Why are you pissed off?

teel@modernevil.com says:
today, Chris is what piss me off.

iain@darwinscomplex.com says:
oh? how sew?

teel@modernevil.com says:
something to do with his attitude and positions on his relationship to how work should be done around here and mine

Like, in the past, I rarely answered VM because Chris made it a point to always check and follow up on VM himself. Then at some point a few weeks ago without saying anything, he just stopped checking VM entirely. Then last week, I heard him delete over 100 VM without listening to even one of them; he was proud of himself. I was disappointed; that is no way to operate a business. I thought he did it so that he could start keeping up with VM again, but we’re at 87 VM right now. On one hand I want to do something about it to try to satisfy the customers, but on the other hand, Chris is my direct supervisor and he is intentionally NOT addressing the VM.

Or with certain complex technical issues that Chris has taken ownership of; he works, sometimes for days at a time with individual customers and Kevin to figure out what the proper solution is, but I never hear about it, so when I get a caller with the same issue and try to get the information from Chris about what to do, or to have him handle it, he takes an attitude like I should already know the answer, and even if I don’t, I shouldn’t be asking him to take calls.

Also, I have had trouble with a few irate customers in the past, and in more than one meeting with Chris and a supervisor in the room, we have determined that the best course of action if I am unable to effectively communicate with a customer is to hand the call off to someone else to try to handle it; they often just want to hear a different voice telling them the same thing. Just this morning, Chris went off on me about this sudden rise in people that I have to transfer to other agents for this reason, and how it is my job to talk to idiots and keep the customers happy, and why aren’t I doing my job? I’m just trying to do my job, and if in 3 months I have to hand over 10 calls (his number, not mine) then I think I’m doing just fine, considering the 2200 calls I took that I didn’t have to hand off to someone else.

Or sometimes a situation will arise where I don’t know the answer to a problem, but I know I have heard chris talk to someone about the same thing, so I ask him what I should do before I begin troubleshooting it on my own – trying to save time – and he gives me an answer, so I give it to the customer. Then when that doesn’t work, and I’ve done all the steps I know to do, I figure it is reasonable to ask Chris to handle it, since it seems to be a 2nd lvl issue. But Chris seems to take the attitude that if I haven’t come up with the solution, I’m not doing my job. If I haven’t come up with a solution using standard troubleshooting techniques and normal knowledge of the software, then THAT’S WHAT 2ND LEVEL IS FOR! That’s why I don’t have a position as a 2nd level technician! I’m not one. I don’t do advanced troubleshooting. I’m not sure I know how to do advanced troubleshooting over the phone. I don’t really want to. I just want to answer the questions I know how to answer, walk people through regular use of the software, and maybe do some basic troubleshooting to determine what sort of known issue they’re having. If it isn’t a known issue, and it isn’t a bug I can report to bugtrack, I don’t feel that a lvl 1 tech should have to deal with it. When a solution is found, it should be disseminated to the lvl 1 techs, and from then on they should handle it, but the actual advancedd troubleshooting should be left to the advanced technicians.

I realize there are only four of us here, and the level of experience between us is relatively equal compared to the average appraiser, but I certainly don’t know what Chris has learned in the last 6 months of meetings with programming, or what the inside of any of HPF’s files even looks like. It’s not in my job description to do so. And when I am expected to do things I was not trained to do, that aren’t in my job description, that sortof pisses me off.

So, that’s a little of what’s been getting to me from Chris lately.

Ooh, one more thing.

I know that the calls that take an hour are going to take an hour no matter which tech they talk to, but the calls that aren’t an hour, I can finish almost 50% faster than anyone else here, and in almost 50% of the time Chris does. So, it seems reasonable to me that when we have a queue and I get a call that I know will last at least an hour and chris or brian is available, I should xfer the call to one of them and handle the queue on my own.

Chris does not agree.

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Teel

Author, artist, romantic, insomniac, exorcist, creative visionary, lover, and all-around-crazy-person.