The Raging Tech

New Help at Work

Tags: GMAT, grad school, personal, Work

Terrible Tuesdays

Good grief. Exam week for college students apparently makes everyone grumpy and annoying. At first I thought, maybe I’m not being polite enough, so I tried harder on the phones today.

Then I heard other people in the call center dealing with angry clients, too. Apparently during exam week, everything is an emergency, and everyone’s computer is broken, and everyone needs it fixed now or sooner.

Couple this with an onslaught of completely retarded problems, like previously mentioned e-mail account issues and students who can’t follow directions.

To add insult to injury, the students still continue to queue up in the entrance way that is shared between student parking and faculty & staff parking, thereby blocking my car from leaving for lunch and making me wait, honking and angry, to get back into the faculty & staff parking after lunch, and making me late. They just sit there, waiting on someone to leave, so they can get into a parking space, instead of moving along and looking for parking elsewhere.

At least there’s an end-of-the-year party I’m invited to tonight. Maybe I’ll push one of them off the deck and into the river. That’ll make me feel better.

Tags: ARGH, dumb, faculty, staff, students, stupid, Tech Support, tuesday

Tired, Sleepy, LOLCat-y.

I’m not sure why I’m so tired, but I do know that I went through half the night in a very light state of sleep. I woke up around 3am and the TV and light were still on. I went and shut those off and I slept slightly better for the next 4 hours before I had to get up.

Also, this morning I’m with one other person on the phones at the help desk, and they and I both keep running into calls that last 25-30 minutes each. It’s really crazy. I’m hungry - I want to go to lunch in like the next fifteen minutes but we just don’t have any coverage right now.

Here’s a LOLCat to brighten up your day:

see more crazy cat pics

Tags: Err., LOLCat, sleepy, tired, Work

Current Work Projects

I have several things I’m trying to do at work while I’m answering calls and hanging on to my sanity. It’s neat to have something to be put in charge of and take responsibility for.

Project 1: Update the Help Desk Website Copy

Myself and the hourly full-time guy are in charge of updating the Help Desk web site so that it contains more accurate information. They’ve adopted Red DOT as our content management system (CMS), but the content itself is really outdated.

Project 2: Presentation on our Student Self-Service Portal, we’ll call it MySTUFF (fictionalized for anonymity).

Friday our entire team is giving a presentation to the student services group (they handle registration, fee and fine payments, advising, and other student things) on our online portal where students register for classes and pay fees and do all the things the SSG is in charge of handling. The basic premise behind this is we want both our team and their team to be as helpful as possible to new students when they call in this time of year with problems logging in or not having an account yet, or setting up their email.

Project 3: (Personal) Read Rules for Renegades by Christine Comaford-Lynch.

I’ve read the first chapter of this book so far, and it’s pretty engaging. A lot of this book is about self-confidence and defeating the demons within, so to speak, but it’s a good motivational book so far. I want to try and finish it by the end of the week so I can return it and tell my boss if it’s any good.

There you have it, a small glimpse into my work world. Hope you enjoyed it, I’ve got to get back to it.

Tags: help desk, projects, Tech Support, Work

Burned Hands for Hump Day

It’s Wednesday, and at 10:01am I already have burned hands and a year end evaluation for work. The burned hands are compliments of an over-filled coffee cup from the coffee bar upstairs from my work place. It literally jumped out of the cup and the lid slipped loose and it started to swish out around the edges, drenching my hands in hot pain.

My boss keeps a case of bottled water near her desk, and she opened her office back door and I stepped outside while she poured a bottle out over my hands. I feel mostly okay now, my left hand is still a little tender.

Calls are a little crazy today, people seem unusually on-edge for a Wednesday. Which ultimately means I have to be a little bit nicer and a little bit more patient just to be sure I don’t reflect their attitudes back to them. Hooray customer service.

Tags: accident, burn, coffee, hurt, ouch, spill