Flashback: Circa 1994

It's amazing this is still relevant today. My how times have changed, huh?

Waiting for the punch line?

I know you all have been waiting on pins and needles to find out what the inside joke was involving the headless chicken in the drawing below. After such a long time it’s going to seem very anti-climatic but I’ll tell you anyway.

About a month or so a go I worked for a very prominent and stable company in town as a technical support representative. Now I can’t tell you the name of the company, so we’ll just call it “P_ _ _ _ _X.” As client support butt-monkey it was my job to answer any moronic technical question of whatever melon-head who decided to call in between the hours of 8am-8pm. We handled product support for the entire country, which means abuse was heaped onto us from both the east and west coast over 4 different time zones. Our busiest times of the week were Monday thru Wednesday but things slowed Thursday and Friday. We were under staffed, over worked and under paid (your typical corporate environment.) Our supervisors had the management style of an absentee landlord. Our performance was based on number of incoming calls answered in a certain amount of time. These numbers were posted on big monitors all around the room for all to see. They hung over us like a blade on a guillotine and when the clock ran out on the time you had allotted to answer the call the numbers would start flashing red. Needless to say given our situation our numbers fell short most of time Monday thru Wednesday. This was pretty much the only time we would see our supervisors up close and personal.

They would come crawling out of the woodwork as soon as they saw those red flashing numbers. Since they had no technical knowledge of the product their employees were supporting, they only had one other course of action. They would start pacing up and down the aisles asking people if they were taking a call or pointing out the fact that we were in the red. Even though we all could clearly see that from where we sitting and had the same numbers flashing at us on our computer screens. For some reason they thought this would speed things along and help get our numbers down back to where they were suppose to be. When in reality it just annoyed those of us taking the calls.

I remember one occasion I was finishing up a client support ticket when my internal line rang. It was one of my supervisors calling to see why I wasn’t taking a call because there had been a call waiting in the queue 3 seconds over the permitted time. Now, had he let me finish up I would have grabbed the call but I had to stay on the line with him to explain why I wasn’t on the phone in the first place. In the mean time, the call is still waiting and eventually hung up. My supervisor closed his call with, “Just speed it up a bit, ok? Our numbers are not good today.” REALLY!? I hadn’t noticed! Thanks for that heads up town crier.

I eventually quit that job and moved onto another position not involving phones. Which is a story for another time. Was it worth the wait?