I’m very annoyed right now with Mike at the helpdesk. I got an e-mail from him yesterday complaining about the fact that there’s always so many e-mails left when I get done at the end of the day. Well Lets start with YOU then… Where the problem lies.
He gets here at 5am. Spends the first 30-40 minutes of the day reading news sites, etc. Ok. Fine. I spend my fair share of time on personal sites too. However I do all my personal browsing at the END OF THE DAY. When I’ve already completed everything for the day, or I do it when I have down time (such as now). Then he spends another 30-40 minutes on the phone with his wife. During all this time, e-mails are coming in and there’s whatever e-mails he HASN’T yet opened from the day before sitting there.
Then once he FINIALLY gets around to starting his work. He opens up THREE, yes THREE! Outlooks. WHY anyone needs to open THREE copies of outlook when they all contain the SAME FREAKING E-MAIL is beyond me! Then he just starts with the top most e-mail and starts working from there. Now…
To explain how our e-mails are set up…. Anything that HASN’T been handled yet, and thus doesn’t have a ticket number is at the TOP of the inbox. Once something is handled and is given a ticket number, it gets categorized. Until last well All of these were put in numberical order, newest ones at the BOTTOM of the inbox. However they started the numbering over and now everything is kinda in the middle of the inbox.
The inbox for ICHELP has over 14,000!!! Yes, 14,000!!!!! E-mails! Dating to over a year ago! How many of these more then a month old are being worked on? Maybe 5-10 of them. Why keep 14,000 e-mails in the inbox when they could be seperated out into an archive? Thus meaning it wouldn’t take 10 minutes to scroll from the top of the inbox to the bottom?
Well acording to mike it’s because “What if someone replies to one of these old ones, it’d be hard to find the thread if it’s in an archived folder”… Now I’m not talking archived as in, Lets export all of these to TAPE and delete them. all I want to do is archive them to a different folder So that we only have the MOST RECENT and thus CURRENTLY WORKING ON e-mails to have to look at!
Because I REALLY DON’T CARE ABOUT “Page Freezed and log outs” Which hasn’t been touched since 7/2004!
Anyways. I think the best thing to do is to READ ALL THe NEW e-mail first. So that way you know what’s got the highest priority. If you just start at the top, then the chances of you getting to the bottom, where things that have already been handled are at, is very LOW. Thus meaning that things sit at the bottom of the inbox (MIND YOU URGENT THINGS) and never get replied to for days, or WEEKS at a time (Yes, I actaully watched something which was marked as “SUPER URGET” set there for 2 weeks before I finially just fucking did it!
This has caused me to miss deadlines before. Because the HD has to send out approval requests for everything that us as SA’s have to do… If they get the request to send a request, and don’t get around to it.. Then we can’t do it! Thus meaning we miss our deadlines.
Ok, so we’ve established that you should read all the e-mails first to prioritize. This never takes me more then 30 minutes to do. Then go back and start working on the most urgent of issues, as well as the ones where you just have to send an e-mail saying “This is done”.
Second problem is that he spends FOREVER on the phone. He can’t just say, “What’s your problem, here’s what I need to know” He feels he has to give EACH AND EVERY person that calls a personal history lesson in computers and how they work and “Back in my day things weren’t this complicated.” Believe me, as an SA I’ve had to sit through more then my fair share of his history lessons about how he ran a multi-million dollor corporation with one computer and how he programmed things to be effiecient and how he doesn’t feel we need something as complicated as we have to run our software. Blah blah blah.
HELLO, Things change! And if you really were SUCCESSFUL at running this multi-million dollar corporation then WHY THE HELL are you working as a HELP DESK person at like 50 years old?!
I spend on average 3-5 minutes on each phone call, he spends on average 20-30 minutes per CALL! Ben and I sat here one morning listening to him talk on the phone to a customer. it took all my energy to not burst out laughing. It was so hilarious!
So the real problem here is WHAT DOES THIS GUY DO ALL DAY! If Wells Fargo, or Dell, or some one else like that who runs HUGE HD’s had every employee like this guy, they’d have to have 10 MILLION TImES MORE pEOPLE Then they have now!
I’m so glad that my time on the HD is nearly over… All next week he’s on vacation, then the other guy is on vacation for pretty much the two weeks after that. Then I’m gone for a week… THEN! No more HD!… Though I get the feeling that I’ll still be working backup, which means that I’ll have to deal with people even more then i do now. How annoying!
In other non-complaining news… I got my 1gig of RAM today for my powerbook. I’m very excited and it’s running a 100x faster. It’s amazing what RAM can do for a computer. Now it’s not caching to the hard drive. 🙂 I’m still annoyed though because the external monitor still doesn’t work. I’m going to take it to the apple store this weekend… I also need to buy AppleCare for it, but I’m not sure I want to spend the $349 for it. Just seems a little over priced. But I’ll thikn about it. COuld come in handy, you never know.
I’m also thinkinga bout getting a mac desktop. The choices are a Mini (1.42Ghz) an iMac (2Ghz) or a Power Mac (Daul 2.5Ghz)… I kind of want to just buy the mini for now to start, and then upgrade to the PowerMac once the Intel ones come out. I’ll have to think about it more. But I really want a mac desktop so that I can get my current desktop to be working more on the mythtv project…
After I installed my RAM I went to Daphne’s and got greek food. It was SO YUMMY. From there I worked on my iTunes project a little. I think appleScript might be the way to go? Not sure yet… Perl is also a contender.
I was really sleepy about 8ish so I took a nap and ended up sleeping till 11. I meant to get up at 10 and go work out, but that clearly didn’t happen.
Working 12-10 tomorrow, and then 12-10 every day next week. Going to be one hella long week. Thankfully I’ve been taking 2 hours m-t off this week so only working 6 hour days.
Tomorrow after work I’m hitting the fair at 10 to whenever then home to sleep hard core. Saturday I’m not sure what exactly I’m doing yet. I’m on call again already. Blah
You know, I realized I went to all the work to put in Current Music to my posts, but I never use it… Even though I’m almost ALWAYS listening to music when I post… So today I did, and hopefully I will remember to do that more in the furture. 🙂
It was HOT here today, like upper 80’s. I heard it was 112 in Palm Springs today. Crazy shit. Supposed to hit 97 back home today. But it’s raining now. How I miss thunderstorms. It smelled like it was going to rain today when I came to work. But by that time it was already too cold to do anything good.
Ok, I think I’m done. Night all.
PS, one more thing: Welcome to my Method Studios guest… You guys do some cool work there, love the website as well. 🙂 I’ve also been seeing someone from United at LAX here every day, welcome to you as well! And just a blanket welcome to all the other people who are new, including the users from Principal.com, and the .mil/.gov people! 😀 Please don’t arrest me.