We’ll kick off this week’s Sampler with a little bit of stillspinning news. We got our very first comment spam this week. I’m glad to see we’ve caught the eyes of spammers - it means we’ve managed to get found my people who didn’t get a link.

Okay, and awayyyy we go.

• There’s a new girl on my team at work, M. M reminds me of me when I was in high school; it is actually sort of scary. M sends me her daily report she always includes a short message. The last two have been really good. “I say squee” and “Doing a German Dance”.
• The Canadian and Dutch have been in an on-going land dispute over a piece of rock sitting near the Artic Ocean. Both nations have sent officals and troops to the rock, though thus far the battle has been limited to bits of litter representing each nation’s culture. Maybe the UN should send sAme peace keeping troops to keep things under control. (source)

Sorry there wasn’t a lot for this week’s sampler.? Maybe next week…

I back to work to get my medicine this evening.? I stopped by my boss’ office to say hello and she told me she was buying some software:

“I’m going to buy some grammar tutoring software for our less grammarfied agents.”

I could say that today was a bad day.? It would be easy enough to dwell on the fact that I very easily could have been fired and, had I had any other job prospects, probably would have quit at one point.? I could say that the powers that be saw fit to, for no other reason than to keep up appearances, to give us an additional five hours worth of work.? Like I said, I could dismiss the entire day as having been a bad one.? I could make a decent case for the week.

But sitting here in my apartment at the end of the day, I can see that it wasn’t all bad.? All of these events events only encompassed a few hours, and though I’ll have to to repeat part of it daily, it truely wasn’t that bad and there were good parts as well.

The specific moments that led up to my nearly getting myself axed even netted some positive results.? I sat down with my manager and we had a real heart to heart about things and our working relationship.? I apologized for my part and she for hers, and I can honestly say that we’ll work better together for it.? I got to spend some time with my agents and I managed to keep my cool most of the day no matter how hectic things got.

So I’m choosing to say that today was a good day.

Today was my first day back after nine days off.? This morning I was actually a bit stressed about having to return.? I like my job, I really do, but I know we had a really bad week while I was out and nothing has changed (other than me being there) over the weekend, so it stands to reason that this week wouldn’t go much better.

Today wasn’t bad though.? I got to spend the majortiy of my day doing what I enjoy doing; a side project here and answering questions there.? I started making arrangements for a training session to take place later this week and I talked to a few agents about joining our speciality group.? Yeah, we had a lot of calls all day long, and a lot of people got stressed out, but overall it wasn’t bad.

I really needed that time off though - more than I ever knew.? Next year I think I’m going to spread my time out a bit better, take a week every three months or something.? That way I don’t have to kill anyone.

I was speaking to my friend A at work today and told him that I’d be turning 30 next week.? I asked him if there was anything I needed to watch out for.? His answer:? 17 Year olds.

Man-o-man, what a week this has been.? It all started out normally enough - work was bad on Monday, but it’s nearly always bad on Monday.? That’s the price we pay for being closed on Saturdays and Sundays.? But once Monday had come and gone the stress lingered across the call center floor.? You could read it on the faces of the agents - they’ve just about had enough.

The Company (our client) has a habit of not communicating with itself very well.? This week we had a mailing go out that was worked on by four or five departments.? There were no fewer than five documents going to four groups, and the information contained was nowhere close to being consistent across them all.? This generated a huge number of calls for our department to handle.

We’ve also started a marketing campaign that, though slow to get off the ground, has begun bringing inquiries in every format possible.? All this extra volume has forced each department to fend for themselves, even my grossly understaffed team.? A lack of time to follow-up with customers has made the calls even more difficult.

And so we have the perfect storm and tempers are beginning to flair. Today we nearly had a fistfight in what is normally one of the easier departments, had a supervisor’s meeting degrade into a screaming match and an entire team pulled to talk about the degrading of the inter-personal relationships.

To add to things, I’ve had my own personal issues that have kept me from being able to put on a strong face for my team.? I know I shouldn’t let my home life get into my work life and vice versa. But when neither one goes right they sort of get hard to separate.

So forgive me if I don’t have any funny stories to tell.? This week its all been for not.

Last week at work we were talking about our favorite comedies and naturally Monty Python and the Holy Grail came up.? E, a girl who I only casually know, and I started sharing our favorite quotes with one another in bad English (and sometimes French) accents.? Yeah, I’m one of those.

So today E came running across the call center floor telling me she had something for me. She presented a brand new Holy Grail poster. I was very grateful and its now proudly hanging up at my desk so she can enjoy it when she stops by to ask questions.

I’m always sort of surprised when people do nice things, especially random nice things, for me. If you haven’t already figured it out I’m some what of a grouch and at times I can be downright mean, though its almost never intentional. I’m just not the first person you think of when your looking to purchase a present, especially if you have to work with me.

So thanks E. You made my day special.

B is one of the guys on my team. He’s really smart, really nice, really quiet and does his job with little or no intervention on my part. Days can go by and all I’ll do is have casual, informal contact with him.

This morning someone asked me if B was going to be in. I looked at his schedule and saw that he was scheduled off for the day as well as yesterday and tomorrow.? This struck me as odd because I thought for sure he’d been there the day before. I asked R if he had been there the day before and she assured me he had.? I asked another of my team members what she thought, T said he was there too.

An informal poll gave us final results of 6-1 in favor of his having been there.? Thing is, he wasn’t.? I don’t know if this says more about B or my attentiveness as a supervisor.? Either way I don’t think I’m going to tell B this story, but I’m sure one of the girls will.

Yesterday just before I left work I was reminded by a co-worker that our boss had demanded that we nominate an agent of the month before we left that day. Annoyed but resigned I returned to my desk and quickly wrote up a nomination, printed it and dropped in off on my boss’ desk on my way out the door.

Today they announced my agent as the winner and I don’t want to take away from her accomplishment. She’s a great agent, is always at work and does her job without complaining or needing her handheld - a nearly perfect employee. I do have to say that the selection process is somewhat suspect.

It seems that each manager reads their nominations outloud to the other powers that be and they take a vote. The nominations are done on a form that pretty much makes them idiot proof - check boxes and text entry are hard to screw up. They even give it to us in an electronic format so we can check the spelling and grammar. One of the managers told me that the decision was a no brainer - mostly due to the fact that my nomination form was the only one that wasn’t embarassing to have to read.

One supervisor wrote that the nominated agent didn’t meet any performance standards. Another supervisor’s was so riddled with misspellings and typos that no one was really sure what was trying to be communicated while a third pled the case that her agent should be the agent of the month because she’s been sick - which also means she’s been missing a lot of work.

Here’s the thing. This isn’t really all that surprising. In the past we’ve had a manager count to the number eight on her fingers, a trainer write a quiz where questions (as in had a question mark at the end) had the options of true or false and a coach announce that all pronouns should be capitalized. It took nearly a week to convince our site director that no matter how good our agents were we’d always have forty of our two hundred agents in the bottom twenty percent in each metric catagory.

I just don’t know anymore.

I’ve been trying to spend more time at my desk and as such I’m hearing a lot more of what my team members are saying to the callers.? Most of it is the same thing over and over again; the standard replys to the caller’s standard pleas, demands and accusations.? But now and then a gem comes out from the white noise of two? hundred phone calls.? The other day I heard this ‘exchange’:

I am not discriminating against you sir. I didn’t even know you were handicap until you told me.

(pause)

I promise sir, the fact that you’re in a wheelchair has no impact in our decision.

(pause)

We are not conspiring against you.

A few weeks ago S defended herself against racism charges too.? The exchange was similar only this time my black agent was accused of discriminating against blacks, and when the caller was informed of the irony it only fuled the fire.

I miss taking calls sometimes.? I starting to take a few on Friday afternoons so I’m sure I’ll have both sides of a call to comment on before long.