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| A Day in the Life of a Tech Support Manager at a Web Hosting Company |
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Have you ever wondered why the turnover rate in the tech support industry is so high (about every 3-6 months)? Have you ever wondered why, when you do have to call technical support, that it is very hard to A. get someone who knows how to fix your issue and B. will be helpful and curteous? Have you ever wondered why you have so many issues with your website? Read this, then, and get a clue...this was a typical Monday morning for me at my old job in hell.
8:00 A.M.
Finally get to work and up the elevator to the third floor. Having rushed about like a mad woman for the last hour to get to work on time and got stuck behind two trains, why am I not surprised to see that I am the first one in? Greet the third shifters with sympathy for their situation. Say hello to the Executive Director of Customer Service, aka Pit Boss. Get bitched out because my people are not in yet.
8:15 AM
Everyone has finally trickled in. Start training on some dumb assed shit for some dumb assed test that has no meaning what-so-ever in terms of doing the job that we are supposed to do.
8:45 AM
File for 15 minutes. Yeah, right. You have got to be joking. You want us to file but you don't make either the billing or the sales people file? Uhhu.
9:00 AM
Read email. Get yelled at for not being on the phone. Explain to them, yet again, that they TOLD me that these emails to the managers took priority over answering the phones. Show them all of the emails that were NOT answered in the last 24 hours. Get bitched at for not having them answered. Argue that I am not responsible for the emails that do NOT come in on my shift. They yell at me some more, for my attitude this time, and go away to let me answer the emails in ~relative~ peace.
10:00 AM
Smoke break. Thank God. Ten minutes of relative quiet.
10:10 AM
After reading through the multitude of emails that had come in and answering all of the idiotic question the "new" tech asks (I told you yesterday, the username for the linux cpanel is cpanel), finally am able to work on the issues in said emails. Someone stops by to give me some gossip, ie one of my "friends" is trying to fuck me over again.
11:00 AM
Finally have all of the emails answered, except for the one that I need to have a sys admin take a look at. Submit a ticket to the queue, pull the ticket, escalate with comments to the admins, call the admins with the ticket number. Ask very prettily for the admin to fix the issue in the ticket. Get grumped at and hang up the phone, telling them I am calling them back in one hour.
11:07 AM
Start to pull tickets. Answer the easy ones with the hot keys that I have specially made for this (ex. Your username for the cpanel is cpanel. Let us know if we can be of any further assistance to you.) Answer new tech's stupid questions. Start to work on manager tickets, either escalating them to the sys admins or back down to tech level. Get bitched at for de-escalating tickets, even when I show that the tech did not put ANY comments in the ticket. To get out of that conversation, take a manager call. Get screamed at for half an hour before I can get the domain name out of the customer. Another 15 minutes go by before I can ascertain what the issue is. Fixing it takes 30 seconds. Another happy customer, my eardrums are bleeding but oh well.
12:00 PM
Leave for lunch. Hit Mcdonalds. Inhale food. Smoke two cigarettes. Bitch about work.
12:31 PM
Come back from lunch. Get a negative $25 spot report (yup comes out of my check) for being one minute late. Argue the report needlessly for half an hour.
1:01 PM
Answer all the manager emails that have come in since I went to lunch. Deal with all the manager tickets that came in while I was gone. What the fuck, am I the only one that answers these? All the other managers are on manager calls. Yeah. Right. To whom, their significant other?
1:31 PM
Call admins back. They act like they never got that first phone call. Tell them to fix it now. It is fixed while I am on the phone with them. Go into the manager queue and pull all the tickets the admins dropped back down. Check to make sure all issues are corrected. Make up some bullshit answer based off the bullshit comments that the admins put into the comments.
2:00 PM
CEO comes in, demanding to know why two servers are down and why there are 100 + tickets in the queue. Call the admins to ascertain why servers are down - kernal panic and file systems checks. Want to tell CEO the real reason for the 100 tickets in the queue is because he is to much of a money hog to hire more damn people and to get the managers off the fucking phones. Refrain from doing so. CEO blames tech support for EVERYTHING that has gone wrong in the last three months, regardless of it being a billing, sales, sys admin, or network administrator error. Threatens to replace all of us with untrained monkeys from Africa. Wait til he goes and bothers someone else and cuss him out fluently under my breath for 10 minutes, while answering tech tickets as fast as I can pull them.
2:30 PM
Kicked out 30 tickets, pull another 30. Get yelled at for pulling too many tickets at a time. Argue that I am the only person answering tickets at all and that I answer them faster and more correctly than anyone else anyways. Get told that manager's are not supposed to answer tech tickets. Blow off manager because I am not going to be here at 8:00 PM answering day shift tickets. Go back to answering tickets.
3:00 PM
Smoke break, God let me just get through the day without killing anyone.
3:10 PM
Answer all manager emails. Handle all manager tickets. Take three manager calls. Answer 40 more tickets while on the manager calls. Am I the only fucking manager in this fucking room? Can I get some goddamned help please?!? Bite the head off of the sales manager who wants to bitch me out for some stupid reason. SM - What, there are only 40 tickets in the queue, why aren't your people on the phone. ME - They are on the phone, you stupid fuck, they ALL have customer's on the phone. SM - Well you know that YOUR cancellations count for the sales people too. ME - Then get your sorry ass on the phone and help us out. SM - Mutters an inuendo about whom I am supposedly sleeping with (the CEO's nephew). ME - Ignore it and her. I am so furious, I feel like cracking her skull open. Bitch!
4:00 PM
Remember that I haven't even glanced at the cancellations today. Cuss loudly when I see 4 new cancellations. Call all four of them. Get cussed out by the two I get a hold of. Cancel them. Answer another 40 or so tickets. Daily average of tickets is 80 for me plus the manager tickets and the manager emails. Do an audit of my people to see how many they did. They did, on average, 15 tickets. Close eyes, count to ten. Read tickets. Reanswer three of the tickets because the answers were so wrong. Check to make sure manager tickets are caught up. They are not, everyone did a ticket dump in the manager queue. Drop the ones that don't need to be there, answer the ones I can, escalate the rest. Get yelled at again for dropping tickets. Threaten to quit again. Finish the rest of the tickets in the tech queue and the manager queue.
5:30 PM
Hand in reports for the day. Pit boss wants to have a conversation with me. I remind him that I was supposed to go home an hour ago. Dragged into the conference room to be told that my attitude is the reason that I will not be promoted to be a sys admin. Tell the Pit boss what I think of him and this stupid fucking job. Desparatly bite back tears while I sign another spot report because I answered an email incorrectly, at this rate I will owe the company money. Fruitlessly argue on the spot report that I answer on average 80 tickets per day and that 79 of them were 100% accurate today, giving me like a 99.5% accuracy rate for the day. Am told that does not matter because I negated all of that by fucking up this email to a high profile customer. Tell the Pit boss that is horse shit. He agrees. Asks me if I am still sleeping with CEO's nephew.
6:30 PM
Last person on day shift to leave. I hate this fucking job. Pit Boss catches me on my way out of the door, he tells me that I am probably going to be moved to either second or third shift. When I argue that I just got off of second shift, he says that he is sorry but is going to have to move me anyways. Fuck you, mother fucker!
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