My Crappy Thursday

My problems don’t amount to much compared to yesterday’s events. But yesterday was a right crappy day.

“Thursdays. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”

Lunch was crap. I went out to Burger King, waited a really long time in the drive through, waited some more, finally ordered my Whopper Value Meal (with Iced Tea), waited some more to pay for it, got to the food window and was handed a suspiciously light bag. Drove back to the office to listen to the radio in the car, and discovered that I had some kind of chicken tenders meal, with the chicken formed into frickin’ star and lightning shapes. Wasn’t bad, was probably healthy, but it wasn’t what I ordered and was probably partly caused by the long delay. Somebody else had to sort out my missing Whopper, man. Stupid Burger King.

Due to a scheduling quirk, Thursdays are the worst days of the week. A lot of my cow-orkers are on a 4/10 schedule: they work 10 hour days, 4 days a week. I’m on a more conventional 5/8 schedule. And as it happens, a lot of “Thursdays off” people are “closers,” who are scheduled to be on the phones until we close at 6pm. So we start out short-handed on Thursdays, and then if people are out sick or on vacation, it’s even worse. Plus, one of our closers just transferred to another team, and they haven’t adjusted anyone else’s schedule.

Add to that: the other account that we cover has a couple of key people who aren’t in on Thursdays, and my opposite number who does the same kinds of things for them that I do for my team leaves at 4 pm because she starts so early. And… on Thursdays the woman that backs her up isn’t in on Thursdays. So – even more badness.

And then yesterday my TL came to me and said she’d have to leave at 5pm. I looked up and realized that we had three (3) people to cover both accounts until 6pm, plus there are some people from another account in another city who are “helping” on some of our calls. Their records are so malformed that we decided not to assign a special queue to them, we’d just watch the normal error queues, where ALL of their records end up. So I was working those and trying to field calls, and fixing one of my cow-orker’s records while he stood around chatting after he logged out for the day (he’s not a closer, but he was hanging around talking about his impending vacation).

Meanwhile, we had 5 calls on hold, and I’d gotten stuck on a @$!!**$ing conference call with some idiot manager and his idiot unprofiled trainee, rebooking something that had been cancelled earlier today, rebooking a hotel that was sold out, and sitting on hold for what seemed like forever while my two fellow closers handled the waiting calls. Finally, finally, got the two idiots off the line, cleared a couple of calls, and started fixing errors in the queues.

Oh, and the sole remaining ticketer leaves at 530pm, too, so I had to watch for one specific kind of ticket to issue (Southwest). Exchange tickets are now issued by a centralized support team based in Phoenix, something that just started this week. We’re still getting used to that and not fully convinced that it’s working, but we’ve been somewhat pleased that they seem to get stuff issued pretty quickly. However, anything not absolutely perfect gets bounced, as they’re not used to our ways.

So, finally, we clear the last few remaining calls and the lines close off automatically at 6pm, and the three of us start working on records that have had to wait for attention due to the call volume. I wrestled with a number of piddling little malformed oddities courtesy of our “helpers,” who were no doubt given extremely sketchy information as to how to document our records, probably along the lines of “Just take the call, book the space, and make sure it goes in the error queue.”

I finally left for good, logging out nearly an hour after my time.

Then I got home and found that TiVo had had more errors recording TAR1 episodes, so I was crushed to discover that I’d missed bits that I’d been looking forward to seeing for years. I’ve read all Miss Alli’s recaps, but I wanted to see this stuff for myself. I got most of it, but one entire episode was lost – the one where they arrive in India. Dammit. David can’t find the error on the TiVo hard drive, and we suspect it might be happening because of a failed fan.

Tonight is Sci-Fi Friday, and no doubt we’ll be watching live. So don’t bother calling with condolences for my crappy Thursday. And I see by the news that we’re starting out with a bang again today, so more on that later.