Contact the Chinese GOV'T DAMNIT

Chinese Internet Users Have Little Access To Overseas Websites

December 27, 2006

In what local analysts are blaming on the 6.7 earthquake off the coast of Taiwan yesterday, communications and Internet access throughout Asia have been disrupted.

Mainland Chinese users trying to access websites like Hotmail.com, Yahoo.com, or most any other website hosted outside of mainland China are finding them very slow to load, or not displaying at all.

Using proxies also is thwarted, as bandwidth coming into and leaving China has dwindled to a slow trickle. Websites hosted within mainland China, like Sina.com.cn, appear to be loading as normal.

A China Netcom representative says work is continuing on fixing any problems, but online reports say the interruption might last up to three weeks. The affected undersea cables have also caused problems in areas like Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Indonesia.


Guess who's on the Chinese queue to relay the good news? It's nice that Chinese customers don't understand the concept of "it's not our fault, natural disasters will strike" type rebute. Sometimes I'm surprised customers don't blame our company solely for bigger issues, like world famine and the globe blowing up for instance. After all, everything is our fault.

And here I was wishing I was working Christmas...

Yeah, no. I missed the eye of the storm for that. Intermittent/No dial tone, 1-way voice path, features not working... System wide of course, and all on Christmas day. For practically the whole day. 120 on SDP queue on hold, and that's our max limit. Oh boy, whoever has our stock better sell fast, cause with that little act, I'm sure we'll be losing a good chunk of our customer base right there. Ah yes, thank god I wasn't there for the massacre.

To sum it all up, a poem a co-worker wrote:

Night After Shawmas

Twas the night after Shawmas, WAN all through the tower,
The digi-phone features were FUBAR, we took 20 calls every hour,
The server room smelled like a plastic chimney cooked rare,
We all had our hopes, the headend techs soon would be there.

The agents were all stressed out, all smug in their pods,
With visions of dct 700's, with black screens and funky VODs,
Greg with his shiny melon, and I in my Shaw cap,
Had just settled in, for a long shift of crap.

WAN over by the CM desk, there arose such a clatter,
I went into break 7 to see what was the matter,
Control Alt Delete Enter, I flew like a flash,
Rounded the corner in full-contact tech support dash.

The moon nowhere in sight in the BC Christmas rain,
I knew the Canucks playoff run would be totally in vain,
WAN what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a drunken Dave Absolon, reeking of gin tonic and beer,

With the twinkle in his eye, so lively and quick,
I knew in a a few moments, he was the AHT prick.
More serious then commandments, his orders they came,
He cursed and he swore as he told us we're lame."

No dial tone, No cable, no high speed internet,
"It's an outage, if you book a SC, coached you will get,"
if it's Digi-Phone crazy and totally off the wall,"
Warm transfer to TSR2 and move on to the next call"

What he said made sense but he was drunker than hell,
Probably sucked back a 26'r, you could tell by the smell,
He giggled and burped as he disappeared in the elevator from sight,
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, it was one hell of a night.

I'm certain...

That there's a masochist in every female (well, minus Tracy, cause she's a freak). Who the hell spends 40 minutes in front of a mirror plucking eyebrows. >.>. My tears were flowing freely at the end of it :(

Nothing interesting at work. It was an easy night. Too easy. I can expect for it to get bad in the next week. On the other hand, I'm quite satisfied with my stats tonight. Seems like a good day! Perhaps people are still happy from the holidays? Nah. Lady luck is on my side.

MORE BOXES. MOREEEEEEEEEEEE. GIVE ME MORE COMMISSION. I'm hoping to make quite a bit on boxing day. I suppose that remains to be seen though. Mmm money. So overrated. On the other hand, I lost like $35 dollars in one day from my stock game. Fucking Intel and its shittiness. No! It will climb back up. I believe!

I'm a little tired. Fucking spinning ball of whirring doom. Why must you be so addictive.

FUCK YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

COMP 1113 Applied Mathematics 86
COMP 1510 Programming Methods 78
COMP 1536 Intro to Web Development 81
COMP 1730 Relational Database Systems 90

Oh god, I totally owe myself a big ticket item for this. I can't even express how happy I am that I fucking owned up that Java final. Holy shit, I must have gotten close to perfect or something to have my mark pulled up that high. I was totally expecting less than 70 for my final mark in Java. Granted, I did worse in math and database than I had expected, but fuck that unimportant shit. I FUCKING OWNED UP JAVA SO BADLY IT ALMOST BOWS DOWN TO ME. I AM SO READY FOR NEXT TERM JAVA. BRING IT ON BABY.

Now for that HDTV *ponders*...

Back to the grind.

Soon. I'd say too soon, but I realize I get bored very easily when I'm not doing anything. Crazily enough, I have moved past gaming for the most part, and don't get absorbed into it anymore. At least not for extended periods of time. I'm trying to get into the stock market now actually. I always seem to be playing when the stock market's closed though bah.

So no, I don't have any funny stories yet. DAMN WHY DID I HAVE TO FORGET THAT JESSICA ALBA POSTER. So hot. Who needs hydro?

Thanks Rachel.

Now it's officially over.

Well, I can confidently say that Web was my worst final out of all of them. In fact it was so bad, it's actually kind of disgraceful, considering that it was my favorite course this term. Regardless, IT IS OVER. IT IS REALLY OVER!!! For at least 6 days anyways. Er, and after tonight's final shift at work that is. Bah.

And now, with 2 1/2 hours of sleep, I adjourn to my bed, where I shall flop and sleep good dreams of sheep flying and cows jumping over moons.

To blog or not to blog...

Well obviously I'm blogging.

Must procrastinate studying further. Actually I must say, I'm starting to feel the pressure for tomorrow's database final. Oh why is my memory is shoddy? I seem to have forgotten the first half of the course yay. How the hell am I doing the best in database for all my subjects again?

So it does seem that I've jinxed myself yet again, because half my calls last night were chinese. I suppose it isn't a bad thing since my chinese is yet again sucking, and thus, requires practice. The only thing I hate with a passion is SDP cantonese calls. Those dropped in the TSR bin I tend to ignore until someone sends me a direct email. :\

Oh my god. SDP Lite is out too. Goddamn. Why do we keep expanding when we don't even have the original at 100% reliability? This poor elderly chinese lady called in yesterday and she wasn't able to dial to china at all. It obviously had something to do with the way it was provisioned since all the failure codes were exactly the same.

Oh and I really love our informational codes for SDP. They're really informative and useful. "The call could not be completed due to unknown reasons." Thanks. I'll get right on fixing that problem.

Anyways, I couldn't go to a TSR 2, because we were severely understaffed last night and there were like 6 people crowding one TSR 2. I was like man forget it, especially since it was one of those TSR 2's that don't know what they're doing for SDP. So what do I do?

I reset the lady's DPT, tell her to try it later, and call back if it doesn't work. What else could I do! It's funny, cause she called in right after the tech fixed her no dial tone problem, and she just got her phone installed on the 6th of this month. Lovely service reliability as always.

OH yea, so one of my good co-worker's voice has been put on the ARU system for our chinese line. That's exciting. She made me listen to it yesterday. She definitely sounds alot more excited in terms of tone comparatively to the corresponding male voice for the cantonese line. The male voice, whom I also know of course, is usually more lively than that on a real phone haha. He sounded kinda funny being so monotone. The old ARU voice apparently, had "improper" mandarin, as my co-worker kindly stated. Haha, god I love her. She's so funny to chit chat with. Anyone who is severely bored should try the number! 604-629-4003. Hearing the two voices contrast is kind of funny. I don't know if this is funny or sad, but I can't understand half of what the cantonese options are that you can press. The guy's vocabulary is so advanced :(?! I think it's 1 for billing, 2 for tech support...? Or maybe it follows our regular ARU system. For some reason, option 1 is to disconnect SDP/other services.

It's like "If you want to disconnect services with us, please press 1." Mmmm nice easy access. It's funny that's the first thing our customers hear when calling.

Speaking of new products, we launched our new boxes, and of course I have no clue what's going on, so I assume it's like the other boxes, which I suppose is not too far from the truth. Except that there's no power button.

So here I am, on my first call with the box, and telling the customer to turn on his box with the power button on the unit after activating it. He's like "Huh?? It's plugged in already."
And being the clueless person I usually am, I say "So?? Press the power button. We need to turn it on."
"Power?!"
"YES POWER." (finally kicks in that there is no goddamn power button) "Er... nevermind sir."

People fed me again yesterday! Yay! I like food. Mmm, that dear co-worker gave me this sweet ass coffee & cream yogurt, which was so goddamn good. I want more of where that came from. All in all, it was a pretty sweet shift since we got a $50 dollar gift certificate to Earls for being unable to attend the annual christmas party for our company. Man Sweet deal, I'd rather have the gift certificate since there was apparently, a 3 drink limit. Pft. Are you kidding me? For 50 bucks I can get double that. Hmm... I'm getting hungry. I think I'll go drink. I mean cook.

YAY FREEDOM

Customer requested to speak with a supervisor regarding outage.
We explained that we are doing all we can to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.
Mr Yan informed us he is using this service for business purposes, and we let him know that we would not reccomend this service for any mission critical applications as it is an entertainment service.

Hoho. That is an awesome quote from a supervisor. I love that guy. That supervisor has the coolest name around too. Mmmmm.

OMGZ TIME TO RELAX. LAST SHIFT FOR A WHOLE WEEK ALMOST.

Have fun with your first shift as sup S. Teehee. I dropped all those intermittent dialtone escalations into your bin.

WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE~~~~~

All over. And I do mean it. It's really all over. Half ass attempt yay. Well except finals, but I write those off like no tomorrow. HOHO.

Where was I... oh yes. One more shift of work and it's a week of relaxation. Well finals, but... *points to above*

This lady was totally enthused talking about her porn tonight. It was amusing. She was like OMG! I need it on! They're like my soap operas, like totally busted, and etc etc titles. That was amusing.

It was sooo quiet tonight it wasn't even funny. I was so surprised. The queue died at 8 pm. SWEET. Finishing my half done project in work mode/customer on hold. Yay.

Ranty. Must get busy on doing nothing.

HELL YES!

OH GOD. FUCK YES. THIS IS WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT. SO. FUCKING. HAPPY.

And it's only 11. I figure I shall stay up until the never hours and attempt to complete my other assignment. I can't believe there's a lab due tomorrow still. I was contemplating on skipping it, but then I would automatically lose 2% of my final grade. ARGH. What a choice. Fucking XML. Putting a damper on things as usual.

Yes, I'm just a little wee bit stressed. Why, oh why did I procrastinate it all. But, who cares! *points to above* JOO NIT TESTS ALL PASSED. Ok fine, there's a nerd in me too Rachel, so Tracy isn't the only one. At least I can appreciate hot guys. Eh?

!! CONGRATS <3<3<3!!

Wow S, big congrats on the promotion to asup! I guess they recognized all that talent you have with dealing with irates, that they're gonna put you head on with em every single call. YAY!

I guess that means from now on I have to be careful of what I say here since technically asups/sups shouldn't be reading this horrible horrible blog contradicting just about all the company values. Tsk tsk, what will our supervisor team think if they found out an asup was reading this awful thing and not firing that damn blasphemous TSR. *shakes head*

Dang, I'll miss you on the phones :(, even though you get morning shifts every month anyways. On the positive side, at least I know who to seek for an SDP escalation now. Teehee. In fact, even if you're not on, maybe I'll bug you with an escalation callback email just for kicks. Or better yet, I'll leave you a voice message on your personal extension. Bet you'd like that eh? I'll send you all the escalations in which house alarms go off many thanks to our flappy DPTs. Those are especially fun.

Haha, I'm joking of course (maybe). Really though, congrats and great job!

Omg, so anyways, onto the good stuff. I saw this SUPER hot guy on the bus today with the sexiest face features. Seriously, it was getting really steamed up in the bus from all the hotness he was radiating. He had these super gorgeous eyes with inhumanly long eyelashes to complement them, and his eyebrows simply perfecting the finishing touch on those oh so gorgeous eyes. Not to mention the rest of his face features. It just seemed so... symmetrical. Yes, Tracy didn't seem terribly impressed, but who cares what she thinks. Can't appreciate hot guys at all.

OH GOD I'M SCREWED. Two major projects due on friday, and I essentially haven't even started on one of them. I better work on it at work.... bleh. And so many cantonese calls. Double bleh.

On the other hand, I love how I can say almost anything on the chinese queue and get away with it. Today a smart guy called in and he could obviously speak english, but he wanted to get faster service and thus dialed the chinese queue. 4 minutes prior to the closing of the china gate line, he gets me, and we have a nice chat and landing me a couple bucks in commission to boot.

He then goes on to say that our company's a monopoly and our hold times for our english line is insanely busy, statements I would not be caught dead in agreeing/disagreeing with in a regular call. However, since it was the chinese queue, and my pent up anger/restraint was waiting to burst, I agreed rather enthusiastically (in chinese of course). We both get a good laugh out of it because I then proceed to tell him how I can totally agree with him cause he's calling the chinese line. WEEE~~

Back to... DOOOOOOOOOOM.

Vegeatable?

Man, so here I am, rushing off to Timmy's during my lunch break, and I'm behind this guy who's with the only cashier in the restaurant. He gets up there, decides to look at the menu for a minute or so, then finally decides on a soup. I was thinking... okay, that was kind of annoying. How bout you decide on the side there buddy. Then he exclaims:
"Hey, vegetable soup is spelt wrong. I mean vegetable."
"Uhh... I don't think so." says the cashier.
"Yeah, isn't there a 'A' after the e? I swear to god it's spelt wrong."
"... *smiles nervously*"
He argues for a good minute before finally letting it go. At this point, I'm wanting to scream at him cause he's taking so goddamn long, and that's when he decides to take his sweetass time on choosing a donut as well, to which he changes his mind twice before finally deciding.

Some people. 5 minutes of my 30 minute break gone.

And no, nothing interesting happened to me yesterday. All the bad calls were going to my brother, who got a garbage call done by a certain TSR that really shouldn't be on the SDP queue. *Coughs*