Tag Archives: Work

A day in the life of a support tech.

Work, ,

In which this is pretty much what I do. All day, every day.

“Okay, so, if I understand you correctly, you can’t connect to the Internet and you swear that your computer is giving you absolutely no error messages. Is that accurate?

“Well, before I can offer you any useful tech help, we need to get an error message. My records say you’re using Windows Vista, is that correct? Yes? Okay. Well, frankly, Vista’s dial-up networking implementation pretty much totally sucks, so we have to force it to give us a useful error message. To do that, we have to dial up from a particular place.

“Are you in front of your computer now? Is it booted up? Good.

“First, let me have you click on Start, and then go to Control Panel. Do you have something called Network and Internet? No? Okay, well, there do seem to be a couple of different versions of Vista. How about Network and Sharing Center, do you have that? Yes? Great. Okay, let me have you click on that for me.

“Yeah, that’ll be a left click.

“Now, on the left, under Tasks, the second-to-last item in the link list says Manage Network Connections. Do you see that? Yes? Okay. Click on that for me.

“Now, under the Dial-up header, do you have an icon labeled BMI? Yes? Good! Double-click on that.

“Double-click. …No. Double left click, please. It should open a new window called Connect BMI for you, once you do it right.

“Okay, now: are we speaking over the same like the computer uses to connect? We are? Okay, well, I’ll hang up now, and if you don’t connect to my server in 60 seconds, I’ll call you back. Remember: if you can’t connect, I need you to write down or remember the three-digit error code you’ll see, okay? Okay. Talk to you soon.”

Or if not that, then:

“So you can’t get online with your DSL. Gotcha. What brand of modem do you have?

“Uh, your modem is the little box you have plugged into both the wall jack and your computer. I need to know what brand it is.

“You don’t know where it is? Um. Okay, well, how about this: is there an Ethernet cable plugged into your computer? There is? Okay, trace it back to see what it’s plugged into.

“Yeah, see, that’s your DSL modem! Good job! What brand is it?

“It’s an Actiontec? Okay, well, do you see the Internet light on it? Is the light green, or is it red?”

And so on. Over and over, all day, five days a week. Srsly. Freaky thing is, I actually like this work. What’s wrong with me? (Wait. Don’t answer that.)

    tech support n. a service provided by a computer or technological company for aiding or advising customers of its product or service, usu. by telephone or email; see ha ha. ha.

This week, my Friday really is a Friday.

Social, , , , ,

In which I give you a preview of the exciting weekend to come!

Work ends in 40 minutes. I’ll be hanging out with K and seeing Becca. There will probably be cocktails.

I have tomorrow off. I will be sleeping. A lot.

Tomorrow night, I’m playing at Woody’s for Dayton Days. It’ll be a good old-fashioned bar gig, and I’m looking forward to it.

Sunday I will be at band practice.

Monday I’ll probably be toning inside wiring for my cousin’s stand-alone DSL.

Twitter’s outages these past couple days are buggin’ me.

In other news, my mother was not killed in yesterday’s tornado.

Extreme Schedule Change! POW! Zing!

Blurbs, ,

In which I go from hanging out at home every evening to only being home to sleep.

When K came to pick me up for work this morning (we work the same hours on Saturdays), Gramma made a crack about my timing and mentioned that ‘it would have been nice to have been ferried around six months ago, when it was cold out.’ (Oh, yeah, I neglected to mention in the last post that I’ve done that Dumbest Of Things and hooked up with a co-worker. Dude’s desk sits like nine feet from mine. I know, I know, but whatever. Shit happens. Onward!)

I feel like I haven’t seen her – Gramma – in a week because I’ve been out every night past her bedtime, and only see her when she’s sitting at the breakfast table in the morning and I’m waddling past on my way to the shower.

My diet’s fucked. My last four dinners: Taco Hell, Pizza Slut, 10 PM breakfast at Shari’s, and last night? We had Applebee’s. (Srsly. Crap-o-rama.) I’m totally not counting the calories from the vodka, because that’s just depressing.

Work has been brutally slow this week. I’ve had hour-long lulls between calls and my file cabinet is already perfectly organized so I have nothing to do. Today I upgraded the ‘box to the latest version of WordPress; it’s not a difficult task but it is tedious and time-consuming (the automatic update plugin won’t run for me without errors, so I have to do it manually) and if that doesn’t prove how slow work is, the following utterly random and dull list will:

  • I want a car.
  • I want a bicycle.
  • My grandmother is still overfeeding my dog.
  • I am lovin’ the dry 95-degree weather we’re having.
  • I really enjoyed my bro’s Coachella post.
  • He wants me to help him with a shopping cart so he can start selling cool screened stuff.
  • VUBOQ has started a sideblog in which he pretends he’s str8.
  • K has started blogging. Like, today.
  • I spent about 10 hours at best of craigslist this week.
  • I need to color my hair.
  • I need to do about 3 loads of laundry.
  • I ran a box fan in my room last night because it’s so warm.

Um. Yeah.

Perhaps the sleep dep’s making me stupid? (Don’t answer that!) But even if it is, I still love you, my babies! *smooch*

Easter Weekend

Blurbs, ,

In which I roll out the stunning vista of my upcoming weekend. Booyah. (Srsly.) (The pace, it’s killing me.)

Last night RB took me to see a band. We went mainly because the band in question gets A-list blues gigs here in the northwest, and we wanted to hear what the competition sounded like. They were good enough, but not terrifically impressive. I can sing circles around the chick singer they had.

I drank four or five cocktails, got three phone numbers (a girl who could be friend material, a tattoo artist, and a guy who just amused me). Then I ate three items off of the Taco Bell menu and went to bed because apparently I’m not chubby enough yet.

This morning I brought Bindu to work with me. We had a lovely walk across town, and saw many other dogs downtown and woofed at them. Work’s been really slow today, with long breaks in between calls. (I like working on Saturday because no one bothers to turn the overhead lights on and I don’t have to fight the glare on my monitor all damn day.)

At six, Gramma’s going to pick us up because she wants to go out for dinner. I really don’t need any more food – I ate an entire bag of salad and a frozen pasta dinner and half an avocado and two bottles of Naked juice – so I might just have an appetizer.

Tomorrow we’re going out for Easter brunch with the family. I think we’ll be eating at the Eagles or VFW or something. Luckily, it’s not until noon so I don’t have to roust out of bed too early. Tomorrow afternoon I intend to do laundry and clean the bathroom. Monday afternoon I’ll be at band practice. (We’ve actually got gigs lined up. We’re playing the Balloon Stampede in May!)

So, yeah. That’s my stunning life. I’m sorry you wasted moments of yours reading this post. *smooch*

Last Night

Blurbs, , ,

In which I am totally reaching for material, here. Totally.

RB picked me up after work and took me to the studio, where he played a new song he’d written for me to sing (a kick-ass blues/R&B number I wish I’d written myself about leavin’ your man), helped me learn a run in another original that I’d been totally bricking, asked me my opinion on a drum track (it just laid there), and gave me A SUPER BITCHIN’ TAMBOURINE. “Now you can’t say I never gave you nothin’,” he announced.

Then we went to the Mill Creek Brew Pub and met this dude who used to play pool with Doc Severinson.

After that, I went home and went to bed. ZzzzzZzzZzzzz.

This morning I woke up and did the sit-ups and push-ups and leg lifts that I did not do before bed last night, and then fell back asleep ’cause that’s how I roll. Then I got up, had a breakfast sandwich, showered, dressed, and then walked briskly to work.

Briskly. Gah. If only I could exercise while asleep… that’d be ideal.

Wednesday. And more about my stupid uterus.

Health, ,

In which it’s freaking growing back already.

I tried to go to Sweet Basil Pizzaria for lunch today but they were closed because they’re off having a baby or something. I wandered over to Merchant’s and ordered a sandwich, but they lost my order and I didn’t get it for a long time. I snarfed half of it and put the rest into a go box and walked back to work, where I logged in a minute late back from my break.

I have a box here at my desk containing half a veggie sandwich, some chips, and some potato salad. They also gave me a cookie for my trouble; hopefully it doesn’t have raisins or something equally gross in it.

The bad news is that I apparently possess supernatural powers of healing: I had three normal months after having my uterus scoured out (“normal” in this case meaning a schedule on which one bleeds for a few days, and then does not bleed at all the rest of the time), but now it seems the respite is over and I’m back to spotting all the time. This means my uterine lining is POSSESSED and is REPLICATING AT AN EVIL MAD RATE, A CONDITION THAT IS RIGHTLY TERRIFYING TO NATIONS AROUND THE GLOBE.

Stupid uterus.

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.

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?

It's Saturday, Damn It.

Work, ,

In which I bitch and moan.

It’s Saturday, and I’m at work.

I’m cold. I’m tired. And I’ve already been on the phone for an hour and I’m usually not even out of bed by ten.

My beloved dog made sad eyes at me when I left the house this morning.

Oh, and I feel crappy on top of it. Wanna be in bed with a warm dog and a good book.

Work makes me boring.

Work,

In which I explain why my content sucks so bad lately.

I really like paydays. Twice a month, they put hunnerts and hunnerts of dollars into my account and then I can do neat things like buy lattés and pay off November’s surgery.

I like the job itself, actually. I work in a call center, talking on the phone all day. I actually enjoy most of the humans I speak to, and I enjoy the challenge of figuring out what the fuck they’re talking about and then fixing it. The job’s not the most stimulating I’ve ever had, but it’s certainly not the worst. (I’m understimulated, of course, but then when am I not understimulated at work? At least it’s busy and I’m not bored.)

Money’s good and the work’s fine. So what’s the problem, then?

The problem is working full-time.

It’s too much. Seriously. Five days out of every seven, all I do is work and sleep and feed myself. Who the fuck thought this schedule up? Does ANYBODY actually like it?

Sunday and Monday I try to clean house, do laundry, socialize with Gramma, love on my dog, rest, read, call friends, and maybe go out if I’m lucky enough to be invited somewhere.

If this were a high school writing assignment, I’d be comparing and contrasting Working Full-time to Not Working Full-time, and you know what would win? NOT WORKING FULL-TIME.

I just need to figure out how to earn what I need in far fewer hours of work. I just DO.