And Then There Are Days It Doesn’t Pay To Put On Pants
I live 40 miles from my office. It takes anywhere from 45-90 minutes to get to work depending on the traffic. I also live 40 feet from an office. One day per week I work from home.
(It really is that small; about 4’x7′) It saves me commute time. It lets me focus on tasks that don’t involve the need to see other people. Tuesday is generally my work from home day. Yesterday was Wednesday. I got up. I took a shower. I put on pants. I went to my home office to collect my stuff and head to work. It was about 6:45 AM.
The phone rang.
I never made it out of my office.
I don’t do anything at my job. I’m the guy they call when we need other people to do stuff. There was an issue with one of our call centers. Not super serious, but serious enough that I needed to get people to do stuff to fix it. This happens enough that we have processes in place to take care of it. I work with over 1000 agents across three states. We take millions of calls per month. There are lots of moving parts and sometimes one of them slips a gear.
I won’t drag you through the details of my phone call. I’d probably be breaking some NDA agreements and frankly, I’m not a good enough writer to make it sound interesting. The short story is a long story. Eight hours and fifteen minutes later I was finally done. I was literally on a call for over eight hours.
Have you ever had to use the restroom while you have a wireless headset on? You check, double-check and TRIPLE-check that the MUTE button is depressed.
And, I wasn’t on just one call. That was my internal call. I was also on another call with the client that went for many hours, as I relayed information back and forth between my team and the client. I have a wireless headset and an office phone on my desk, and I also have my cell phone and ear buds.
Occasionally, I messed up the mute buttons and asked the wrong conference call a question at the same time. Mostly, I spent a lot of time waiting for stuff to get done.
I waited for the engineers to join the call. I waited for the engineers to fix the issue. I waited for my call center agents to test the fix. I waited. Occasionally, I would get a third call. It would ring into my cell phone, putting the conference call on hold. I also attended a webinar. I routed the sound for that through my home audio system. As the webinar was presenting I had people talking in both ears. It made me question my sanity. I didn’t get an answer. I think I’m planning to get back to myself sometime next week.
Around 4:00pm when I finally signed off on the final location as being healthy, I realized that putting on pants today was a total waste of time.
Some days are like that.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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