More confessions of a Tech Support rep

It has been awhile since i have written anything about my lovely part time gig. I can not complain. It is easy money. It will pay for the tile going in my house and to have my house painted. The issue with the Doctor who basically wanted me to be fired was a blessing in disguise. It raised my profitability. My Team Lead basically told me I was on cruise control. He still wants to go days. There is a young guy named Dustin that I hope gets the position. He is a good guy and has been with the company over 2 years.
I have been opting to leave early pretty much every time I work. This is going to cause me to work at this place longer that I would want because my paychecks from this place are smaller than they normally are.

What drives me nuts about this part time gig?

1) This place is full of kids that work there while going to school. There is drama galore.
2) The lady that monitor's our calls from Centurytel is not a real tech at all. She reads from a script to see if we hit all the points. What is interesting is that when she first started, we were all getting "Good Calls" on pretty much every monitor she did. Now, she takes off for stuff which is totally untrue. I now look at these monitors as comedic relief.
3) They have promised we could work from home every since I started in January. The new phone system is in place but still we are at the "hurry and wait point".
4) The people calling in whine and complain about the silliest things. All they need to do is get on the phone, let me know what the problem is and let me fix the problem. They do not need to keep calling in about the same issue if we have trouble tickets in for no DSL sync or slow speeds.
5) Dial up customers and DSL customers who are signed up for 256K/128K and cry because their connection is too slow. Dial up customers need to go with DSL and those DSL customers need to upgrade their speed package.
6) Customers who call in who want me to go outside my scope of support because they have screwed up their system. I love when folks call up and tell me they have viruses and want me to fix it, or they have installed some program that screwed up their machine and they are like, "Well, you are my internet provider." I will admit I have gone out of scope of support to fix an issue for a few customers, just because they were nice and cordial with me and I figured if I punted the call back to the manufacturer they would get the run around.
7) They need to seriously pay their techs better. My Team Lead told me about this company who hires their techs who work from home from day one and pay them about $5 more than hour than what they start out at.
8) There is a web filter at this place. It is not too hard to get around it. There was talk about allowing higher level reps outside of the filter, provided you were not on probation for points. That has yet to happen.
9) This company is on a "points" system. They need to do away with points. If a person calls in all the time, or is constantly late, it needs to be at the discretion of Team Lead to put that person on probation or terminating the employee.

I ran into one of the recruiters when picking up my kid from daycare. I had to be careful what I said to her about the job. I did not want to bite me in the butt later on. She asked me if I had met the Network Admin before. I had not met him in person but knew who he was. What is funny is my first week at the job, I was able to get behind the firewall. This guy pretty much does things backwards. I am not sure if it because he does not know what he is doing or perhaps maybe that is the way he learned how to do it.

Overall, I know my days at this place are numbered. There is going to be a time where I get fed up and just walk out, never to return. I would hope that I would be done with my projects before that happens.

This is why Google must have taken the short bus.

I am a Database developer/Data Miner at my job. I am constantly on the look out for fraud patterns diligently work at ways to stop it immediately. I am fairly good at my job. One year, I saved my company over 4 million dollars and helped them to recoup that over 4 million just on one product alone.

When I emailed Google about a website they were hosting on Blogger that was basically selling gift cards bought with stolen credit cards, this is the "canned" response I got.

Thank you for your note. Please note that Blogger is a provider of content
creation tools, not a mediator of that content. We allow our users to
create blogs, but we don't make any claims about the content of these
pages. We realize this may be frustrating and we regret any inconvenience
this may cause you. In cases where contact information for the author is
listed on the page, we recommend you working directly with this person to
have the content in question removed or changed.

In cases where the author is anonymous, please note that in accordance
with US state and federal law, it is Blogger's policy to only provide a
user's contact information pursuant to a valid third party subpoena or
other appropriate legal process.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team


In cases like these, all I have to do is identify myself and contact their support team as well as their legal department. I usually do not have to pull out the big guns and get our former cop who works in Corporate Security to contact them directly. I am amazed that Google would allow fraud to take place on their website. What if it was something threatening to nationality security? Is Google going to allow fraud to take place on their website and try to wipe their hands clean with it? I am all about the First Amendment right to free speech. I can talk about my thoughts on here and rant and rave about whatever. You do have to be careful what you say on Blogs and on the internet because it could come back to haunt you. Companies are becoming more savvy and googling potential applicants to get a glimpse inside their lives.


Thank God I have friends in high places. I am sure whoever wrote me the "canned" response was some person sitting in a cubicle in India. What is even funnier, they did not even sign it with a name.

Google needs to wise up, they are starting to act like Microsoft.