The Time Is out of Joint

Today was full of anger and upset.

It began almost as soon as I logged in for my regular chat shift.  I was short with a technician at Gemini who was stuck on a wireless call and had no idea what she was doing with it, to the point she called me down for it.  I apologized twice, once right then and again at the end of the chat, but I expect I cut no ice with her, and only confirmed the opinion of me as an ogre, which I understand has formed at Gemini.  (Actually, Gemini techs seem to regard ALL the Circulith Resolver team as near-ogres.  We’re “mean” to them, the story goes.)

After that, I could never get away from escalating cases.  Fully a quarter of today’s chats were escalations, and one in particular, a “onsite technician didn’t show up” call, I couldn’t fix.  It was a combination of wrongly-set customer expectations, bad service-technician scheduling, and an inaccessible service provider liaison team—they were, every one, in their team meeting and unavailable for an hour at the exact moment I was on deadline and needed someone right then.  The customer fully appreciated and said he realized I was doing everything I could for him, but “everything I could do” didn’t come close to being enough.  Someone living in Pumpkin Centre, Alberta (or some wide-spot-in-the-road like that) was mad ’cos the service provider hadn’t called him to set up the service call, which was due to happen today.  That one, I think, finally sorted itself out after I sent several escalating emails to the service provider liaison, who was finally back from his meeting.  Then the Army Corps of Engineers called from BFE, North Dakota complaining because they had tried to give a service provider updated contact information for a service call, only to be brushed off by the service provider’s “help desk” (just guess where the help desk is outsourced).  They were told “The parts are being shipped directly to you, not to us, and our technician is not going to do ANYthing until you call us and let us know the parts have arrived on site, and anyway you would not receive service before Monday no matter what.  HAND, Sahib.”  I couldn’t do a thing with that because the parts didn’t arrive until too late in the day to get them onto today’s service schedule, and the service provider was within its contractual rights to defer the service call until Monday.

Finally, I got to do what I wanted to do for a few minutes, which was to analyze how recent changes in the queue are affecting our chats.  About two weeks ago, management moved one segment of our business out of Auric Corporate (my outfit) to Auric Small Business, in Countryburg.  To make up the lost call volume (better than two thousand calls a week) and not have to lay off a bunch of techs, they decided at the same time that Auric Corporate would begin taking calls for high-end workstations that didn’t have Auric support contracts.  In a fit of inconsistency, they further decided that for the time being, Small Business customers with workstations and Auric contracts would be routed to Countryburg, but all Auric Corporate workstations and all non-Auric workstations of any sort (even if you’re a home user who bought a Big Penis Computer just because you had to have a Big Penis Computer) would be routed to us.

Since those changes went into effect, gut feelings told us all that we were taking a lot more workstation chats than we used to, but we didn’t have the statistics to back it up.  Today, I went back into my personal logs and pulled together data that told me we were absolutely right, workstation calls had changed the mix in a BIG way.  I compared May, the last month before the change happened, and July, the first full month the change was in place.  My fixed (desktop) workstation chats were up 155% July over May, and portable workstations were up 112% for the same period; regular desktop chats were down 26% and regular portable chats were down 20%.  That’s an enormous change in the mix of chats I take, particularly since workstation calls tend to be high-complexity due to the variety of possible configurations (SATA, SCSI, various flavors of RAID, different varieties of video cards, etc.)

And THEN . . . my cell phone rang in the middle of the day, an uncommon occurrence.  T was on the wire, telling me she’d just been told her move-you-out-to-manage-your-own-store date had been moved up from the end of September . . . to the end of next week.  T speculated that another store’s manager must have done something egregiously stupid and got fired.  She doesn’t even know where she’s being reassigned yet; the best she could say is “somewhere between Longview and Corpus Christi.”  Now we have to figure out how to get her moved, find out whether the company will front any relocation expenses, whether they’ll pay any relocation expenses at all, and a million other things.  Oh, and T says she’s in a major cash crunch and doesn’t have the money to pay her August rent and can we do anything?

Hamlet consults Salvador Dalí’s melting watch.  Fnord.