 Little boxes, Little boxes...
It's been quite some time since I have put anything here. And I have a few excuses you don't care about. However, I did finally quit my second job. They were very upset to see me go. It appears that in contrast to my day job, they offered everything they could to get me to stay. They said that I was their star and that they just couldn't bear to see me go.... an interesting contrast to whe treatment that I got at my first job.
It seems that at my first job, I'm perceived as "normal... average". Those were my boss' words. I wanted to see what other people thought, so I asked them honestly what my coworkers thought of my performance in the department. Many of them stated that I was the person that they went to when they had a question. They described me as a "killer" because I responded to and closed so many network trouble tickets. Some just said that they only had numbers to go on and didn't know me that well and that based on the numbers, I should be running the department.
I felt that my perception that the boss has of me must be skewed by something. I had to ask him what. I didn't mention my little informal poll that I did. I just went and asked how he formed his perception of my abilities and how he came to the conclusion that I was just an average employee. The answer surprised me. Apparently, customers spend a lot of time worrying whether or not you're going to feel sorry for them and stroke them and coddle them.... they don't really even care if their problem gets fixed or not. The worst employees in the department. The ones that don't work, the ones that just come here for the check and get as little done as possible... these are the ones getting the kudos from the heads of the department.
That's a battle that I'm not prepared to fight. Apparently, because these people trade off their work ethic for a good word in the ear of department heads, they spend a lot of time nuzzling with the customer so that their names are in the heads of those customers. When the problem eventually really, actually, truly gets fixed by an "average" person such as myself, and then they just hear the words "it's fixed" from me... the person that they remember is not the person that actually got the work done. The person they remember is the person that talked with them about their children, their church, their car-- everything but the circuit that kept their business functioning.
I took a week off before the end of the year. I went on several job interviews and got a couple of offers. I turned them down. Although one put me at quite a respectable salary level... think close to 6 digits... I didn't take it. Apparently I have something left here to prove. I just want-- before I leave-- for someone to recognize how key I am to the place I'm working now. For some reason, it's more important for me to be happy where I am, and NOTICED for the work that I do than it is for me to get paid. So I'm still struggling to make ends meet.... and nothing here has changed. For the last month, I've still been busting my ass to provide top-notch SERVICE to customers, while others here provide the stroking and blow-jobs that it takes to make them REMEMBER their names.
I refuse to be one of those people. I refuse to spend so much time on the phone making the customer feel big and good that I don't have time to do the job. It seems like in this department of 16 people, there are 3 or 4 key players that get all of the work done. The rest play with themselves all day long. Take this morning for example. For the weekend, we got 56 new tickets. 16 people, 56 tickets. I got 11. The tickets were closed before 9am. Out of 16 people, that's a fairly high percentage. Now I'm just sitting here answering queue calls as they come in, handling things as they happen.
I'm looking through some of the other coworkers ticket queues... I see one person that has 32 tickets backed up since middle-november. This is a person that is still suffering from an outage on a circuit that has an SLA (Service Level Agreement). Just think if you had a T1 to your building that your business used day in and day out. How long would you suffer with the outage before you went to another company? 2 days? 3 days? 1 day? Think about it.... these people have been down for almost THREE MONTHS and haven't been given anything but the run-around by this guy. However, there must be SOMETHING keeping him here.
At first, I tried to figure out what *I* am doing wrong that places me in the category of "average" whle this guy can keep tickets open for months and never get so much as a stern talking-to. I wanted to make sure that I had figured out what *I* was doing before I tried to take a look at those around me. I've come to the conclusion (obviously) that it has nothing to do with how WELL you do the job. It has everything to do with how you make the customers feel when you talk to them. Getting it fixed isn't enough. You have to tell the customer that it's okay, that they didn't do anything wrong, and rub them and give them their bottle. If you treat the customer like a spoiled child, you win as an employee.
I applied for and interviewed for another job last week. If I get offered the position, I'm not going to think twice about leaving. I've put myself on the line just about enough for a job that doesn't recognize my WORK.
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testing, 1.. 2.. 3.