Christmas, New Year and Broadband Support
The yule-tide season finally reaches pinkwookie, so dust off your Christmas trees, grab a cracker and have some good old vintage 2006 mulled wine on me.
Christmas was a very normal and routine affair as it has been for me the past few years. This year was probably worse, as I was in that awful period after having graduated, having the time of my life at uni, to a life of unemployment, few local friends and possibly worst of all, no Internet.
I fully meant to do something other than stay in my room on New Years Eve this year, but my immune system decided to play a horrible joke on me and after having an early night, I woke up around midnight and was pretty ill. Bringing in 2007 by being sick wasn’t the best celebration and made me think of what the other 364 days had in store for me.
As a year, 2006 certainly had its moments, we graduated, Oblivion came out and ruined my life and we all learned the importance of Pentapeptides.
It took way till February until I could class myself in the enviable group of employed. I moved into Watford, started a job and festered for a while. Neither the area or the job was for me, despite being told I was quite good at the job. Basically what it entailed by broadband technical support was receiving a call from a disgruntled customer whose Internet wasn’t working and it was a race to either find out why they couldn’t get online and offer a solution, or providing a walkthrough to fix it over the phone. I mean, it wasn’t enough that we got normal customers with a normal problem, we only got the angry ones; when you ring up technical support for our company, you get through to a helpful person in India. When said customer exhausts all possibilities and gets thoroughly annoyed with said Indian, complains that they want to talk to somebody English, that’s when they get through to us. I did find it an amusing irony that a large portion of my colleagues were Asian, or Indian anyway, they spent the first 5 minutes of a phonecall describing the English weather and what time it was in England. To the credit of the general public, the vast proportion of calls that I took, broadband wasn’t working through no fault of their own, i.e. bad signal, not yet activated, the accounts department decided to mess up randomly and deactivate their account and broadband. From February till June I worked there and as you can guess I have some amusing war stories of customers which I’ll share.
I’ll protect the name of the company that I worked for, a few of you know it, but I can say they were Brazenly Terrible, Brilliantly Trashy and Broadband Trouble.
Well there were the usual hard of hearing, elderly, partially blind (and worst of all, a combination of all 3) and believe me getting them to put the cursor in the address bar was harder than finding the lost city of Atlantis, let alone typing in the address for our remote support tool so that I could do everything for them. You do wonder in circumstances like that, what the heck they’d do with the Internet if it was working…
There was also a guy, during my first week there, he was disabled, housebound and relied on the Internet as a lifeline to order food from the local supermarket. What you say to someone in that situation when he has no Internet is beyond me, and although whether his story is valid, when a person is telling you a story like this, you have no choice but to believe it.
There was the suicidal woman, who was crying over the phone as she had lost the Internet, and was saying things like “If you don’t ring back, I don’t know what I’ll do to myself…” Until the situation turned round, when I got her someone out to fix the problem and she was a completely different person, apologising for her behaviour, saying that I have a calming voice and asking if I’d ever thought about a career in teaching, as I’d be the perfect candidate for the children she taught.
Then there were the nice people, like an elderly gentleman from Scarborough, who I was reminiscing all the places there, him inviting me in for a Whisky, next time I’m in town. The uber-hot sounding welsh women, where I almost considered delaying offering the solution so I could stay on the phone. The hot sounding young female doctors and the praise I got back from some customers who rang us back, got through to someone else, but they just rang to say my name and say thank you. Although the constant threat was there that your call was silently being monitored by a superviser, I generally got through the day without sawing off any limbs, scored top associate the first month I worked there, and got high empathy scores when supervisors were listening to me. I know I’m blowing my own trumpet here, but haven’t we all at some point? Besides, anyone that I talked to during that dark era knew I was pretty unhappy and my heart wasn’t in it, and the old gall bladder thing was the last straw of being in a remote area where I knew little to noone in my spare time and doing a job that I wasn’t overjoyed doing. I did meet some cool people whilst working there and am sorry to have left them, but it’s been for the best.
In other news, recently my numb right thigh has finally beneffitted me, I accidentally bashed it on the corner of the table and it took me a few moment to think…’wow, that really should’ve hurt, oh well’