Dedication and hard work!

Yep, that totally describes my work ethics alright.

I had a pretty lousy day today actually. But looking at the bright side for the rest of you (maybe), this will be a long blog :P.

So, my alarm clock on my cell phone, yet again failed me twice in a row, leaving me to miss my classes yet again. Thank god I had no labs since those actually count, but it still pissed me off since each lecture is worth like maybe 5 bucks ? or more? :( Anyways, not a big deal I guessss. Not like I would have paid attention anyways.

So anyways, there I was, waiting at the bus stop 4 mins ahead of schedule to when the bus is supposed to arrive, and the stupid bus comes 7 minutes late. I'm a little panicky since I might not be able to get my coffee, but whatever, at least I'll get to work on time. AT LEAST THAT'S WHAT I THOUGHT, BECAUSE THEN, the stupid ass bus breaks down in the middle of the road 9 blocks away from the skytrain station, leaving me to sprint to it on my dumbass heels. (I hate formal work days)

Surprisingly at this point, I'm actually still kind of ahead of schedule arriving 4:26 pm @ waterfront, so I'm like man what the hell, plenty of time*runs into Timmy's to grab my coffee*. And who do I see before running into the restaurant? My supervisor! He's like "HEY YOU!! How you doing?? What time are you supposed to start?"
"uh. 4:30...."
*looks at time* "Oh?" *raises eyebrow*
"uhhhhhhhh, gotta run, bye!!!"

Hahaha, I still made it to my desk logged in at 4:31 pm, which is still considered on time woohoo!

Anyways, back to my dedication and hard work...the second I logged in to a phone, I went straight to my TSR 2, and demanded that he give me the project to take me off the phones. He agreed and I got to work on it for almost 3 hours until the supervisors called me up and wondered what the hell I was doing with 20 people on hold haha.

It's amazing how many people in this call center don't know how to create a proper trouble ticket. Oh yeah, so let me explain. My project was basically me going through all the open TSR 2 tickets in COMX and closing the invalid escalated tickets, meaning non-TSR 2 related documentation. Soooo, here are the top few that really pissed me off to read:

1) POOR POOR ENGLISH. MY GOD. Grammatical mistakes so severe a sentence CANNOT be made out. eg. My god I can't even think of eg. You know it's like one of those ESL students back in high school where you don't expect their english to be that great at all, but only worse... and here they are, working with our company...

2) In addition to the above lousy longass run-on sentences that no one can understand except the writer/rep and even that is questionable like this example only worse.

3) ALL FRIGGING CAPS. THIS DOES NOT MAKE THINGS EASIER TO READ. IT PROVOKES AND ANGERS THE SUN GOD TO MURDER SOME CROPS. AND NO, IT'S NOT TO EMPHASIZE A POINT. THIS REP JUST TYPES ALL DOCUMENTATION IN CAPS. SOMEONE DIE PLEASE.

4) Reps that DO NOT document what they did/said to the customer. All they put down is what the customer told them, then leave the ticket open and expect people to be able to figure out what was supposed to be done. Those tickets piss me off so much since there are certain things I'm looking for before force closing, that when I see one of those, I force close it anyways even though it may very well be a TSR 2 issue. :x I get so impatient.

This sentence is a tribute strictly to Miss S. I ABSOLUTELY LOVE YOU. Your trouble tickets are always legit and easy to read. And although you would be depressed on seeing how many of your tickets are left unresponded to (lol?), I still love seeing that trademark "**remarks**" in the long description. Ditto with Miss M. But she doesn't read this blog so too bad.

Anyways, while I was doing my project, chilling out listening to my mp3's and illegally chatting on msn, my TSR 2 walks over maybe half an hour into it and I'm thinking *aww crap I have to get back on the phones already*. But no, he was like:
"My god, are you even reading the tickets or are you just closing all of them? My page automatically refreshes to show me how many are in the bin and it's going down like 10 every minute. First it was at 100, then 90.. then 80.."
"WHAT! Of course I'm reading them. Well glossing anyways, it's pretty obvious most of them don't belong there. I'm just glossing over."
"Wellll... okay, not too glossy alright?"
"Fine."
*slows down and msns more*

I had a couple upset customers, but I was actually pretty lucky yesterday. I had a couple callbacks for cable, which were actually pretty funny. Here's how a typical callback goes:
*takes next call by getting out of work mode*
"This is an automated callback, the caller's name is: "
"Customer's name (but they can put whatever they want in here)"
"Press any key to continue."

So I have this customer where they start screaming "WHY DO YOU NEED TO KNOW MY NAME. I'm not giving my name. This is the 5th time this month my cable has been down. Fix it and call me back right now."
*dreading, presses a key on the phone to initiate call*
*BUSY TONE*
*giggles in delight and releases call*

And the next callback, pretty similar. "Rob, AND I'M PISSED. CALL ME."
*presses a key on the phone to initiate call*
"The number you have called is out of service, please check the number and call again."
Lol, that customer screwed up putting in his phone number. That's pretty rare.

The one callback that did go through that was a bitchy customer was one that I needed verification on since it was billing related. So here I am:
"And your drivers license number please?"
"I've never been asked that before."
"It's for your own security."
"I've dealt with you guys for years and never had to give my drivers license number."
"It's company policy for our customers own security, you gave it at the time of sign up for a reason."
"I'm not giving my drivers license number."
"Look lady, this is our policy, if you'd like to discuss this with billing I can transfer you over, but they are even stricter on this policy than technical support."
"ALL I WANT TO KNOW IF I WAS CHARGED OR NOT. If I am, I'm not paying the bill. *Click*"
But that's fairly typical. I thought I'd blog it since I haven't had an irate customer for awhile. Hey no way I'm gonna get my ass pwned for not doing my job properly.

Then finally, the last interesting call I received near the end of my shift was a distraught customer who called in insisting that someone was stealing his internet signal even though he disconnected his wireless router. I thought it was interesting cause he insisted that, verbatim, word for word, that his "modem was possessed because all the lights on it stay on after he turns off his computer."
"... Sir, your modem's power is in no way correlated with your computer power, unless they're both plugged into a power bar and you shut off the power bar."
"But it never used to be like that. And I even brought my modem to a friend's house and tried it there. It did the same thing! Can I swap my modem? It's obviously faulty."
"Or you could just hang a cross over it to get rid of the demons haunting your modem." (lol, I wish)

Ok, long blog, hope that makes some of you happy. It was steady at < 40 callers all night, and the queue died at 10 pm. Funny how low queues follow me around no matter what shift I take eh? :P