There’s a drug addict in my team.

I know he’s a drug addict because he told me he is. We were in a sharing mood because I’d told him about my problems with the booze. There must have been the camaraderie that comes from sharing a shitty situation over a length of time. I thought he was clean because it fucking sucks to assume otherwise without evidence, especially when someone’s appearing to be honest.

For the sake of this post I will name this drug addict Dave McSteveson.

Dave McSteveson became sort of a senior in the team because he can bluff his way through a lot of situations and none of the bosses care enough about things to pay too much attention. As long as the numbers stay within certain limits they really don’t care. Sure, I know more about cheese than pretty much anyone in the building, but he had experience managing different work queues and helping the Manila teams with training. He also was willing to do a lot of overtime. The bosses love handing out overtime.

He was put in charge of a few different systems, managing correspondence and online chats. He was always a little slap-dash about it all, did a lot of work but did it too quickly and missed details, details I had to pick up at a later date when the customer called back angry about whatever. Some people at the call centre get really shitty about that kind of thing. I’m not too bothered by it. Everyone makes mistakes. It’s the nature of call centre work. You’re going to get calls where someone you work with did something wrong. There’s all sorts of damn gaps things can fall through. Training gaps.
 Communication gaps. Maybe someone didn’t have enough coffee that morning. Maybe the night before their partner told them they were leaving to follow the call of the sea.

You fix the problem, you move on, you don’t make a fuss, you take the next call.

Making a fuss means it takes longer than needed to fix the problem. It takes longer before the next person gets helped. As long as it’s not a recurring issue who cares? No one really intends to fuck up, right?

I guess the real problems started about a month ago? I mean, before that it was a running joke. The guy was sloppy. If someone was calling saying they spoke to someone who wasn’t very helpful we’d go ‘oh that Dave McSteveson’ like he was the comedy relief in an eighties sitcom about cheese. Then he missed a whole day of work without calling in. That was really fucking annoying. The team’s got five people in it. Losing twenty percent of our capacity makes for a shitty day and makes everyone shitty.

Then I noticed the value pack of ibuprofen I keep in my drawer was missing. Headaches are frequent in that damn place. It’s a good thing to have eighty painkillers in a box and it’s good to be the guy who can go ‘yeah, I got what you need’. Makes folks a little happier. I gotta admit I dunno what the heck taking a bunch of ibuprofen at once actually does but I’ve seen the empty blisters on the floors of public toilets. I’ve seen the looks the pharmacy staff give me when I’ve bought the damn things. I guess I could look it up. I’ll look it up later.

There’s a pen of mine on his desk. I love scribbling and there’s a particular type of pen I love. It’s got a nice fine point but the ink doesn’t run. I’m the only one in the place who has them and they go missing every now and then. Of course there’s one of them on his desk. It’s annoying but I don’t say anything because I gotta bloody work there. Of course it’s sitting chewed up on his desk right now.

This morning someone’s headphones went missing from their desk. When we got an email asking if someone had found them, good old Dave McSuspicious jumps up from his desk and starts chattering to the boss about how his headphones went missing as well. He wouldn’t let it go, kept repeating he had a pair exactly like the set that went missing and they’d been stolen as well.

Who the hell steals in-ear phones? Maybe people with compulsion problems?

Then this afternoon I had to take online chats because he was off somewhere else being not very useful. It was while I was taking calls and I got pretty pissed off. One person I was chatting to must have had a bit of the same medicine because they were grumpy as hell too. I scrolled back and found I could read the nice customer’s previous conversations. And there he was, Dave McShitbrains quitting out of chats as soon as he’d gone into them, booting the customer off the website. There were two logs of him doing it to the one person. I helped the customer out, got their cheese working and emailed the chat logs to the boss.

Fuck it. I had a quick meeting before the boss went to his daughter’s dance recital and it looks like on Monday Dave McFuckface may be no more.

Dropping a customer is the worst damn thing you can do in a callcentre. It’s the primary thing I’ve seen people fired for. The make noise about other stuff, put you improvement plans, make you sign little bits of paper and promise you’ll improve, but I’ve seen situations where people have suddenly been marched out without warning for intentionally dropping a call. Just because it’s a chat program doesn’t mean it’s less of an offence.

It’s not going to bring my pen back, and it’s not going to help the people he’s messed with and it’s not going to make me feel good if he does get fired. Maybe he won’t. Maybe he’ll get a warning and start a new, more honest chapter of his life. I’ll find out Monday.

 

 

Labels: Callcentre, Cheese, Sailing the Seas of Cheese, Shit, Work

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posted by Da at 3:45:00 PM