Monthly Archive for April, 2008

New Security Measures

Published
by
mattfast1
on April 30, 2008
in Blarg!
. 0 Comments

I have created more security measures for my domains. Now, any access to mattfast1.com, mattvandusen.com or vandusens.us (and their subdomains) by those in certain troublemaking countries will be denied. While in the interest of security I’m not going to reveal my exact methodology for these filters, let’s just say it’ll take a bit of effort for them to break through.

The effect this should have is to GREATLY reduce the comment spams that are caught by Spam Karma, reduce (or completely eliminate) the bad URLs accessed and noted on my stats. Legitimate users will hopefully not feel the sting of bad 403 errors, but if you send me a message telling me who you are, what you were trying to do, and (roughly) what time it was, I can generally unblock you. I realize those who are being blocked will not be able to read this text from my website, but you will be able to read it on the many mirrors of my blog that update via RSS.

Note that this only represents a portion of my traffic. If the spammers keep harassing me, even with the new measures in place, I will continue to block entire countries. As it is I’m tempted to block most of the countries on two entire continents, those being Asia and Africa. They’re lucky I haven’t blocked them all out yet.

Boom De Ah Da!

Published
by
mattfast1
on April 22, 2008
in Asides
. 0 Comments

Watch this video: Boom De Ah Da!

QA Average

Published
by
mattfast1
on April 5, 2008
in Stories and Work
. 0 Comments

Well, stats have come back from the last month’s incentive period.

Out of the 20+ teams in our call center (which happens to be the best in the company), my team is #5 overall. Out of the 30+ agents on my team, I was #3 overall, and for two weeks I was #1 for the week.

My bonus for being awesome is 12.6% of my gross on the next two paychecks.

As Quagmire would say, “All right!”

Also, for those wondering, my QA average for the 1st quarter of 2008 is 94.16%. The average handle time of my QA’d calls is 10:16. Compare this to 2007 (I started in October of 2007), when I had an average of 92.73% and an average time (on these calls) of 14:51.

F* you.

Published
by
mattfast1
on April 1, 2008
in Stories, Stupidity and Work
. 0 Comments

Now that I’ve got your attention…

F* you, HyperQuality.

So now I have to explain myself. Well, on Friday I’m sitting there taking calls, and unbeknownst to me, I get QA listening to my call. It’s an authorization call, and a repeat call at that. Well, step 2 of troubleshooting is “Send a hit”, which is supposed to send any receivers on the account commands to reauthorize themselves. It takes about two seconds to send a hit using Dish Promo, one of the pieces of our account management software. However, the previous agent failed to send a hit, preferring to be lazy instead. They noticed the software on the receiver was outdated, so they had the customer update their software.

So, I’m working with the call, and the first thing I asked was the software version. Then I asked for DNASP information, the version of the firmware on their smart card. That’s about when I noticed, looking at previous notes, that no hit had been sent. So I sent the hit, and verified the receiver and smart card numbers, because at that point I didn’t trust the previous agent knew what they were doing, even though the receiver and smart card numbers were in their notes, I wanted to kill some time while the hit was sent.

Well, I did a hard reset, and it came back on like I knew it would. I made sure she could change channels, I knew it was resolved, and I also knew a 87-year-old woman didn’t know or care how it was fixed as long as it was fixed, which it was, so I didn’t bother to “summarize actions taken for resolution“.

Now I’ve got this 92% score which I KNOW I don’t deserve - I was quick, efficient, and arrived at the correct resolution following the steps laid out by engineering, unlike the previous agent. I solved this lady’s problem in 6:17 - with 1 minute being probing/verification, and a minute and a half waiting for her receiver to reset after unplugging it from the wall. I would call that efficient customer service, even though we made her repeat two pieces of information twice - Receiver CAID and Smart Card ID. Also, what really burns me is if I hadn’t have asked, they would have knocked me for not following the steps outlined in the CSCWeb, and probably for “not picking up the line of questioning appropriately”. HyperQuality is not supposed to be a Catch-22, it’s supposed to be a “you did this wrong” or “keep doing this shit, this is great” tool.

Funny thing? They tell us “well, they’ve done your job, so they know what they’re talking about”.

BS.

Now there’s a game I was good at.