24hour support people

2008-06-06T18:15:00.003+01:00

So we've been busy, and kind of forgot about this.

We're doing our own things around the galaxy, but we still meet up somewhere near Tatooine now and again for a few black ales.

Random Irish people

2005-09-15T08:11:00.000+01:00

Don't get me wrong, I like Irish people. I simply don't like bored Irish people, because they call me at work to abuse me. Following is a phone conversation I had last night.

"I want to complain about my internet connection."

"Ok. Which provider are you with?"

"[name of provider]"

"We're [our company]. You need to call [name of provider]"

*phone gets snatched away from the caller and and a man's voice booms....*

"YOU'RE A FECKING SMARTARSE, AREN'T YE?!? I'LL FECKING RAPE YA IN THE ARSE WHEN I COME AND FECKING FIND YA, YA BAST-click* "

I hung up.

Ho hum... the Devil makes work for idle hands...

Utter Confusion

2005-06-18T23:12:00.000+01:00

Do you ever get the feeling of total and utter confusion? There are so many things going on and changing, that you don't know your new customers from old, and your Bluetooth™ from your 9600 baud?

I do. That's where I am now.

There is so much going on, so much happening, that I seem barely able to keep up.

Goodbye, world... I'll be busy playing on my new Atari Lynx. :)

MANAGERS ABSOLVED, TECHIES UNDER FIRE

2005-05-01T21:19:00.000+01:00

Unhelpful people this week...

"No, I can't do this, as I don't know how. Don't bother calling me a again about it"

This translates into;

"No, I can't be bothered to do this, as it's a bank holiday weekend and this is my personal time, despite me being a point of escalation for you. I'd rather be pleasuring myself over furry p0rn. Now go away. You wish you were as 1337 as me"

That is what happened, and complaints will be made. We sit here for 12 hours at a time, whatever day it may be, and still take shit from people despite the crappy wages we get paid.

People like the person in question get paid to be available 24/7 for a week a month, and get paid handsomely for it.

Don't get me wrong, I don't begrudge them that one iota. I begrudge paying that dolt ANY wages for being wholly unhelpful. Had I taken his word for it, and left it alone, I'd be getting a shafting this coming week.

Thankfully, I know better than to take that course of action, so I went over his head. I'm not proud of it, but I'm saving my ass from forced entry.

At ease, soldier. Await further orders.

2005-03-21T21:54:00.000Z

Delegation, delegation, ooooh, delegation.. that's what you need,
If you want to be the best, and you want to beat the rest, oh,
Delegation's what you need... if you wanna be a MANAGEMENT ASSHOLE

DON'T PANIC!

2005-02-17T08:36:00.000Z

I hate outages.

We have these things called Major Customer Events. In short, this means "IT'S BROKEN!" and all the stops get pulled out.

I've been here 3 years. We've had 2 of these while I've been here.
Both in the last 2 weeks.
Both on my shift.

Another update later. :)

2005. Good riddance to 2004.

2005-01-04T23:57:00.000Z

2004 blew goat cock. I don't hold out much hope for 2005, either.

Still, I hope you all thought of a New Year's resolution - mine was to stop being such a cynical, pessimistic bastard, although if you ask the wife it'll be something boring like stopping smoking, annexing small countries, etc. I manage to project an aura of such negativity that my 6-monthly review has 'be less cynical' as one of its goals.

But why be cynical? After all, we have lots of jolly good fun, especially the lucky ones working over the festive period, whilst you were all tucking into your turkey on Christmas Day (R5-D3), and drinking yourselves daft on New Year's Eve (support droid #45). Indeed, we all enjoyed ourselves!

Or not.

Enough with the negatives, anyhow - how about two (recentish) comical moments:-

#1] You're my husband
"No, I'm not" was my reply, to a series of prank telephone calls we recieved whilst on a rather slow nightshift back in November. The calls went on for around 2 hours, and covered such enthralling subjects as "how tall are you?", "what do you look like?", and "how old are you?" (7ft 2ins, purple with yellow spots, and 237 years old, if you must know). This what you get for having an 0800 (toll-free for our non-UK readers) telephone number.

#2] Baubles do, in fact, break
As I found out, again on a nightshift (a recurring theme, I know). Kids, don't hit plastic baubles with sticks - they smash into a few hundred tiny pieces which you end up picking out of the carpet (or your feet) for the next four hours.

There'll be more, but they escape me right now.

So yes - in other news, I'm still doing tech support. I had what was more or less a 'guaranteed position' 6 weeks ago, which would have meant a return to being a sysadmin. This steadily went down the pan for reasons out of most people's control (think: company politics). Exploring other possibilities, but as per usual, I don't expect them to come to much.

Maybe we should fight crime

2004-12-19T07:44:00.000Z

I liken us Support People to the Police, God love 'em.
Here is why;

1) We do a thankless job that people take for granted.

2) People think we can get around the restrictions that our employer imposes on everyone else. 99.9% of the time, this is not the case.

3) People only acknowledge that we exist when things go wrong and someone, somewhere figures they can lay the blame on us.

4) The generla public assumes we get certain perks to our job. We don't.

5) The same people are known to assume that we get paid for an easy life. Also untrue.

See where I'm going here?

If not, I'll explain. Why don't they merge Support People with the police? After all I could do a 12 hour shift on a weeekend and while it's quiet, I can go and control the drunk people 10 minutes away from work.

And we have a shower here, too... handy if said drunks spill beer or vomit on you. I think it could work, personally.

Now if they'd only give us tazers and body armour....

::ill Will Press:: NEUROTICALLY YOURS CARTOON: TECH-SUPPORT

2004-11-23T01:30:00.000Z

::ill Will Press:: NEUROTICALLY YOURS CARTOON: TECH-SUPPORT

..nuff said...

I am to return

2004-11-19T01:59:00.000Z

So I took a month off to marry my lady-droid, and I go back to work next Wednesday... :( Not good...

I love my job....

2004-10-10T21:38:00.000+01:00

Me, here. Shit, 60-feet above me.

2004-10-08T07:29:00.000+01:00

Do you ever feel like everyone's out to dump on you?

I felt that yesterday, and I can feel it's going to happen today, too.

Business is a wonderful thing... You do well, "Everyone involved did a great job!"
You cock up, " did this and a retraining opportunity has been recognised."

Alternatively, someone else fucks up, and you (being the shift leader on that day) have to answer the kinds of questions that David Blaine wouldn't be able to get out of your head.

I'll probably update later...

The calm before the Storm...

2004-09-11T11:26:00.000+01:00

Excuse the pun.

Ever have one of those times when you know things are coming that will change everything you thought you knew about your job?

I'm there now. It's the calm before the Storm [good luck goes out to Florida and Jamaica]... things will soon change and 3 months of hell will ensue.

I'm just waiting for the day and looking at new suits....

mis-managed? never!

2004-08-20T02:53:00.000+01:00

(apologies for lack of update - times are hard and humour thin on the ground...)

Tech Support Skill #34:-
Learn, practice and perfect telepathy

To shed a little light, the department in which I work also supports a number of customer solutions, some of them for rather sizeable customers. Time and careful planning is put in to make sure that this (new|migration from xxx ISP) solution all goes smoothly. Everybody involved makes sure all the relevant people who need to know the details, know them. All good, yes?

Er... no.

What really happens is that all the lovely details, the dotted i's and crossed t's are all dealt with, and then just before the whole shebang kicks in... somebody realises that the poor fuckers who have to look after the solution don't actually know anything about it.

*scream*

Oh, and not to mention that when it does go live nobody thinks to see if go live = works properly. And doesn't initiate a small nervous breakdown in the unlucky bastard who is manning the management console for that particular shift.

Danger pay for all support bobs! Tell that to your MP.

woo woo! all aboard the idiot train!

2004-08-03T23:21:00.000+01:00

Touching on a subject I know I've mentioned before - everyone else thinks we're fools.

No - I know we're not and you know we're not but unfortunately the rest of the world thinks we are.

Ever had those times in the middle of the night where something breaks, you know you can fix it because it's the easiest thing in the world to fix, but because you're deemed 'too stupid' you can't. And you have to call someone out to fix it.

I don't profess to have a solution to this problem, but fuck it - might as well let them waste their time.

Next time someone is condescending to you about something you know full well about - let them expain everythign in excruciatingly simple details, while they can make themselves feel bigger. While they're having to think about how to describe it in layman's terms, you can sit there and do useful things...

...like figure out how to get through the rest of the mountain of shit.

Sod's Law strikes again

2004-07-28T11:57:00.000+01:00

Oh poop... I tpyed a load of stuff out twice and hit "Back" twice, thuis losing all I had typed.... arse.

Anyhoo...

I should feel like;

Yet, I feel like;

normal service will resume shortly

2004-07-27T18:01:00.000+01:00

Owing to a rather quiet shift at work, this week's ranting is somewhat watered down. Ah well, it's time I made an entry that was light-hearted...

games you can play on a night shift

chair bowls - Obtain a number of waste paper bins (amount doesn't matter - any more than 5 will do). Arrange at the end of an open area. Find willing colleague (or yourself) who wishes to be pushed as fast as possible down the office, knocking the bins over. Score based on bins knocked over, style and poise, and not falling off.

office rounders - Find something long and hard. And flat (stop it...) Also find something round and solid. Those stupid stress-balls that companies always find amusing to give you to somehow increase morale. Yeah, those. Bastards. One person bowls, the other twats it with the aforementioned implement. Scores based on how far you can hit the object. Bonus points for broken strip-lighting.

office chair sprint - Scraping the bottom of the barrel, sorry - but find somebody who wants to be pushed down the office on an office chair a la chair bowls, only faster. The best type of flooring for this is that crazy laminate stuff. It's ace. They'll never stop.

Bonus points for utter destruction in the process.

I'm going to.. I'm going to... Oh, I'm done.

2004-07-22T07:44:00.000+01:00

Lack of warning.. that's the subject.

You sit there all night and nothing happens... then half the management equipment appears on the monitoring window, making it feel like Christmas came early.
You call the on-call bod, and he replies "Yeah, we're doing a change... ignore it all"

THANKS VERY MUCH, FOOL!

And so tonight went on....

jack of all trades, master of none

2004-07-21T22:47:00.000+01:00

This may sound familiar (all too familiar) to many people who work in tech support, and we all know what it means:-

you will be able to answer every question any customer ever has

you will never be able to know enough to call yourself an expert at it

Think about it - it's true. Unless it's a personal interest, tech support is bad for your learning. You're taught what you need for your job, but not afforded the opportunity or resources to be better than you need to be. Hence the 'piggy-in-the-middle' effect of making you the company's idiots

Anyway, I'll leave that one there because I'm rambling now, but I tend to do that when fucked off with things. Work does that to me, and today was no exception.

There's only so many support calls that can be closed for being simply retarded before you go postal.

Meet me and my family...

2004-07-20T16:13:00.000+01:00

Just in case you're interested, this is me;

I'd just had a tune and polish that day. Rather spiffy, eh?

And this is my cousin, R4-D8. He's not as clever as me but he's a Mac user, so it's not so bad.

Adios...

Pissing into the wind, anyone?

2004-07-20T16:01:00.000+01:00

Don't hate wasting your time? I mean, you can spend ages doing something, setting something up, and the people who can benefit in the long term bitch about it.

I hate short-sightedness, too. I don't mean myopia.. I mean how people want to see a return on something now, NOW, NOW! They don't want to wait for a few months for something to come out good... they want it yesterday.
And sometimes, it's not just one person who's worked their ass off [amongst the 10,000 other things to get done], in this case, it's two people.

It's especially annoying when the people who gave you support at the beginning of said project turn around once everything's moving and try to beat you down, to defame the hard work you [and others] have done.

and for my next trick...

2004-07-20T03:50:00.000+01:00

...I'd like to welcome along R5-D3, who will be joining me in writing drivel on these very pages.

Howdy.

clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right

2004-07-20T02:16:00.000+01:00

One of the things that irritates me the most about working in tech support is that everyone talks to you as if you're stupid - whether it be customers or people higher up the career evolutionary ladder.

People think that because you're the one who speaks to the customer, you're a clueless idiot who's no better than the customer. Customers think you're a clueless idiot who's there to log the call and pass it onto a real person to get it fixed for them.

I have a solution for this: act stupid

Act dumb, pretend you have no idea what they're talking about and appear as if you're really trying hard to understand what they're talking about.

Because there's nothing funnier than getting people to describe to you 'what an IP address is' or 'how SMTP works' for the 17th time, knowing full well what the answer is having learnt it when you were back in high school.

It works for me. Maybe I'm just sadistic.

Or maybe I just like a laugh.

night shifting

2004-07-15T04:28:00.000+01:00

The cursed dreaded nightshift.

Say what you like about them - I prefer them to days. Consider the benefits:-

nice and quiet (in the office)

nice and quiet (work-wise)

you can eat the worst kebab EVER in the history of gut-rot takeaways. And only offend a handful of people, not about 40

there's something to be said for taking nice long fag breaks on a night time

Ok, admittedly there's a downside or three:-

you're tired. All the time. No matter how much sleep you get beforehand, your body KNOWS it's night, KNOWS it should be in bed, and is going to MAKE you feel like that's where you want to be more than anywhere else in the world

the social aspect. All your friends know for sure you're a hardcore nerd because you spend all day at work on the internet, and doing this at night as well only serves to concrete the opinion, justified or not. And the pub is open while you're working

there's nowhere open. You want food? Best grease up the stomach before hand because the only food you're going to be buying on a night shift is either delivered or it's a festering... something... out of the vending machine

Still - 4 pros to 3 cons ain't bad.*

* Is it? Please say yes. Pleeease? Oh OK, sod you then.

"thankyou for calling BT broadband assurance...

2004-07-15T04:18:00.000+01:00

...your call is currently held in a queue, and will be answered as soon as one of our customer services advisers becomes available"

Fuck off.

Now fed up from wasting precious life-minutes away whilst on the phone to BT, I've decided to keep track of just how much time i'm wasting doing it. Call me sad, but it gives me something to aim for. A target, if you like...

Just thank your personal favourite deity that someone invented headsets. Or i'd be walking around with my right ear glued to my shoulder by now.

So, to set the ball rolling, the BT timewasting tally is at 1 hour 20 minutes. And I was hung up on once. Cheeky fuckers.

the 4th law of customers states...

2004-07-13T05:50:00.000+01:00

...that the less a customer pays for their services, the more they will complain. Thus:-

an ADSL customer will always complain about an unscheduled outage more than a leased line customer

an ADSL customer who has switched from a leased line to ADSL will start to complain more about the above

a leased line customer who was an ADSL customer will increase the complaining twofold upon switching

I defy anyone to prove me wrong.

waiting for BT is like waiting for christmas

2004-07-12T16:31:00.000+01:00

Had to chuckle upon seeing the latest advert from BT in regard to them keeping appointments, with the ever-so-classic line:-

"If you arrange for an engineer to visit, we will do whatever we can to keep that appointment!"

what?!?

It made me almost piss myself laughing - here is the UK's incumbent telco saying, pretty much, that they'll "try" and keep appointments they make...

...as anyone knows who's tried explaining to a customer that the reason that their BT engineer hasn't turned up yet is because "No appointment was made", "There was no engineer available to go to site", and the spectacular "We've pegged it to an engineer, but he hasn't picked it up yet. We don't know when he will, because we can't get hold of the engineer, because his mobile is switched off."

Classic.

taptap* is this thing on?

2004-07-11T03:24:00.000+01:00

Life in tech support is never without its highlights.

Problem is, it's the lowlights that most of the time make you want to hang yourself from the highest rafters in the place.

Some of you can sympathise here.

Welcome to my world.

I work for a UK-based telco/ISP providing support for their customers. That's all you need to know.

So join me, your host, on a magical trip through the cubicles of madness.

"Somehow, I don't think our shared webserver *is* attacking you, Sir..."