Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2005-04-30 06:05 pm
azurelunatic) wrote2005-04-30 06:05 pm
Entry tags:
Better time of day, better frame of mind.
Other than my brain falling apart far too late the other night, I've been having a good couple of days. Work yesterday was insane but otherwise decent -- I was running check-in, and while my hours were adding just fine, the day was made to be nutso by a batch of very irate callers around 7pm or so. One lady was mad because we were calling her at 9:20 pm (and I can see being annoyed, but this was serious off-the-handle stuff involving screaming, profanity, threats to sue and/or fire people, and the CEO's contact information), and one guy absolutely positively needed to talk to a supervisor because he needed us to send him a free box of cigarettes. (WTF? We're trying to gather opinions, not send out boxes of death sticks.) After that, someone got upset about being called "man" (the fellow in question has an accent, and was actually saying "ma'am") and someone else threatened to fly down to Phoenix to take care of things in person.
It's the end of the month and stuff is closing down, so all the phone goons but a last little cluster got off early, leaving just one supervisor cleaning up the last stuff, me, the Stressy College Chick Shift Ops Super, and the Lead Trainer Monitor with a clutch of n00bs in training. I needed to stay to do the paperwork, the Stressy College Chick can't leave until after I do, and then Pirate Comic Super was taking care of the computers and kickin' it and gossiping about his youthful sexual misadventures. Many lessons can be learned from hiscounter example...
Today, I was on the phones (in theory); I was testing one of the re-written surveys for next month until well after break, and that was a pain in the arse. We were comparing the survey on the computer to the paper survey, noting the discrepancies, and noting the other things wrong with it.
There were a handful of questions from the old version that popped up out of bloody nowhere in the middle of the thing, causing me to cuss, yowl, scowl, write up a handful of furious notes, and utterly doubt my sanity. The survey branched without warning, and one combination of choices caused it to go on one track, and another handful of choices caused it to go on another, and I wound up making a flowchart (color-coded) to illustrate what was going on. Sadly, my favorite line from the snarky commentary (Inevitably, VAR_043U is followed by VAR_043V, but not by inner peace, for neither of them exist, according to the paper survey!) could not be used, because it turned out that it was only Q through T that were not supposed to be there; U happened some pages later in the paper version, albeit out of sequence with what was actually going on with the computer version.
Another question had been re-worded from the paper version and wound up asking an utterly different question (the paper version wanted to know how important it was that $COMPANY do such-and-such an item; the computer version wanted to know how $COMPANY was doing on the issue), and I'll leave it to the fine people in the back room to figure out which the fuck is supposed to be there.
A third set of questions had other issues. Comic Pirate Super came over to ask me how it was doing. "Found anything?" he asked.
"Yep, it's dreadful."
"That was not what I wanted to hear."
"But it's not a really big deal."
"Oh, good."
"But it is."
"WTF?"
So I explained: the formatting of the question was screwed, so the question's three responses with letter-perfect identical beginnings had the all-crucial different endings shoved so far the crap over on the screen that they went off the screen and were therefore invisible, and therefore unreadable and indistinguishable. It made the question useless, but fixing it was not a programming issue, just a reformatting issue, and therefore easy.
My obsessive attention to detail resulted in the Short Chick Super not having to do half as much work, because I'd already found the major problems with the survey and yelled about them at length, and she didn't need to duplicate my work.
Once we'd finally gone through and found all the problems, and gotten enough test surveys input to make the people in the back room happy, we wound up back on the phones. By that time, though, there were only a few hours left. I wound up getting one survey, and two and a half pages of random scribbling. The respondent was a nice and well-informed one, and there were things that didn't fit into the survey, sure enough, so we'll see what happens when that survey gets reformatted again. (It was already re-done just the other month, so it's got bugs out the wazoozie.)
So, yeah. Work. Fun. Stuff closed, so by 3:15, I was off the phones and cleaning up. I got in a half-hour of cleanup, including the much-needed refilling of the 409 bottles, then off home!
It's the end of the month and stuff is closing down, so all the phone goons but a last little cluster got off early, leaving just one supervisor cleaning up the last stuff, me, the Stressy College Chick Shift Ops Super, and the Lead Trainer Monitor with a clutch of n00bs in training. I needed to stay to do the paperwork, the Stressy College Chick can't leave until after I do, and then Pirate Comic Super was taking care of the computers and kickin' it and gossiping about his youthful sexual misadventures. Many lessons can be learned from his
- When you are a high school kid with a girlfriend, the walk-in freezer sounds like a pretty good place to get it on.
- Once.
- After that, you prefer the refrigerator.
- Or the roof.
- Or the ladies' room at the park.
- Or, in fact, anywhere else you can get it on.
- In some cases, it's advisable to check the religion of your partner before the act.
- Once your partner has informed you that she's a member of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, it's very much not advisable to say, "Well, at least you're not a fuckin' Mormon."
- After she hits you (hard), you should at least apologize.
Today, I was on the phones (in theory); I was testing one of the re-written surveys for next month until well after break, and that was a pain in the arse. We were comparing the survey on the computer to the paper survey, noting the discrepancies, and noting the other things wrong with it.
There were a handful of questions from the old version that popped up out of bloody nowhere in the middle of the thing, causing me to cuss, yowl, scowl, write up a handful of furious notes, and utterly doubt my sanity. The survey branched without warning, and one combination of choices caused it to go on one track, and another handful of choices caused it to go on another, and I wound up making a flowchart (color-coded) to illustrate what was going on. Sadly, my favorite line from the snarky commentary (Inevitably, VAR_043U is followed by VAR_043V, but not by inner peace, for neither of them exist, according to the paper survey!) could not be used, because it turned out that it was only Q through T that were not supposed to be there; U happened some pages later in the paper version, albeit out of sequence with what was actually going on with the computer version.
Another question had been re-worded from the paper version and wound up asking an utterly different question (the paper version wanted to know how important it was that $COMPANY do such-and-such an item; the computer version wanted to know how $COMPANY was doing on the issue), and I'll leave it to the fine people in the back room to figure out which the fuck is supposed to be there.
A third set of questions had other issues. Comic Pirate Super came over to ask me how it was doing. "Found anything?" he asked.
"Yep, it's dreadful."
"That was not what I wanted to hear."
"But it's not a really big deal."
"Oh, good."
"But it is."
"WTF?"
So I explained: the formatting of the question was screwed, so the question's three responses with letter-perfect identical beginnings had the all-crucial different endings shoved so far the crap over on the screen that they went off the screen and were therefore invisible, and therefore unreadable and indistinguishable. It made the question useless, but fixing it was not a programming issue, just a reformatting issue, and therefore easy.
My obsessive attention to detail resulted in the Short Chick Super not having to do half as much work, because I'd already found the major problems with the survey and yelled about them at length, and she didn't need to duplicate my work.
Once we'd finally gone through and found all the problems, and gotten enough test surveys input to make the people in the back room happy, we wound up back on the phones. By that time, though, there were only a few hours left. I wound up getting one survey, and two and a half pages of random scribbling. The respondent was a nice and well-informed one, and there were things that didn't fit into the survey, sure enough, so we'll see what happens when that survey gets reformatted again. (It was already re-done just the other month, so it's got bugs out the wazoozie.)
So, yeah. Work. Fun. Stuff closed, so by 3:15, I was off the phones and cleaning up. I got in a half-hour of cleanup, including the much-needed refilling of the 409 bottles, then off home!
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*takes notes*
(Catching up on huge LJ Flist backlog)
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