All about the Pentiums (Confessions part 4 )

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 28^th. They removed all our responsibilities to the other bank on March 31^st. We still had to come in until May 27^th. So we came in on March 31^st 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.  

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