Superstar Performance

[Tdarcos]

Same government agency where I and John set up 65 new computers without error, and one of the regular thing I did was help desk/tech support. (I actually submitted the story to a magazine; I got a $25 Amex gift card for it.)

So, anyway we had a logging system so that when someone had a problem we recorded it, this gives us a track so that if they had a problem and someone tried a fix and it didn't work, we'd know not to try the same thing again.

(Continued message #2)

[Tdarcos]

(Continued from #1)

Well, the other people on the help desk, about 10, tended to go out to people's offices. (Except for the people calling in from regional offices; can't very well take a plane to Florida from the DC area because someone's printer wouldn't work.)

Well, I'm fresh off another contract where I was doing tech support, and it's not laziness, but I know the fastest way to get something fixed is to tell the customer what to do and walk them through it. As a result, I basically never had to visit a customer's desk. I also had a very high closure rate on help desk calls. Very high.

(Continued in #3)

[Tdarcos]

(Continued from #2)

On the help desk system, when you responded your name got added to the ticket, if nobody else handled it - because you closed the ticket at the same time you opened it - then yours is the only name on it. Everyone logged in by first name, and fortunately none of the people there had the same first name so it didn't cause a problem.

There were probably about 2500 tickets issued in the three months that I was there. The second highest person to close tickets had about 400. The highest person had the user name "Paul" and closed over 1,000 tickets.

(Continued in #4)

[Tdarcos]

(Continued from #3)

When I came into the office, they had an eight week backlog on getting trouble tickets cleared. Now, because I handled practically every new call that came in, it gave the other people there time to solve the supposedly "really difficult" cases.

Our boss said that if we could get the backlog down to two weeks he'd buy everyone in the office a pizza.

Within a month after I showed up, the backlog dropped from eight weeks down to ten days. We all got to visit the Shakey's pizza that was 3 blocks from the office.

(Continued in #5)

[Tdarcos]

(Continued from #4.)

By the second month I was there, we had no backlog at all; calls were being closed either the same day or within 2 days of them being opened.

We had one guy call us from Florida, he had a problem in that the office line for the satellite office was also the phone line he used to call in with his modem to the office to collect e-mail, and the computer kept answering the phone. No one had been able to figure out why. I said, "I can do it."

{Continued in #6)

[Tdarcos]

(Continued from #5)

I spent an hour and a half searching for manuals and finding the place in the remote dial-up software he had to tell it to set the modem not to answer the phone. I called him back and walked him through the steps to tell the program how to set the modem for dial-out only.

I found out that I had solved, in 90 minutes, a problem that nobody else there had been able to solve in 90 days!

The guy wrote me up for a commendation. I would get three of them when I was there.

(Continued in #7)

[Tdarcos]

(Continued from #6)

One guy came down because he had gotten some amazing service. Seemed that he had a problem, and, I didn't know him from anyone else, walked him through how to fix it on his computer. Net time to fix his problem: about 5 minutes.

Found out that he wasn't my/our boss (he worked in the office at the end of the room) and it wasn't his boss (he worked in the room next to our boss), and it wasn't our boss' boss' boss, he worked in the IT headquarters one floor up. It was the guy who was one level below the commissioner of the agency, our boss' boss' boss' boss.

(Continued in #8)

[Tdarcos]

(Continued from #7)

He's the kind of guy that normally the people who worked in help desk got up and went to see him and do the fix themselves, which means he would usually have about a 30 minute wait because it takes time to get down there and he'd have to explain the probem to the tech, then the tech would have to fix it.

Well, I'm not political; I don't know anyone there, all I do is tell people how to fix their problem so they can get back to doing their work.

I did make one personal visit to a customer once.

(Continued in #8)

[Tdarcos]

(Continued from #7)

A guy wanted to know how to send an e-mail message over the Internet to a correspondent. Sounds simple, right. Not when your mail server is CC:MAIL, you have to use a gateway encoding to tell the system the recipient is a foreign system; the foreign system being The Internet.

If you've ever had to work with the old X.400 e-mail messaging rules which were designed by commercial e-mail providers back when e-mail actually cost money, then you'd understand that the syntax was very esoteric and was complicated. I wrote it down, and went to see the guy who asked, because it even confused me and I was afraid if I explained it in e-mail he wouldn't get it.

He was the only customer I actually had to do an in-person visit; I fixed everyone else's problem over the phone.

(Continued in #9)

[Tdarcos]

(Continued from #8)

I am proud to say that in the entire time I was there I'd never once had a technical problem be too complicated to solve; sometimes I had to hunt down manuals to find a solution, but I don't think I ever had a problem that I couldn't get back to the person the same day (if I couldn't solve it while they were on the phone) or the next day (if it was close to closing.)

The office held a going away party for me on my last day, because the contract was only funded for three months; they couldn't afford to keep me on and there was no budget to hire me directly. I then discovered

(Continued in #10)

[Tdarcos]

(Continued from #9)

that I personally had been the one that had reduced the backlog from 8 weeks to nothing because everyone else had lots more time to answer other questions and go solve the trouble tickets they had. And it was the only change; the backlog had been 8 weeks until I showed up and right after that it started dropping.

I mention in my other message about the guy, who I called "Milo", who was also one of the contractor employees - he

(Continued in #11)

[Tdarcos]

(Continued from #10)

was on a different contract and would still be there after I left - and I mentioned the story of the guy where I solved his problem in 90 minutes that no one else had been able to do in 90 days. I almost wanted to slug him, because he says, "How come it took you 90 minutes?"

It was John who told me that essentially every one of the other tech support/help desk federal employees there more-or-less did not like me (although they never let it on to me personally) because basically I could out do

(Continued in #12)

[Tdarcos]

(Continued from #11)

almost any of them and they didn't like the fact that my extremely strong performance often made them look bad by comparison. Maybe "didn't like me" is the wrong phrase; maybe it was more like they resented my level of competence compared to theirs.

I got to speak with him over the phone a few years later when I called him because needed a personal reference. He decided to become a federal employee and work directly for the commission.

Oh, I just remembered. I did a video some 5 years ago about an event that happened at the commission:

[youtube][/youtube]