Well, after Decay's post about a change in jobs, I'm following suit. I'm three weeks off finishing my uni commitments (save for things like waiting for results and stuff). Working in the technical support department of a software company can be rewarding, as long as the people you talk to on the phones understand that you're there to help them. Sometimes there isn't an easy solution to their question, but it doesn't mean that it's open season for them to get angry, or demand that we fix it for them, or get a discount or refund or something.

On a whim, I checked the internal positions available, and applied for a position in the IT department. Yes, this would be the same IT Department that Decay had just left. The kind of work I would be involved in is still support, but internal to the company, and not involving anywhere near as much talk on the phone. Things that I'll get to do include resetting passwords, generating reports, and working different shifts to make sure things don't fall over for our international branches. A couple of scary interviews later, one with Decay's former boss, they offered me the job.

For someone who isn't really that much of a phone person, I'm surprised I haven't completely gone insane being phone technical support for the last 19 months. For the most part, the people who ring in are all really nice and make talking on the phone all day something that I don't mind, and I know I've had to come up with some strange ways to explain things over the phone to get a point across. There have been discussions on why doing something in the software is akin to wanting to know how to unbreak an egg, or how you can't change the interface because it's like how you can't change the order window or how the person at the order window asks if you'd like fries with that.

I'm quietly freaking out about starting in this new position though - the floor that the tech support department works on is really quite noisy all day. The mood in there is very supportive, in a kind of "we're in this together, and we'll help everyone" sort of thing. Downstairs where the IT department lives, it is so quiet. The occasions that I've had to pop downstairs in the last few weeks, I've had to be in a bit of a rush because of the rostered breaks in effect in the contact centre, and I feel like I'm far too young and noisy to be allowed to work there. I know I have the base skills to be able to do this position justice (or I would never have dreamt about applying), but there is still so much to learn. I'm not moving downstairs not knowing anyone on the floor though - I met quite a lot of them while Decay was working there, and I'm joining a couple of former technical support representatives who made the move earlier.

I've got approximately 24 hours split over three days left on the phones. On my average per day calls, that's another 100-150 calls. The most calls I've taken in a day is 55. Some people have been known to take upwards of 70 calls in a day. I got into the habit of keeping callsheets to keep track of who I was talking to and what their serial numbers were, and except for one sheet which was lost after being used to have one of my call ratings reversed from autofail to something decent, I still have every single sheet, unless they got lost while I wasn't there. Each sheet has space to record 124 calls, I normally get 120 or so calls per sheet, give or take a few. The stack of sheets is about 1.5-2cm high, uncompressed. A ream of photocopy paper stands at 5-6 cm for the very neatly stacked 500 sheets it contains. A low estimate of the number of pages gives me about 87 pages (1.2 for every week I was on the phones, not including annual leave taken, and training time, and not accounting for the parts where I was actually working full time, which is about 9 months of the 19 where I probably went through closer to 2 pages a week rather than 1), which works out to be about 12,500 calls. I'll update this part when I actually get to count how many sheets. I'm not going to count exactly how many calls I took. I'm not quite that insane, and I don't know that I'll have the time to do so. I'm sure I'd be able to work that out (go SQL queries!) once I move into the new position, seeing as I'll have more access to the database that we log our calls ...

[update]

I went and counted how many callsheets I kept - there were 81 of them on my desk, I know I lost one, and I know there were times where the calls weren't written on the sheet due to phone and computer connectivity issues. Overall, that would probably account for maybe half a page, in total. I'll revise my estimate of the number of calls I've taken down to closer to 9600, rather than 12,500.

I did take my last call yesterday, and I am glad to say that it was a nice easy one, to do with payroll and leave accruals. Very typical of the kinds of phone call I took during the 19 months of being on the phone. I got to talk to someone who was pretty switched on, and just wanted clarification on the steps involved in fixing up what appeared to be some settings missed prior to starting a new payroll year in the program, which resulted in leave accruals not carrying over, and leave also not accruing at all. Bonus points for having a backup to refer to, to find out how much leave had accrued to the end of June. Double extra bonus points because I didn't have to walk through an example, although I would've been more than happy to do so. Triple extra bonus points because I finished the call at 5:30pm on the dot.

My team leadery dude gathered the troops around for a double farewell presentation thing. His team is currently being depleted by the number of internal transfers to other departments. In a few weeks, he's going to lose another full-timer, one of the ones who started with me. Kind and funny words were said, gifty things were given, thankyous and you shouldn't haves, and I'm only moving downstairs were also said. Once the Uni stuff is over, and my brain has recovered, I'll be firing the oven back up again, for more cookies. Yay!