing worked.  Finally I gave him the bad news:  back up all your data, we’ve got to do a format/reinstall.  This led to another twenty minutes’ worth of getting Roxio Easy CD Creator debugged enough that he could burn his data to CD.  I left him to that, with instructions to call back when he was finished and ready to re-install.

After lunch, I had an hour or so of chasing a DVD/CD-RW problem round and round.  It kept looking like a Windows-type problem, because the computer (a portable) would boot normally if the DVD drive was not installed, but crashed with a Blue Screen of Death if the DVD was installed.  Eventually, though, we ran built-in diagnostics and caught the drive failing during a read test that it shouldn’t have failed.  I sent the customer a new DVD drive.

That was when the queue went all to hell, and wouldn’t you know that my reinstall guy called me back while I was in the middle of the DVD problem, so I couldn’t pick up the line.  An hour and a half later, when the backlog came down into single digits, I got the queue master’s approval to pull myself out and call back my reinstall guy.  The format and reinstall went very smoothly and as quick as I could hope for, but it just takes time to do all that, and by the time I clocked out, I was 45 minutes into overtime.  Overtime is officially Not Allowed right now, but if you’re in the middle of a call when your shift’s end comes, you stay with the call and work the overtime anyway.  The whole point of Auric support is to make the customer satisfied with the service we provide, and “punting” calls midway doesn’t count as making the customer satisfied.

I do at least have my own cube now, and don’t have to continue the awful practice of “hoteling”—camping out in the cubes of other people on their days off.  Hoteling is a perfectly miserable way to work, because you have to spend a quarter of an hour or more daily configuring a workstation that you may use for only that one day.  Horrible waste of effort.  My cube features a CityBest 270 with a 2.3GHz P4 processor (a good workhorse model), half a gig of RAM (pretty generous, given what I’m doing), a 40GB hard drive (enough, but not enormous), and 17” CRT monitor (I could wish for a flat-panel, but ain’t likely to happen unless I can put up a really, really good argument with the ergonomic-evaluation people).

And since I have a cube where I’m expecting to stay for a bit, maybe I can start bringing in a few things from my box of Office Stuph that’s been sitting under the bed ever since TEX fired me.  It’d be nice to have that much less clutter underneath.

The cold pit viper retreats Secret Master Henry Huggins from my back yard.  Fnord.