I got into a bit of a snit today at work. It wasn’t huge or anything, but I felt frustrated with my boss during the course of the day. I nearly bit his head off, which probably isn’t a good thing when you’re barely two months into starting a new job, but it was one of those things where I kind of have to shake my head and wonder what the fuck was going on there.
I take a number of issues during the day, and depending on how complicated the troubleshooting can be, resolving it can take anywhere between five minutes to five hours. And I mean five straight hours, especially if you’re on the phone with the customer while you’re trying to resolve it. And we have customers who won’t let you go until the issue is resolved. It’s difficult to get them to let you call them back, especially when you might need to bring it up in an engineering meeting. I’m guessing these customers don’t have a lot to do at their jobs, because it seems that they love to just hang out on the phone all day. Maybe that’s their way of getting out of work. Who knows?
Anyway, I was having a day such as this. Right as I walked in the door, I got grilled on an issue from yesterday. I mean, I hadn’t even taken off my coat, yet. No good morning or any other kind of greeting. Just a straight up accusatory question. Shit like that will ruin a day for you, but even if that hadn’t happened, the rest of the day’s events might have done me in, too. So, while I was working on the open cases I had, my boss walks in and asks me to do a whole mess of tasks. Except it turns out that these weren’t just asks; he was handing off five new cases to me. I already have eleven, and I’m not even complaining about the number of them, really. What I’m complaining about is that he handed them to me and gave me no information about what was going on. He just said, update the binaries on these units and then walked out the door to a meeting.
When he came back, he started asking all sorts of questions about the units, and I was like… whoa, there. All you did was ask me to update a file, which I did. I have no idea about why it didn’t work or why it’s still in error state. I didn’t even know it was in error to begin with. Did any of these units have case numbers? No. That meant I would have to create five new cases for myself. And creating cases is yet another nightmare, because Salesforce.com is not bred for support organizations whatsoever. Opening a case is painful, requiring a lot of information that is assumed… if you got the alarm either by phone or by the monitoring system. If you open a case without customer information or contact specifics, it becomes a bit harder to open up a case. The system wants to know who to email the ticket to, but whatever… it just felt like the whole thing was piling on top of me so fast.
Of course, the eleven cases I had open got neglected, because these five new ones took priority and took up the day. So, now I have to hope that tomorrow, I will be left alone long enough to quickly close cases before my boss decides to dump stuff on me like that. And hopefully, with better communication and little more than a simple task request.
While I’m at it… I hope for a pony, too.
