Monday, September 29, 2014

The Magic Of Apathy

A co-worker found a very effective way to deal with difficult cases.  He followed Roderick's Rules and performed a "Deny, Deny, Deny".

Let me expand.

I get a frustrated customer from Widgets Inc. that said my co-worker (let's call him "Fred" for this example) was supposed to have called him back last night.  I check the case and there are no notes from Fred and Fred did not take ownership of the case.  So, as far as our records showed, Fred never touched the case or talked to this customer.

Normally in tech support you follow the "Trust, but verify" model which means, the person on the phone isn't lying to you, but they might be wrong in what they are telling you.  This is a pretty effective method for everything so I tried to reach Fred on IM.  Unfortunately Fred was at lunch.

The customer was VERY SPECIFIC about what Fred did, said and told them he was going to do.  Plus they were pretty upset that they weren't called back.  So I wind up working the case with an unhappy customer trying to get them back to happy status.

It was a beautiful job on Fred's part.  He ditches the unhappy customer, the difficult case, plus his STATS look good and since he put nothing in the case, he gets no blow back.

I'm now working under a couple of different stat metrics which are screwing me.  First, the more cases you pull, the better your stats.  Balance that with the customer satisfaction survey (CSAT) and it rolls together to determine who gets a better shift at the end of the rotation.

Fool me once...

Saturday, September 27, 2014

Body Envy

I was in high school when the movie Top Gun came out in 1986.  I remember the volleyball scene and while the scene was in there to provide eye candy for the ladies, it was soul crushing for a 14 year old airplane geek.

Well, hello there ladies!
Yep, I wanted to fly jets.  Prior to 1986 I wasn't looking anywhere other than the cockpit of an F-15.  It was (and still is) a BEAST of an aircraft.  Top Gun changed that for me and I was dying to fly an F-14.  When the F-18 came to the fleet, I was still a Tomcat fanboy.

Furthermore, I wanted to be a sex symbol.  To have the ladies oooh and ahhh over my chiseled features.

I wanted to be a hunky guy like Val Kilmer.

Finally I accomplished at 42 what I couldn't do at 14.

Well, hello ladies!  NOM!  NOM!  NOM!
Yep, I finally have Val Kilmer's body.  We are literally twice then man we used to be.