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When I look out there it makes me glad I’m not you,
I’ve experiments to run, there is research to be done,
On the people who are still alive..
Now, for part two of the IBM saga. More happy bunnies, oh yes.
On night shift, I worked with a fantastic crew. There's nothing like grown-up geeks at two in the ayem, strung out on Mountain Dew and cigarettes, discussing the relative merits of politicians, v8 engines, or asian girls in bikinis. These were, without a doubt, some of the best working conditions I had experienced. Late hours, no dress code, playing games with customers. Not like scrabble, but like "who can say "Mew" the most times during a single call. Or "interwebs" or "automagically." (I still hold that record) Not to mention the felonious speeding we did. Oh, those races around the IBM facilities. I think security still has a picture of my car somewhere, and they anxiously await my return, their rent-a-cop hearts thudding sickly in their chests.
It wasn't all fellowship and fun, but these are the moments I would like to remember. Because everything else was torturous and abusive. As the most senior agent on shift, I fell into a leadership role. I didn't mind as such. it needed to be done. Somone had to watch out for our crew, keep management up to date on the various goings-on, and handling VIP and angry caller escalations. That's the way it goes for the ones in charge. They are the first to be blamed for what goes wrong, and the first to have to explain why. It needed to be done, and I did it. Now, I can't exactly explain why. After a while, management finally realized that we needed a new teamlead. Our previous teamlead had been "relocated" to another position, because his epilepsy made him unable to work a night shift. This wasn't exactly his choice, as he was also demoted. I was told by our desk manager (different person then my contract manager) that they were looking for a new team lead. I was in the running, with another employee.
As for the workload on night shift, it breaks down like this. Our desk, originally staffed with five people, handled calls from the "EMEA" regions. EMEA is Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. (not to mention Africa, Russia, and whoever in the US happens to be awake at 2 in the morning, which is a damn lot of people.) Day shift just handled calls from the US. They had a staff of around 25 people. One country, 25 people. A hundred countries or so? 5 people. There is a desk in Australia, staffed with around 25 people for handling calls on that side of the globe, but this desk was notoriously underperforming.
To put that in better perspective, I have to touhc on stats. Each desk has a certain level of statistics they strive to meet each month. The stats are comprised of sever factors, but primarily focus on how fast calls are anwered, how many calls are answered, and how happy the customers are with us. Our desk was the only desk to have made stats consistently for over four years. The australian desk had *never* made stats. Ever. They sent management teams out there to get the desk to perform at the levels of our other desks, multiple times. They left calls in queue, they didn't work cases, and they transferred calls to the US when they didn't feel like working. Which was often.
Here's how it works at IBM. If you work there, you're one of two things. Either you're an actual IBM employee, you get yearly raises, three weeks of PTO, and a nice benefits package. Or, you're a contractor. You don't get raises unless you do special tasks that are above and beyond the standard call of duty. You don't get PTO unless your contract specifies you do. You're lucky if you get benefits. You have no job security. Your best hope is to work there long enough to be hired on with IBM. After three years, IBM still wasn't calling on me. To be moved into a managerial position, you can't be a contractor. You *have* to be an IBM employee. So, for me to be moved to a Team Lead, I had to be hired on with IBM. Months rolled off the calendar, and fell into the wastebasket of life. Six months, to be exact. During that time, I continued to fulfill the duties of a team lead. They had to be done.
After six months, I was told that I didn't get the job. neither did my competition. Instead, they were closing down the desk, and couldn't backfill the position of Team lead. They knew about this in advance. Long enough to run down the clock, letting me do the team lead position work, without actually getting the position, and all the nice benefits, like being paid for what you do. It was right about then, that I really stopped giving a s**t. I stopped caring about getting all the above and beyond stuff done. Why bother? We're being shut down. Our desk was being outsourced to India. (more on that later.) Like a very good movie says, "That's my only real motivation, is not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired." That's where I was. Doing my job, and not the managerial aspects that needed to be done. Managers started to notice, and as such I started getting hassled. So did the rest of my team.
Part of our job was working email cases. People sent emails into a queue, with problems they were having, and we were supposed to pull cases down, work them, and resolve them. The problem was, our tools (password reset tools, account lookup tools, etc) started become inactive. We weren't able to work the cases without the proper tools. I can see it now...
"Sorry your password stopped working Bob, but ours don't work either. Umm.. guess we're both kinda ********. Good luck! -Thanks, GTRC"
So, we informed the dayshift teamlead. Told him about our broken tools. They went unfixed. For weeks, then months. During that time, what did we get? Yelled at for not doing tickets. Sounds annoying? Yeah, repeat that cycle. Until you vomit. While this was going on, our management decided we weren't up to par for Cisco employees. Within the span of my last month, we were sent three seperate emails, each more heinous than the last.
The first accused each and every member of my team of stealing. Earlier that week, a headset had gone missing. It was borrowed from a day shift member by an evening shift member, who forgot to return it. We knew about this, so why then, were we accused of stealing? Apparently, more than the headset had gone missing. Desks had been rifled through, more headsets were missing, as were some mice. At this point in time, my crew was in an entirely different room. We didn't go into the dayshift room, because we had no need. There wasn't anything in there, other than the group refridgerator where some of us kept our food. As for the headsets, keyboards and mice, I had extras in my desk if anyone needed them. Headsets and etc go bad, stop working, whatever, over time. I had extras from our spare parts closet, so we could use them. So, why steal them?
The second email accused the entire desk of doing drugs. Now, there's some story to this one, so mind the breif explanation. Callcenters will hire pretty much anyone when they're in a people crunch. if they're understaffed, you can get a job at a call center. It's easy. We had a hairdresser at one point. A hairdresser, walking people through using VPN, wireless connectivity, and Voice over IP systems. Her computer knowledge beforehand consisted of playing solitaire. I s**t you not. I trained her. So, you're apt to get some people who smoke pot, or do whatever. Now, I really don't care if you smoke pot, or drink or whatever on your days off. Just, don't bring it into the office. It's only an issue when it starts affecting anyone else on the team. One of our emplyees let it get this far, and was reported by another teammate.
Not because, on the whole, we gave a s**t that he smoked pot, but because one wednesday morning, the whole room reeked of pot, as he'd picked up a dime before work, smoked a good chunk of it during his lunch break in his car, and then came back into our little cave of a room. (Imagine 10 cubicles in a room the size of a small public restroom, and you get the idea of what our office was like. Smell included.)
So, he was reported by one of my team to management. Also, that morning, one of the morning shift reported him as well. Management responds by sending an email, directed at night shift, to the ENTIRE TEAM. So, everyone on the desk gets told, that the five of us on the shift are all under suspicion of smoking pot at work. They also noted in the email that we would all undergo random drug screenings. Tactless, to say the very least. What would apropriate protocol be? Maybe sending an email to the reported employee? Or having a private conversation with him? Of course, there's nothing quite as team-building as giving your coworkers a nice excuse for abusing your team just a little bit more.
The third and final email, what I like to call the "I've take all I can stands, I can't stands nummore!", which was also sent to the entire team, noted that every single member of night shift was in imminent danger of being fired. In this one, they restated the accusations of stealing, of doing drugs on site, and finally, of not doing enough work. they noted that our stats were "Below expectations", (At this point, we had the highest stats of any night shift, ever, on the Cisco desk.) and that "given our workload, we were not doing our jobs apropriately". They cited the half-hour wait times, and the fact that our aux code usage (Basically, when you're not taking calls, be it in the bathroom, taking lunch, or helping a teammate) was abusive.
Basically, how they came to this conclusion was by looking at our stats compared to those of dayshift. Their logic was, that if you average dayshift employee was able to take 40 calls a day, then night shift should, too. If day shift was able to have an average talk time of 6 minutes, then night shift should, too. If day shift was able to finish an escalation in under 15 minutes, then night shift should too. These assumptions were made by team leads who had never actually been on night shift. They had never sat through a full shift, never taken some of our calls, and never dealt with our customer base. In the entire history of night shift, only one manager had ever sat in on a shift, and that was our desk manager, Sue. She's basically the head of the desk. The highest up you can go. She's one of the managers they sent to Australia to try and get them to do their damn jobs. She was damn cool, and the one I reported to about most of our issues. She kept nightshift running well.
Our average talk time was closer to 30 minutes. Why? Becuase the majority of our callers weren't native english speakers. We also encountered more difficult problems than on dayshift. I'm not just saying that to cover my a** or anything. Having spent over a year on dayshift, followed by a year of nights, I've seen both worlds. Night shift had harder calls. Mostly because people in the US called when they didn't like their wallpaper, or when their numlock key turned on. People in europe tended to call when they were 500 miles from home, and couldn't get a wireless connection for their VPN. So yes, our calls times were longer. Thing is, they had *always* been longer. Why now, was this a problem. It went from normal, to a problem, for no reason. So, if your call times are longer, then obviously, you can't take as many calls as people with shorter ones. Simple math. Take an 8 hour shift, and divide it into 30 minute chunks. It's going to be less than an 8 hour shift divided by 6, or 10 minute chunks. Once again, our call volume and total calls per agent were lower, and had always been lower. This was normal. So, why now was it a problem?
Now, for escalations.. Basically, when something goes completely FUBAR, you need somone to fix it. If our desk couldn't do it, then we sent the problem to the next level of support, usually the guys and gals who worked onsite support in the offices. On dayshift, there was a chat up for handling these issues. You simply put a case number into an instant messenger window, and it was picked up and handled within minutes. On night shift.. the process was a little longer. First, we had to compose an email, and send it to three recipients. Then, we had to find the contact number for the country we were talking to. Then, we had to call that number and hope that somone picked up. Instead of a team of people handling this, we usually came down to one or two people per country. So, if somone calls in sick, we had to locate the next nearest tech. Once we got them, we had to issue the case over, recontact the client, and ensure that the issue got fixed. The process had always been this convoluted. These escalations had always taken about 30 minutes or more. So, once again, this was subbenly a problem.
To top it all off, it had always been the assumption of dayshifters that night shift was easy. That we just sat around, goofing about all night, doing practically nothing. So, the rest of the desk viewed us as slackers and malcontents, because we "had everything so much easier". So, you can imagine what these emails made dayshift think of us now. Not only are we not doing our pathetically easy jobs, but we're stealing things and getting high at work, too. You can imagine how well they treated us after this. Oh, and they were sneaky about it, too. When the email was sent, in the "To" field were the email addresses of the night shifts. In the undisplayed carbon copy fields, was the rest of the team. So, everyone got a copy, but they didn't want us to know.
Why the dodge? I don't even know. It seems silly and juvenile now. Hell, it seemed juvenile then, too. Maybe they were trying to make the work environment so uncomfortable we'd leave. I talked to our contract manager ( the one who had sent these emails) and expressed my upset over them. Was I told it was a mistake? No. I was told that if I wasn't stealing or doing drugs, then I shouldn't worry. I asked what evidence they had that we were stealing. He couldn't tell me. I asked why everyone was warned when they were told exactly who was smoking pot. They said they weren't sure it was only one employee. Right. After they had been told by several people exactly who it as. Sure.
He then proceeded to bug me about my stats. I was apparently spending too much time off the phones helping the other team members. At this point, I had been there for over three years. I knew more about our systems then our knowledge bases. I had seen just about every problem, and new how to fix all of them. I was the escalation contact, the VIP contact, reigning senior agent, trainer of new agents and when our desk contacts list came out, my name was listed in bold, with asterisks, with my phone extension, so that people could contact me if they had a problem with anything. So, yeah, when people needed help, they came to me. When there's an angry german on the phone, I took the call. If there was a VIP in russia, he got sent to me. If you had a problem you'd never seen before, you asked me how to fix it, if I didn't know, chances are I could find out how. So, telling me I'm spending too much time helping out the other agents seems a bit asinine. It was encouraged by management!
Now, don't take this as me being the big cheese or whatever of the desk. By that point, pretty much the whole desk had been replaced by new people over the last six months. Only a handful of people had been working Cisco for longer, and of those, most just didn't know as much as I did, or hadn't been stuck doing the same crap I did. So all my experience just came from time, and getting shafted with extra jobs that no one else had to do.
Right about then, I started deciding when to put in my two weeks.
More to come in part three. Yes, there's more. Sadly.
 Twistex · Thu Dec 06, 2007 @ 08:15pm · 5 Comments |
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