All about the Pentiums (Confessions
part 4 )
Recently I helped some friends move. My oldest daughter came
with us to help. She helped as much as you can expect a 6 year old to help. So once she was tired she sat there on the
couch and the lady we were helping move showed Madison her Gameboy Advance SP.
Madison has no clue what it was and no interest in it. I lit up like a
Christmas tree. Then in appreciation for our help she gave it to us along with
5 games. I told her a story of how I had
one and I loved it and would play it all the time when I did Helpdesk at the
bank. She gave me that look of “shouldn’t you have been working at the helpdesk
instead of playing video games?” and I explained to her what it was like to
work there. She was very amused
especially as Lindsey confirmed my story. Then occurs to me I hadn’t done a
funny tech support post in a while and I have lots of story that fits this
theme.
All those times the bank paid me to
do nothing.
Doing call
center work is difficult. It’s considered the armpit of the tech industry a lot
of the time. These Dilbert comics are really not that far off.
My job at
the helpdesk largely consisted of me telling people two things. “Have you tried
turning it off and on again?” and “Ok. Let me reset your password for you.”
That was half of what I did. The bank didn’t really invest in what you might
deem “cutting edge” technology. So when someone rebooted, and we had to stay on
the phone until they got all the way in, would take up to 15-20 minutes for
some departments. The users would put you on hold for those 15-20 minutes so
what to do? We would spend this time surfing the internet since we were on hold
and couldn’t leave lest the user come back at any moment. Then of course they
the bank blamed our long hold times on personal internet surfing instead of old
tech and insufficient staff. So they made a rule, no personal internet usage.
What do you
do while you are on hold for 15-20 minutes at a time several times a day? We
would draw, listen to music, write, email each other, play catch or trashcan
basketball, eat, sing along to the hold music, and in my case, play Game-boy.
While it was wrong for us to use the internet for personal reasons all those
other things were perfectly fine.
Eventually
we were bought out by a larger bank, ironically two months after being assured
by our CEO in a series of speeches all across the company that they were in no
hurry to sell the bank.
They were
giving out 60 day notices to everyone but they overlooked our department. We
were supposed to be let go in march/april and then a few days before what was
initially supposed to be our last day they realized that no one ever gave our
department our 60 day notice. So we got our 60 day notices on March 28th.
They removed all our responsibilities to the other bank on March 31st.
We still had to come in until May 27th. So we came in on March 31st
and we had no work to do. The first day or two we just sat there not really
sure what to do.
We started taking longer breaks, longer
lunches, a lady brought in her portable dvd player and we watched movies. That’s
right the entire month of April and the first part of May they paid me to come
in and sit at my desk in case they needed me. We weren’t allowed to look for or
accept other jobs because they might endanger our severance packages. My last
act as Team Lead was to teach my entire team how to play Texas Hold Em.
It actually
was a lot of fun all things considered. They laid me off In May then hired me
back 5 months later. Fast forward to the end of August 2007. I get back from a
trip to SE Asia and find out that once again our department is going to be
eliminated because of reasons. Most likely we will get our notices come
Sept/Oct 2007. So Sept 2007 comes around and once again I don’t have any work
to do and since I’m a field technician at this point there’s no office for me
to go into. So I “work” from home. I go from 40 hours a week to about 5-10 most
of that being Monday.
That’s right
now they are paying me to sit at home and be ready to go to work in case they
need me. So I get up each morning at regular time, get ready, then proceed to
spend the first half of my day doing school/church work (I was in seminary at
the time) and my afternoons involved a lot of naps and PlayStation 2.
-5.jpg) |
| I beat this game in less then a month. Normally would have taken 4-5. |
This went on
from Sept 2007 until June 2008 when I got my second 60 day notice. Good times!
Glen
