I know I said I wouldn't write much because of the tiny lil keyboard I'm using, but I felt this deserved an update.
Just about everyone has dealt with this at work at some point or another: the thing that won't go away no matter what you do. Maybe it's an account, maybe it's a person, maybe it's that pesky harassment complaint. Whatever is is, the more you want it to go away, the worse it gets.
For me, it's been this one account. What should have been a minor issue that would take a day or two to fix took close to two weeks. Nothing was every easy and it just kept getting more annoying. All I wanted was for it to be done, and yesterday I finally thought it was.
But OF COURSE it wasn't ... out of nowhere I got an e-mail from a sales rep about one seemingly easy last thing. This account's ads on our website needed to have the one sentence tagline they could edit changed back to what it used to be. Usually we just tell the customer to change it, but because of all the problems I offered to do it. Was it easy, of course not.
What seemed like a relatively innocuous statement was getting blocked by our system's profanity/offensive language filter, and I had no f*cking idea why. Then I thought maybe it was the word violence, so I took that out, and it still wouldn't take. I was ready to throw things, but instead I relatively calmly emailed somebody who runs the system asking why it wouldn't post and telling the sales rep the changes wouldn't be done when I said they would.
The next day I found out the problem, it wasn't that our filter was super sensitive and was picking up violence. Instead, the system was reading the word assault, seeing ASS and shutting down the whole thing. We were able to work around it, but I also had to e-mail my boss and my boss's boss explaining that this issue would take the rest of the day to fix because our system couldn't differentiate an ass from an assault in the ground (that doesn't work and isn't really that funny, but I'm leaving it).
These are the kinds of things I deal with on a daily basis. And tomorrow is another day; a day of all day training about how to train other people. Perfect.
Listening to: Village Idiot Radio on Pandora
About to: Watch some awful TV and sleep
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
R.I.P. Underemploymentness?
Is this blog dead?
I don't think so. There are two things trying to kill this little adventure in literary mediocrity: (1) my lack of computer and (2) my new job status.
The lack of computer is a huge bummer. As you can see in the last post, I got the blue screen of death a couple weeks ago. The computer is completely fried, totally unsalvageable and has taken lots of pictures, video of my friends looking like fools and Itunes purchases with it. Video of friend whose name I won't mention trying to eat a huge slice of pizza in four bites: I'll miss you the most.
Right now, I'm stuck using a year old netbook that was sitting around unused. The keyboard is approximately 2.6 inches across, and typing on this is a huge pain in the ass. I'll probably pick up a new computer in the next week or two, so until then updates will be few and far between.
But the more interesting thing that might lead to this blog going away is the job situation. The big changes I have mentioned in recent posts are starting to happen. Our department is changing from four horizontally equal groups working with basically different accounts to one large group with four vertically different positions. Over the last week or so, we've all found out what our new position was going to be and all that. I'm starting out one group below the top of the four, which, and I'm tooting my own horn here, is pretty f'ing impressive because I've only been here seven months. I have a crapload of new stuff to learn and all sorts of new responsibilities, but it's going to be a lot more interesting. And it came with a nice little raise as well. All in all, I've got nothing to complain about.
But does all of that mean the blog is over? I say no. Even with the bump in pay and responsibility, I still think I'm in the ranks of the underemployed. And I still work with some first rate wackos. So hopefully I'll be able to keep this interesting. But this keyboard is killing me, so it's time to go.
Listening to: Bill Simmons interviewing Artie Lange on his podcast
About to: Focus on the Yankees
I don't think so. There are two things trying to kill this little adventure in literary mediocrity: (1) my lack of computer and (2) my new job status.
The lack of computer is a huge bummer. As you can see in the last post, I got the blue screen of death a couple weeks ago. The computer is completely fried, totally unsalvageable and has taken lots of pictures, video of my friends looking like fools and Itunes purchases with it. Video of friend whose name I won't mention trying to eat a huge slice of pizza in four bites: I'll miss you the most.
Right now, I'm stuck using a year old netbook that was sitting around unused. The keyboard is approximately 2.6 inches across, and typing on this is a huge pain in the ass. I'll probably pick up a new computer in the next week or two, so until then updates will be few and far between.
But the more interesting thing that might lead to this blog going away is the job situation. The big changes I have mentioned in recent posts are starting to happen. Our department is changing from four horizontally equal groups working with basically different accounts to one large group with four vertically different positions. Over the last week or so, we've all found out what our new position was going to be and all that. I'm starting out one group below the top of the four, which, and I'm tooting my own horn here, is pretty f'ing impressive because I've only been here seven months. I have a crapload of new stuff to learn and all sorts of new responsibilities, but it's going to be a lot more interesting. And it came with a nice little raise as well. All in all, I've got nothing to complain about.
But does all of that mean the blog is over? I say no. Even with the bump in pay and responsibility, I still think I'm in the ranks of the underemployed. And I still work with some first rate wackos. So hopefully I'll be able to keep this interesting. But this keyboard is killing me, so it's time to go.
Listening to: Bill Simmons interviewing Artie Lange on his podcast
About to: Focus on the Yankees
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