Band and Research

So it's been a little while since I posted. I know this because the Queen complained about it last night. She was telling me that "that geek and the queen site is totally dead." So I thought of something.

First, to follow up the prior band post, I did some checking into the company that purported the opportunity to play in front of people, and they apparently offer that to everyone who suggests having a band as long as they're willing to sell their own tickets. A band promises to sell X tickets to their fans, and they can play. I told him point blank that I really don't have any fans and I can't guarantee any tickets. I figured playing with other similar groups would help to introduce me, but also asked if there was an inhouse box office that sells tickets as well since I don't have a lot of personal interaction with some people who might go. He never emailed me back. Oh well.

I hear from The Mixer, though, that The Player is interested in starting back up with the piano-drum thing, which was fun while it lasted.

As to my other topic here, it's ore of something I hear around my office a lot. and by a lot, I mean A LOT. The way we work around here is we get problem requests from clients and create these service tickets so that any notes or anything can easily be passed around to whomever needs to work the problem. Word of warning: if you are the lucky recipient of this ticket, no one else will touch it. They won't help the client. They won't even guess as to the problem. And so help me, they will NOT contact you when this person decides to call the main support line to find out about. No, they'll pop a note on the ticket saying that so-n-so called in about it, and so-n-so was informed that the issue was still "being researched." Wait, so-n-so implies there's a name left. Those people don't leave names. They always write "client." Not "The client." Just "client."

So from the client side, what does being researched mean? Well, note that these same people become responsible for tickets as well, and we have a game around here called "the follow-up game." The follow-up game is where you create something called a follow-up related to the ticket with a date on which you are required to contact the client and let them know where you are on the ticket. What can potentially happen on the date when the game is played? The client gets an email stating the following. "Hello, I'm following up with you to let you know that this issue is still being researched."

As a client, this might seem all right. They're still working on my problem, so they haven't forgotten about me. What it really means? "Oh shoot, I completely forgot about this" or "I still don't want to deal with this" or my personal favorite "God, I hate doing follow-ups for that person who is out of the office today, so I'm going to send emails." If your email says it is "still being researched," that means nothing has been done, and you're lucky that the person even acknowledged the existence of the ticket at all.

The people who play this game do not work anything that isn't due today. They will take a call, create the ticket, create the follow-up, and then promptly forget about it until it's due, even if it's something easy or something they can legitimately hand off. I've received these tickets after two days when the person finally played the game on it, sent the "still being researched" email and then forwarded it to my queue. Gee, thanks for giving me someone who has been disacknowledged for two days.

I think it's good that there's a date associated with these, since some of these people let tickets languish for weeks before this started. However, they need to be encouraged a bit more to work these things every day and keep their personal queues clean instead of playing the follow-up game. It's just annoying.

And apologies to the Queen for more of a complaint post instead of something more interesting about life, but that's what I had on my mind as I read through ticket after ticket that said "this issue is still being researched" when I know they never bothered to even find out.