Month: September 2016

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Oh Yeah… Gotta make sure ya get that pound of flesh!

First, I guess I took a little more than a short technology break. I don’t know how frequently I’m going to be posting but I’ll see what I can do to be a bit more regular about it.

Abusers

I’m posting about this growing trend to make sure that someone is absolutely bashed, kicked, shows appropriate contrition, and then is bashed and kicked some more.

Here’s an example.

Been working at a company 6 months, been transferring calls to the appropriate extension for all that time. Phones and extensions are changing all the time and so it was without much surprise that I get a new phone list.

Dead center of the page, there’s a RED label that says “Warm Transfer” followed by an extension. It’s an unfamiliar extension and so at a glance you’d think that the red lettering was calling your attention to a new extension.

WRONG!!!!

Beaten

Turns out someone thought that coloring only the words “Warm Transfer” was a good idea to highlight a supervisory extension on an otherwise data heavy, very busy page.

So in a chaotic, very busy environment, where you’re graded on how many calls you take in a day, and how often your associated paperwork has mistakes and people on the phones complaining about everything from their lot in life to other products, and the product that you actually are there to answer questions about, you make a mistake. In a normal workplace, making a mistake would be, meh and the employees wouldn’t live in fear. Unfortunately that’s not the case where I work.

Torturers

Someone on a call, needed to talk to a person in the department associated with the “Warm Transfer” number. So you dutifully set about to transfer them, and you dial the most prominent number on the phone list.

OOOPPPPSSSS!

An unhappy supervisor answers and asks how they can help. You explain what’s up and they respond by telling you “This is a supervisor line.” You apologize, then they ask how you got this number you explain it’s on a paper in front of you next to text that says warm transfer and tell the supervisor that you’ll let everyone around you know that the number in question is associated with a supervisor so they shouldn’t use it unless they need a supervisor.

The Sup tells you ok, and transfers you to the right extension. You take care of business, then move on to the next grumpy, annoyed, irate person.

Then your corporate instant messaging lights up asking all kinds of questions and demanding to know why you’re not paying attention to their instant messages, when you’re actually doing your job and talking to a customer.

You finish the call and respond to an interrogation via instant messaging. Then you’d think it was over.

IT’S NOT!

Screamingsupervisors

The last and final indignity is that now YOUR supervisor comes over to make sure that you are appropriately contrite, know what your mistake was, and that it was solely your fault that you interrupted a supervisor.

FOR GOD’S SAKE! REALLY?

It was a simple and easily corrected mistake. On top of that the mistake had been corrected & noted immediately after the first supervisor had said it was the wrong extension.

But in this day & age there is no such thing as an innocent mistake. 

Waiting for your mistake

So for me at least, every day is a grueling eight hour stress test.  Make no mistakes, answer every call, don’t spend too much time documenting, move on to the next call, don’t say what should be said or what needs to be said, and live in fear or terror of being chastised, yelled at, or honestly… bullied all day long.

I come home each day more exhausted than when I was working lifting and toting 50 LB bags of fertilizer, or crawling around in 100° F attics running ductwork.

I’ll tell you this, those honest jobs were a hell of a lot more personally satisfying. 

Workplace Bullying institute

Ahh well, this too shall pass.

And that’s why I’m looking for a new job and why I’ve been offline for the most part for the past few months.

We as a society need to remember that minor mistakes and problems, not only shouldn’t but needn’t be blown out of proportion. 

A simple comment, a word, or small mistake is not cause for the weight of JUSTICE to be brought to bear on the individual who misspoke or did something slightly wrong.

Most of the time, folks will correct their behavior on their own with a simple, “Hey, X, Y, or Z isn’t right.”

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Took a little technology break

Guess I should turn my phone on soon…

I spend each and every day wrangling technology. Either I’m working through some broken or malfunctioning bit of client technology or I battling with what has to be one of the most kludged systems I’ve ever seen, in an attempt to find, document, or send a replacement to fix a customer’s problem.

I just couldn’t take it anymore and shut everything off. I’ve been working through a problem with my automated backup routine and had finally narrowed it down to the antivirus software I’ve been running for years. Turns out the company updated their software and appears to have a bug in excluding files or folders from on-access scanning. The practical upshot of this is, every single byte of a backup is scanned. Meaning that an incremental backup of a couple of megabytes that should take 5 minutes now takes five hours.

Well, at least I know what’s causing the problem. On the down side, that’s many hours of my life spent troubleshooting that I’ll never get back.

Which probably explains why I decided to take a break from technology for a day.

To ease back into turning technology on;

I watched the Apple event on the Apple website, this morning. I wasn’t interested in watching it live because streaming the event is often a problem because a billion other people are trying to stream the same event. It’s a lot more convenient for me to wait until its up on the Apple website then I can watch it un-interrupted without the image freezing.

This is the annual iPhone event. On that note…

iPhone 7… Meh. I like the Jet Black color, I like the water resistance, I like that the home button is solid state,  and I like that the machine has a brighter display. But these things aren’t enough to make me salivate for the new model.

I’ve got an iPhone 6s and from what I could tell my current phone will run IOS10 just fine.

I did think that their use of power management inside the CPU was clever. After all, why fire up the whole CPU for simple tasks that could be served by a less power hungry subsystem? 

I’ll be looking at the iPhone 7s next year of course, but unless there is some compelling reason to replace my phone, I could potentially see myself holding off until the 8s.

I’m like ApplePay, in those places that I’ve been able to use it but it’s not ubiquitous just yet. The iPhone 7 doesn’t do anything to advance that over what my iPhone 6s does now.

I don’t play games on my phone, and so generally battery life isn’t an issue for me during the day. Which that brings me back to keeping my current model since the display, and processing speed aren’t something I generally have issues with. I suspect that a lot of folks are thinking along similar lines.

The Apple watch series 2 could be in my future. One of my concerns about the 1st generation was the water resistance issue. I tend to forget about water being a problem for a watch, primarily since I’ve worn diving class watches for years. I have the very bad habit of expecting my watch to go wherever I do and most of the time completely forget I’m wearing one. Not a problem for a dive watch, BIG problem for a little bit of high technology.

Where I live and work isn’t exactly the best place to be wearing a Rolex, Tissot, Ball, TAG or even a higher end Fossil. So for the past several months I haven’t been wearing a watch.

I like having a time piece on my wrist though.  Having someone mug me for a $400 Apple watch is a lot more palatable than a several thousand dollar swiss work of art.

The new Apple watch has a GPS built in and that plus some of it’s fitness features could be useful. Given the building I’m working in it might also be nice to find the sweetspot at my desk where my phone can actually “hear” the cell tower and then allow the watch to notify me of text messages phone calls. (Working in a “DeadZone” is a whole other story) I also can see the usefulness of having the ability to initiate a 911 call and send emergency text messages to selected individuals, directly from the watch. 

Particularly, since there are people in my life now that are more prone to having medical events that would require 911 interventions. 

I liked the AirPods. a little on the pricy side but neat. If Apple wanted to make a splash they could have asked Nichelle Nichols, or Zoe Saldana to introduce them. As the Apple event unfolded, showing off the new AirPods I couldn’t help but see Lt Uhura. Perhaps it was just me.