Long time

Well, its been sometime since my last post. Many things have happened. My wife is imminently pregnant with our 3rd child. I am going to be on TV. And our friend is within inches of losing everything due to not paying his taxes. Add to that the usual cornucopia of craziness that is my work and well there just hasn't been time. Hopefully that will change over next while and I will be able to post more often.

Next time, I will expand on some of the items mentioned here.....

Victory is Mine!

In a previous post I spoke of the mayhem caused by my local TD bank. Well, some victory has been achieved. $150 bucks and the I-pod I was supposed to get. They were not going to give me the I-pod either until the wife intervened.

Now usually her powers of pit bull get her in trouble but occasionally those abilities of hers really come through. She took things over and got the I-pod for us. I told her because she got the pod when I wasn't going to get it that she could have it. Much happiness ensued.

ATtack of the killer PEBKAC

Sometimes in my job I deal wonderful people who I am more than pleased to help. Mostly I get okay people who I am happy to help. And then there are those few who distinguish themselves with the depths of their dimwittery. We call these people Pebkac's. As in 'Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair'. These people call in and have a chip on their shoulder from the minute they pick up the phone. They are not interested in getting their product running. All they want is to vent on someone.

Like the caller one of my co-workers had. First words out of her mouth were," Send me my tech!" No problem, but what are we sending a tech for? What unit? Then, when the agent tried to what was going on the lady on the phone lied to the agent, telling him she had done things when she clearly had not. The funny thing is the unit was working, and when the ready light came on this PEBkac insisted that meant the printer was broken. It actually means the printer is ready to print. Now if the printer was brand new that might be forgivable but it was 5 months old.

One I had today. The Pebkac was upset that we didn't have a certain driver for our product. I took him to the web page and showed it to him. He told me they sucked and if we didn't get the kind he wanted he was gonna sue. As soon as that happened I was allowed to disconnect the call and I most definitely did.

People, RTFM!!!!

Read the.........fine Manual.

Oh, by the by.....

the stick is blue, repeat, the stick is blue.

Initial protocol P

Swim rats, Swim!

So the rats are swimming away from the ship here. In the past month we have lost at least 50% of our senior people. Now today comes more good news. As of today one of our senior helpline people has left the contract. Also, one of our two tools champs have left, again as of today and one of our four team supervisors gave his two weeks notice.

Wonder if there are any life preservers left on the Titanic? They sure are loading us down with enough stuff to make us sink like rocks. Two more new sets of paperwork to be filled out during calls.

Coincidence

Here where I work we are constantly graded and scored on things. 3 things we get measured on are Customer satisfaction, support offers and eculture. Customer satisfaction is pretty obvious. Support offers is doing things like offering extended warranties and the like. Eculture is telling the customer about online stuff.

Now this is in addition to teching out the problem and getting things fixed up. The interesting there here is that my group has the highest customer satisfaction rating but about the lowest offer rate for the other two stats. Our team supe has been after us the past coupla weeks to start pulling those numbers up. It will be very interesting to see if those numbers come up and the Customer sat numbers go down.

Yawn

Boring!

Well, here it is. Boxing day in the mighty world of Tech Support and it is so friggin quiet here. We have some people who haven't had a call in an hour. Why am I here? Cause I get paid for it.

Do I want to be here? No way. Would much rather be back in the warm comfy bed snuggled up to the sweetie and with cuddly little bodies of my kids chunked up against me for warmth. What do I have here for comfort. Cold ham, cold buns, cold water. Can't even buy cola cause the aforementioned sweetie purloined my debit card from my wallet. C'est la vie.

THUD!!!!

I know just about anyone who has ever been Tech Support has said this at one time but:

WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE AND WHY DO THEY KEEP CALLING ME?????
WHERE DO THEY COME FROM???

I have never had such a streak of hyperactive, hydrocephalic, PEBKAC's who can't RTFM in my frickin' life. Darth Vader wasn't a corrupted Jedi. He was a tech support person that finally snapped. OBI WAN this!

Boned

Well, I'm boned. I set up the Easy-Switch thing with the TD bank back in the summer hoping to get a free Ipod out of the deal. Well, after the bank screwed around and screwed around they wound up screwing me out of about 300 bucks in NSF charges at my other bank. Mainly because they kept on saying they were gonna have things set up so I never put money into the account in the old bank. I put it into the TD bank expecting the insurance payment to come out of there.

Well, it didn't. And so mainly because I was not diligent on this I am out the case and the insurance and no real way to get it back. The wife wants me to go yell and scream at the bank. However I am not a screamer and the whole thing is probably about 40-50% my fault. I am probably going to sick her on them as I have no stomach for this whole mess even more. I have even less desire to go with her and watch her become something less in her anger and frustration. I will give her the tools she wants to go do it but I don't want to witness it. I know sometimes she can get results but most of the time all it does is close options off to her because the people she vents on no longer have the desire to extend themselves on her behalf.

So, I'm screwed both ways. I'm out the cash, the insurance and now with the proper options having failed the options the woman I love wants to do I find......unpalatable. No wonder I haven't been sleeping at nights and been crabby.

Poem Time

"There comes a time, between life and death.
When all men stop to catch their breath.
They look to the stars and ask,

Why?

We question our lot.
The stars look down and answer,

Why Not?"

-Dr. Henry McCoy aka 'The Beast'

Still makes as much sense as it did 10 years ago.