Watch James Spin
Spin, James, Spin
We provide technical support 24/7/365. We contract those services for companies whose staff works only the basic forty hours. We do this on a nation-wide basis.
When it is quitting time on the East Coast, our workload doubles. It increases again as they quit for the day in the Central, then again in the Mountain, time zones.
I wasn't really thinking, when I agreed to come in at 7:00 on Sunday, that it was 10:00 in the East. The hunt was on. Calls were coming in faster than I could write them down, much less answer their questions and concerns.
Why do wealthy (at least compared to me) middle-aged men -- to whom you have to explain each time, "now double click the mouse ... click the left mouse button twice in rapid succession ... no, the left mouse button" -- buy an expensive laptop computer on Saturday evening that they have to get set up and running on Sunday morning and you can't even explain to them what a slide bar is: "the vertical gray bar on the right of the window -- the box containing the information -- with an arrow at the top and bottom and a control tab in the middle that you can move up and down -- okay, little triangles, not arrows -- yes, you put your cursor on the slider tab -- that's the arrow that moves when you move the mouse -- put the point of the cursor arrow on the slider tab and hold down the left mouse button -- the left button -- and move the slider up and down -- yes, now release the mouse button". Surely you realize how much I've condensed that little segment to avoid repetition -- it seemed to go on forever.
Then there are the angry users who don't want to part with any information that will help you solve their problems. "But sir, I can't test your account settings if you won't tell me what they are. How can I tell why a message was bounced from your account if I can't access your account? Don't you want me to fix the problem?".
When I first got there this morning, I couldn't access one of the customer databases, the associated servers being down. You've seen those old WWII submarine movies where they sound a klaxon horn just before diving. Whenever a server we care for goes down, a klaxon sounds. When I walked into the office it sounded like all the bad submarine movies in the world being shown simultaneously. The tech on duty before I got there had been calling for about ninety minutes before he was finally able to wake an engineer to come down and look at the servers in question. It took another hour for him to get there. But I was too busy with phones to worry about much else.
When the customer service manager got there, after I had been alone for about three hours and feeling totally lost, he told me to ignore most of the calls. There would always be more calls than I could handle, so I should take one call, do my best with it, write up a ticket on it while it was fresh, then go on to the next when I was ready, taking a break when I felt overwhelmed (which was most of the time).
Doing that would have cut the number of calls I handled about in half, but I would have done a much better job with that half.
There was never a moment of calm when the phone wasn't ringing. Most of the time there were calls backed up. A few of the calls were easy to handle, particularly when the person on the other end knew something about computers.
I can do all of the setup necessary to get almost any computer going, even if I'm not familiar with its operating system. My hands just automatically seem to know where to go based on what I see on the screen.
I cannot translate this into verbal explanations. To do it is automatic. To explain it is nearly impossible. They have provided me with a number of tools to help me with the explanations but I still have problems getting my mind wrapped around the problem set at first. But I think I'm already getting better.
I've had nervous diarrhea almost every morning I've had to go to work. My blood sugars have been significantly elevated. I've had a few nightmares already.
I should get over it. If I don't, then I'll look for another line of work.
Comments (1)
Hopefully you'll either get used to it soon or they'll promote you out of there.
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