I just got off the phone with AT&T. Again. My new theory is thus: when your job consists of talking down to people who know more about your web site than you do, you really ought to look for a new line of work. The experience reminded my of my surreal encounter with Sony’s tech support, which is a story for another day.
It struck me that there is a connection between the people I talk to at AT&T and the people working in telemarketing. Before the job I have now, I worked for five months at a call center. We had a client called Splawn and Ward and we did calling for them for home equity loans and lines of credit. They changed (and, as I understand, continue to change) their requirements on a near-daily basis, while laying any blame for mistakes they made on us. As part of the loan application, we had to collect the customer’s social security number. If they could not or would not give it at the time, a supervisor was supposed to manually call them back later in the day and get it from them.
I was mainly in charge of programming the Splawn and Ward calling script, as well as various other web tools for the supervisors to use, such as one to input the social security numbers and update the customer database after the manual callbacks. The supervisors and call agents were routinely known for breaking things in record time. After several breakages, I composed the following email:
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Sometimes you order a pizza, forget to say, "No anchovies," and must rush back to the phone before your pizza is ruined beyond all possible reparation. This is what we in the Real World refer to as an Emergency. In the Realm of Telemarketed Disillusionment, the definition of "emergency" has become somewhat obscured; now it can mean anything from "The server room is on fire!" (an actual Emergency) to "I forgot my lunch!" (not an Emergency, but still important) to "I’m an agent and therefore exempt from all possible logical action, and anything I feel must happen now inherently constitutes an Emergency of Utmost Proportions" (definitely not an emergency, but somehow we still get duped into believing that it is).
Because manual callbacks for Splawn and Ward fall under the category of Emergency as defined in the Realm of Telemarketed Disillusionment, a web page has been created to update the CallHistory table for these manual callbacks, so that completed "applications" are exported nightly, hot leads don’t get cold, and most importantly, the fish stay in the ocean, far, far away from our Canadian bacon.
For reasons unfathomable, the Manual Dial Call History Update page has been abused. Exports have been jacked, yes, WOG levels have risen beyond Reason, and the Fiery Bowels of the IT Department’s Ire have been opened and unleashed upon the Realm.
After much Deliberation né Cussing, a Solution has presented itself, however temporarily.
Pressing the "Verified" and "Not Verified" buttons on the Verification page of the Splawn & Ward script will now update the CallHistory table for you. I feel it sad that I must, due to past experience, point out that this means one button or the other during a call. It does not mean both, and it certainly does not mean to become inexplicably color blind, lose voluntary control of your hand, and click the “Hot Lead” or “Ate Kidney Beans on a Full-Mooned Thursday in Texas” buttons. The Manual Dial Call History update page must still be used for a Hot Lead or Failure disposition. Why? Because we said so.
While we have tried to make this change as easy to use and as robust as possible, the words of Douglas Adams shed profound illumination on the hope that we will be completely successful: “A common mistake people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
Please enjoy this new functionality, and when you manage to dispel its usefulness in the first hour, please refrain from running immediately to the nearest IT personnel, so we can bask just that much longer in the pride of a job well done.
Enjoy,
Your friendly neighborhood Steve Eastland
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So what’s the connection between the AT&T and telemarketers? I have no idea. Ben told me to put this email up for viewing, so I had to tie it in somehow.
And to be fair, the first guy I talked to at AT&T–the one who signed me up–was very nice and polite, and smart to boot, which is probably how I got duped into thinking the other people there would be too.