The Fallout

I received a response from the TPC I sent the scathing e-mail to. It was not what I expected.

Two of the managers from the TPC and one of the managers from the customer we both support joined me on the call. I was asked point blank by the TPC, "Who should be running this?" I gave them an earful.

Since our customer was on the line, I prefaced my comments with, "You know Burt (the TPC manager), $customer does not want to be burdened with our internal problems. She is welcome to stay, but she is not required to be here. With that said..." and then I lit into them.

First I defined what we are contractually obligated to provide and how the TPC was impeding that by not documenting what their techs were doing in the ticketing system. "If they fail to do that", I said, "then we cannot do our part and keep the customer and our mgmt informed of the progress or lack thereof."

They tried to defend themselves by blaming it on the e-mail system not delivering messages to me and I shot that down real quick by telling them that the only acceptable delivery of updates was via the ticketing system and phone...two methods the techs in India an KL fail to utilize. My tongue lashing went on for about 15 minutes or so, then the other manager, Don said quite simply, "You are correct. We have failed to live up to the contractual obligations and for that we have no excuse. We will work to rectify the situation." We ended the call with an invitation to me to join the concalls next week on the resolution of this. I do not plan on attending. Instead, I am going to let our escalation manager attend. If you think I have a bad attitude, then you have not heard him in action. To give you an idea on how caustic he can be, allow my manager to do that: "The TL/colleague is the good cop, the Esc Mgr is an a$$hole and El Gee is somewhere in between". I think that says it all.

After that meeting, I was anticipating having regular updates to the open trouble ticket the TPC is working on...boy was I wrong. There were no updates all day long. Some rectification.

All I can say is that the rest of my day went by pretty quickly. I told the my TL/Colleague to go home early since he was going to have a rough weekend but no more did he walk out the door was I told to help the Esc Mgr work on a load of tickets that one of the local techs owned. It seems he has done all the work, but he does not have access to the system to close the cases. My boss told the Esc Mgr and me to close them...125 of them. At first I thought we would have to close them one at a time, but after poking around the system for a while, I figured out a way to run a query on all tickets assigned to that tech that were older than 90 days and I closed them with simple batch close. Of course there is no real info in the ticket describing what the tech did, but that is not my problem...it is the techs.

I handed the phone to my TL/colleague at 5 PM and left for home. I stopped off at the store to get a few things my wife needed (and some ice cream for me...) then came home. After a quick dinner of hot dogs, chips, and iced tea, I went out to finish spraying weed killer on ours and our neighbors lawn. A quick shower when I was done and I feel great.