DOH

Just wanted everyone to know that today was the day of hell. DOH.

It was really quite bad, a huge outage that piled callers on us and buried us for FOUR HOURS. Tomorrow should be mellow, I hope. At one point we had 107 people waiting for us to answer their call (at the time that I looked) and the first person had waited 17 minutes or more for us to answer his/her call.

Not pretty at all.

Turns out our ASA (Average Sevice A - something, basically the average time to answer a call) was 2 minutes or four minutes depending on if you were calling for a password or tech support. The numbers for the last several weeks have been 7 seconds. Just to give you an idea of the hell (that's 120-240+ seconds if you can't convert the math, so about 70 times or more the standard wait time).

Yeah, it was no good. I got only one break, partially my fault, because they wouldn't let us go to break during that rush. Which I don't really blame them, but I REALLY needed that break.

The day didn't get much better with having a caller yell at me, essentially, because he "knew" how to do my job better than I did. In one regard that's why I like the inexperienced caller, because they don't question the policy. I can't change the policy anymore then they can, so why do they need to get on me about it? That and some of our tools went down, again...

To be honest, it wasn't all bad, I did manage to save about 15% on...

But I did get to do my first remote session. Basically I remotely manage a caller's computer so that I can uninstall/reinstall software. Someone from Virginia, I think. It was something that tech support should have done, but they didn't do it right. So me, this lowly password reset guy, no experience with it at all, did it. And did it right. Sure, I asked for help in one or two trouble spots, but I got the job done. Now I just need to get paid for doing the job that I'm doing. $3 difference per hour for that sort of thing.

AND it looks like I'll have this Sunday off so that I can sleep and not be freaked out at work. Sure, it's a Sunday, so it's not a big thing, but I REALLY don't want to be up all night Saturday AND THEN go to work on Sunday. Plus I'm sure I can be helpful if I don't work.

So it looks like I might have a line in the water to hook some of you for Mtn. Con. Yeah, for those of you that aren't already involved with the planning/volunteering, heh. If the famous people doesn't get you (even the Dragonlance author), then the concert should. If the Vatican says their good, then they've got to be good, right? (No, they aren't religious rock, the Vatican just gave them the proverbial thumbs up for being a drug free band and some other cool stuff.)

I think I'm done here, now. I plan on having my baby by the end of the week, time schedules permitting. I've just been completely screwed with the companies hours. The company I'm getting it from has a service window of 7-7 CENTRAL TIME. Which is just outside of my free minute period (exactly the opposite hours, actually) and is pretty much when I'm working. So I just said "screw it" and fired them off an e-mail about it. So in theory I could have a response by tomorrow, and even better is that I could have that puppy by week's end. If nothing else I'll go pick up an external hard drive so that I can start installing all sorts of fun things on it.

Alright, I think that's about enough from me and my random interludes. Good news in the news today, if you believe the talk about North Korea. We shall see, but in the furthest corner of my mind there's a sliver of intelligence saying "don't buy into it". I hate being a realist, everyone thinks you're so cynical all the time...