Category Archives: Blurbs

Tech Support Purgatory

Blurbs,

In which I give you a picture of call center life.

Yesterday, for my first call of the day I was on the phone with a customer for 106 minutes trying to set up his DSL. It should have been a 10 minute call, tops.

The hardware was properly cabled and all the correct lights were lit on the router, but Vista would not let him login to the modem GUI. I manually put the machine on the proper subnet, disabled all other connectoids, and IE still wouldn’t let the customer into the damned GUI.

It was frustrating because I don’t know Vista, and all Vista users are over 60. Which means I can’t just say, “Close out of that window,” or “Open your firewall application,” because they don’t know what statements like that mean. They need to be directed through absolutely every single click – especially those stupid Windows Vista security pop-ups – and it’s hard because I don’t know exactly what they’re looking at and, to make it even betterer, most people can’t read very well. If I say, “What does the window say?” they gurgle and mumble and I have to guess.

Later I had a guy who was super upset that I couldn’t help him – not wouldn’t, but couldn’t. The problem was that he wanted to connect his computer via USB to a DSL modem but he didn’t have the driver disc. I explained that he had to have the driver disc to go any further, and that since he hadn’t bought the modem from us I didn’t have one I could send him. He insisted that we “should be able to go into Control Panel and Internet Options and install the USB driver in there” because he’d “done it that way before.” (Which is, for you non-techies, utter bullshit and just plain wrong.) While I was trying to explain to him that drivers can only be installed three ways: from files stored in Windows, from a driver disc, or from the Internet, he hung up on me in a fit of pique, but not before telling me that he’d never had such bad service from our company before. And I was being NICE!

I’ve been doing this computer shit for a long time now, and while Windows will typically find drivers for USB cards themselves, there are very specific and particular drivers for weird USB peripherals like, say, ebook readers or DSL FUCKING MODEMS FOR FUCK’S SAKE.

Then there was the guy who ran the CD he got from the telco after ordering DSL from my company, even after we specifically told him not to, and it killed his WinME machine. Killed it, dead. The thing won’t even boot. And I had to tell him it wasn’t our fault and there was really nothing we could do about it. I felt so bad.

Then there were about five calls from DSL orders that had gone strangely awry and had weird, totally unusual things wrong with them. No path, or strange hardware failure, or actual telco outages…

Damn near every call was an exception call, the whole day. My call time average yesterday was about 45 minutes and when I left – after working a nine hour shift – the queue had still not been cleared.

Today my department supervisor was agro because he’d been yelled at all morning by customers who didn’t get called back yesterday. He fired off a few emails to us techs that made me agro too.

Because shit, as they say, flows downhill.

Today it’s slower, thank god, but the morning was all angry voice mails left by customers who can’t connect because they don’t know how to type but think it’s my personal fault and that I’m maliciously keeping them from being able to surf for porn over their cheapo dial-up connections… Okay, maybe it’s not that much about me, but STILL.

Right this second, I’m on my second DSL call in a row with a customer whose order was lost or halted for some reason only the telco knows, and of course it’s after five so I can’t do anything about it until tomorrow…

And even though it’s a new day, the attitude of the great unwashed “them” is pretty much what it was yesterday: pissed off and petulant. And I really do take it personally when I can’t fix it for them, because that’s why I do this job: I like to be able to fix shit for people.

Long story short:: work’s been kicking my arse these past two days. Gah.

Failure

Blurbs,

In which I do one thing in place of another.

I couldn’t install my new 120Gb hard drive because I need a hard drive caddy because I can’t get the one on my current hard drive OFF because of un-ideal tools and a lack of significant hand/wrist strength. This whole hard drive replacement project is one stupid thing after another. I went to eBay and bought a second caddy and also an Ultrabay caddy so I can have both damn hard drives in the machine at the same time.

Moral being that quite often, throwing money – in this case, about $27 – at something does make it all better.

On the subject of money, only two paydays between me and the Global Blogger Meetup in DC next month. I’m so excited! I’ve already purchased my tickets, and now I really should schedule a hair appointment.

Oh, anyway: yeah, with the hard drive project hung I installed a new WP template here on the ‘box instead. (I even tested it in Internet Exploder! Go me!)

Happiness is a Warm Mug

Blurbs, ,

In which now my desk is fully tricked out.

I used to have a Mr Coffee Mug-Activated Warmer. It sat on many a desk next to me as I worked for many an employer. It plugged into an electrical outlet and faithfully kept my beverages – and sometimes even my hands – warm.

When I left LISCO I thought I’d thrown it into a box with all my other crap, but when I unpacked that box recently there was no mug warmer. I can’t imagine myself leaving it; I’d had it for so long and it was such a handy little device…

Oh well. Shit happens. I ordered a new one.

USB Mug Warmer

This one plugs into a USB port, is a 4-port USB hub, and has cute little lights on it!

On Ageing

Blurbs,

In which I ramble on about getting older.

Work tonight was perfectly paced. Never got behind, never got ahead, just one call or call-back or chat presented itself at a time, all in an orderly fashion. Usually it’s not like that, it’s either banging or totally dead. I guess I liked it; appeals to my Libran sense of… appropriateness, I guess. A place for everything and everything in its place and all that. Orderly.

This morning I walked to catch the bus for work. A man was walking along the sidewalk toward me, on the inside. As we drew abreast, he stopped suddenly with a slap of his feet because there were branches in his path and he didn’t want to swerve into my lane. I smiled vaguely at him, and he shrugged and smiled back, almost coquettishly, and I realized a moment later that I’d seen him as a person, not as an old man. I saw boyishness in his presentation of himself to me, and knew that he’d interacted with me as a peer even though he was probably half again my age, if not more.

Ten years ago, he would have been an old man to me, some inscrutable thing outside of my experience. More an iconic representation of the idea of old-manness than a real human being. But lately I’m looking at the people around me and realizing they all feel like they did when they were twenty, but they’re trapped in bodies that are forty or sixty or eighty. I see the boy the man used to be and the girl the woman used to be now, not just an old person.

I think it started with Gramma. She’s 46 years older than I am, but still giggles like a girl under the right circumstances. She’s told me stories about her life, and I see that her sense of self is much like mine is: she still feels like herself, but then she looks down at her hands and notices they’re the hands of some mysterious old lady. She says things sometimes just like a woman in her prime would, and I have come to realize that one’s sense of self doesn’t seem to change much beyond, say, 30 or so – though our bodies certainly do.

I am now getting permanent wrinkles on my face. My hair is both turning silver and thinning. I even have a varicose vein, of all fucking things. And yet I still feel like… me. Whoever that is.

I suppose I always thought that older people were different than me, that their perceptions of both themselves and the world around them were as different from mine as mine were from my own when I’d been two or three. I think I’m somewhat disappointed, actually, that the evolution of my self seems to have stopped. I expected 40 (well, almost) to feel as different from 20 as 20 did from 10, but it doesn’t. I just feel like me. I have more memories and I’m somewhat quicker on the uptake, but that’s really about it.

Oh, hell, I can’t figure out what I’m trying to relate. I suspect everyone else rather already knew about this – that a person is a person is a person, regardless. I have nothing profound to reveal, other than the fact that I must be realizing my own life’s more or less half over, and that old people no longer seem all that damned old.

Well, that and the shocking realization that 20-year-olds are now, for the most part, total fucking aliens (a feeling I never expected to feel). Honestly, though, I suppose I’m mostly just pissed about the hair thing. And that 20-year-old bodies are TOTALLY wasted on 20-year-olds, holy shit, can I get a witness?

Overheard in Oregon

Blurbs, ,

In which there’s a bar moment.

Last night RB picked me up after work and took me over to the Oasis. Between the band’s sets, the bass player came and sat next to our table. There was a lit cigarette in the ashtray next to him.

An attractive woman walked up, picked up the cigarette, and took a drag. Three women at her nearby table cheered and clapped. The woman put the cigarette down, exhaled, and walked away.

The bass player turned to us with a slightly stunned look.

“Wow,” I enthused. “You know her?”

“Never seen her in all my life,” he replied.

“Was that your cigarette?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Hmm,” I said.

We all sat in silence for a moment.

“Maybe it means she wants to give you a blow job,” I opined.

“God I hope so!” he said.

The Curse

Blurbs, ,

In which it’s way better this way, but still not ideal.

I think my ability to perceive the glass as half full is actually a character flaw.

I think this because I can slog through a fairly unacceptable life and yet still be convinced that I’m happy, even when I’m patently not. I learned this about myself when I was married: I was terribly unhappy for years without realizing it. Even developed a panic disorder, that’s how deep in denial I was about not getting my needs met…

But that’s a whole other post. I’m probably not, in point of actual fact, living a life that is unacceptable: it’s probably just PMS.

I love not bleeding for 29 days out of every 30. It’s awesome. It’s fantastic. I’m frantic with joy that I no longer have to fear my life is leaking out of my uterus. (Rollerball ablation has been very, very good to me.) But. I still get evil, wicked PMS and I hate it. Bloating is evil! No one should have her ankle bones disappear every month! Feeling despondent, tired, and quasi-depressed for a third of every month is just plain sucky.

I remember when I was young and bullet-proof I thought women who complained of PMS were just complaining for attention. Now I realize the truth: hormones are hell.

Maybe I’ll luck out and be born male next time. While males may have shorter life spans, at least their reproductive processes are eleventy-hundred times less complicated!

Meaningless Drivel

Blurbs, , ,

In which there are a few things, and not a one of them is interesting.

I had my first review last Friday: apparently I’m doing a kick-ass job. I asked for an ergo keyboard and got one the same day. Yay!

Winter’s here this week. It’s about sixteen degrees below freezing. Today I’m wearing fleece-lined jeans, boots, and a fleece vest under my wool sweater. I’m so bulky I look like the Michelin tire baby, but at least I’m warm.

I thwacked my ankle on the wooden asana in front of my laptop at home, and now my whole ankle’s swollen and it hurts.

It took over fifteen hours to sync my iPod with my newly reassembled iTunes library. I have less than 3Gb of space remaining on the iPod, so next weekend I’m gonna prune the crap out of my music library. Yesterday I splurged and bought a new hard drive for my laptop, because the laptop’s drive is the same size as the iPod (30Gb) and that’s just stupid. Plus it was way cheap on eBay.

I made payments to the surgeon and the dentist yesterday, and now I have barely enough lunch money to get me through until next payday. To stave off the feeling of poverty, I finally spent the $100 Amazon.com gift certificate I got from my uncle, Dangerous, so next week I’ll have a nice box of books to cheer my broke ass up.

My life is boring. All I do is work and sleep and play with electronic gadgets. Thank God I have such lovely electronic devices or I’d be lost, I tell you, utterly lost.

Organizing Data

Blurbs, , , ,

In which I spend most of the day in front of the computer.

Today I woke up hungry at the ass-crack of dawn, but I stayed in bed until nine or so rockin’ out to tuneage on the beloved iPod. I made eggs and toast and coffee for breakfast when I finally got up. Then I plugged in my external hard drive enclosure, and began the process of putting my iTunes library back together.

I’ve been using SharePod to add content to my iPod since I left Iowa last September, so what’s on my iPod no longer matches the backup I have.

I couldn’t find my old library .xml file, so I had to import all the tracks into iTunes and right now it’s updating album art. When it’s done, I’ll import all the tracks I’ve got on the laptop, then the six gigs of music from Jayrob, and then the video content I have.

Then I’ll spend all evening massaging files, editing tags and shit, and finally I’ll export my playlists off the iPod itself and into iTunes. Once all of THAT is done, I’ll be able to sync my iPod for the first time in over four months… a process that will probably take half the damn night since iTunes will decide the relationship is new and re-write the entire drive.

Long story short? If you’ve got an MP3 library bigger than a few gigs, back it up. Now. Any way you can. Srsly. This is a pain in the arse.

In other news, I’ve decided to attend the first-annual Global Blogger Meetup in DC in March. So far, only three bloggers are actually slated to attend, but that’s all good because it means I get to call dibs on Vuboq’s couch without anyone arguing with me. (I’d prefer the guest room, of course, but Only Me’s already got it, the quasi-Aussie git.)

Vuboq says there will be a chili night on Sunday – I offered to make veggie chili if needed! – and maybe Monday Afternoon Margaritas the next day since I’m dying for the spinach enchiladas and liquid cheese he’s always blogging about. Then on St. Pat’s Day we’ll all go get trashed in honor of Vuboq’s birthday.

Airline tickets are $359 right now, so with vigilant surfing I should be able to find something under $300 and be able to take a reasonable amount of cash along. It’s a lot of damn flying for a 3-day vacation, but what the hell. I do, after all, have both an eBook reader and a kitting bag to stave off boredom, and I’ve already decided 2008 should be a Year Of Travel for me. DC in March, Seattle in June, and NY in September!

Now all I have to do is convince my employer to give me all that time off.

Movies

Blurbs, ,

In which you tell me what to do!

I want movie recommendations. From YOUSE, my babies!

If you use Netflix, befriend me (I’m goblinbox, of course) and recommend stuff. And if you don’t use Netflix, leave me a comment and tell me what to watch!

Thank you. *smooch*