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!)
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