Hidden Something

[azurelunatic]

Today was very much Not, for me.

Belovedest was scrubbing the bathtub when I woke up. I had Ramen, The Sequel for breakfast. I poked at my desk for a while.

There were the sounds of a very energetic cat fight. alexseanchai and I yelled "Ladies!" simultaneously and ran towards it, expecting that somehow Yellface had got out of the basement and Murderface had taken exception. Instead, Murderface was on the windowsill above my bed, in an absolute fury that there was a cat outside.

Neighbor Cat is allowed to exist, kitty.

In the early afternoon I fell over for a nap. It was evening when I woke up.

The Siblings were up for games. alexseanchai made possibly the last of our strategic orange chicken supply. We had a nice Siblings video call with Mystery Case Files: Rewind.

I'm clearly focusing almost all my anxiety on toilet paper.

Belovedest's art-posting project cleared most of a shelf in the display tower. I added the emergency radio, the emergency lamp, and the little disco spreaker, since the emergency power banks were already there.

The new boogie board we got for the shopping list had its magnets coming unglued. Yesterday's hardware store run got bins, waterproof twist-ties (nosepiece size) and super adhesive. So I re-glued the magnets.

The resume I sent out the other day came to nothing, but I had fun with the cover letter.

[workerbee] let me know that there was a potential need for someone. I've known [workerbee] since a mutual friend at [college] thought she should introduce us.

I have a technical education and deep experience learning new systems and organizing other people's information and objects. I have most of a Computer Information Systems bachelor's from DeVry, before life happened. I recently developed an ADHD-friendly physical filing system that can be adapted to nearly any existing filing system. I have not spent any time in the SCA myself, but I am friends with [Kat] among others in several kingdoms.

I usually take an organization-heavy role in any team I'm on. When my team is notified that we'll be getting a new piece of technology, my manager lets me loose at the documentation to see what we're getting into and what the team should know, in addition to the official orientation.

Like many other people who got online in the 1990s, I learned some light HTML on my own; I backed this up with some formal web development classes in college. I would need to brush up on WordPress before jumping in, as long as someone maintains/patches/etc. the server. I'm willing to learn PBX maintenance.

I've used Bugzilla, Jira, ServiceNow, SalesForce, Iris ([]'s internal ticketing software), and the homebrew helpdesk integrated with LiveJournal, although I do not have experience in maintaining them. I can hold enough detail of about 2,000 tickets in order to find them with a simple search system; after that they start falling out of my head and I need a more robust search function.

At Virtual Hammer, I was the research scheduler for my User Experience researchers. This meant keeping and maintaining a CRM of potential candidates, including past contacts, contacts picked up at trade shows, candidates recruited online. We went through three different solutions, two homebrew and one from an external vendor. I have an informed grasp on approaches that are likely to work and unlikely to work. I generally recommend a commercially developed product that is not SalesForce.

I worked in a consumer research call center, working with both random digit dialing and listed sample, which we cold-called on a variety of surveys. We worked from a verbatim script, capturing responses in exact terms of the survey instrument. I went on to work as a quality assurance monitor, manual labor-hours per client job calculator, and developed a custom, in-house researcher productivity report based on reports pulled out of the mainframe and Microsoft Access. This replaced an exceptionally complicated and unfit for purpose series of Excel spreadsheets developed by my predecessor.


In my time at Virtual Hammer, I experienced two significant whole-company tool transitions.

The first was Outlook/Exchange to [], an open source email server and web client. I'm told that the server back end is robust and even pleasant. VH had purchased [], so it was an in-house product at that point in time. Unfortunately there were many usability stumbling blocks in [] 7, although many were fixed in [] 8. In my secondary role as administrative assistant to the user experience team, somehow I managed to trip over some unique bugs not yet reproduced in the issue tracker, as well as some already reported ones, some of which I was able to add enough detail to get [] staff to verify. By the end of []'s time at VH I was on cordial terms with the lead designer. VH ultimately went back to Exchange and Outlook.

The second, and far more disruptive, tool switch was of the internal helpdesk ticket tracker. Originally a creaky old Bugzilla install, they transitioned to a custom web app built on top of a ServiceNow instance. Unfortunately it was wildly unfit for purpose and was released into production over the very specific complaints of the alpha test group. The web interface made finding the correct place to file any given ticket obscure, ticket categories that did not correspond to any service a department offered, and (most concerning) tickets that were incorrectly filed could wind up in a completely unmonitored queue. In this situation, I managed to keep track of the tickets my department filed, and follow up on them when the SLA was exceeded with no action or response. My follow-up schedule and diligent reporting of tickets against [hell app] itself uncovered some of these showstopping issues. I helped coordinate the engineering team's priority issues and created a wiki tracking grid to reduce duplicated effort. As the chain of responsibility for the app was starting to resemble Monty Python and the Holy Grail's credits, I pursued the issue up to the CEO. Ultimately the extremely broken web app was discarded and the engineers learned to live with, and avoid, ServiceNow.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

Yay scrubbed bathtub!

Thea also tried to beef with a different cat, who, being in across-the-street's next-door's yard and given our windows were all closed, did not notice a thing.

See the løveli lakes
The wøndërful bug repørting system
And mäni interesting furry animals

[azurelunatic]

Oh, cats.

I think she was doing Hypervigilance Patrol on the window in the bedroom this morning.

[azurelunatic]

Last night I was hungry late and tried one of the odd ramen blocks with what turned out to be too much bouillon powder. I set a second block to soaking in the leftover broth overnight.

[jesse_the_k]

Damn that's an impressive resume -- I'd hired you to run any system I need herding.

[azurelunatic]

Gaining that experience was *fascinating*.

I have a limited number of systems that I'm confident administrating, but a lot of systems that I'm comfortable power-using.

[ilyena_sylph]

Oh, Murderface.

[azurelunatic]

She is definitely a cat. She was lurking behind my chair this morning and was startled when I turned around and smacked an ankle into her.

[ilyena_sylph]

All that's in my head right now is the "you kick Myet?!" meme, because cats.

[azurelunatic]

ONE THOUSAND YEARS!!

[ckd]

That's a great cover letter. (Previous deleted comment was meant for a different tab. I plead WFH brain.)

[azurelunatic]

Workerbee friend has been wanting to unleash me on that office for a while, but unfortunately a) the office really needs it, and b) they're not hiring at this moment in time.

[kellan_the_tabby]

... which is a HELLA shame.