Killing them (not so) softly, Conclusion... Tech Support |
- Killing them (not so) softly, Conclusion...
- Um.... I don't have a response to that complaint
- Can't access VPN.... I wonder why...
- Can you send me the letter template on word?
| Killing them (not so) softly, Conclusion... Posted: 26 Jan 2020 10:54 AM PST tl;dr I'm the person who asks inconvenient questions in the middle of a complicated movie where everyone is a diehard fan. I'm somewhere between "Why's Captain Kirk talking funny?" in the middle of Incubus and "The wierding module wasn't in the books" in a extended Director's cut of Lynch's Dune. I'm also about to get yelled at by my boss for it. I thumb to Shi, my boss. me:"Hi there. Is this an offer to roll off this project?" Shi:"Can you just keep your head down for a day?" It seems my air cover is going away. I'm going to be beaten up on both sides. For a minute I consider going back to something less confrontational, like litigation. me:"Shi, I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be a pain in the ass. I was just asking the simple questions and the answers I got were horribly wrong. If a cop pulls over a car for a traffic infraction and notices that all four occupants are covered in blood, they kinda have ask some follow up questions. Maybe it's innocent, like they're coming back from a GWAR show. Maybe they're spree killing" Shi:"And they're covered in blood?" me:"Sort of. They're immature and they're expecting a seamless migration." Shi:"Every rollout has friction. What you're doing is causing concern at the client and that's not a good look for you" me:"I understand. I disagree about friction. This isn't friction. Their ops team is pulling all nighters patching stuff by hand. They're going to make a mistake. That's bad. No backups means no safety net and rollbacks are hard. An organization that runs like that doesn't know what they have, much less write it down somewhere. Their infra falls over, it stays over. That's not a good look for us" Shi goes silent for almost a minute. Shi:"Ok, so what do we do?" me:"We need to ask to push the cutover. We need to ensure we have a solid, up to date set of their business state so that transactions process in case this goes badly. It's safer that way" Shi:"write that up" While I'm preparing a formal, measured response, my email is like a nature documentary of rival ant colonies, separated by acts and set to Holst's Mars, the bringer of War.
Bad hotel coffee and flopsweat keep me going for the process. I've got to prep a project plan for the Client. In addition, an exec summary about the nature of the problem, a slide deck, a selection of potential questions and their responses. The Plan is cumbersome, a few hours. That's sent to Shi, Shi's boss and the Managing Director. Exposure to senior management during a crisis is good, unless you're the one who caused the crisis. <<THIS WOULD BE AN EXCELLENT TIME FOR A CLIFFHANGER>> Shi and Shi's boss have opinions on the Plan. Shi believes that my plan needs more details. They'd like to see actual tasks with time estimates for each task that roll up to milestones and sample validation procedures for testing backups. Shi's Boss calls me about 18 hours in as I'm about to step in the shower. Shi's Boss:"This is going in the wrong direction. The plan needs fewer details. Also the validation procedures are too detailed for senior management." me:"The procedures aren't for senior management. They're for the techs" Shi's Boss:"This should be high level. Executives don't want to read all this" me:"Isn't that what the Executive Summary is for?" Shi's Boss:"Everything in this is for senior management to read. I don't care what the final procedures look like, I just want the ones the execs see to be simpler" Instead of taking a desperately needed shower, I'm writing a bunch of procedures designed to never be followed because I raised the wrong questions. This makes me flash back to seventh grade when I had to write "I will not do my math homework in base four" in my notebook over and over again. I finish the documents, including a high level exec summary, one set of procedures for management to look over, another set to actually follow, a presentation and sample Q&A. I shower and get a not a lot of sleep before the flood of meetings. Meetings happen. Shi, Shi's boss and our Managing Director remind me of the importance of many things, including using better judgment, not asking difficult questions and the importance of customer impressions. During all this, I notice that there's one meeting I'm not invited to- the one with the client bigwigs explaining what went wrong and what we're going to do about it. All my work was to prepare someone else. The emails drop off as I realize I'm no longer on most threads. I pack up my stuff, throw my bags in my rental car and drive to the client site. On the way, I call Tomas, one of the project managers I have a passing acquaintance with. me:"Tomas- can you meet me in the lobby in a bit? I need to give you some equipment" Tomas:"Uhh, Sure. What the hell did you do this week?" me:"Too much, it seems" I leave the rental right in front of the lobby, see Tomas and walk over to him. I hand him my Client badge, work badge and laptop and take a selfie with him. We nod to each other and I hop back in my rental car. I text Shi with the selfie I took with my gear and Tomas, turn my phone off and drive to the airport. Both good and evil are punished and I'm neither sure which one I am or who cries the loudest. [link] [comments]  |
| Um.... I don't have a response to that complaint Posted: 26 Jan 2020 07:41 PM PST In the summer of my junior year in high school, I got a job at the call center for a small cable company. This was back in the mid-90s for reference's sake. The job was 1 part tech support, 2 parts service order management and 4 parts sales. Basically customers would call and either has a problem with their service and I would set up an appointment to check their connection or ship them a replacement receiver box. Sometimes a customers would be mad about their bill and demand we cancel the service thinking it would mean they would get free service for the rest of the month and we would offer them a new package deal or offer to "renew their contract" so they would get a further 3 months of service at their current rate. But every so often I got a call that caught me flat-footed. I am going to be honest and say that in hindsight I think this may have been a troll-call but I can attest that this call was received and at the time I didn't think it was fake. My line rings. I flip the switch to answer. "Thank you for calling [cable company name]. This is me. How can I make your day better?" I say. Even 25 years later I still remember that obnoxiously stupid intro line. There is a brief delay before the caller responded. "Yeah, hello. This is Mr So&so" he says. I'm already typing in the information and looking up his account. "I live at Such and such address." He continues. No account info found. Probably a potential customer looking to get service at his house. I'm already mentally pulling up the info and looking at the pamphlets that list the service packages. "I just came home and caught one of your installers in bed with my 16-year-old daughter. I'm going to kill him. I just thought you should know." he says. The next thing I hear is the click of the phone hanging up. I took what felt like 10 minutes to get my brain to process what I had just been told. In reality, it was probably 5 seconds but you know how your time perception works at moments like that. All I could do was notify my supervisor and pass the call details to them. I never heard anything else about it so no idea what became of it. [link] [comments]  |
| Can't access VPN.... I wonder why... Posted: 26 Jan 2020 03:36 PM PST Quick one from yesterday. Myself and a colleague get an email from our boss saying that a board member cannot access email. They are connecting via VPN and they are getting 'cannot connect to portal' from the VPN software. They've attached a cellphone photo of the error. Now, it's the weekend so we're not working but my colleague responded before I did and has checked both portals and everything is fine - the problem is probably at the board members end. Boss thanks him for the reply. While drinking my 2nd tea of the morning I look at the picture and notice something. So I reply.... " the 'Globe' icon in the task bar (bottom right) has a little 'no entry' sign on it, they're not connected to any network". Boss and colleague reply a little later to my email thanking me for catching that little bit of information. Hopefully the boss can explain it slight more politely that they need to connect the laptop to a network...... [link] [comments]  |
| Can you send me the letter template on word? Posted: 26 Jan 2020 11:01 AM PST I'm not in tech support, but have wanted to tell this story for a long time but had nowhere of posting it. So here goes. A few years ago i was working in credit control for a global courier company in the UK. We had some standard template letters that were needed to reply to queries on customers invoices. I cannot remember now what the letter was i needed to write, but i didn't have the template. I asked my colleague who was this lovely older lady if she could email over a copy. She asked "how do i do that?". I was about to walk over and show when her friend sitting next to her, Karen (actually called Karen) said she'd show her. No worries i thought, and waited. A few minutes later an email comes through. I open it up and it takes me a few seconds to realise what is wrong. She'd taken a screen print of the letter. Saved it in as an mpg or something and sent it over. I went over and asked Karen to explain what i mean by "send me a copy of the letter", she replied with "i've always done it that way". When i showed her how to attached a word doc to an email, she said "that's what i just did". In the end i just copied and typed out the letter. The mind boggles [link] [comments]  |
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