After many years in IT tech support and web dev, I unexpectedly ventured onto a new path. Now I'm in my thirties and have a double degree in Earth Sciences! I am raising fowl, a goat, a horse, four cats and a husband. I spend my free time in the garden and with my animals. Currently, my long-suffering husband and I sleep with one of our cats in the bedroom with a young pullet in a cat cage on a shelf who refuses to sleep with the other chickens! It strangely works out. My husband is an aspiring author writer and often blogs a story about our lives on the farm etc.
I am passionate about chickens, cats, web design, blogging, Pinterest, sprouting seeds, taking cuttings and other gardening, trialling make-up and hair products, baking, writing stories, spinal disabilities, making things and offering all kinds of advice to people.
Being one who loves to read, TaintedBlood.org is an old URL I purchased in 2002, inspired by the Margaret Weis science fiction fantasy Star of Guardians series of novels. Jazhiaran and Ashe are the names of rpg characters I created in the 90s inspired by the Raymond E. Feist fantasy novels following Pug the magician.
If you'd like to contact me, please do!
© ACO 2012-2016.
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| Cheese. |
I have to write about my job at some point. It’s difficult because H't is small and the internet is smaller. It’s probably needless paranoia but I’m worried some current or future employer will see this so I need to talk about in a sneaky hidden way. So what I will say is that I work in cheese. I don’t actually work in cheese. That sounds interesting in an impossibly romantic way. No I work in ‘cheese’. That way no one will ever actually know what I really do. I’m so fucken clever.
Anyway so yeah I work in cheese. Cheese support, technically. I work in a call centre taking phone calls from people who have received our cheese and have issues with the way their cheese works, problems with the ways we’ve charged them for our cheese, complaints about how they were sold cheese or just people who require help with cheese in general.
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| What the fuck is this shit? |
The bosses also expect me to answer emails, use chat programs, respond to tickets and make outbound calls while I’m dealing with calls coming in. The bosses think doing two things at once is an efficient way to do things. The bosses think shouting at us to work harder every half hour or so is a good way to get us to do more work. My bosses really earn their salary that’s slightly higher than mine.
They probably don’t even think that. It’s probably worse than that. What they’re really thinking is we’ve got an impossible amount of work, that if they had a team that was double the size they have now they still couldn’t get all the work done. But that would never happen because no one wants to make that level of change to the budget. They’re thinking they’ve been served a bowl of shit and if they have to eat it so do we. So they shout us to make it look like they’re doing something. They expect us to do so much work because admitting we can’t would mean they’re at fault somehow.
Which they are. Fuckers,
I’m not a model employee though. Fuck that. Being a model employee at that place would mean socialising with everyone after work, following the right sporting codes, going for drinks and talking about gambling. I’m not going to do any of that.
One of my current tasks is writing up documents for training our Manila call centre. I’m being paid peanuts, an entry level wage and I’m writing up documentation. Which strikes me as ridiculous but the only other person in the building that can write has so much work she has to have long meetings where she screams at the other bosses about how she has too much work.
I get time off the phones to write this stuff up so it’s all good. I’ll take it and it gives me something to put on a resume. It’s better than talking to arseholes about their cheese. Again, everyone in the places knows this. The people who run the show know that I’ll do the work, they know I’ll like it and they know that they won’t have to pay me anything extra. They’re counting on it.
The best part is the way my team leader plays me. My team leader is a bitter man. He’s been working for the company for seventeen years, used to run the callcentre but just leads a team now. He’s a little older than me, loves to talk, hates women and is out of shape. He’ll bitch about people viciously then greet them like long lost friends the next. When he’s talking to me he pretends I don’t know what he’s like. He’s been telling me plans about how he wants to reduce my workload and utilise my particular cheese expertise for the past eight months but none of it’s happened.
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| More cheese. More cheese joke |
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He sent me a list of what he wanted me to write up. The folks who wrote the list originally didn’t know cheese from shit. I decided about half the things on it were pointless to train people in. I gave him an estimate on how long it’d take me to write up the important items even though I had no fucking idea how long. I haven’t done that type of writing in years.
I barfed up a bunch of processes based on my experience. I managed to get five write ups done in a day at around seven pages each. while taking calls on the priority queues as well. The priority queues amount to sales reps calling up and making us doing things for their biggest, shittiest customers. I dunno if that amounts to a lot of work, but I do know no one else in the whole goddamn building could have put together the documentation I did in so little time.
I missed a few things from the that were required so I told my boss it would take about an hour and half solid to get them done. Just before Easter, while he’s on a day off he emails telling me I have an hour to do it. Fucking bullshit. I got it done in two hours, mainly because it was first thing in the morning and I’d only had about four servings of caffeine when I started. But that’s the level of what I’m dealing with at work. Shitty management, shitty practices and just plain shitty cheese.
I hope they choke on their process guides. I probably won’t get a chance to write up any more. I gotta get out of that place. I told someone today there that I’m just bored with cheese and that’s gotta be one of the worst things I’ve ever said.
Labels: Callcentre, Cheese, Sailing the Seas of Cheese, Shit, Work
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