saint_monkey

if i could indulge upon your patience... i would now like to bitch about my job.

a few months ago i wrote a program that collects the results of three databases and writes them to ~400 excel files. there are many factors. in this entry, the bit of data i'm bitching about belongs to the "quality team." They listen in on customer calls and rate them. each call is scored from 1 to 100. the quality team wanted me to pull all the scores and loop through each and test for certain standards... here are those standards:

(on a 1 to 100 scale)
>90 = WOW-"Gold Standard" (if i score this do i get a bottle of tequila?)
81-90 = excellent
61-80 = good
51-60 = just OK
<51 = poor

(*These stats have not changed... even with everything below, the standards still remain the same to this day.)

i was supposed to pay attention to "WOW" , "excellent" and "Poor"

of all the shops, 50% or more had to be either WOW or excellent, and none could be a Poor.

simple enough... i wrote this into the program

the first time i ran this, i received numerous accusations from the various supervisors that my program was flawed and that it was being "too easy" on people. 81% was way too low. excellent isn't good enough apparantly.

i went to quality and oopsie! apparantly i misunderstood where the line in the sand was to be drawn, it wasn't 80%, it was 90%. they call this number a "WOW %", so i'm only supposed to be looking at the "WOW's"

ok. not a problem, i must have misunderstood, and i made the change. i went to talk over these stats in person instead of sending an email (mistake) anyhow, that was two months ago.

today a new supervisor complained that the database that i draw the stats from makes it's own reports and that these reports list a drastically higher percentage of "Wow%" for his team (my report 27%, his 78%) my program, he concludes, is therefore farked up.

i looked at their report, looked at mine, ran the numbers, and whaddya know? same number of monitors, same scores. just the percentage is screwed. i do the math and my report draws the line at 90%, theirs.... at 85%.

WTF? 85% isn't a dividing line in their standards... and when you print the report from the problem database... it lists the standards i've referenced in a little table up top. the stupid report draws the line at 85% and says it draws the line at 90%! So it looks like my program is busted when it truly reports on a 90%. No one questions it because it looks okay to them! looks fine from where i live!

so back i go to quality and figure, somebody made a mistake with their report.... but oopsie! it turns out that i misunderstood again! silly me. although the magic line of 85% isn't on the standards anywhere, that is indeed where the division is supposed to be. didn't we tell you that?

WTF WTF WTF!

so now i'm supposed to change the dumbass code to reflect this BS standard that isn't supported by any documentation anywhere, and leave it at that and not expect this to come back and be interpreted as something different two months from now.

normally if i change the code, i comment as to why it changed, when it changed and who approved it. i then save the email asking me to make the change. but these standards come from when the program was written, so the comments aren't there, or the decisions were made in a face to face meeting, and handed to me on paper. since then we've had a building move and all paperwork relating to non-essential issues was destroyed. and the head of quality is pretending that she never told me to change the stats from 80% to 90% at all, so apparantly i made that up in an argument with some schizophrenic version of myself pretending to be the head of quality. and since the line was NEVER at 80% but ALWAYS at the imaginary 85%... which i magically should have known, in fact "i'm sure i told you," so i MUST have been schizophrenic when i programmed them into the code to begin with.

i feel like telling them that clearly SOMEBODY in this whole chain's sanity is at doubt, and until we figure out whose, then we shouldn't go altering the code anymore. the worst part is, no matter how this all comes out, i look like the irresponsible one, because i'm going to be putting out revisions to reports filed two and three months ago so that i can honestly reflect the situation on end-of-year reports, and that just sucks.

i wish i had something to say. but i don't.

sorry. in case you haven't noticed, the end of the world happened already. you missed out.

i had my review... it went well, they gave me the most raise they could for a cs position, 5% per hour, boosts my salary by 60 cents. (if you do the math, you can find out what i make... sad, isn't it?)

anyhow, the review came with a promise to re-evaluate my salary as a workflow analyst once i move under the workflow group. that situation seems to be the proverbial carrot on the end of the stick here. it seems that they keep making the carrot bigger and the stick longer. but the joke is on them... i'm much happier doing this work... it is just sad that the one thing i really want, an earlier shift, seems to be part of the carrot to them.

anyway, my "boss" (she's in quotes because she isn't my boss, i'm on loan from my real boss, who doesn't care what the hell i do. he told me so, ) has given me a few tasks to help with a training of about 90 cs reps, once they are in place, the word is, that they won't need me to back up the floor, and i can make my official move to analyst. that looks like a march timeframe.

anyhow, that sucks.

i am post-happy today. post-happy!

this is geek heavy, so beware.

just had to add this, i got the strangest escalated mac call. the user was entering a payment amount in our website on an XML form, when he would type a value with a leading 2, he'd get an instant error fromthe "onchange" event, saying that invalid data has been entered. this happens normally on the site when a hard space is typed in. sometimes, other mac users using safari will get an error from the site that tells them that the "&" character isn't supported when they are typing only numbers. so i took a look at the page source, which says:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"? ><tr class="row0"><td class="rows_sched_pmts">PHILADELPHIA ELECTRIC CO<br />26-01-38-300835</td><input type="hidden" name="Payee2911947" value="PHILADELPHIA ELECTRIC CO" /><input type="hidden" name="UserPayeeID2911947" value="2911947" /><td class="rows_sched_pmts" align="right">


see that header declaration, utf-16...? that refers to multi-lingual unicode 16 bit standard. it is telling the form which characterset (language) to accept the entry with. older macs with the old motorola processor (pre g-3) support ASCII charactersets, or at the most, utf-8, the 8-bit unicode standard. what happens when utf-8 input meets a utf-16 form that doesn't know how to properly fall back? the data gets re-interpreted as ASCII. the utf characterset for the number two (the decimal number 50) is hex 0032, transmitted as &#32 by ASCII. (see the ampersand... explains safari's ampersand problem, but what about the "invalid entry...?") well, either the xml, or ie, or the server, is converting &#32 into the decimal value 32. and tries to make a characer out of it. if you convert 32 back into hex, you get... 0020. 0020 is utf-16's hex code for the hard space character. trippy.

this guy i work with. he's a big guy, kinda looks a little like a shorter, chunkyier, danny glover, but he doesn't sound like him. got a real big voice. name is Ira.
"I.R.A."
He spells it to customers on the phone. But when he first introduced himself, it was "Call me BIG I." I got to know Ira in about a minute intervals in between calls, long enough to get a tiny bit or factoid, but never the whole story. To sum it up, he partied a lot in the seventies, claims to have met Andy Warhol, and doesn't have a very good home life. He has a son whom he doesn't get along with, and a daughter that he adores, but not enough to not work 20 plus OT hours per week.

Ira sometimes sings when the calls go dead. He gets bored. He only sings the same song ... "Chances Are." But he only ever sings the first line, and he does this at least thirty times in an evening, until one of the grumpy call center supes tells him to stop...

"Chances are... because you wear a silly grin..."
"IRA!"
"Whups! Heh Heh!...(then he gets a call...) GOOOOOD Evening, Thankyaforbankingatcommacebank this is Ira... no, IRA, I..R..A.. Ira."

You can tell when the call is over, because

"Chances are... Because you wear a sill ... GOOOOOD Evening, Thankyaforbanking..."

Now we got a new guy, as yet unidentified, that is whistling the Intro to Guns-N-Roses "Patience" whenever it gets slow. He never gets more than about ten notes before he must stop to answer the phone.

He must never gets closure because as soon as his call ends, he starts in on it again. Forever locked in a struggle with the late 80's. I kinda wish I knew which guy it was, cause then i could buy him the casette. He could play it in his Camaro while he brushes his mullet and combs his unkempt dirty blonde moustache. Or at least he can imagine the Mullet and messy moustache, our company's dress code prohibit both.

Anyhow, Ira must be jealous of the Whistling GNR guy, because right after he starts up, Ira kicks in with

"chances are... because you wear a silly grin, whenever you come into view..." (for the purposes of this competition, Ira seems to have unveiled the second line of "Chances Are.")

and they have a bit of a competition until one of them has to get on the phone, or someone yells for them both to cut out the racket.

caller: so HOW many digits is my passcode?
me: it can be from 4 to 10
caller: JESUS! i wish you internet people would get UNIFORM.

drunk caller: "why do you keep charging me these bounced check fees?!"
me: "It's our policy to charge the fee whenever you write a check for which there are no funds available."
drunk caller: "but my kids are starving!"
me thinking: "perhaps you can feed them beer."

this job is making me elitist and mean and i don't like myself that way.

the place where i work has no testbox for mac related issues, and the programmers, who got their degrees from crackerjack boxes, refuse to even consider coding for the mac, often they say "it is the user's fault for using a MAC." so any customer service/tech issue about the site comes to me ... presumably i'm mac expert because i own a mac and i know about the holy trinity for pre os X related issues. (Trash the Prefs, Rebuild the Desktop, Zap Parameter RAM) ... Since there is no Mac at work to try and duplicate problems, i've had to resort to doing this type of thing at home. I don't know why i'm expected to be the one to go and resolve HTML/Javascript/Active X issues with Macs and the site, when i don't get consulted or paid to concerning the code to begin with, and I really don't have the degrees or know how to futz about with that stuff.... but the techs have made it clear that they will do NOTHING without a solution spoon fed to them, and the customer contacts are getting bounced to me, because if someone says "Mac" then it's my issue. since i've finally resolved thier trouble (has to do with bad javascripting.... wrong form of the Submit method of a form control... i even know how they can make the control work without changing the control (the control is looking at an "Optional" field like it is a "Required" one, but only on Mac OS9.2 and below) and it took three hours of my own time, examining html and javascript source, and testing the site under various conditions on the mac, i'm thinking about going and submitting a bill before i tell them how they can fix the trouble.

but my workplace can hardly be blamed, they are just following the example set by the industry, especially Uncle Bill and Microsoft. (who just announced that they will no longer develop future versions of Internet Explorer for the Mac.)

there is a quote. if i weren't so damn lazy i'd look up it's source on the internet. i'm sure there will be ninety pages with different variations, attributing it to different people, so to save everyone time, i'll mis-attribute it right now, to ... let's say, General Tso, of "General Tso's Chicken" fame.

the lottery is a tax on people with poor math skills. -General Tso

Last night, at work, i tried to determine the procedure one must follow to be "paid" for jury duty, as my employee handbook promises. It's a "perk" that takes effect immediately, according to the same handbook. Since my supervisor has been MIA since the flakes started to fly (odd, since i live in Manayunk, 35 miles away and over the Betsy Ross bridge, and she lives in Cherry Hill, not five minutes away,) I had to ask another supervisor ( alady wearing a blaze orange cowboy hat with the words "deputy wow" printed on it, and sporting a roll of carnival tickets which are handed out to those with the best morale, to exchange for what? i'm not certain, as i have the morale of Eeyore.) anyhow, i asked the Deputy about the whole "jury duty" procedure. She said that since i worked an evening shift, they would begin paying me. They would start at 2:30 when my shift would normally begin and end whenever jury duty ended, (probably 5 o'clock) then i would be expected to return to work and complete the remainder of my shift. So really, i would only be "paid" by my employer for two and a half hours of eight hours of jury duty, and i would be expected to complete the majority of an eight hour phone shift after spending a day awaiting dismissal in various underground subchambers of city hall, and if i'm lucky, hours of mindless testimony in a dank courtroom. As this sounded not only unfair, but collosally unfair, both to my duty as a juror, and to my duty to do my job well, i asked another supervisor, and she said "Yeah, that's what they'd LIKE you to do, but technically you are excused from your entire shift when you have jury duty." So i've found that i can be excused, but still no clue on how pay for that will work.

as if i'm not irate enough about the job, the lady in the cubicle next to me spent close to an hour wrapping up customer contacts off the clock. you see, in customer service, the customer sometimes will want things that require that you step away from the phone. stepping away from the phone is a cardinal sin in a call center. especially this one. i get the feeling that two things matter above all else. 1) that you present an incredibly saccarine attitude at all times. this is the aforementioned "WOW." at commerce, WOW is a religion. it's written on everything, the desk mirrors they issue so you can smile before taking your call ("Smiles can be heard!" the stationary says, along with "how can i WOW you today?!") it's pretty orwellian in it's scope and intensity. i get a real feel for Kafka in this place. 2) that you always, always, always, be available to take the next call. So "stepping away is frowned upon." and it isn't like the customer wants you to deliver the moon to them....these are generally reasonable things, lately what they often want are copies of old checks so they can submit them in court, or copies of old statements for tax purposes. this takes maybe five minutes to print and put into an envelope. as part of their overall veneer of respectability, commerce says that "of course" we are to fufill these requests. large requests are charged to the customer if they take lots of labor to complete. small requests are expected to be done in a mythical "between call" state. this state doesn't exist. composing a three line email "between calls" at commerce took me about an hour last night. so for small requests i punch the "not ready" button and dash off to complete the task before taking another call. since i am only allowed to be in the "not ready" state for 9% of my workday, this has to be quick. I'm sure i've gone over my 9% a few times, but if i am questioned, i've actually saved the customer's requests to offer support for my "away" time. this worked at microsoft, where the "not ready" policy was equally as draconian.

This lady next to me had saved all her tasks up, and then logged out and punched out, and spent an hour wrapping up. Still working for commerce customers, handling paperwork with the commerce letterhead, and stuffing statements into commerce envelopes. i asked her why, and she said that she had been warned by her supervisor about going over her "not ready " time in the past, so she used to log out of the phone at the end of her shift, to avoid going over her "not ready" time, and then complete these tasks and then punch out, logging maybe fifteen to forty five minutes of overtime a shift. (you see at commerce, every second of your shift is on the phone, only the 9% is permitted away from the phone. you must come in, find a place to sit (no assigned desks, not even shared desks, ) boot your pc up and start the required tools, one takes a good five minutes to load... and log into your phone and punch in no more than two minutes early, even though boot up takes twenty minutes. furthermore, you can not be even a minute late, or you get an "occurrance." five occurrances, and you are fired. by the way, if you are two minutes late, this is two "occurrances," So five minutes late will get you fired, or at least a paper warning.) So where was i? Oh yeah. My deskmate's off the clock wrap up. The payroll department accepted my deskmate's "log out wrap up punch out" plan for a while, but then began quiety pushing her last punch of the day back to the time she logged out of the phone. They didn't tell her that the wrap up was unacceptable, they just stopped paying her for it. Essentially encouraging her to work off the clock. I asked her how other people wrapped up these tasks. She said that the ones that didn't care told the customer that these things couldn't be accomplished, and took the hit for "lying to the customer" and "not providing WOW service" when their supervisor or the Quality Control department monitored their calls, but she says that the reps eager to advance complete thier tasks off the clock. "But keep quiet about it" she says, "this is the way to become salaried."

what's the common denominator here? both of these practices are incredibly exploiting, if not out and out illegal, but the employer has no culpability, because they are creating a situation where the employee willingly, and against stated "policy," violates labor rules on their own because of subtle coersion by the company. So the real situation here is, they spout some pseudo policy that is not a policy at you, then if you buy it, or you knuckle under, they exploit you, if you don't they will excuse you but they will "frown" upon it.

once again a single thought burrows into my forehead. "i need to get another job here, folks."

on the way home, a huge billboard for the pennsylvania lottery stared out at me. "Daily payoff $300,000" it said. even though i know that the chances of winning the lottery are non existant, i almost buy a ticket at the gas station on the way home. i have to think three times about it. the billboard has an incredible draw. what is a dollar for a dream that involves something other than how can i get my empoyer to treat me like a human being and not some kind of nazi productivity experiment? $300,000 would look pretty nice in my savings account, with that lump sitting there, i could put the "Ow" into "WOW." I might stay on just to see how the company handled my aggressive attempts at Unionization.

last night, the snow began at around eight or nine. white rain from the god of wealth, whose birthday is today according to spicebush's fung shui calendar. at ten thirty i got out of work and began a laborious trek over the betsy ross bridge, which hangs like the proverbial bird of doom that shifts and cracks, over old art deco factories with thirty foot windows and seventy foot rusted smokestacks cropping up out of the rotten textile and cement industry spead beneath. cops run there with no lights in pairs silent, only sounds the hiss of wheels, but i wouldn't know, that's kensington and "YOU don't go there" is what my white co-workers tell me. it loks like the burbs in atlanta where i dug ditches in the red clay, the same red clay would stain my socks, get in the creases of my skin, little mica chips and sweat would stick to my forehead and slide into my eyes.... the glittergrit eyeshadow of hard work. at the end of the day i couldn't wait to wash that earth's blood down the drain. i hated hard labor, but it was always nice to feel that dirt come off. kensington seems strangely compelling. the death one looks at over the edge of a high building. they can't mean me. i'm invincible, and everyone is very nice here. no one really means me harm, and all the white folks are paranoid, they tell me not to go to gertmantown, or to the north of philly, but i go there all the time, cruising ogontz avenue and chew street. right through the warzone. nobody cares. i'm sure it is the same in kensington, just like i know i'd float, not fall towards the death at the edge of a building.

anyhow, over the bridge i go, "two lanes to phila" staying to the left, while the crazybrave and the damnfool rip by to the right. huge trucks, fast little sportscars with no low gear, old primered beaters... all blast by me, the road a white wasteland, visibility is good, a hundred yards of foggy DMZ, fading into static ahead, static behind. the road is cold, the snow is powder, not slush, so it isn't real slick, until we hit the freeway, here the trucks have laid salt, and the snow has given away to slush and frozen almost immediatelytto a rock hard rink. here the crazybrave hit trouble, the porsche is stranded (what's the difference between a porcupine and a porsche? a porcupine has the pricks on the outside.) good joke, but this particular prick isn't on the inside, he's out in the lane, trying to punch cell phone buttons on his afterthought of a cell phone with his rabbit fur lined leather gloves... london fog felt coat blowing in the wind, scarf flying out in front, smacking him in the face from time to time. i pass the beater on the elevated ramp connecting 95 to 476 (Central Phila, the sign states in it's green and white informational way. orange sodium vapor lights behind it are diffused so much by the snow that the whole sky from horizon to horizon is sort of a midnightblue fading to burntpumpkin.) the beater looks like he started to skid on the onramp, forgetting that the wind below was cooling the surface of the road some 20 to 30 degrees more than the earth beneath the freeway... when he began to skid, he slowed down, and now can't get the traction to get going again. he's trying to coast down the breakdown lane backwards, to get back to the freeway and take a run at it.) he is tough to get by.

on 476 the traffic volume has melted a lane of traffic, and everybody is piled into it, praise god, there is pavement again! (it's a trap. sometimes god wants you to take the hard road,) water falling from the bridges above has frozen on the exposed pavement, the snowy lane, less travelled, towards the left, has escaped this... on ramps from the city dump new victims into the fray, each sliding through one intersection, then another before getting over into the snow and slowing down to 25, nearly causing conniptions for the entering drivers who dart for pitcher plant salvation of the exposed left lane.

76 is a replay of 95, the crazybrave and damnfool are back, but truckers are tempering them, they are strung out in the left and center lanes, positioned so that all traffic has to slow, they are tempered by time and experience, they know that until the plows get out here, this is death... they force the traffic on 76 down to 35. towards city boulevard, a SUV makes a break, all four hubs locked, and then all four tires begin to spin... much faster than the forward motion betrays... the lady in the suv floors it, speed equals traction being the thought here, i guess.. the back end fishtails and she hits the brake, (while trying to recall physics formulas in her head, i'm sure, force equals mass times.. times.. times...what?) when she skids further she tries to correct and takes her foot off the gas... the SUV's automatic transmission shifts into a lower gear, turning all that wasted motion into torque. the tires bite and the suv straightens out. she floors it again and the tires spin once more. she cruises down the road this way, managing to achieve another ten miles per hour, and miraculously, begins to navigate the web of semis.

fortunately, i get off on kelly drive. ridge avenue, a gentle slope... is blocked by two city busses and about twenty cars. the busses slowed for their stops and can't get the momentum to get going once more. i assume the drivers are fitting chains, at least i hope so. hazard lights are monotonously telling me not to go up that way. i go down to main, and up a much steeper set of backroads... i have to stop for about two minutes while a tow truck tries to extricate a step van from the road. "you'll never get by" he finally tells me, but there is barely enough room, like that sliver of hope on the edge of the building, or on the left exit off the betsy ross bridge exit off of 95, that would take me away from work, down aramingo ave and into kensington. i wait a second, and the driver moves the truck just a foot, enough to erase all doubt about the matter, and i ease easily by into our parking lot.

things to do today:

• go to the "ace check cashing" on ridge avenue and buy a bas pass
• go up to target and get some cheesy dress slacks and sweaters and ties for wage-slave job (can you believe that they have the nerve to ask for business professional at a job that starts at ten an hour? the raw, bleedin nerve of the jerks.)
• ask jason to take a look at going out of business shoe store to see if they have any 9 and a half or 10 sized doc martins that were black and looked dressy. if they do, ask him to buy em, and reimburse (consider this askin, buddy. i'll send ya an email too) otherwise, check out docs on zappos.com
• at some point, actually go to wage-slave job.
• start lookin for resarch material for "tea drinkers" print, perhaps japanese kimonos, look at local coffeeshops
• look at schuykil river, take some digital shots for "frozen schuykil" print.
• order olive oil from the bariani family in san francisco.