Balderdash

I haven’t been stuck on a book like this for a long time. I think I’ve read it through about three time (it is a quick read). McCarthy weaves a compelling and tragic vision of a world broken, without hope of a future, yet sets two hopeful characters against the bleakness. The father and the boy each the only thing left to hold onto. This is definately making it’s way to the top of my distopic future list. This book was a grisly, horrific, tender, and tragic story.

“Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed.”

Dis-topic future top ten:

1. The Road
2. 1984
3. Brave New World
4. Handmaid’s Tale
5. A Clockwork Orange
6. Farenheit 451
7. Riddley Walker
8. A Canticle for Leibowitz
9. Neuromancer
10. The Children of Men

Got a nightmare, dystopian book I should read let me know. I’m settling into ‘Under the Volcano’ for the next few weeks but I’ll need something for August.

I saw this on the way to the T on Saturday.

I sense a disturbence from Friday night.

So I’m an IT guy and I now ‘manage’ IT guys. I got my start with my current employer as essentially a customer service representative. Here is what I learned:

Service matters.

• Customers aren’t always reasonable, sometimes they are downright irrational, but they’re people who need help.
• Frustration and anxiety are often a result of an ambiguous or difficult to understand process. By working with people who are frustrated you may find some big holes in what you thought were logical processes.
• Showing them some empathy, consideration and human decency is how you get people to come around, out the tree what have you. IT is a business with notoriously bad service. Frankly by showing an ounce of humility and understanding people think we’re super stars.  
• No matter the technical expertise a jerk is going to give your department a bad name. It might be time to find a well-balanced geek. Good IT people manage themselves to some extent.

How can you specifically improve your IT department’s standing in your company?

• Don’t impose a new policy without advertising it to your user base.
  • Test it out with a handful of supporters and known detractors.
  • Try to both address objections and make clear why the change should happen.
• Did you put something extra into that last help ticket?
  • Don’t just fix a missing mapped drive clean out the temporary internet files.
  • Make sure you clear some of the junk out of the user startup folder.
  • When a user finds that a machine that runs better visits from IT might seem, useful.
• When was the last time you replaced some of the aging equipment on the floor?
  • When the printer is older than your first born it is long overdue for replacement.
• Did you ask some users how you might be able to assist with their work?
  • You’d be surprised how many people are trying to do things that would take 10 minutes in Excel. Run training.
• Talk to people.
• Make friends with your fellow service departments.
  • Finance loves predictable equipment expenditure in capital budgets. They like budget to actuals that come close to expected expenses.
    • Did you not understand that? Take a finance course and buy a book.
    • Love HR. These people know when folks are leaving, when more people are coming, and they have an inside edge into when the company events are going on.
      • Company softball games are good times for server upgrades. You’re not really good at sports anyway.

Take it from me and soon you’ll be measuring your service levels in thank you notes and bottles of wine. IT is not all computers and servers after all.

So I got a call this morning from a T-mobile Representative and well they can get me an Account Rep and, as a one off, a co-terminus cell contract.

They were super nice and had a good sense of humor.

Come on T-Mobile you used to be cool. I remember when we first got involved; you put your best people out there to win me over. Maybe I was an easy mark, smarting from that abusive AT&T character. Maybe I’ve suffered through too many 10K invoices. I though well it’ll be better next month one too many times.

Now you start to play the same old games, and I just feel like I can’t win. Where is my cellular provider in shining armor? No, I see how it is, I have to threaten to leave to get my way. I just want a new line of service with a co-terminus one year contract and you go all postal. Wow. It’s not like I asked to activate a SIM on a full separately purchased 8530 unit, oh wait, I did.

I see. It gets messy and complicated and you just can’t be flexible! Well it wasn’t like this when I was in Europe! In my wide days I could give an unlocked blackberry to a VP and they could stick any old SIM in there and get what they needed, oh baby. I ask you for this little co terminus contract and you say ‘that makes sense, but I just can’t authorize that’. Really…..

You COULD authorize our 36 line conversion. You were all ‘free blackberries’ and extra sim cards back then.

You used be cool T-mobile.

After realizing that the automatic installation from Dreamhost was preventing me from utilizing certain features (755) in WordPress a fresh start was in order. Like my original blog, I promise that this blog will be random and serve no real purpose in the world.