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!
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 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!
When Kieran first mentioned that he had the chance to go and help brew the School of Computing’s graduation ale and was looking for some volunteers to go with him I nearly bit his arm off! The chance to head across to the E&S Brewery in Elland to have a go at brewing up our own batch of beer. it was like a dream come true.
As the date approached, however, it became clear that the brewing would clash with my new job at O2. It turned out alright in the end though – the brewing would take place from 6am – 4pm and I would work from 5.30pm – 9.30pm at O2. You just have to love the seventeen hour days!
The 4.40am alarm went off on the morning of the brew and I rushed myself a breakfast and headed over to Kieran’s to pick him up ready to be in Elland, near Halifax, by 6am. Armed with a bottle of Kick and a change of clothes we arrived at E&S eager to start our day’s work and what a day’s work it turned out to be!
The brewer’s day is a long one. Often at work by 6am, lots of manual labour and careful scientific work, then hours of waiting around they don’t leave until well into the evening. It is highly rewarding though.
We started off by loading a quarter of a ton malt and wheat into a hopper ready to go into the mash ‘tun, this was then mixed with hot water to make the ‘mash’ which was then left to stand for an hour or so. This ‘wort’ was then drained off and piped into the copper, basically a giant kettle, and was then boiled for an hour. We added the hops and some other ingredients and set about clearing the masher. We had to shovel by hand the original quarter ton of malt (now much heavier as it was soaking wet) out of the mash tun for the cows to eat. We then hosed, scrubbed and polished the inside of the mash tun ready for the next brew. We managed a quick lunch before we had to start pumping the wort from the copper into the fermenter where we could add the yeast and start turning it into ale. When the copper was empty we set about cleaning it, removing all the hops and other debris. This is actually done by climbing into the copper and shovelling it out again.
A hard day’s work, but well worth it in every day. Roll on graduation day so I can taste it!
A big thank you to all at Elland Brewery for letting us play in their factory and also to fellow volunteers Kieran and Tony.
Some of you may recognise the tagline I used for my heading for this post… that’s right, it can be seen on some of the O2 advertising from a few months ago.
They now own my services! Yep, I now work for O2 part-time in their technical support department for the newly launched O2 Home Broadband. I am currently in training, which should last for another 6 weeks but it seems like a decent enough job. I am only first line support at the moment, basically a phone monkey, but hopefully some vacancies will open up in second line support soon enough. It is a good place top work in all honetsy, relaxed dress code, good perks and a good bunch of people.
Now, the reason I had to go out and get a job. I have a new house! We signed for it last week and move in around the 23rd June, just after Chris and I get back from the Secular COnference in Edinburgh. It is a really nice house with plenty of room, which is a bugger for wiring it up with networking cable. At the moment it is looking like a good couple of hundred metres!
I will upload some pics of the new house just as soon as I get them off my phone.
Congratulations to all the Computing lot too, they all graduated!