No Reported Issues.

We had a widespread issue today that brought down many of the teller systems in The Bank. But what really made the life of the Help Desk a living hell was the way in which it was handled.

It didn’t take very long for us to realize that something was wrong and not much longer after that to realize that it was such an issue that separate tickets were not going to be needed, nor was there going to be a single ticket under which multiple users would be added. We could simply tell users that we knew there was a problem, we didn’t have an ETA for resolution and that they needed to use specific offline procedure located in a folder at their branch.

Now, our phone system has what is called a "front end message", that is, a welcome message which usually says "Thank you for calling the Help Desk. We have no reported issues at this time." Under situations like this, one would think it would make sense to change the message to let people know that something was going on.

Sometimes it makes sense not to put up a front end message, especially for things like notes servers. For example, if Notes server 025 went down and we put up a front end message, people on server 030 who experienced a problem might hear the message about 025, assume it was for them and hang up so that we wouldn’t find out right away that 030 was having an issue. But in this case everyone was having a problem. There was nothing to be done and we weren’t keeping track of just how widespread the issue was because we understood that it was everyone.

But no front end message was up. Hundreds of people were calling and we were telling them all the same thing. Over and over again. Because so many people were calling, they were waiting in the queue for over 10 minutes to finally hear us take 45 seconds to explain the situation to them. If they had heard the message first thing, they could have saved themselves and us a whole lot of effort and aggravation.

Normally, I’ll take about 45 calls in a day. Today I took 150 calls. The most I’ve ever taken in a day.

Why a front end message wasn’t put up is beyond me. H**** suggested that it was because the Corporate Overlords want to leverage The Bank by saying, "See all the volume we need to deal with? We need more money or resources." Personally, I don’t think that flies very well. The Bank isn’t completely stupid and could see through such a claim with the counter argument, “These sorts of days only come every few months or so. The rest of the time you have more than enough to address the call volume.”

Some of the more cynical thoughts are that the support groups don’t want us to put up a front end message so that we get bounded and look bad. We are contractors, after all.

I am in the process of training some new analysts. The person sitting with me was wasting his time. I couldn’t put him on the phone to take what were essentially easy calls because we needed maximum throughput. There was nothing for him to learn as I said the same message over and over again. He eventually fell asleep. Literally. He was out for about 20 minutes. I didn’t care. Hell, if it were me in charge I would have sent him home.

The day was a complete waste that could have been handled so much better.