Working Hard
I have worked throughout the Christmas/New Year period again this year. It is fair to say that this time of year is less hectic than others due to the large number of customers who are not in the office. This year has been no different, however the period is quite clearly over.
I had an inkling today would be a return to somewhat normal levels at the end of last week. This was nothing more than a gut feeling having worked through a number of “shutdown” periods before. That was confirmed last evening at about 6:30pm when I was invited to a crisis meeting over an issue requiring minimal work. The fact that someone from the problem management group were actively calling for a meeting on a Sunday just screams “brace yourself the brown stuff is about to hit the spinning thing”.
Today has been a mini-disaster full of many perceived crisis’. It all began with a phone call at 5:35am after an abnormally horrid night of sleep due to ridiculous humidity. Unfortunately the caller neglected to leave a voice mail when I did not answer. The call did rouse me from my sleep, but diverted before I could answer in my semi-comatosed state. This left me cursing the caller for the next 45 minutes whilst I fell back to sleep. It also left me assuming it was some foreign cold caller trying to sell me an anti-virus service I don’t need. Turns out all me fellow team members, including those on holidays, were recipients of the same treatment.
Needless to say when I got to my post I was called by a colleague who beat me in with a question of “Do you know about issue x?”. Of course I was not aware due to the shoddy call described earlier. As it turned out issue x was a trivial thing to fix and amounted to minutes of work. However, it is followed by hours of waiting whilst things happen automatically on a global scale. If the caller at 5:35am had left a message it could have been all but fixed by the time I got in the home office.
There have also been related incidents today all perceived as a crisis by those reporting. Truth is that these incidents are only seen as a “crisis” when perceived by the reporting individual with no to little impact to business operations. However, having worked in Managed Services for many years an ugly truth I have learnt is that “perception is often reality” especially when the client is telling you it’s a crisis. Slowly but surely knocking them on the head. Better brace myself for tomorrow!
It is easy to correlate the relationship of workers returning and the volume of work. During the break with the volume of logged on users roughly 33% of usual between December 23 2011 and January 8 2012 on a system I administer. Today theres an upswing with 66% of usual logged in and active. As a result of users returning the work volume has escalated. However my teams numbers are about 40% of normal, leading to a busy day.
P.S. Hope I can sleep better tonight I think I am going to need it!
