The wheels on the bus go 'round and 'round
Let me see if I can remember what has happened since Friday. Saturday was my day off and I spent it doing laundry and working on tickets from home unpaid (yes, for free) because I am an idiot and cared way too much about the customers' line repair tickets getting done in a timely manner. People at work consider me crazy and I can't blame them, but it wasn't just an effort to keep the company from getting into hot water when the work wasn't done on time. It was also because the customers were the ones that were going to suffer and have serious delays in getting their problem fixed if those tickets weren't done. Yeah, I'm stupid enough to care if Joe Blow in Podunk, NY gets his DSL service back in one day instead of three.

Sunday it was back to the office and the new position at the moment consists primarily of supervisor calls either transferred to me or callbacks that I have to do. I get to spend my day listening to people yell at me about the horrible service or the horrible tech or whatever it is that happens to be horrible for them because sometimes it's not even related to the product or the tech support.

A customer asked me today why I was able to solve her problem in 15 minutes when she had spent almost 2 hours on the phone with other technicians. I told her it was because this particular type of installation can be a bit tricky on some computers and I had years of experience dealing with the issue. The customer was left to assume it was tricky from a technical aspect, but the truth is that the tricky part is getting a frustrated, computer illiterate person to perform the necessary steps to get the damn thing working properly. That is something I that I DO have years of experience doing (in fact, more years than the age of some of our techs.)

Now while that particular call required a small bit of technical expertise, most of them don't involve anything more than calming the customer down and doing whatever I can to make them happy (within reason.) This quite frequently involves poking another department with a sharp stick and that is probably the most difficult part. You see, this requires calling a customer service rep in another department who usually doesn't give a shit about the customer or their problem. I then have to convince this rep that they do need to give a shit and go the extra mile for my poor beleaguered customer. It can be a daunting task. Some companies are more service oriented than others and have reps that really do care about getting the customer fixed up; those are the easy ones that leave me with a warm fuzzy feeling. Others leave me with a sense of despair that my best efforts accomplished nothing more than yet one more dissatisfied customer. And how I feel at the end of the day generally depends on what mix I ended up with. Yesterday I was a happy camper. Today I could easily declare that this job sucks.

Outside of work, I've been studying for my ham radio exam and learning what I need to know to help my friend with his studying for the CCNA exam. I also got up early on Tuesday to see the eclipse of the moon. Original plans were to watch the whole thing with coffee and donuts, but I've been really short on sleep the last week, so I watched the shadow take the first bite and then went back to bed and napped until the time of the full eclipse. It was pretty cool, but I didn't watch long since getting more sleep before I went to work seemed a more attractive option at the time. In retrospect, I wish I had stuck with the coffee and donuts plan, but it was probably a bit much to expect a sleep-deprived brain to make a logical decision in the wee hours of the morning. I'll have to plan better for the next one.