Friday and Saturday were very quiet work-wise. I vacuumed the house on Saturday, played with the dog we were pet sitting, took a nap, and watched "Red Dawn" for the millionth time...those were the high points. On Sunday I went to Sunday School and Church and then to a little Mexican place for lunch. My wife and I shared the combination fajitas (and still had some to take home) and headed back to the house.
It had been quiet all weekend long from an on-call perspective. Enough so that I decided to grab as many of the five new 9key hides in our town while nothing was going on.
I drove by the first one, "The Devil Needs Dental Work", but was unable to find it. To be honest, a lone adult male wandering a neighborhood park has a hard task in front of him if he is trying to find a well hidden geocache without looking like a pedophile. Needless to say I did not stay lone. There is only so much time you can spend in a cedar tree and look "inconspicuous".
The next one I went to (La Cucaracha) was a little more involved than I was dressed for. it was hidden under a low bridge that crosses a drainage ditch. I needed to be wearing boots and all I had on was my well ventilated sneakers so I passed this one up as well.
The next one on my list was "Private Eyes". The log entries intrigued me enough that I was optimistic about getting this one. After a false start, I found the little (pea sized) cache and signed the log. I laughed the entire time.
With one cache out of three, I headed off to "Got Cache?", a five gallon bucket with several small cache containers hidden inside. When I found it, I was very pleased to see four travel bugs inside. So with much eagerness, I logged the TB serial numbers and closed the cache back up. I almost got back to the truck before I realized I had failed to sign the log, so I trotted back to sign it. As I was heading back to the truck (for the second time) I ran into another cacher, "Drooling_Mongoloid", who was placing four more TB's in the cache. We introduced ourselves, swapped a few stories, and he even let me write down the serial numbers from the TB's he had. After that was done, I bid him farewell and I headed off to my last stop, "Montgomery Farm".
Montgomery Farm is a high end subdivision with a wildlife area and a paved nature trail winding through it. I found the cache in short measure and was able to inventory it (I discovered another TB), sign the log, and replace it just as three dog walkers were rounding the bend. I hopped in my truck after the short walk back and started back home.
On the way home my mobile rings. It is the local help desk who has a customer requesting priority on a ticket he has submitted. The ticket is a single user issue regarding his Blackberry. I explained that single user issues are never high severity unless the user is a VIP, which this guy was not. The help desk thanked me for the info and I hung up.
Two hours later my boss calls me and asks me about the case. When I tell him, he agrees with my decision and we end the call. End of story. Not.
The next morning my colleague gets a phone call from one of the Accoutn Mgrs. One of the higher up directors asked that the case I had refused the previous day be escalated. Against better judgement we did and when the tech was informed, he just sighed and shook his head. It seems the person who is having this issue USED to be the President of a company that the company we support bought out. Now instead of being "President", he is given the title of "Director" or something, however he is still not considered VIP and that burns him. Well, all I can say is, "Welcome to the real world, sir." It is something we have had to deal with for a long time here in the trenches.
When a person is used to being a big fish in a small pond, that person is used to getting things done their way. The company that bought them out has done a lot in regards to keeping then happy, but they are having problems adjust from a 1000 person company to a 60,000 person company. Try as they might, they are just not the big fishes any more.
We have fielded a lot of complaint calls from the company that was bought out. Most of the complaints have been WAN related, something that w are not contracted to work on. So when a problem arises for them they call us, we see that it is a WAN issue (or something else we are not responsible for, like their PDA's) we hand the issue to the mother company, since that is what they do. The the company that was bought out calls us complaining about the service they are getting...which is, in effect, THEM!
You gotta love corporate America.
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