And the hits just keep on coming

The Service Level Agreement team I’ve been helping to manage just gets more hectic.  Only yesterday I learned that all this time, all the workload managers (which includes me) have been supposed to be watching Corporation E’s on-site service calls and calling the on-site service provider if it looks like a technician might not get to a branch office on closing time the next business day.  Then if the service provider says “Nope, not gonna get there, we got the parts too late in the day,” we’re supposed to cancel that call on the fly and reissue it as a four-hour response service upgrade to make sure the technician does get on site that day.  Those instructions are in the documentation, but I’d forgotten about them since the team lead has been handling Corporation E’s calls almost exclusively because it’s such a mess, and what I don’t use, I can easily forget.

Frankly, I don’t think I could have managed that level of bird-dogging on Monday or Tuesday either one, since both the team lead and the other backup were both off Monday and Tuesday, so I was trying to manage all four accounts myself without very much help from the other team members.  What with the ones who forget to get into our IRC channel and are incommunicado, and the ones who took extra time off for Thanksgiving week, help was mighty scarce.  And three of the four accounts—State A, State C, and Corporation E—were just bombing tickets at us all week long.  With enough help I could have managed, but trying to do most of it myself ran me ragged.  I never saw any work code on the phone except AUX 7 all week.

It seemed like I couldn’t get any tickets closed for the life of me.  If they weren’t going into “delayed for backlogged parts,” they were “put off because the customer isn’t in the office.”  I know we closed a bunch, but the number of live tickets just wouldn’t go down.

Yesterday the other backup manager was in the office, and that’s when, at mid-afternoon, I found out we were supposed to have been bird-dogging the Corporation E tickets all along.  If he hadn’t been there, I would have sunk.  I had the account’s technical manager at me to make a list, split it up between three of us, call the service provider on all the tickets, confirm onsite times and upgrade if required.  There were a few I couldn’t do anything about, like the one in Vermont where it was already 4:30 their time, the tech wasn’t going to be on site, and there was nothing I could do to help it.  Another was a little better; it was in San Jose and the parts had already been delivered, so I just issued a service upgrade with no parts.

And that was how it was when I walked out the door at 4:30 yesterday.

But even with the screwup on Corporation E, everyone is still telling me I’m doing a great job at coping with these accounts.  At the last team meeting of my assigned regular team, the Tulip got up and presented me with a Bronze Star award, with a suitable-for-framing-at-work certificate, a star lapel pin to attach to my employee badge, and a twenty-five dollar gift certificate that I still haven’t figured out how to spend.  The stars (Bronze, Silver, and Gold) signify that, in increasing amounts, you either saved the company from losing a chunk of money, saved the company a chunk of money, or improved some process that will benefit the company significantly.  Stars aren’t handed out to every Joe that comes down the pike.  I don’t think any other level-one tech on my team has one.

I’ve heard a rumor floated that the SLA function will soon be split off into a custom queue of its own.  I have no idea what kind of reorganization that might mean, whether I’d be asked to join the new queue, or whether I’d want to go if I was asked.  It all depends.

Winston Churchill reenacted a green pocket calculator.  Fnord.