Office Chronicles: Nacho Libre Day, hosted by the Activities Committee

I'm on what we call "Service Reception" right now, from 9:00 am to 12:00 pm. Basically, I route calls throughout the Tax and Accounting Divison - which are the two offices here in Ann Arbor and Dexter. I'm the voice who says, "Good morning, Service Reception. How may I direct your call?" (I've been doing a lot of that this morning - the users are calling in like crazy!) In the meantime, between calls I have time to write about Nacho Libre Day and our Activities Committee.

This is the image that I received in an e-mail on Tuesday, December 9 - subject line: "December Nacho Liebere Event!"
Here in Customer Service, we have our own version of The Office's Party Planning Committee - the Activities Committee, or "AcCom." Pretty self-explanatory. The commitee members plan activities. Today's activity was a red-eye viewing of "Nacho Libre," which was slated to begin at 7:25 am but officially started at 7:45 am (due to technical difficulties). Four were present this morning for the viewing: Jay (our boss, the big cheese), Max (most helpful during intern training - he would always say at the end of each session, "any questions, concerns, confessions?" He also has the whole Pistons team on his desk - in the form of bobble heads), Jason (AcCom member), and me. Jason ended up having to leave due to an emergency, but the viewing continued as planned.

AcCom coordinates monthly birthday celebrations held on one morning meeting of each month. Since I started working here, I have experienced two such celebrations: October was the game Spoons with donuts to eat, and November was the game Balderdash - with fruit to celebrate. December's celebration is next week Wednesday, with another round of Spoons on the agenda. AcCom also coordinated our Thanksgiving potluck, held the week before turkey break, as well as the White Elephant Christmas Party after work last Friday.

In September during my interview for this job, I asked about the social interactions outside of work. Brian, my interviewer and present team leader, told me that the department was great about spending time with one another outside of work. Sandy, another colleague who interviewed me, said that there is always laughter heard throughout the department. And now that I'm here, I'm happy to say that both of them weren't lying. The reason that I wanted to write about our Activities Committee is because I love how it really does cultivate a sense of community within the department.

The event will continue at lunch, with a nacho bar. I can actually smell the seasoned ground beef and venison (yes, venison - our team leader Brian is a bow hunter) marinating in crockpots in our meeting area, located at the back of our department.

(I wrote the above paragraph sometime earlier this morning. And now that it is 12:00 pm, after routing a million calls throughout the Tax & Accounting Division of Thomson Reuters, I am off to lunch!)

a case of the Mondays (or lack thereof)

Last night I fell asleep to "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire." I was watching it with my dear friend Esther, who has informed me that I snore. She ended up leaving shortly before midnight, which is when I finally climbed into bed - pretty late for a girl who has to be at work by 8:30 am. When I go to bed late, I usually end up with a case of the Mondays. I find it necessary to mention that today is an exception.

This morning, I was making my usual round of UltraTax renewal calls. Spoke with one user who definitely wanted to renew his software, but told me that he would have to wait to speak with his wife about it first. He shared with me that she recently had surgery to remove a cancerous mass, but that she was home today and cancer-free - not the purpose of my call, but I was thrilled to hear the news. Ended up getting thrown on incoming calls shortly after that call, and decided at 11:58 am - two minutes before my lunch - to pick up a call from the UltraTax cue. I figured I could wrap the call up in about 2-3 minutes.

Two and one-half hours later, I had walked the user through updating his yahoo account password so he could check his e-mail for the password to our website so that he could renew and download his software. He also said that I had an accent, which I explained was the Michigan "e-yac-cent." (I also wanted to say, "Same to you!" because he was from New York). He said that he felt bad for making me skip my lunch, and that I could charge a sandwich to the credit card that he had given me during our conversation. I let him know that it wasn't necessary because Jimmy John's came today with free samples, and I had gotten a sandwich already. He said that they didn't have Jimmy John's in New York, but they called sprinkles - like the kind with which to top ice cream - "jimmies." That inspired me to share with him about how here in the Midwest, we affectionatly call carbonated beverages "pop" - and the user thought that that was "old-fashioned," compared to East Coast "soda." This led to another nice tangential conversation about sociolinguistics: he said that it was easy to tell the people from the Bronx because while saying "soda," it comes out sounding like "soder." And yes, we really did go over everything. While helping him to download the licenses for his software, I told him to go to the "help" menu, but he said that it should say "call Iris" there, which was sweet.

When I finally took my lunch break, my boss asked me to step into his office for a project for me to think about, since I was so "creative." And the way that came about was from spearheading the effort to decorate the department for our Harvest Fest (I don't think I ended up writing about that on this blog - we turned our department into CandyLand a couple of months ago...) In any case, the new project at hand has to do with designing labels for custom keyboard shortcuts - so I have something new to think about.

After that, I sat and ate lunch next to my co-worker Katie's cube. We ended up having a conversation about what we do. Both of us agreed that our initial impressions of working in customer service were very different from what we actually do. Almost everyday, we have to transfer licenses from software license holders who are deceased to living individuals at the firm. But the point of the conversation was that what we do isn't just monthly billing and software renewals - it really is listening to the bits and pieces of what go on in people's everyday lives, and seeing how change is ever constant. For example, the user that I was on the phone with for two hours changed his e-mail address because his wife had passed away and he had been using her e-mail address. And the answer to his secret question to reset his password was his pet, "Jade," who incidentally was also deceased. The user said, "as you can see, a lot has changed in my life."

After all of that, I still don't have a case of the Mondays - despite the exposure to extremes (celebrating over free Jimmy John's/empathizing with users in their personal losses). I find it extremely exhilarating to hang up the phone and know that I have helped someone to resolve their issue, in a relatively efficient manner. And now that I have said all of that...on to more phone calls!

Office Chronicles: chaos in the call center

The phones are ringing at the Tax and Accounting Divison of Thomson Reuters.

On any other day, that statement would not be out of the ordinary. But on Thursday, December 4, the call center went down - over and over again. When you work in a department where most, if not all, business is conducted on the phone, the call center going down is not a good thing.

If I had been as productive as I should have been, making phone calls on our cash cow UltraTax, then I don't think I could have appreciated the situation for its worth. (I was chatting with Lauren in Hong Kong instead...)

All of a sudden, all around me I hear, "Hello? Hello?" "Are you there?" "Can you hear me?" multiplied by the 24 other people in the department, and then exclamations of "oh!" and groans of "ohh no..."

We have a tiny window called "Q-View" on our desktops where we can see how many people are in each phone cue. When the phones were down, the cues started filling up. One representative exclaimed, "Oh my gosh, these people are stuck in phone cue hell!"

I was fortunate to wrap up each of my calls and miss the first few times that the phones went down - but the last call I made a few moments ago cut out while I was wrapping up a conversation with a user.

On our office instant messenger, someone sent out a message saying that she had chocolate in her cube. Subsequently, I heard footsteps rushing in her direction and "chocolate? I think we need some vallium here..."

My co-worker Katie says that we should write to The Office writers and tell them about today as an episode idea. I also wish I could write today as funny as it all happened, so here was my attempt. and I'm sure the phones will probably go down again once I finish this post and call another client.

Random fact of the day: Ann Arbor is home of the cubicle. (Said by my co-worker Linda while we were waiting for the phones to go back up again)

Shout out to Lauren Milewski because it's her 23rd year on this earth today, Hong Kong time.
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*update* this just in, at 1:50 pm in my inbox from my boss, the big cheese:

"FYI… the phone issue turned out to be due to a combination of a bad cable and a failed “fail-save” backup device. The cable was responsible for the up and down nature of the problem earlier today. The backup device failure was the culprit for the last couple of hours of down time.

The expected/needed behavior, of course, would have been for the fail-over to make the whole issue invisible. That didn’t happen and will result in some investigation and reconfiguring.

Anyway… unlike past fixes today this one is the real deal. So, proceed confidently. Thanks for your patience. We haven’t had this much excitement in Call Center in years."

(In years! An exciting day indeed!)