Quality, Not Quantity

On day three of my work at home week I got pummeled. It was not the number of calls...it was the subject of them.

The first one had to do with the complex way our company images new client PC's. While I cannot go into detail for legal reasons, let us just say that it involves lots of people when something goes wrong: LAN, WAN, Server, PC techs, and DBA's. Well, yesterday this broke and it was a mess to sort through. Actually it is still a mess. Right now the case is with the LAN provider of our customer to check the firewall logs. I have given them 3 megs of local logs to sort through.

The next issue is also still ongoing. For what ever reason, a seven year old virus reared its ugly head and kept me stepping and fetching for hours. The worst part was that there were two separate issues that were lumped together. While this does not happen often, when it does it causes chaos.

Now most of the time the end user is the one who makes the faulty assumption. We get a call for a problem after a similar problem has been opened. Our help desk gets the call and asks for info and then the customer describes the current issue perfectly...so the HD adds this person to the master ticket. When the initial issue is resolved, the master is closed and all the child tickets get closed along with it. Then the end user calls back and tells us the issue is not resolved. When we look into the issue more closely, we see the end user had a completely different issue and we need to start from scratch...lots of time wasted.

This time the customer did their best to explain the difference but the HD was so slammed with calls that they were deaf to what the customer was saying. It was not until about halfway through the day and after a couple of hot calls to me did the difference become clear. Once I realized the error, we got teams working on the second issue, which was the AV software in one of our Latin American countries was corrupted on several machines, causing the rash of calls.

I dealt with these two issues until about 10 PM, then I went to bed. I got up at 5:00 AM and started working at 6:00 AM getting caught up on e-mail. It looks like it could be a slower day if all we have is fallout from this latest rash of issues. If we get many new issues, I am toast.

I tend to gauge my workload by the numbe of cases Europe gets. They have had it light so far...maybe that will bode well for me and my day.

I am praying that things will go well up to and including the weekend. I have a lot to do if work allows it: Meat and Movie night at Paul's place (BBQ and a war movie night for the boyz) on Friday night, Men's breakfast and demolition of the food pantry at church on Saturday, and Sunday school and church service on Sunday...you know, a typical weekend sans the geocaching!