I don't even know where to start with this one.

I've got no words to describe this. . .

I'm not sure if I blame Rick Astley, WoW, or just the Internet culture in general.

Oh Noez! The WoW Screenshots!!

This post could also be called Fast Mounts are Fast. Seriously getting Chipple her epic flying mount made me question how I could stand to have flown anywhere before. Not that the regular flying mount you can get at level 70 isn't very nice, because it is extremely useful, but damn is it slow. Slower, in fact, than the epic ground mount you can get at level 60, but that 3rd dimension of movement is so worth it.

As mentioned above, and as depicted in the picture I've acquired an epic flier for Chipple. A Purple Riding Nether Ray to be exact, and I love it. Well worth the grind to get the required gold (and in the case of the Nether Ray the required reputation with the Sha'tari Skyguard). Although I did cheat a little bit, I raised a bit more than 4200 gold myself, and Dan was nice enough to loan me the final 1000 gold. Thank you Dan. Thank you Dan. And did I mention thank you Dan.

Aside from the loan, the other thing that really helped me earn the required gold for the epic flier was patch 2.4. This patch raised the number of daily quests that a character can do per day from 10 to 25 (and also introduced the Isle of Quel'Danas and all the new daily quests found there), which made making money in WoW significantly easier for a level 70 character (given enough play time to actually complete these quests).

With this latest WoW accomplishment achieved, I promptly set to work rebuilding my gold reserves and purchased an epic ground mount for my hunter Steinthror. So Dan is going to have to wait for at least one more day before I start building up the money to pay him back, but since he knows where I live I doubt he's too terribly worried.

Of course now I need a new WoW goal. Well I have to pay Dan back, but that's not going to take very long. It might be time to start giving some of my alts a little love, as they did get neglected a bit while I was grinding gold to pay for my flier. And there are still plenty of factions left Chipple needs to improve her reputation with. I guess my immediate goals will probably be get her exalted with the Scryers , and raise her enchanting up to 375 (currently sitting at 335).

On a WoW related note, I recently (a month or so ago) got around to founding the vanity guild I'd been wanting to since shortly after I started playing WoW. So I leave you with a picture of Raffles, Guildmaster of <Gentleman Thief>. Anyone requiring or desiring an explanation can go here.

I can't really add much to this

I ran across this little YouTube gem on the PAA forums. I think it pretty much speaks for itself.

Well BOO! the embedding on that clip has been turned off. You can still see the cats on a tread mill by going directly to YouTube, but no fancy embedding for us. I guess I could replace the video with some other video of cat(s) on a tread mill, but I've opted for a different species playing on multiple tread mills instead. (Not that I think there are many people left on the Internet who haven't already seen this, but it is still one of my personal favorites.)

What city and state please?

I find, that for me at least, it is the little things that build up over time that prove to be the most frustrating aspects of my job. Were I to enumerate the behavior of customers that really gets to me (relax beyond this one particular example, I'm not going to do such a silly thing) I'd have a list of a thousand different little insignificant peculiarities of human nature. I cannot think of a single thing that would make this hypothetical list that the majority of people who have never worked in a customer service related job (especially one conducted primarily over the phone) would not dismiss as laughably trivial.

Truthfully they wouldn't be wrong, taken out of context, in isolation, not one of these behaviors would rise above the level of minor annoyance. But when you start talking about hundreds of calls a day, five days a week, it doesn't take long for even a small percentage of calls to build up from hundreds of little irritants into one frequently encountered major annoyance. Informal chats with my coworkers lead me to believe I'm not alone in these feelings. Everyone of us has a slightly different list of things that annoys (or in a few select, and extreme cases angers) us, but the impetus for this post is a pretty universal source of aggravation (at least I believe it is among my coworkers).

Broadly defined the most common customer behavior that is guaranteed to cause me irritation is not listening. The specific example as seen in the title of this post is the directory assistance customer responding with anything but a logical answer to the question, "What city and state please?" The most common "incorrect" response to this question is the customer's desired search; I ask for city and state, and my customer responds with John Doe, or Random Business, Inc. I've lost count of the number of my coworkers who at one point in their career have mused, "just once I'd like to ask a customer what state the town of John Doe is in." There are variations to this namely answering half the question and giving either just the city or just the state as an answer. If the customer's desired listing is uncommon enough, a state will often be sufficient, on the other hand a customer looking for something like "Robert Smith" is probably going to need to provide a bit more information before a successful search can be performed.

I suspect with the other side of the coin, giving only the city, often has more to do with customers assuming the operator is located in the same state (if not the same city) as themselves and/or in the case of larger cities the customers frequently just assume the operator will know the correct state. In a case like Seattle that works out fine, the only Seattle in the United States is the one in Washington (or another example the only place in the US you'll find a San Francisco is in California). Consider however that nine different states can lay claim to a Boston, Phoenix can be found in five, there are eleven different states with a city named Dallas, seven different states have a Manhattan, and three different states have a Milwaukee (and if you count Milwaukie, OR you can bump that up to four). I could easily continue but I trust my point is clear. A note for the curious I'm basing these numbers solely off what gets recognized as a city in the directory assistance database used by my employer. A cursory search of Wikipedia gives slightly different results.

The only real cost of this behavior is the inefficiency being forced to repeat a question to a customer causes. And while those few seconds add up after a month or even a day into a not insignificant amount of time I could have spent helping an additional customer, for the offending customer the direct effect is minimal (although enough prior customers engaging in such behavior can contribute to the amount of time my current customer spent waiting for me to answer). Well that and possibly my sanity, but I question the sanity of basically anybody working for even a moderately large corporation. Alright enough complaining about unchangeable realities of my job. I now return this blog to its normal state of me ignoring the ever increasing amount of anime I've been meaning to talk about.