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One of the best things about working from home is doing so with a puppy on your lap. One of the worst things is doing so with a puppy sitting staring at you with a "why won't you play with me?" look on its face.
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Aug 20, 2013 15:19
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I would like to point out that there has not been any update or resolution on the puppy in the data center issue. This is unacceptable. If this were PI there would be many people expressing concern about Puppy Explosion Syndrome. Please do the needful.
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Aug 22, 2013 15:09
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Yes a very happy Monday. Customer of mine has an old system that had a certificate expire. The vendor needs to update the cert, since we don't have access. However, the system is not under maintenance, so they will not work on it without having us purchase a new service contract. Basically maintenance referred me to sales. So now I am talking to sales, and they are telling me that I should just put in a maintenance ticket. And they put in the ticket for me! Very odd. Let's see how far this goes before someone brings up money this time.
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Aug 26, 2013 17:49
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Volmarias posted:Right, this is exactly why they did it. Someone got a bonus for making an awful, awful support system that made me strongly tempted to switch providers right then and there. I spent some time dealing with Avaya yesterday. Avaya does the other thing I hate. Even choice point, every hold message, every option urges you to go to their support site and enter your ticket on the web, even going so far as to say that web tickets are handled faster. The fun thing is that Avaya's business is pretty much dependent on large call centers, so it's ironic that they are not wanting you to use the phone.
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Aug 27, 2013 14:47
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ThinkFear posted:Holy poo poo, Avaya's phone system has to be one of the worst. Pretty much made me swear that I will never buy another Avaya system. And of course their web site is slow, keeps giving you "not found" errors that go away when you refresh, and their knowledge base articles would be hilarious except the at best waste your time and at worst actually cause more problems.
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Aug 27, 2013 16:35
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Dick Trauma posted:I used to manage an Avaya Definity system via one of those little dedicated terminals and the thing was rock solid. IP Office on the other hand... terrible piece of poo poo. The old stuff was bulletproof. Good stability and most of the time if there was an issue it was hardware related and solved within 4 hours by dispatch/part replacement. The new stuff is IP based, which means the stability is based on network, server hardware, and software quality. Especially if issue are software related, fixes can take weeks.
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Aug 27, 2013 17:49
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So they updated our ticketing system. First they made it so that you have the option that every update would send an email to the customer with the update. Of course this sucks if your update is log entries etc. We do a lot of emailing anyway, so that added an address that you can cc a case to, and it would add the notes to the ticket in the subject line. However, they just decided to make that address the main address, and that any email sent to that address would create a ticket if there wasn't and existing ticket in the subject line. Ug. Aside from the whole out of office alert creating infinite tickets, we are having big issues with ticket quality, because all our tier 1 does is copy the email into the ticket, make a snap decision on the severity and the product it refers to and send it up. Add to the fact that we cannot lower the severity on a ticket without management approval, and wow this is taking too much of my time.
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Aug 28, 2013 16:52
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Crowley posted:I cheat and virtualize all my servers. HOLY MOTHER OF GOD YOU KEEP YOUR WIFE AND KIDS IN THE. Oh never mind. Sorry read that wrong. Haven't had coffee yet. Carry on.
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Sep 2, 2013 14:31
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Siochain posted:
The best I had was poor voice quality when running a softphone app on on Iphone tethered to a home wifi in Japan that connected to a US PBX via VPN. So much wrong.
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Sep 3, 2013 16:34
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stevewm posted:
The problem is that they are a PUC, so if they admit to a problem they could get fined. If it takes to long to fix an issue, they could get fined. So you have a situation where they do not want to admit there is anything wrong (but try it now) and if the world is on fire they want to delay the start time of the incident as soon as possible. And of course their is the fact that customer service is there to hide the fact that they are not servicing their customers, but that is another rant.
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Sep 4, 2013 16:17
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EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:
Yeah there is nothing like getting a trouble ticket for a server in Japan and having them fax you random log dumps because they will not let anyone access their system.
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Sep 7, 2013 17:39
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Langolas posted:We have a translation group that works directly with them. They won't even let us talk to them. I wonder if the translation guys have gotten faxes of logs... now I'm curious. The vendor I worked for had employees in Japan, but due to culture, they represented the Japanese customer's interests more than our company. So you get things like opening tickets with scanned faxed logs asking us to diagnose an issue, when the logs had no relation to any problem. What I learned pretty quickly was that they were not looking for a fix or even someone to dive in and give a complete RCA, but rather someone with authority to just say, "we examined the provided information and we believe the problem is X, which should not happen again." Where X was whatever explanation our guy had already given them. And of course all of this took place over multiple emails with imperfect translations, which led to things like the 'gently caress switch' story that I think I have told before.
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Sep 7, 2013 18:06
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ookiimarukochan posted:"gently caress" is a generally-understood term in Japan - everyone over 18 (at least) knows what it means(and, as I think I've mentioned before, in my experience when Japanese developers get angry they tend to swear in English, which I find hilarious) - they were probably being all passive-agressive at you (This is extra-likely if you're in some sort of partnership which was set up with a non-Engineering part of the Japanese company, BUT communicate with the engineers) I think it was real. The guy was an employee of my company and it was used multiple times in a ticket to refer to switch hook flash. After we discovered it, which by the way shut down tier 3 support at a major vendor for an hour, as people just had to read it and show their friends, gently caress switch was changed to switch hook flash and there was an email thread added wherein a developer had to explain to the engineer why they changed it.
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Sep 8, 2013 16:35
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Well the new smell is off the YOTJ and the warranty has expired. Their Service Delivery Excellence project turned out to be what I expected, metrics, metrics, metrics. They are starting to send out emails to improve the metric of the week, and will shortly be starting competition between teams, based on metrics, which is what destroyed my old job. The managers and teams that did best were the ones that fudged the metrics best. I'm flashing back to my first IT job in a call center where they had your average call time written on a balloon above your desk. Fake edit. Just got my first metric review and I am crushing them. The old me would have been excited to be doing well. The new me can see the hamster wheel.
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Sep 10, 2013 14:51
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Sadly, the YOTJ stuff may have to wait, as my wife has it even worse. She will most likely be fired at the end of this school year because her students will not show improvement on standardized tests. She teaches non verbal, severely autistic elementary school kids, but there is no provision for their exclusion from testing.
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Sep 10, 2013 15:23
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nitrogen posted:This will eventually happen in *ANY* call center type/support environment. I think this is Pournelle's law of bureaucracy happening. When an organization gets large enough, you gain promotion by serving the organization rather than serving the organization's purpose. So metrics make the organization look good, and you have to make the metrics look good instead of providing good customer service. They talk like good metrics = good customer service, but there are always opposing goals. We just went from 1 manager for 24 engineers to 6 managers over 4 engineers plus 4 tier 1. I would say the organization is getting large enough. edit: And to be sure I am not in a call center. I am a support engineer that gets tickets escalated to me. Not that much difference, but at least (for now) I am not logged into my phone. SubjectVerbObject fucked around with this message at 15:44 on Sep 10, 2013 |
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Sep 10, 2013 15:37
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blackswordca posted:I know. Its basically a small amateur racing league there are 15 drivers or so. I don't even know why they need a board. Amateur or semi pro sports are the worst. The powers that be always have delusions that they are running some big show. A story: Back in college I worked in screen printing shop. One day a guy came in who demanded to speak to the owner. The owner came out and they talked. The guy was the president of a local semi pro hockey team that was just started and was wanting to use is as his branded attire company. Great! But of course he wanted discounts now based on all the future business we would be getting, and logo design, etc. What followed was 2 weeks of hell where this guy micromanaged every decision, rejected multiple designs, and demanded a quick turn around. The day finally came where we had everything ready, just needed him to pick stuff up and give us money. He never showed. The owner was PISSED... until the manger of the shop next door came over with the newspaper. rear end in a top hat hockey guy is on the front page after a neighbor kid told his parents about the pictures that hockey guy was taking of him. They raided his house and found a lot of child porn, most of it taken by himself. So what I am saying blackswordca, is whenever this rear end in a top hat racing guy is yelling at you, just think to yourself "8 year olds dude."
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Sep 10, 2013 17:44
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Things pissing me off. The familiy cabin where we used to go to get away during the summer to de-stress has most likely been wiped off the map by the recent Colorado flooding. I say most likely because it will probably be months before it is reachable. The main highways to it are gone, and there are 5 bridges to cross to get to it that are almost definitely gone.
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Sep 14, 2013 17:04
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EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:The terrible Document Management System that we use has a conference in November! OMG I have always wanted to hear Muhi Majzoub speak!
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Sep 16, 2013 15:50
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I once worked in a place that wanted you to give a reason for why you were taking sick time. Not PTO, but sick time, and not just miss 3 days and bring a DR's note, but tell us exactly what you have or take PTO. We tried to get everyone in our group to agree that the only reason we were going to give was "explosive diarrhea" but not everyone was comfortable with that. Hoping this story ends the derail.
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Sep 16, 2013 21:37
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On with computer maintenance scammer right now. edit: Oh this is fun. There are 1000's of junk files called INF files that are on my computer that get downloaded from the internet. edit 2: 30 minutes of messing with them, doing everything that has ever been done to me by end users. I even got passed to level 2 support because "Justin" couldn't walk me through downloading the ammmy remote desktop .exe file. Highlights: Him: take a look at your keyboard Me: well there are some crumbs in there, could that be the problem? Him: Go to your desktop please Me: Ok, Google! Him: Heavy sigh Him: What browser do you use? Me: Internet! SubjectVerbObject fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Sep 17, 2013 |
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Sep 17, 2013 19:38
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Another Monday, another version of the new ticketing system, one we are supposed to become experts in. This one is special. They are trying to put so much information on the ticket - customer information, engineer tracking, contacts, etc - that you have to scroll down to get the the part where you enter or read notes. You know, the part I actually use. And then if you scroll down, you can't see what customer you are working on. It sounds picky, but I work on multiple things at a time and it gets really confusing when you can't just click on a window and see what case you are working on. I know I could make changes to screen size/resolution, but my eyes aren't getting any younger and making things smaller would not be good.
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Sep 23, 2013 14:42
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My wife and I were just talking about Ipads at schools. Their school just got them, and she hates them. Besides the logistics, part of the problem is that the teachers are expected to find stuff for the kids to do on the Ipad. Teachers are not mobile app developers. There is some freeware out there, but otherwise there is a real lack of content. The other problem is she works in special ed. There are a couple of "look at the great things were are doing with autistic kids and Ipads' videos out there. This leads to the administration saying, "You have Ipads, why do you need more resources?" and the parents saying "my kid has an Ipad, why haven't you fixed them yet?"
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Sep 26, 2013 23:08
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blackswordca posted:Thats pretty much the situation. With my luck, he will call during my interview. If he calls you, during the interview or not, don't answer. Let him leave a message. Right now he still has some power over you because you are sitting thinking about what will happen when he calls you. Decide that when he calls, you will let it go to voicemail, and then depending on his message, call him back or not. You need to have control. If his message is just insults don't bother replying. Do you really want to continue to work with the guy if he is just calling you up to yell at you? Send him an email or certified letter asking him not to contact you and be done with it.
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Oct 1, 2013 17:58
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AlexDeGruven posted:A Reply All storm came in. Is it wrong that I always want to reply to all back with "Arrrr maties, here be a shot across your exchange server bow!" and attach a 10mb email etiquette guide?
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Oct 16, 2013 02:42
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hihifellow posted:I used to do this for a startup and it was the worst goddam thing. Expect people to either jump ship as soon as it starts, or deal with it for a few months to a year or so and then jump ship. It's amazing how miserable a rotating shift can make someone. Not to mention that a rotating sleep schedule can take years off your life.
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Dec 10, 2013 04:39
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I don't think there would be any amount of money that would make this worthwhile, especially if they plan to blame the BSA compliance issues on you. The paranoid part of me says they will deduct whatever fines they have to pay out of your check, or sue you. No, much like a tornado, this is a glorious disaster to sit and watch, but no amount of money is worth being at ground zero.
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Jan 23, 2014 20:08
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Loose Ifer posted:
Please don't do this. If your old employer are as bad as you say, they could come after you. Besides, leaving them with a hunk of random information with no organization is so much better. Or let them delete it when they reimage your machine.
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Feb 5, 2014 20:47
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Che Delilas posted:Just chiming in to offer you another pat on the back. There's always a breaking point, and I'd say a panic attack over an unjustified reprimand is way past it. Good for you for not putting up with the bullshit; quitting can be just as difficult and stressful a choice to make as having a confrontation with the boss so don't think for a moment you handled it wrong. I was unhappy in my previous job and had a decent interview with a new place. While waiting to hear from the company I had some not exactly stress related health issues and ended up in the hospital. I accepted the offer while in a hospital bed and came back to work to give my notice and took my remaining time off to get me to 2 weeks. Never went back. It is weird to say, but I am glad I was in the hospital, because it put things in perspective a bit. If I had been healthy I would have waffled over leaving. The people were good, the pay was ok, etc, but lying in a hospital bed thinking about needing to make changes to your life is a great time to get a job offer.
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Feb 6, 2014 07:20
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Not spending money on storage is more important, until they lose important email. And then it's blacksword's fault.
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Feb 6, 2014 19:28
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ConfusedUs posted:A ticket went out... What type of phone and phone system?
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Feb 13, 2014 23:41
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go3 posted:I guarantee that someone going 100% for 8 hours every day is punching out poo poo work My company has really gone the metric route. The two big numbers are utilization, how much time you worked versus how much time is attached to cases, and cases closed. So you need to work and close a lot of cases or else get scrutiny. They just offered overtime to have people come in and clear up the unassigned case back log. It turns out that people are cherry picking easy cases that they can close quickly, and avoiding the flaming piles of crap, which means those cases are sitting for days and making the customers even more unhappy. I am sure no one could have predicted that this would happen.
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Feb 20, 2014 20:18
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I get the feeling that your company is all about customer service and responsiveness, and being able to
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Feb 21, 2014 20:51
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Roargasm posted:Maybe initiate conversation as little as possible unless it's good news. My 30 second impression is that your manager either hates managing or he has a problem with you specifically Yeah, for what reason are you telling him about issues? Do you actually need help, are you bragging, or just telling him what you are working on? To me it sounds like he is busy and feels like you are putting stuff on his plate. If you really need his help, listing the facts in an email might be better. Otherwise if you are just telling him about stuff, it might be better to find other topics. I say this because it is a problem I have had. I will assume the boss wants to know everything that is going on, so I will tell them. The first problem with this is that they don't necessarily have the time and want you to get to the point. The second problem is unless you can be brief, the do not know if you are telling them a problem you need help on or how you fix something until you get to the end, and they get more antsy the longer the story goes on. I did a couple of things to try to improve my communication. 1. Try to have the first contact of the day be a positive one, even if it is just to say good morning. You don't want to dump on them right when they come in. 2. If you do need something, get to the point quickly, but have your facts. "I need help escalating this issue because the network team is ignoring me" is way better than 'I have sent emails to the network team about the open ticket I have and tried to call them but they don't respond so now the customer is upset, what can we do?" 3. If you fix something, let them know but in 30 seconds or less. Even better, if you get praise in email form, send it to them. 4. Try to find non work things you can both talk about. Do not corner them and spend 15 minutes telling them about your WOW characters or whatever, but if you know they like old cars occasionally saying, 'hey I saw a need 57 Chevy on the way in' might give you a way to talk to them in a way that you two can relate together. The whole goal of this is to make their reaction to you coming up to them 'oh hey it's so and so,' not, 'oh no, not again.'
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Feb 25, 2014 23:47
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CommanderApaul posted:
I think my favorite call (not) when I worked helldesk was an admin wanting to schedule a Urgent severity case for 3 days out. Their logic was that a conference call had to work, but it wasn't happening until 3 days later, and wasn't technically broken, but if it was, they would need an urgent ticket. Or something. I let desktop support deal with it.
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Mar 11, 2014 07:11
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notwithoutmyanus posted:The datacenter staff are being laid off. Management has decided 24x7 coverage isn't needed, at least that's what's being said. I love how in management's mind, people wanting to go somewhere else before they are laid off is rat's fleeing a sinking ship. Maybe someone should explain the concept of brightsizing to him.
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Mar 26, 2014 15:48
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Is our monitoring solution up to snuff, as in are people actually reading the midnight/4am/etc alerts that poo poo is down? Of course not...yet. Waiting 8 weeks for an extra exchange address to create an alert account will do that. At the same I'm going to try to get the hell out of dodge to apply for a different role outside of where I'm at (security analyst instead of availability & capacity management). In talking to the director, he implied I should leave my current role better than when I started it - so that I don't look like I'm part of the "Rats fleeing a sinking ship" scenario. So my question is: how can it be anything but exactly that at this point? I'm not part of the staff being laid off, but considered part of the datacenter.
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Inspector_666 posted:I just have to track my billable time, not all of my time for the day. If I had to do that there would be a lot of invoicing for "Utilized ergonomic chair technology to rest my tuchas." I am supposed to be pressing a button on a ticket to start the clock when I am working on a case, and then press it again when I am not. So what they want me to do is start timer on case A, work case A, get call on case B, stop timer on case A, start timer on case B, finish call on case B, stop timer on case B, go back to case A, start timer on case A, etc. 75% of my time needs to be put on cases. Luckily we can just add time to cases, and that is what I do, especially since I tend to work on 2-3 things at once.
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May 6, 2014 16:38
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Inspector_666 posted:For an MSP that is pretty standard. You can't really remain in business if you don't bill for your time... Not an MSP. All of this is work on customers with maintenance contracts. They just want to be sure we are actually working on tickets.
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May 6, 2014 17:46
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KoRMaK posted:You guys should implement that "call you back" system that is pretty convenient. I think Time Warner uses it. Virtual Hold. Ug. It is a special application that interfaces with your PBX via whatever CTI interface you have. When it works, it works, when it doesn't, good luck. It also requires some infrastructure that you may not have, depending on the size of your company.
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May 9, 2014 18:31
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 22:57 |
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But letting a prospective employer know that you will give 2 weeks notice is good. I have seen willingness to just jump with no notice take someone out of contention. Congrats Blackswordca.
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May 28, 2014 20:18
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