So why did I quit? The short answer is that the job was horrible. On a typical day at EC, customers and managers alike yelled at us, threatened with firing, forced us to do things outside of our individual realms of expertise. You name it, someone did it. At this time, I was on first shift and we had to login and be ready to work at 8:00 AM sharp. I was one of the many technical support managers, responsible for a team of seven plus all of the managerial duties that came along with the job. Therefore, I would come in, log in, and go talk to the Executive Director of Customer Service, a.k.a. the Pit Boss. Now it's 8:15 AM and everyone has finally trickled in to the Pit (1). We train on technical issues for thirty minutes each morning and test the teams later. Sounds like a good idea, right? Well, this could have been a good idea had the training curriculum actually been the responsibility of the managers because we constantly saw what problems the techs had as well as re-occurring customer issues. However, the curriculum came from the CEO and, by the way, he had not answered a technical email in so long, he did not remember what his passwords to the ticketing system were. He was too out of touch with our day to day routine to make an effective training schedule.

Then, at 8:45 AM, we filed the hard copies of the customer records, one team filing while the other two answered the phones and emails. We rotated and let one of the other teams take over after fifteen minutes so that each tech team filed in the morning. I had a real issue with filing for many reasons. One, it effectively thirded our work force in the morning, even if it was for only forty-five minutes. Two, temps would be able to do the filing faster and cheaper than we could, not to mention catch up on the huge backlog of filing we suffered under. Three, the sales team, which was larger than our entire technical support department by the way, did not have to file at all. After filing, I would check the Manager emails (2) that had come in and not been answered. My team and my counterparts on the different shifts were in charge of any customer whose customer number ended in 0, 1, 2, or 3. Usually, after I read the first email, someone above me would stop by and speak to me about not being on the phone. My answer was always that the Manager emails were the number one priority in the company, according to the CEO. As these emails were not answered from the previous night and having become my responsibility when I walked in the door, I needed to get them answered now. I show this boss all the emails that came in and then, typically, the person yelling at me would yell some more about the as yet unanswered emails. After I had enough, I would make a smart-ass comment to the tune of, “if you would just go away, I could answer these right now” and they would leave. Thankfully, I was immune to most of the office politics because no one else could do the job as well as I could.

Having finished the emails around 10:00 AM, I leave for a smoke break. These are highly regulated. You have exactly ten minutes and, if you are a minute late, you get a spot report (3). Did I mention the fact, at this time, I was making around $24,000 a year? Yes, I admit that the price of living in Fayetteville is lower than many other places and, yes, there was not a formal dress code so I saved money on clothes. Still, $25 out of a paycheck, when you are only bringing home about $657 per two weeks is a lot of money. Therefore, after sucking down the cigarette and talking to Beau (4), I go back inside, ready to work again. I read the multitude of emails that came in and answer the questions the "new" tech asks as I start working on the issues in said emails. By now, it is 11:00 AM and I answered most of the emails, except for the inevitable one that I need to have a systems administer correct. It doesn't matter if I know how to fix the issue, there are some problems that I do not have a deep enough access on the server to be able to fix. So, I submit a ticket to the queue, pull the ticket, escalate with comments to the admins, and call the admins with the ticket number, as per company policy. Since it is a good thing to be friends with the admins on duty, I ask the admin very nicely to fix the issue in the ticket. Generally, they agree and I hang up the phone, telling them I am calling them back in one hour.

Wow, look at that, its 11:07 AM. Finally, I can get some work done now that those Manager emails are finished. I start pulling tickets and answer the easy ones, using the “hot keys” that I specially created for this (ex. “Your username for the cpanel is cpanel. Let us know if we can be of any further assistance to you”). In the middle of this, I answer the new techs’ questions which are constant throughout the workday; the turnover rate in this industry is brutal so you are always teaching new people how to do the job. I work on manager tickets, either escalating them to the sys admins or dropping them to the tech level. The tickets are seperated into queues; the tech level being level one all the way up to level five, which was the officer level. Therefore, when I say I dropped a ticket, I dropped it back down to the tech queue. My managers would then yell at me for dropping tickets, even when I show that the techs did not put ANY comments on them. Company policy was that we could drop tickets if there were no comments added. To get myself out of that conversation before it becomes yet another argument; I take a manager call. The customer screams at me for half an hour before I can get the domain name. Another 15 minutes go by before I can ascertain what the issue actually is. Fixing it takes all of 30 seconds. I made another customer happy and I answered a bunch of other emails while I was on the phone. Finally, it is lunchtime. Generally, I pick up food for my team and return but sometimes I just bail out and go sit in the parking lot for half an hour, chain smoking. If I am late, that is yet another spot report meaning I will spend at least half an hour arguing about it. If they are going to steal money from me, I am going to make them pay for it somehow.

After lunch, I sit down; playing Staind on the computer and punching out any Manager issues that have come in since I left. Rank has its privileges, so I take control of the music. I do see, as usual, that my Manager has not answered any of the Manager emails or tickets; he is sitting with a phone attached to his ear. Therefore, I start working on the emails once more. Glancing at the clock, it is 1:30 and I call the admins back. Sometimes, they act like they never got that first phone call and I have to either beg or order them, depending on who I am speaking with, to fix the issue now. Unless the admin is working on another, more important, issue, they will fix the problem while I am on the phone with them. I then go into the manager queue and pull all the tickets the admins dropped. After checking to make sure all issues are corrected, I make up some bullshit answer based off the bullshit comments that the admins put into the comments and send that out to the customers.

At 2 PM, the CEO comes in, demanding to know why two servers are down and why there are 100 + tickets in the queue. One of us calls the admins to ascertain why servers are down; Kernal panic and file systems checks, fairly typical of the Linux servers in prime time traffic, especially since the servers are overloaded. The CEO then blames my department for everything that has gone wrong in the last three months, regardless of it being a billing, sales, sys admin, or network administrator error. He threatens, again, to replace all of us with “untrained monkeys” from Africa. Finally, he leaves and I continue to answer tickets as fast as I can pull them.

By 2:30 PM, I have kicked out 30 tickets and I pull another 30. The Pit Boss yells at me for pulling too many tickets at a time. I counter that I am the only person answering tickets and that I answer the tickets better, and more correctly, than anyone else. The Pit Boss responds with the argument that ‘manager's are not supposed to answer tech tickets because they are supposed to be doing managerial things’ like manager calls and emails, I suppose. I end up blowing off the Pit Boss because otherwise I would be stuck here at 8:00 PM, still answering day shift tickets. 3:00 PM rolls around, I sneak out of the Pit, desperate for a cigarette and I am not the only one. I swear, more people pick up smoking at that job than anywhere else I have worked, it was just that stressful. The ridiculous part is that it does not need to be! Had the CEO just expanded the server room, hired some more techs and let us train them properly, everything would run a lot smoother.

I crawl back into the Pit and start answering Manager emails and tickets while taking, on average, three manager calls. I churn out at least 40 more tickets while on the calls; thank God, I am really good at multitasking. Then, the sales manager makes the mistake of wandering into my territory. Here is a short snippet of that particular conversation; SM - What, there are only 40 tickets in the queue, why aren't your people on the phone. ME - They ALL have customers on the phone. SM. - Well you know that YOUR cancellations count for the sales people too. ME - Then get your people on the phone and help us out. SM - Mutters an innuendo about who I am supposedly sleeping with (the CEO's nephew). ME - Ignore it and her. I am past furious at this point. Some time around 4:00 PM, I remember that I have not even glanced at the cancellations today and I see four new ones. After dealing with that, I answer another 40 or so tickets; the daily average of tickets for me is 80 plus the manager tickets and the manager emails. I then do an audit of my people to see how many they did. They did, on average, 15 tickets each and I have to re-answer three of the tickets because the answers were wrong. I do a final check to make sure manager tickets are caught up. They are not, everyone did a ticket dump in the manager queue so they will not have to stay late and answer them. The sales team is particularly bad about treating us like that. Therefore, I drop the ones that do not need to be there, answer the ones I can, and escalate the rest. My boss yells at me again for dropping tickets and I threaten to quit again. I finish the rest of the tickets in the tech queue and the manager queue.

Finally, at 5:30, I hand in reports for the day. The Pit boss wants to have a conversation with me and I remind him that I was supposed to go home an hour ago, along with the rest of my crew. Overriding my objections, he drags me into the conference room where he tells that my attitude is the reason that I missed the sys admin promotion again. Since we have such a great relationship (I trust him not to mess with me or my “protectors” will finish him), I tell the Pit Boss what I think of him and this stupid job. He agrees with me and hands me yet another spot report because I answered an email incorrectly; at this rate, I will owe the company money. Fruitlessly, I argue the spot report; I answer on average 80 tickets per day and 79 of them were 100% accurate today, giving me like a 99.5% accuracy rate for the day. The Pit Boss tells me that none of that matters because I negated all of that by messing up this email to a high profile customer. I tell the Pit Boss that is shit and he agrees with me once more, too bad he is too much of a pussy to do anything about it. Before I can leave, he asks me if I am still sleeping with the CEO's nephew. Once more, I refuse to answer the question because this is flat out not company business. The Pit Boss tells me that I am probably going to be moved to either second or third shift. When I argue that I just got off second shift less than a month ago, he apologizes but insists that I have to move anyway.

Now, I am not going to sit here and pretend that I did nothing wrong while I worked for the company or that they were just out to get me. They were not. I just have a very forceful personality (not to say a bitch) and I tended to be at odds with the management of EC because their corporate ethos was just wrong. They treated us like crap; they did not pay us enough; they had very chauvinistic attitudes; and they had some very shady business practices. Had EC had better management, treated us better, or just paid us a bit more, I probably would have stayed with the company. Had they just followed their own policies, I might have stayed but they broke them once to often for me to consider it. EC was truly a dog eat dog company; something I remember being shocked to discover. To make matters worse, the CEO and all the other officers were oblivious to the nasty behavior and some of them even contributed to that particular office fund. There was no need to yell at anyone, ever, especially when the other people around you are on the phone with customers. Managers and officers should never berate their staff, especially in front of other people because it undermines that person’s credibility.