i fought with my boss yesterday. and won. and today my boss AND his boss called an overarching team meeting and so far have literally spent the entire time apologizing to the 40+ people who they've put through hell by being fucking stupid.
i want to try to explain the best i can because i've been just Suffering through this and keeping it in for weeks bc what else is there to do but it's Long so i'll stick part of it under a read more and then probably delete the post later lol
i work for a Very Large software company that makes business software that most businesses use, lets call this Parent Company. my team specifically does not work with Parent Company's software because we were brought in from an acquisition. we barely have access to it.
Parent Company has a very large support team. Parent Company also predictably tried to make an AI chatbot that was intended to "cut down on the amount of cases"
in order to force customers to use the bot, Parent Company decided to completely change the process of submitting a ticket
to submit a ticket, customers are now forced to first enter a chat with the chatbot
if the chatbot cannot solve the issue, which is 99% of the time, the chat is transferred to an engineer, who is forced to take the case through the live chat interface
this has (again, predictably) caused an enormous chat case backlog to begin with. customers can no longer create tickets on their own and are forced to use this chat process
the backlog got to 500+ cases and the 'leaders' at Parent Company panicked
apparently, the most immediate answer they could come up with was "let's throw literally everyone into the general chat and case queue. including the people who don't work with our software"
the general queue is for literally all aspects of Parent Software. there's 80+ topics that fit into that category. i have never heard of about 90% of them. every single chat i got thrown on was about an area of the software i wasn't even aware existed
we were not given any training. 0. it was literally just "we're putting you in this general queue, do your best".
me and the rest of my team completely flounder. it's bad. we're on back to back chat cases, all these customers have emergencies that they're demanding immediate help for, we have no idea what we're doing. we bring it up to leadership.
leadership goes "ok, so what if we train you in Parent Company's security department? they have a big back log AND we can train you" ok, we say, sounds good
they schedule us for a full week of 6 hour trainings for security
first day of training: "actually, we're cutting this meeting down to 4 hours and we're only doing today and tomorrow" rest of the meetings are immediately cancelled
second (and last) day of training: "actually we're only doing 2 hours today"
we get pushed into the chat and case queue for security cases directly after
literally the next day, all of Parent Company's security policies change. i cannot make this shit up, it was literally the next fucking day. everything, EVERYTHING we learned in what totaled to 1 day of training was made irrelevant. all of the training materials were immediately out of date. every single process we had learned was now wrong.
this change also means that Parent Company drastically changed the login process for 100,000+ customers. who are businesses. some with thousands of users.
the security queue is instantly (AND PREDICTABLY) hammered with hundreds of admins who cannot log in to a very important part of their business and all have legitimate emergencies because this change locked all their users out
my team has to try to relearn everything because all of the info we were given in training is wrong, and we have to relearn it while on live chats with customers. we are 100% new at this and we are getting back to back live chats with customers who are all completely locked out and none of us have any idea what to do.
there is no time to figure out what to do because we have to stay in an available status, which means that we have to keep taking chats without any time to work on the cases that are generated from the chats themselves. every chat generates a case, so every time one ends, a case is created for me to work on. which causes all of our caseloads to explode to like 30+ cases (our usual maximum is 15 at the worst). there are other statuses that can be used for casework but we are not allowed to use this
we bring this up to our boss and beg for help
boss goes "uhhh i don't know what to do because i'm not familiar with the software either, why don't you make a Public Cry For Help [these are called swarms] and see if the security team can help you?"
ok. we do. the security team is already overwhelmed by these Public Cries For Help and it takes a very long time for one of them to get to us. it does not help that there's only like 4 people on that team who can respond to the Public Cries For Help
customers start demanding that we get on live calls with them because again, it's an emergency. this becomes the breaking point because we DON'T KNOW WHAT WE'RE DOING AND CANNOT HELP THE CUSTOMER ALREADY and will just make a fool of ourselves if we show up to a zoom meeting with a customer and just go "i dunno, i'm as new at this as you are"
bring this up to boss -> "uhhh ok yes that's a problem, i'll talk to the more experienced security engineers and see if there's a process to have someone else take the call" -> public post 10 minutes later from boss: "hey guys the security team is overwhelmed right now, i know you guys can't do calls because you don't know anything but can you pleaaaaase just call this customer and Pretend"
another public post from boss: "HEY GUYS YOU NEED TO BE IN AN AVAILABLE STATUS FOR CHAT FOR 70% OF YOUR DAY AT LEAST. EVEN IF YOU HAVE CASES YOU NEED TO WORK ON. GOING OFFLINE FOR LUNCH AND MEETINGS COUNTS TOWARDS THE 30% OF TIME NOT AVAILABLE."
another public post from boss: "hey guys you need to be closing at least 3 cases a day!!! don't slack on this, people are looking at our metrics!"
yet another public post from boss: "remember to respond on ALL your cases at least once a day! obviously you still have time to work on your actual cases right"
boss's message to me: "heeyyyyy you got a low CSAT survery from a securities customer who said you didn't know what you were talking about"
public message from boss's boss: "remember to study for your Developer Certification that's required for everyone, you should be studying during your workday"
all of this cumulates into what happened yesterday. my boss scheduled a surprise meeting to talk about cases and i just exploded at him. and honestly, he didn't really argue that much, it just seemed like he was suddenly having some very uncomfortable realizations about the amount of work we suddenly had. there was one point where i asked him directly to tell me if someone who had just been hired and given 1 day of training would be held to these same metrics/standards and he just quietly admitted no, it would be completely different. i had kept track of how many back to back chat cases i'd taken over the last couple days and data that backed up the fact that there's no. fucking. time. to work on ANYTHING. and he was like "maybe i shouldve pulled a report on the amount of chats you guys have been getting..." IS THAT NOT LOGICAL??? FOR A MANAGER??? WHO IS BEING TOLD WE ARE OVERWHLEMED???
there is also NO PROCESS for transferring a case to a more experienced engineer. i have no fucking idea why or how there is no process for this. when i tried to get an answer as to what the fuck i'm supposed to do when i'm in over my head and cannot help a customer my boss just had no answer for me
i guess a bunch of other people on my team and the overarching team said the same thing because lo and behold, we all log in today and there's the Leadership Apology Tour meeting on the calendar
they apologized to us but honestly i and a lot of others on my team have completely lost faith in them. they really just seem like total fucking idiots who barely know more than we do about processes and what we're supposed to do
idk, all of these sound like really logical effects of the decisions made? how do you not think about the consequences of forcing people with no training to provide live help to people working in a software we've almost never seen before. how can you be this fucking stupid.
My boyfriend starts sneezing when it's going to rain (water) because he's allergic to ground mould (earth) that rises into the air. His sister is allergic to direct sunlight (fire) and their little brother has cold intolerance (air).
Only the avatar, who could get their ass beat by all the four elements
I made the mistake of looking at this while taking an order over the headset at work and started laughing really hard and had to gather myself for a second and my coworkers kept trying to look at my phone to see what I was laughing at
i think its fun when people use the trope of vampires thinking that werewolves smell like shit but its especially funny to me when they say a werewolf smells like 'wet dog' . like specifically WET dog? not dry dog? something about werewolves makes them smell damper than any normal dog even if theyre dry as a bone? fascinating implications. wet werewolf vs creepy vampire. much to consider.
I don't understand why "Adrian doesn't like Grace at first" is as popular as it is on fanfics.
Imagine for a second you are Adrian surname The Eridian. Your spouse has been missing and presumed dead for around a decade, and suddenly one day an alien spaceship comes into orbit. And you cheer "Yay alien species have realized we have the same problem and have come to either give us a solution or join or efforts, too bad my mate is still gone."
Except he is not actually gone, because the eridian equivalent of a carebear decided to save them. And he doesn't want anything in return, in fact he is well aware that he might die A PAINFUL SLOW DEATH, shortly after fighting just to get the love of your life back to you. But it's ok :) because Rocky (yes he gave them a silly name) is my best friend! Oh- Are you ok-
i like when a piece of media says that an all-powerful character "sees humans as insects" because that really could mean a lot of things. maybe they view us as insignifigant and will squish us under their boot. maybe theyre actually studying and cataloguing us for their thesis paper. maybe theyre campaigning for human protection because we're an important part of their ecosystem. maybe they see a human and go "ew ew ewwwwww someone get the cup and get that FREAK out of my house." .
I met someone when I was pretty young who had received a generous inheritance -- not enough to live a life of luxury, but enough to live on comfortably without working. He had chosen to simply keep going to school his whole life. He did get degrees, but he didn't use them for anything other than pleasure -- he had a Ph.D but also two Master's degrees, three BAs, and was currently serving an apprenticeship in blacksmithing while considering trying out some trade schools next. I thought, if I had the money I'd do that too, and then thought about how I still could learn all the time, it would just have to be a hobby instead of the career he'd made of it. It definitely changed the way I saw both education and leisure.
I think to myself frequently how if I had the money, I'd go through paleoanthropology, egyptology and archaeology courses literally just for fun
Hell, might even fulfill my ten-year-old-self's dream and study marine biology
I also ☝️ think it's important to tell the difference between "the author's barely-disguised fetish" and "the audience member's unrealised kink that they're projecting onto the author because seeing a character tied up is making them feel funny in their Audience Member Parts"
