Life Moves Pretty Fast

[ehowton]

Work has been interesting (and by interesting I mean insufferable) insofar as we haven't had any projects for a couple of weeks - this is rare. Also serendipitous, as we've been given weeks of computer-based training to do on future applications and processes. In-between the spirit-crushingly dull online training, at least I personally have had some server outages and other unix distractions to keep my week bearable. Thankfully, I can navigate my iPod effortlessly with Rhythmbox, which turns out is MUCH faster than Amarok AND I don't have to download kdm libraries!

I'm back on schedule - that is to say, "non-Summer hours." I am a magnificent creature of routine and now that the kids are back in school, I'm *at* work at 0700 instead of my wife rousing me at 0900 for my daily conference call, usually not making it in until 1100 :/ Speaking of the 0900 meeting, after not saying anything for a month other than, "Nothing for the Group" I recently announced,

I usually listen to very thematic music throughout the day. However, this morning I've been powering through a lot of Rammstein - German Industrial - and I have NO IDEA how this may affect me.

Despite my lackadaisical week at work, I've had plenty of pre/during/post work activities which keeps me, quite literally - hopping. From the school's gear-up meetings (my son asked that I volunteer to be a parent-chaperon at 3-day overnight Adventure Camp), to the P90X my wife and I started (at 0400!!!) each morning as a sort of mild martial-arts replacement program until we're able to get back to that sometime next year. And we're still walking in the evenings which have turned blessedly cooler as Autumn descends and still reading "The Hobbit" to the kids. Busy, busy!



Professionally, things haven't been as rosy. We've been through a series of layoffs (the first I can recall in about ten years) with the threat of more to come. And though my wife and I have run through several exercises of our "emergency plan" of different scenarios over the years (one of which includes my job loss) I found it particularly difficult to lose one of my co-workers. So while this was our second cut in as many weeks, and reduced our already small numbers considerably (we've lost over 25% of our team in under a month without any decrease in work) increasing our individual load and accelerating on-call rotation, it was also unexpectedly painful.

And it seemed to me the hissing sound, as it were, of an opening sepulcher, punctuated by the stale odor which came behind; The Grim Reaper curled his bony hand in our direction and I heard a scream. "Behold, one shall be taken from you." And she was gone, and joy followed with her.

Now I'm not one to let external influences change my behavior. I keep my head up, and remind everyone outwardly that we all still have a job to do and to do it well. But inside, I think I died a little bit. We are all brilliantly executing our assigned functions, but no one's heart is in it, and I have not been motivated to write. Nothing I say here will ever change anything.

But I can try.

Comments

[schpydurx.livejournal.com]

I don't see how it is my job to do my job and someone else's job when that co-worker doesn't do their job. I don't get paid to do both jobs, so why should I work two jobs? Furthermore, if I am doing someone else's' job because they aren't pulling their own weight, shouldn't the deadweight be pruned so the team can grow?

[ehowton.livejournal.com]

That's probably why you struggle.

[schpydurx.livejournal.com]

Ya think?

Where would I be without ehowton's guiding light to illuminate my path. Ass.

The double-suck in this scenario is that the department that I'm talking about doesn't just do a kind of work, everyone does the same thing according to their ability. Namely, answering the phone and solving customer's problems. There aren't tasks that can be assigned according to strengths and weaknesses.

[ehowton.livejournal.com]

Really? As IS Manager I got to see exactly how the Helpdesk Queue Manager ensured the right calls went to the right techs. Even in a narrowly defined "silo" environment where what few people I had appeared to "do the same thing" looking in, some were better at some aspects of the job than others. We had one guy who was better at identifying hardware anomalies which presented themselves as application artifacts and another who was better at navigating the numerous menu system than he was at troubleshooting. One guy could build & deploy systems faster than the rest and one was great as the customer interface.

All I'm saying is its your lack of willingness to excel which holds you back. "I don't see how it is my job to do my job and someone else's job when..." is a very poor attitude to have whether its justified or not and if you think management can't see the weak links in their chains you're gravely mistaken.

It is frustrating though, when it takes "over three years" to see that fruition. THAT'S what never ceases to amaze me. How long it sometimes takes.

[schpydurx.livejournal.com]

Now that you put things in that perspective, I will concede a little ground.

We do have people that are better at certain things than others, but the manager never gets involved. The problem that we do have though, is that when there is a mistake, instead of dealing with the person that made the mistake, the entire department gets chewed out. I have a problem with that.

The problem with what goes on in the department is that we aren't assigned calls; all calls go into the queue and we call everyone back. So those that don't know what they're doing either take calls that are simple or they take everything so that they can claim to have "triaged" but in reality all they're doing is passing the buck because they aren't cutting down on the volume that is passed on to the people that know what they're doing.

The good news is that I'm not in that department anymore, so I shouldn't care. The bad news is that currently, they've got one of the developers working on integrating the ticket tracking system and the call log in order to try to get a feel for how long an average call for a specific problem takes. There's a few problems with this.

First, there isn't enough granularity with the types of calls. The call type is vaguely broken up by product and category. The problem here is that there isn't enough categories, so someone that is having a problem with turing on their machine when using a specific title of ours is a whole lot different from some dipshit that doesn't know the first thing about networking and blames us for "their program not working correctly."

Secondly, the statistics aren't going to be helpful at all. Instead of taking a hard look at the data, the numbers will be used to justify keeping the deadweight around. "She takes more calls than anybody and she has the shortest time on her calls too!" Oh yeah? So could I if I called up a customer and told them to eat shit and die. What's your point?

When the development came up in Code Review I was livid. I facetiously asked if they were going to include the audio of the call as a column in the data set. I later made another comment to whester (who, by the way, is having to pick up the slack I leave behind) that perhaps they ought to have yet two more columns for the nudies taken by the X-ray scanners (which of course my company doesn't have–yet) and the analysis of the weekly anal swabbing.

Tech Support is the department that holds everything together because that is the department that catches all the shit from both ends. If the turnover I predicted occurs, there will be no more company.

At least they haven't started welshing on the tuition reimbursement–yet.