Meeting of the Bored

Oh, the joys of working in a call center. I'm lucky, I don't actually take calls anymore. I now report on how the different projects are doing, how many calls they're taking, how long they take to take them, what customers think of our service. Thankfully I no longer have to speak to distraught customers, and answer the same questions, and fix the same issues, once an hour or so. Instead, I get to talk to project managers, with the same issue, and the same questions, once a week or so. At least the customers kept changing, so there was a reason they never seemed to learn. I get to sit through meetings.

To my great annoyance, I am not able to write about my planned subject, the regularly scheduled meeting for Wednesdays. It's normally a highly frustrating experience for me, with people repeating the same thing they've been saying for the last several months, and me explaining the same simple math I went over for the 4th time last week. The math thing is especially aggravating for me, as I know the people I'm explaining weighted averages to make lots more money than I do. I have a hard time with someone with such bad math skills having a bigger number on their check than the number on mine.

But anyway, that meeting was canceled today, as the guy who called it was too busy to actually show up. We have the meeting so we can gather missing data for his project, but since he has to supply almost all of the data we are missing, it seems a little counter-productive to me. But what do I know, I'm just the girl who can do simple math.

The meeting we actually had today was prompted by someone who complained that two reports, reporting the same data, did not have the same numbers reported. To be helpful, he gave specific examples... which he appeared to have made up. No, I'm not kidding, I couldn't find the numbers he quoted anywhere. So after hunting through my report for the number he swore was reported there, and not finding it, I pretty much decided he must be smoking the special stash on all those smoke breaks. But we were able to find out the guy who does the other report was getting some of his numbers sent from India instead of getting them himself. That pretty much guarantees those numbers are wrong, and my report is right. I always love it when I’m not wrong.