ladynadiad | (no subject)

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Okay, for those who probably saw my hiatus in Luceti today, yeah, work has been pissing me off a lot lately.

For those who may not know, I work from home and support a major video game console. Can't say which one on here due to NDAs and stuff, but for a big hint, I own said console.

Work policies have changed a lot and on top of that we're having a ton of tech issues. Stuff like we can't create repairs most of the time, the servers lag, servers stop creating tickets, agents aren't doing what we went through training for on these procedures and can't ask when they aren't sure, lack of support for when we aren't sure so we can't get answers, so customers are getting screwed over because we can't get support, our stuff isn't working and put simply, the new policies suck. Seriously, I feel for Nuke because she's on the end of having to call the people I set up callbacks for, and I get them back all pissed that they didn't get their call backs, or even worse they were told by their agent that it would be resolved or it was already done when it was actually escalated. Yeah, needless to say, dealing with the calls is a major hassle if we didn't have all these tech issues.

But on top of that, it takes 10 minutes minimum just to get a server that isn't going to lag like crazy. I've been reporting the lag over and over again to my team leader and basically today my team leader says his boss wants to try a fix out and to go report to the help desk and let them know I was supposed to meet him there.

Yeah, that was what I was told. Instead I get pawned off on a help desk person and get to spend the afternoon basically being told that it's MY fault I'm getting lag on more than half the servers that nearly EVERYONE is reporting the same issues on. I get to spend the rest of the afternoon on the phone with my ISP getting an upgrade for my service because my having the minimum upload speed requirement isn't enough because sometimes it will test low.

Yeah, Nuke, if your upload speed isn't around 1mpbs, go get that upgraded. They will blame you for the lag.

And on top of that, they made up some random new requirement on our computers. They have to have something called hardware virtualization enabled. Oh, here's the kicker, they won't tell us how to enable this outside of "it's in the BIOS". Okay, I can at least go into the BIOS and look for said setting, I know how to play with the BIOS without messing it up.

I come to find out my computer lacks said feature. My computer that I just got in October. It's likely better than the computers that half the agents have to be honest. My net is now way better than most agents and yet I'm still being blamed for the known lag issue.

Yeah, I see why no one is reporting it. We've been told "it's been escalated to the client, just keep on logging out and in until you get a server not in the 20s" No one has been reporting it because we've been told there is nothing help desk can do, the client has to fix it, so we just log out and hope we can get a decent server quickly or else report it as a tech issue if it makes us late. A lot of the agents just take whatever server they get and deal with the lag, which means customers get mad because they are on the phones longer since it takes a minute to get past one screen (and we usually need to go through a bunch to get through a call). But now because I lack said feature, I've been basically told I no longer can get support from the help desk.

Yeah, I don't think I'm going to be nice and report issues with servers any longer. I'll just do the usual thing everyone else does from now on. Screw helping them out. I've been screwed over by trying to be helpful too many times. We won't even get into my issues with the scheduling department and how they screw it up every time I try to help.

Lesson learned, nice people get screwed over.

Anyway, I'm wanting to try out some new coloring techniques on some manga panels so I'm taking requests. Just give me a link to a manga panel, and if you aren't sure if I know the canon, references would be awesome! I'll try to get one panel colored per person, but may do more if I have time and will try to icon each one too.

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You know what else is fun as hell? Having the your direct coach telling you to do one thing while the senior team lead says another, and the project managers say yet another. The last few days have been hideous. Only two of us on the callback team even at work and both of us manning the incoming call queue from agents... and nobody actually calling anyone back.

And then we get The Man coming down going "WHY ARE THERE NO CALLBACKS ASHDAWlIDSLAKDJ"

I'm doing my own damned thing on Friday after my "weekend" here, no joke.

Also, total bullshit from the help desk. I have never once actually been helped whenever I've needed to go there. It's always just "YOUR COMPUTER NEEDS MORE THAN 1 GB OF RAM" and then they kick me out. The computer runs clear as a bell 90% of the time (unless I'm being a dumbass and running every program ever). RAM is not the issue. Good to know it'll be my upload speeds next.

Also, for the record... if your TL ever tells you to escalate a UA claim to the CCE queue? Don't believe them. We're being told to push you guys back and not take the call.

Oh, even in the support rooms us agents get different answers when it comes to what gets escalated. My TL has basically just said if he's on and you need an approval, IM him. And he's given us a blanket ok to just put his name down for approval for tokens and manual DRMs as long as he's on shift at the time since he actually trusts his team isn't full of a bunch of idiots who don't know how to do that stuff at least. But then with the fact that we're in the top 5 for most stats, he can give us that trust. But seriously, I see one agent asking if they can transfer for missed callback and gets told to call CCE, next agent gets told to transfer the SR and tell the customer 24 hours for the same damned thing (which often means sup escalation then).

And actually, when I got hired I was told the actual requirement for RAM was 2 GB and was hired on the condition that I upgraded and got a landline and I just had to send a screenshot and a scan of my order for the phone line. My newer laptop has 4GB of RAM. But the hardware virtualization is going to kill a lot of people because it seems that is a feature only available in the BIOS of newer high end machines, and well the vast majority of agents don't have those and probably don't even have Windows 7. And you know what, it's not in the guidelines we are given for what we need and they even admitted to that. My opinion on it is that I'm not buying a new computer until this one is at least a year old and out of warranty. I did give my TL a heads up on that, because I think a lot of people are going to hear about that one.

But my TL is awesome and passed along what they did to me to his boss and the lag issue I'm having is going to be handled on his end. Honestly my TL said it was BS and he could pull five random agents and they'd all be having that same issue. He just pulled those of us who weren't putting up with that BS. Even he's having the same issue, though it seems the TLs and mentors have a way to always end up on server 39 that us poor agents can't use.

And my download speed is now 10 mbps and upload is 1 mbps. You don't want just 512kbps which is the minimum requirement because your speed tests will range from .42 mpbs to .55 mbps, and if it tests low the second help desk has you run a speed test, well it's all your fault.

And honestly, you should see the shit my computer is running while I'm on the SRD. Usually have Photoshop open with a huge file. Firefox with 35+ tabs and my flist auto-refreshing every 15 minutes. Trillian on to catch links and messages, etc. I close that stuff when I'm told to come back to the room outside my SRD, but yeah, I'm always running that stuff even if I'm told I should be running nothing beyond my firewall and anti-virus. Screw that, this computer can handle it. My old one couldn't.

In good news, my TL did say you guys were going to get some more people once the classes currently in training start taking calls. He said he's likely losing three people from his team to CCE when that happens (no, I'm not one of them, I wouldn't volunteer for that even if I got double my pay).

And you know, I didn't even believe them when they said UAs should go to you. They still auto escalate and as long as someone isn't a retard, they will go out of the account and back in to make sure it did so before giving the customer the SR.

Your TL sounds awesome. ;_; He's not Dean, is he? I loved being on his team while I was there -- not often you get someone so willing to be open and honest with his entire team. I still try to lend a hand for him whenever I can ~~although CCE has been brutal and has been making that hard~~.

Hopefully it won't be quite so hard on all of us once we get more of us on callbacks. Less pissed customers for you front line T1 agents, less insanity and backlog on us, less people raging and heading for supervisors.

...I hope.

Also, just a note, but server 35 is nearly as bad as the servers in the 20s. I keep getting that hunk of junk and it crashes severely at least once a night. Also, 11:20 every night means my entire SRD crashing. Don't know why it's 11:20, but it happens. every. night.

I have James L now actually. Had Deanie before, but she quit and we all got moved, I seemed to have lucked out and got someone as awesome as she was. Seriously, there's people in my room who beg to be moved to James' team, but he's sadly more than maxed out on people. He looks out for us, and that's why we are ranked well.

And server 32 is my most hated server. It runs great for an hour. Then it stops creating SRs. And then you can't quit it. I spent three hours one day trying to quit that damn server because every time I got off it, I ended up back on it. The only way you can quit it is to shut down your computer, reboot your networking equipment and start everything back up. If you go the log off F5 for two minutes route, once you log back into citrix, you're back on it before you even click to load it. The other way is to log off citrix for a half an hour (I found this out by accident since on that day where it took three hours, I gave up and went to lunch and left Citrix logged off the whole time, and then I finally got lucky and got 47).

James has definitely heard plenty of ranting from me about my hate for server 32. Everyone else bitches about 25 and 26, nah, those are nice servers compared to 32.

And really, I don't mind being a front line T1 agent. I just am sick of having to come up with nice ways to say their previous agent was an idiot who didn't know how to do their job. I love it when it's their first call and I can resolve it. I had a guy the other day who called in because he kept getting disconnected, I walked him through opening ports on his router (which I can pretty much do from memory now on Netgear and Linksys routers), and not only was he no longer getting disconnected, but he also noticed an improved speed to the service and was so happy that he was able to make his first kill ever in one game.

That stuff makes it worth it. Or getting someone back into their account after they forgot their password. Or setting up new service and teaching mom how to work the console so she doesn't feel like an idiot. Had one the other day that was having disc read issues and troubleshooting worked. Poor mom had her kids home on spring break and thought she was going to have to listen to whining and complaining for a few weeks and instead got to say she got it fixed for them. I even got to hear the kids all happy in the background and saying I was awesome.

I miss that, honestly. ;_; I had one glorious night that they pulled me back into Universal out of PS and I spent the entire night feeling like I was Wonder Woman. EVERY SINGLE CALL! FIXED! Four kudos calls in two hours! Only one customer so irritated that I wouldn't break policy that they hung up!

I had one cold transferred invalid escalation yesterday where they needed to reset their console safety passcode and I got it for them on the first try and the woman was so happy. Her husband was in the background going "That first girl said we needed a supervisor for this but it was so easy!" I miss that stuff.

Hopefully it'll all go back to the level of sanity we had before Christmas again. We all need it, I think. Even the coaches and team leads are dropping like flies.

Yeah, nice people usually get the short end of the stick, unfortunately.

http://www.atelier-canticle.net/files/49.jpg - The one on the left? It's Ryu from Breath of Fire IV. I forgot if you played the BoF series or not.

Yeah, they really do. But my team leader is awesome and let us have a team meeting today off shift (though paid) which basically turned into a ranting session. It definitely made me feel better to know everyone else felt the exact same way.

And yes, I have played BoF, though not IV yet. But Ryu is pretty much the same no matter what game it is appearance wise, just not always personality wise.

No matter what, nice people will get smacked upside the head in life.

SWOOOOORD (http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i150/ShikyouDaemon/DevilDevil/swordo2.jpg). Sob. My goal is to get to 100 colored icons and every little bit helps. sadly i'm the only one who colors these and there's no real color scheme (http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i150/ShikyouDaemon/DevilDevil/sword17copy.png).

Yeah, and the sad part is the nice people are going to be the ones providing the best service.

And yes, every little bit helps. I just make no guarantees on how long it will take because well, very new methods I'll be trying out, but the results look incredible!

People never get that, though. They'd rather scream at the poor person on the other side of the phone.

Aha, I'm in no rush! I need to scrounge up the money for a paid account and reread the manga again. Excited to see the results, though! If you need any more references, there's like 30 on

swordnotsouma. /o

Honestly, I don't get that many screamers. Sometimes I wish they would because if they raise their voices, cuss me out or insult me, I can hang up on them eventually. What I get are the ones who are understandably mad because they've been screwed over by the new process having a lot of problems to it because it is new and there isn't enough staffing to make it work like it should. But telling a customer to do the same thing that didn't work and expect that it will work is going to obviously make them irate. I don't blame the customers one bit, my frustration is with the fact that the process isn't working, but I have to pretend that it works fine to the customers.

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