Work, and other mysterious ailments

[azurelunatic]

Got to work to discover that my water bottle had leaked all over the inside of my brand-new (inexpensive) purse. Garr. One box of altoids, dissolved and spread all over the inside of the purse. Oy.

Wound up on a brand new survey. Did a few training runs through. My strength is that I observe things. Got hauled off into the nice conference room through the security door to do the briefing. It was a live briefing: Du-rag Supervisor was reading the briefing guide aloud with a live tape recorder, being as this was the first time anyone's been on this job. He pointed out the places where it should terminate and what it should do; when he was done and turned off the tape recorder, I pointed out two bits he'd missed: another place where it terminates, and then how if they'd only mentioned two companies that they were very or somewhat familiar with, the third line in the "compare these companies on a number of aspects" intro question would display a 12 for some reason. Neither of these things were supposed to happen, evidently. I seem to be one of the sharp ones. (This is why I'm a monitor.)

I got one survey on this new job. It's weird saying "Good evening, I am A. Lunatic from $HELLISH_COMPANY, an independent market research establishment," rather than "Hello, I am A. Lunatic..." The tone of this survey is far more professional than most of the ones we do. I like it more.

Break was fun. I was going on break just as othercat was getting off early; she stayed long enough to hang around for break, play with my palmtop, hijack my journal, and go over the infamous Can of Beans story.

Everyone else was getting off around 7:30; as the new job, we stayed until around 8:30 before Du-rag Supervisor finally shut off our numbers and had us go home. We were on the paced dialer for most of the day, but we got to spend the last 30-45 minutes on the automatic dialer.

One lady had been getting nothing but garbage numbers all day -- busy, answering machine, not in service, really not in service, business, probably some cellphone, phone butler, completely and utterly not in service, and gods know what else. This inspired me, and I sketched a very disgruntled stick Phone Goon getting these calls, and then a stick supervisor pouring numbers into a funnel out of a large garbage can. (For those who don't work with us/don't work with the same kind of phone system: the numbers the paced dialer goes through are fed into the system in programming constructs called "funnels"; each funnel can hold several queues of numbers, and evidently rotates them so they get dialed at roughly the same time.)

Just before we left, we got to hear the telltale sound of rain hitting the roof. The rain had stopped by the time we did get out, but it was nice and soft and windy outside. I could taste the water cool in the air, and the wind picked up my hair and tied knots in it while I was walking home.

Hooray, wind...

Comments

[pyrogenic.livejournal.com]

Hm... I think I got this survey ... financial institutions?

[azurelunatic]

Banks and insurance type financial institutions, what attributes are the most important to be held by same, which attributes are held by which institutions, testing out a new catchphrase or four and seeing what people thought of it, which catchphrase was the best for a financial institution, and would you ever consider doing business with $FINANCIAL_INSTITUTION?

[pyrogenic.livejournal.com]

So similar, but not the same. I actually took it 'cause I never miss a chance to give Commerce Bank good press. Mine was "what companies come to mind when you think of financial institutions" "how satisfied are you with your financial institution?" "how many times have you visited a branch bank in the past month" two or three I say, she says "if you had to pick one answer would you say two or three?" (what's the deal with that?!) "on your last visit were you one very satisfied two satisfied three neither satisfied nor dissatisfied four dissatisfied or five very dissatisfied" (that last bit got repeated so many times ... I'm a smart guy so I caught on to the pattern and started answering right away, to which she kept apologizing that she has to read the entire question.)

[azurelunatic]

The deal with "two or three" is that the field on the computer survey is only set up to take an integer, not a range.