Archive

Archive for July, 2008

First Day

July 31st, 2008 No comments

Yesterday was my first day in O2′s Home Broadband call centre. Now, although I have worked in a number of call centres before, doing a variety of jobs, this is the first time I have been a little nervous walking onto the floor. The reason for this is that all the other call centre work has been relatively mindless – selling, or data entry etc, whereas this one actually requires some technical knowledge and real problem solving skills. luckily it is also the world’s quietest call centre. Just over 2000 calls in a day! I have worked in places where that is less than an hour’s work!

After a welcome meeting fromt he grad bay manager, we went out and took real calls. Luckily (or frustratingly) most of the calls I got were relatively easy, mainly sales enquiries and package info. Although there were a couple of trying calls which took a little while to solve.

All in all it was a good first day, i can’t wait to get my teeth into some real problems and hopefully impress enough to move up a grade to 2nd line!

When we go to the zoo, why can’t we talk to monkeys?

July 29th, 2008 No comments

I was reading Facebook today and an AHS colleague of mine from Oxford Secular Society had written a note based on a blog post from God Be Gone and the follow up.

It cracked me up. Seriously, how crazy are some people?

For those who can’t be bothered going to the links, here is the the content mercilessly ripped off and reposted…

‘Proof that evolution is wrong’

i saw on your blog that you like to talk about the religion of evolution and trick people by using big words and pretending that science actually proves evolution. I dont know any science or anything and even i know evolution isnt real. for one it isnt in the bible the bible said god made everything in 6 days, not millions of years. second, when we go to the zoo we cant talk to monkies, if we used to be monkies why cant we talk to them? three, how could a monkey become a person over billions of years when they dont live that long? AND why are there still monkies if they turned into people? five, even darwin said he was wrong. on his death bed he converted to christianity and said evolution was a hoax. If there is any science that makes it look like evolution is real then it has to be either a hoax by EVILutionists or put there by god to find out who believes in him.

I hope that after reading my questions you will see that evolution cant be true and people dont come from monkies. i will pray to god asking him to make you think like me.

From: GBG
To: kevin

You are joking, right?

From: kevin
To: GBG

firstly i didnt give you permission to put my email on your blog. teh email copyright is owned by me and i will talk to my solisitor about making you take it down.

And no im not joking, you know im right thats why you didn’t answer. If we used to be monkies we should be able to talk monkey. its like if a french man becomes american he can still talk french, its called logic. also on tv a scientist says crocodiles havnt changed for million of years. if evolution was true they would be able to fly by now or talk or grow fur or invent things. if evolution happens why didnt it make crocodiles better?

the devil tricked you into believing you are from mud to take you away from god. Why would you want to be from mud and monkies when you have the option to be from gods hand? If you just stop thinking the bible makes sense and you dont have to worry about anything. If you just stop trying to find things out and accept gods word jesus will forgive you.

i thing you should watch expelled by ben stein. It shows how science is from the devil and good christians are being fired from jobs because atheists know they have the truth. evolution believers know its evil and from the devil, and thats why they are frighetened of christianities real sciense

DONT PUT THIS EMAIL ON YOUR BLOG!!! SERIOUSLY! I DONT GIVE PERMISSION!!

Blog Update

July 27th, 2008 No comments

I have tidied up some of the permalinks and some of the back end bits and pieces. I have also added a Links section which will start to get more populated as I sort out my favourites list on Firefox!

Party Time!

July 27th, 2008 No comments

Friday night saw two landmarks.

1) I finshed my O2 training, so I am allowed to talk to real people about real problems from Monday!

2) We had our housewarming party.

The party was pretty good, it started really slowly – 5 people when I got home from work at 10pm – but it picked up nicely by the end. I was a little worried that it wouldn’t as we do live some whay away from the rest of the gang and the majority of students cannot be bothered to make the two buses to get to our house. The only disappointing thing was that a couple of mates from work flaked on me and didn’t turn up. Kudos to Dan for turning up and staying even though he didn’t know anyone! James and Mike suck!!

I was suitably drunk by the end of the evening as were most people, which is always a good sign. We also had a full house as most people stayed over.

Spent a lot of the night arguing about politics which was very grown up fo us, except the topic was socialism which is very studenty. Most people grow out of socialism when they get a job!

All in all though, a good night!

I made a girl cry…

July 24th, 2008 No comments

I am coming to the end of my O2 training, hence the lack of posts over the past few weeks, and we are focussing on the more difficult aspects of the job this week. Namely, IP Stream – or home access – broadband. This is the slowest of our packages and is offered to customers more than 9km from their local exchange. It is the hardest package to deal with due to the fact that BT still control their lines and not us which means a lot of faffing about. Our regular trainers can’t teach us this as they haven’t done the course themselves so we had to get a specialist in.

Her opening line was “I don’t really know anything about broadband and I am not an IP Stream expert…” and that was the start of the end!

By the end of four hours of ridiculous training, that had no logical progression, little relevance to our role and and incompetent trainer we had questioned and debated her to tears.

Now whilst I feel bad about that, it wasn’t entirely her fault – a lot of the the problems we highlighted to her had started in the previous weeks, but I didn’t feel bad about letting her know what I thought about the training and her delivery.

Yesterday, was supposed to be the second day of this two day course but she didn’t come back and we were informed that we were not going to receive any further IP Stream training before going live next week and we would have to learn on the job!