I do tech support for a college textbook/e-learning publisher. I'm on a sort of quasi-elite team of people (believe me when i tell you i am the stupidest one on the team) who handle all of our biggest products for all of our most important adoptions (colleges who are using the hell out of the product/s). So i support maybe a dozen of our most major products up to a "tier 3" level, which means that unless the problem absolutely must involve a developer, the problem must end with me resolving it. No problem so far! It's kind of fun. Or it should be.
Although we use a ticketing system (actually one for internal escalations up to developers and one for our customers to bring us their problems), we still manage to get several hundred internal emails per day from various sources. Most of those are copies of every escalated ticket from everyone in our group, which we are for some idiotic reason not allowed to filter or rule away into their own folders or auto-archived (as if they expect us to read all that shit). Every other communication is copied to everyone else on the team, so everyone essentially gets everyone else's email all of the time. Several hundred of 'em. Per day. Most of which must be manually dealt with in some way.
Well because that's
not enough work, they asked me if i would "volunteer" to be cross-trained for another team's products. At first i said "yeah i guess i mean okay sure i suppose" but then a few hours later decided to backtrack on that. I told them it would just be too much for me since my dad had died only a couple of weeks before. I was already a little stressed out and overwhelmed, to say the least.
So that next week i find that i'm on a schedule to be cross-trained for TWO other teams' products.
The one they originally asked me to "volunteer" to handle has about 200 products. Mostly minor products and some that are downright obscure, but 1) there is very little documentation for most of it and 2) virtually none for some of it. So now in total (and damn sure i counted) i handle 230 products, up to a tier 3 level.
The other team whose products i suddenly find myself supporting are the
real elite hit-squad in our tech support center. They work on really very complicated issues involving, essentially,
APIs - pushing our content and platform out to various colleges'
LMS systems (to put it basically). It's pretty high-end and very involved.
Of course, despite the fact that we have a training department, my "training" consisted of
a couple of days sitting with a person in each of those two other groups -
peers, who were not even told to expect they'd have to suddenly find themselves skilled at training people.
Thankfully, they said i'd only have to be backup for those other teams... just handling their calls when they have overflow - when they have more calls than they have available agents. In practice, those teams are sitting there waiting for several minutes or more between calls while i am taking calls for
their products back to back to back all day long. And this is in our off-season. When i would normally be playing Angry Birds or some shit while waiting for a call.
And did i get a raise for this bullshit? Grrr.
