It’s hell not to be able to trust people

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.