Forum Overview :: Peter Molyneux's The Movies :: Re: Homeland S03E02

[quote name="Commander Tansin A. Darcos"][quote name="Horrible Gelatinous Blob"]He even spells it out for her: I can't let you can't walk around doing whatever you want without regard for others unless you are very, very good. You have to give me a reason to defend you.[/quote] Absolutely. I was doing tech support on help desk as a contractor employee for a non-classified government agency, if I mentioned its name you'd recognize it immediately. I come in on my first day and I guess I scare the manager of the help desk section, because the guy he saw walk in - I was able to walk then - was 6' 2" and 400+ pounds, so I guess he figures I'm going to spend all my time eating and I won't be much good. He even goes so far as to complain to my boss back at my office making comments about my clothes, my size, or all sorts of thngs absolutely unrelated to my ability to solve customer problems. Now, this office has nine people on help desk, 7 federal employees, their manager who only takes a call if everyone else is busy, and his manager in the other office, plus me, and John, who was my supervisor and worked for the same contracting company, so that's eleven people in the section. John and I became friends almost immediately. Everyone else I was more or less cordial or friendly, but mostly they stayed away, I guess, like the Pterodactyl airplane in <i>The Flintstones</i>, you don't want to get too close to the front end lest he mistake you for food and eat you, bones and all. So I think the manager decides to try to think of a way to encourage the regular employees to do more or something, because he says if we can get the eight week backlog in help desk calls down to less than a week, he'll buy lunch for everyone. I didn't even think about it then, I just simply proceeded to sit at my desk, answer the phone, and <i>proceed to solve people's tech support problems over the phone</i>. I didn't realize it until later. I had just come off a 6-month contract doing phone support for an ISP, so the way I do a response when a customer calls, I walk them through how to do a self-service repair. The rest of the help desk employees almost always went to the customer's desk, which, of course, makes the call take longer. To me, it only makes sense. It's not that I'm lazy, it's that the fastest way to get someone's problem fixed is to explain to them what needs to be done and walk them through it. In all the time I was there I had exactly ONE call where the solution was so complicated I couldn't give the customer the solution over the phone and walk them through it, and where I had to go over to the person's office and explain it to them in person. All the rest I could tell them over the phone and get them back in service fast, fast, fast. Well, anyway, the manager stopped complaining about me after I'd been there about a week when the backlog started to shrink, not slowly, but it started to drop like a rock. The eight week backlog on help desk responses? Let's put it this way: he had to buy a lunch buffet down the street at Shakey's Pizza for everyone within 30 days after I showed up. That was the only change in personnel was that they went from 8 federal employees to 8 plus me. The 8-week backlog was completely gone after 30 days and all the time I was there we never went above a 2-day backlog. One guy called in. Had a problem. Really simple. Told him how to fix it. Didn't know him from anyone else, but I solved his problem over the phone in two minutes, total. Okay, now remember my supervisor John works over in the next cubicle, the section manager (who is basically John's supervisor and also my boss even though I don't work for him directly) works in a private office, his boss works in the room next to him, his boss' boss works in the executive office, and as it turns out, the guy I solved the problem for on the phone was his boss' boss' boss', he's one level below the head of the agency. This guy is the sort of VIP who normally gets in person service. He, however, came by to see who the Wizard was who told him exactly how to fix his problem in 30 seconds. Then he found out I wasn't wearing a conical hat and a silk robe and carrying a star on a stick, I was just a regular guy in buttoned shirt and pants. By the time I left after 9 months because the contract had run out of funds, the scoreboard read as follows: The #1 responder of help desk calls logged into the trouble ticket system had the username "Paul" with over 1,000. Number 2 had less than 300 calls. And I still had time to setup 60 machines when we upgraded the customers from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 when I wasn't answering people's calls. Then there was the time a guy casually mentioned that he was having a problem, it didn't sound that hard, I said I could fix it. It took me 90 minutes but I found the answer in one of the manuals, called the guy back the same day and walked him through fixing it (I had to walk him through it; I was in the headquarters here in the Washington DC area, he was on the phone, calling from a field office in Florida.) I then discover that the guy wrote me up, he wrote me a letter of commendation to the department manager because I'd solved in 90 minutes a problem that nobody in the office had been able to solve in 90 <i>days</i>. Yeah, when you're a superstar, <i>then</i> they cut you a lot of slack. I was doing so much that it allowed everyone else to get their work done, plus it meant the people who really needed handholding could get it. But unless you can do that level of work you are not going to get a whole lot of support. [/quote]