You’ll forgive me if I am repeating myself. I’m too lazy to go back and check my own archives to see if I have ranted about this before, but then, I feel its worth repeating anyway. All this is a bit ironic considering the title and subject. heh heh.

When I was young, or younger depending on how you want to look at it, I was a complete slacker. Even at the tender age of 8 I was standing around while the rest of the family did yard work proudly declairing that I was “supervising” the rest of them. If I could avoid work, I did so.

My grandfather, my father’s father, gave me a tired old piece of advice that I didn’t understand at the time. “Any job worth doing is worth doing well.” Frankly, I didn’t consider yard work worth doing, which is hilarious considering the plans that I have for the yard I will have at the house I will one day own.

Later on, when I took a “real” job after high school, I came to believe and follow this tired piece of advice. I even went so far as to come up with a couple of pieces of “tired” advice myself.

The first: “Any job that pays a decent wage is worth doing.” Its just a logical, for me anyway, extention of the old standard. Basically means what it means that if the job pays okay then its worth doing, and furthermore, worth doing well. Simple.

The second: “Any wage you agree to work for is a decent wage.” Another logical extention. Personally, I won’t work for peanuts. If its not enough to cover my bills I will find something else. So, if I take a job, then I am agreeing to the wage, therefore the wage must be decent, and the job worth doing, and worth doing well.

So why am I writing about all this you may be asking yourself? (and if you aren’t, please pause and ask yourself this now) Sometimes its hard to not hold people to the standards that you hold for yourself. To expect others to live up to your ideals. I have come to the point that I cannot work in a good 95% of the world’s help desks or customer service areas. Other people, and companies in general, just seem to not give a shit. My coworkers tell me to just “let it go” and that its “not your problem”. But… it IS my problem, and its my job to NOT let it go. Its their job too, but they give in to the adversity of the workplace. Every day I seem to pull my hair out
(what little is left) at the bizarre hoops that I must jump through. Things that should take a day, two at most, to resolve take a week. And if someone here says it should be a week, the customer should just cancel service with us because its never going to get done.

There are far too many transfers, changing of hands, and with it all done through an electronic call tracking system problems can sit open for days with no one looking at them, adandonned in the queues. There are too many gaps and holes in the system for it to function with any degree of certainty. Calling this helpdesk is like playing Russian Roulette. It shouldn’t be that way, and with the smallest of effort it wouldn’t be.

Someone, anyone, please. If you know a company that actually cares, that actually provides good complete service to its customers, one that is hiring, send them my way.