Zero To Shitty

 

As a support engineer, some days at work can be so crazy.    There are times when you get crazy issue after crazy issue.   The customers have little decorum at times, demanding someone reach out to them right away or else.   To top it off I still have to assist others on their own nightmares.   There are days that I'm so busy I barely get time for lunch.   

The worst is when a day that is seemingly quiet turns into what I recently coined "zero to shitty".   It's enough to make me want to scream.   When I'm in the office it's terrible because I can't even scream.  I may have an outburst but I have to keep it in check.  It sucks too since my immediate team is in Indianapolis while I'm in Chicago.

One of the shitty issues I received last Friday was from a customer who was checking on a "promised" fix to a bug that they found.   They referenced the previous case where the claim was made.   The only thing, there was no documentation proving that an investigation was made or another acknowledging the issue and scheduling a fix.   The customer had an angry tone and said they did not want to get called to ask about the issue.

I reached out to the previous engineer and his excuse was that he was a newbie at the time.   I involved my manager who reached out to that engineer's manager.    The engineer gave me a webex video of the call which helped me narrow down the issue.   I was able to repro the issue on a demo org and document the steps.  It would be a matter of me "swarming" the issue with a different channel to verify on it and create an investigation where our Research and Development team could confirm on the issue.

I then forgot that the specific issue gets handled by a different team.  I put in a "swarm" request to the dedicated channel.   The leader of the channel declared that the channel was only for those who handled that specific skill set and to transfer the case to their team.   They basically gave me an out.  Woo hoo!

So I transferred the case.   Of course I checked on the case to see who ended up with it.  Later on I saw the new owner reached out to the previous case owner and basically made them take the case.   I probably should've done the same but I hate when engineers try to pass the buck just because you may have worked on an issue a year ago.   I've had it happen to me.  I honestly may not have remembered the issue.   But in this case since the mistake made by that engineer was so blatant, maybe it was justified.   It'll definitely be a case I'll keep watching periodically to see where it goes.

In the end a lot of the issues eventually get resolved but the journey to get there is a shitty ride.   Is Blackberry stock at $20 yet?   LOL