For anyone who knows where I work, you’ll understand somewhat when I explain that this is our “Christmas season.” We run high profile national advertising on a certain higher-profile sporting event. And for the next few weeks, pandemonium reigns.
In theory that pandemonium brings along some nice commissions, but this year it’s been thin on the commissions and heavy on the headaches.
Generally speaking I enjoy tech support. I have been known to de-escalate friends from panic mode, talking them down from blue screens of death, walking verbally through the process of murdering not-so-innocent viruses and other muckabouts on their computers, and other assorted and sundry tech-related pains in the collective asses.
In theory this job is simpler than the things I’ve done before. I don’t, thank GOD, have to troubleshoot somebody’s code. If it’s broke and it’s their coding, they get to fix it. Sorry, yer on yer own. If it’s our fault, chances are it’s outside my expertise and I escalate it to somebody else. So I most often handle middle-of-the-road stuff (at least for me,) and simple sales. Some days the biggest challenge is keeping track of everything we have for sale, knowing what it is, what it’s used for, and figuring out if it would apply to any given caller. Ostensibly it’s fast and dirty to get things fixed and get on to the next call.
Notice I said ostensibly. Because even we insiders can’t find a whole lot of this stuff online. It gets better: on an open-book “skills” test, my boss couldn’t pass the test on her first try. It’s not that we’re stupid. It’s that the contents of our knowledge base conflicts with the information on the test. The knowledge base does get updated with a fair degree of frequency.
The tests… not so much.
Aaaaanyway…
Overall today was a turning point, hopefully to the positive. I have to work tomorrow 8 hours of mandatory overtime. Ugh, though of course the money will be welcome when it arrives. And for every day you work mandatory OT you’re entered into a very narrow-scope (one per team of 15-20 people) drawing for a big-screen TV. And given how shitty my sales have been this week, I’m hoping for a miracle day tomorrow in terms of numbers.
Tonight my third diary reader (yeah Ange, that would be you, hehe) and I battled through getting her signed up for some stuff on our own site. It was four times as hard as it should have been, thanks to systems made buggy by sheer overload. We got there but jiminy Christmas, the network was a bitch!
Ange and I precede this journal and precede Diaryland. We met up on Delphi Forums back in the day. It must’ve been around 2002, maybe 2003, if that. We were both working with CSS on forum customization. That’s how I initially learned CSS – by pounding my head on my desk and looking for ways to get section A looking like I wanted it to look.
If I remember right, Ange was already running circles around me in not only CSS, but also javascript and HTML and heaven knows what else. I never fully caught up with her, but in all fairness I always chose more divergent paths. I expanded my learning to domain administration and streaming media, started playing with PHP and flash and so on, and so on.
It was a blast – if one underwritten by frustration – to chatter on the phone with Ange tonight. Wish we had more time to talk, but time is an increasingly precious commodity these days.
I envy the folks who live fairly stable lives. My kids never understood my Internet addiction back in the day. I lived the life of a nomad, never in one place for more than a few months. For a 7 year old it’s not such a big deal. For a thirty-something single mom, the Internet socialization meant I suddenly had neighbors who could keep up even with someone constantly on the move. I wasn’t a pariah for being so poor the churchmice looked down their noses at me. I had discovered that the most fabulous riches in the world were finally available for me: friends!
It’s been ten years since I originally signed into Delphi Forums, and I still keep up with more than a dozen friends that track back almost to Day One. Ange’s connection doesn’t go quite that far back, though she, our friend D, and I shared connections considerably closer than the raucous email tagteam calling ourselves The Lushes. (I also connected there with another dear friend in Canada who’s literally as close to me emotionally as my sister, but isn’t part of either group.)
My riches expanded further when a fellow radio-based loon introduced me to Diaryland. I’ve had the extreme luxury of meeting some of my fellow Diarylanders in person, and am hoping for a repeat performance again before too much time passes.
This afternoon my youngest announced that she’d finally enrolled in her first nursing classes. She arrived home with books, money and more optimism than she’s displayed in forever.
So while the week as a whole hasn’t been one of my best, at least it looks like it’s ending on an up note.
I’ll take it.
One side note – one of my colleagues was talking today at lunch about a stint living in Australia. It gave me a whole new perspective on the indomitable Miss Hiss‘s life.
He described babysitting a friend’s pet joey. He explained that the tripod stance – tail balancing two mighty strong legs – means these critters are almost impossible to topple.
During this babysitting adventure, the sweet little umpteen-pound joey tap-tapped down the smooth wooden floors of the house, occasionally sliding around corners, making the most of the slick surface. Finally it bounded sweetly into the middle of my friend’s bed and onto his chest.
Wake-up call!
Then, just to sweeten the pot, the joey decided his newfound buddy needed a warm shower. Of the pee kind.
My colleague described trying to unseat a creature that was kind of like one of those punching clowns; push it aside, it bounces right back up. Only this punching clown had claws and was merrily peeing as it bounced.
One of those stories that gets you right there, isn’t it?