When I started this blog there was one particular occurrence I was dreading. That moment has finally come. Something happened today at work that made me stop and think to myself this will make a great blog entry. And yes I’m going to post about it.
This does give me an excellent opportunity to actually write a bit about what it is I do. I debated for awhile whether or not I’d actually mention the name of the company I work for, and in the end I decided no I wouldn’t. It’s not that it is any great secret, I’m happy to tell people I know what company I work for, but given the possibility that total strangers may actually read this post (or people connected to the companies involved in what I’m going to relay) I’d rather not make identifying the players involved in anyway easy.
I work for a telecommunications company, that does an awful lot of different things relating to information technology. I, in fact, have only a vague idea of all that they do beyond my immediate (and in the scheme of things rather small) division known as Operator Services. Their corporate offices are located in Minneapolis, MN (technically I think they are in a suburb). My own little corner is a call center located in rural Minnesota near the town of Morris (where I live). I work at one of two call centers they run (the other also being located in rural Minnesota).
The first thing people tend to think when they hear call center is telemarketing. We are not, repeat not, telemarketers. We do not cold call people and try to sell them things. We are what is known as an inbound call center, basically meaning people call us. And we do basically what the name of our division says we provide operator services. Our direct customers are telephone companies (a mixture of mostly small CLECs, and ILECs) around 300 in number spread out mainly through Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, and South Dakota (but also Arizona, Oregon, Utah, Washington, California, and probably a few states I’m not thinking of). The two main things we do are provide directory assistance, and toll call processing (the aforementioned operator services). What this all boils down to is when customers of one of the telephone companies we serve pick up their phones and dial either 0 (or 0 + (area code) + 7 digit number) or 411 (or 1+(area code)+555+1212) they come one of the two call centers my company operates. From there the operators at the call centers either provides assistance in placing calls for the people who dialed 0, or look up a listing for the people who dialed DA.
That is the main thing (but not the only thing) my call center does. I find my job is mostly clearly described as a shift supervisor. While I am on duty I am responsible for assisting the operators with difficult calls (or callers), managing the current staffing level (which can involve taking calls myself if needed, or getting extra operators to come in if needed, or sending operators home early if they aren’t needed), and generally doing what ever needs to be done to get the center through the day. I am also responsible for ensuring the operators both know how to process the different types of calls, and that they are correctly processing the calls they receive. My actual job title is not in fact supervisor, but Lead Customer Contact Representative, and generally in house my position is informally referred to as In Charge (I guess as in my position is in charge of the floor). However if a caller asks to speak to the supervisor of one of my operators I’m the guy that gets the call (assuming I’m on duty otherwise it goes to one of the two other people who also hold my position in the call center).
So that is the crux of what I do. Now back to the whole reason for this post. Another service my call center provides is what we call After Hour Repair Service. Again our direct customers are other companies (mainly telephone and cable providers) and while they are closed if their customers are having a repair issue with their service (such as having no dial tone on their phone line) they can call in and speak to us, and we’ll take a repair report and get their problem reported to the company in question (and if needed call out a tech for repair). Most of these companies have us fax a copy of the repair ticket we create to their business office, but a few of the companies instead have us e-mail them a copy of the ticket. Now of the companies that have us e-mail them a ticket a smaller subset has us e-mail the ticket to multiple people inside their company, and of that group a even smaller subset sometimes replies to the e-mail. These replies are usually from the technicians looking into the problem, and almost always directed towards the other members of their company. I suspect they either forget that my company will also receive the message (since we are the ones who sent out the original e-mail), or more likely they just don’t care. I say I think they just don’t care because generally the reply we receive is a few words about how the problem was resolved along the lines of, “replaced cable box service restored.”
Today however when I arrived at work and checked my e-mail I found a real gem, and I quote:
"As far as I can tell, the profile he is using is borked, I couldn't find the main profile to change it globally though, so I changed his line directly to bar premium and operator, but allow everything else which is how I think the voip should be set up. I didn't call him to let him know its fixed though since this is the "data" guy and didn't want to get into an hour long conversation about dhp dll subinfrastructure disabling to increase the throughput of his bearshare filesharing or something like that… again. Also, Im assuming he was told to expect a reply Monday, so if he tries it, it should work now, and if not, who the hell makes calls out of the country? C'mon ppl, write a letter, send an email, it's probably O'Dark O'clock over there, let em sleep. Unless its Canada of course, and unless you have Moose relatives, there ain't much reason to call up there."
They only response I could think of that was appropriate was OMG and LOL. And lol I certainly did.
A few things in brief:
I enjoyed the two new anime on Adult Swim this last Saturday. Of the two I found the first episode of Trinity Blood more interesting, but I found Bleach to be cute I guess is as good a word as any. I look forward to seeing more of both. Sticking with anime I watched another episode of The Prince of Tennis on Toonami Jetstream, and still find it to be an enjoyable little diversion. I actually watched the Saiyuki movie. I liked it, really it was just like a long filler episode, and has no real effect on the ongoing plot, but it was fun. I still haven’t watched disk 5 of Tenjho Tenge, which I guess says something about my opinion of the series. I received the first disk of Saiyuki Reload in the mail at the end of last week from my anime rental service, and I look forward to watching that soon.
Going with TV as a theme (and anime) I’m considering actually canceling my cable service, because aside from Adult Swim on Saturday I don’t watch TV any more. Of course I really like watching Adult Swim on Saturdays, so I’m not sure where that leaves me.
Okay that HeroClix thing I was going to talk about. . . Back in August about the same time I received my computer I also received a Venom figure from WizKids. This figure is their send away figure for their Marvel (tm) HeroClix Sinister set. Basically each time WizKids releases a new HeroClix set if you buy what they call a brick (12 booster packs) you can fill out a form, send in the receipt, the 12 proofs-of-purchase, and pay shipping and handling and in return WizKids will send you a limited edition figure from the set that you cannot get any other way (well not directly anyway). This was all fine and dandy, and I was quite happy until near the end of August I received a letter from WizKids that said at the end of July some of the credit card information relating to certain orders of this particular promotion were compromised. The letter goes on to say the incident was quickly discovered, and there is an ongoing police investigation. The letter advises me to pay close attention to my credit card balance, and tells how to contact the police detective running the investigation if I see any suspicious activity on my card. I have been paying close attention to my credit card, and I’m happy to say there has been no suspicious activity on it, but the whole situation just makes you want to say, and I'm quoting an ex-girlfriend here, “Nerrr.”
I amused myself this weekend by ripping all of my Beatles CDs, and most of my jazz CDs onto my computer (okay so I amused myself for at most 45 minutes doing this since it takes like 3 minutes to upload a CD onto iTunes). I now have 135 Beatles songs on my computer (6.2 hours worth). I have 120 jazz songs (10.7 hours) on my computer, but I haven’t finished ripping all of my jazz CDs yet. I have 192 songs coming from anime soundtracks (10.9 hours) I have 425 songs (24 hours worth) on my computer I haven’t listened to yet. Of course that just means I haven’t listened to it in iTunes, not that I have never listened to those particular songs. In total my music library at this time has 1059 songs (2.5 days worth of music). I’ve come to realize iTunes is like the ultimate mixed tape.
City of Heroes continues to be enjoyable, and a major reason I’m not watching much TV. At this point it is probably safe to say I could devote an entire post to the game. The likelihood of me buying City of Villains is pretty high. Which means the likely hood I’m going to continue playing the game for a while is also pretty high. That of course means I’m unlikely to get into World of Warcraft anytime soon, although it remains a game I am quite interested in. That is a shame, because I have several friends who play World of Warcraft, and only one (that I know of) that plays City of Heroes. And while logging onto City of Heroes by myself is fun, logging on at the same time as my friend is a great deal more fun, so having a lot more friends I could play with is a major attraction for World of Warcraft.
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