Nothing To Do

There's nothing to do at work today. No, really. Nothing.

This is how it works. There's a bucket. Not a physical bucket. A figurative bucket. We logon to this web page, click some stuff and there's the bucket. It's full of tickets. Figurative tickets. You see, people from all over the State call into this Help Desk (a.k.a Level 1) and open "tickets." They can't logon or their server's down or they forgot how to turn on their monitor or whatever. Level 1 takes all the information and sends the ticket to us, at Level 2.

Side note: Level 1's real job is to troubleshoot the issue and send the ticket to Level 2 ONLY when they can't resolve the issue. But Level 1 does not troubleshoot. Level 1 answers phones and types inaccurate information into the tickets, creating the need for Level 2 to call the person back, get all the correct information and begin troubleshooting. This completely invalidates Level 1's existence.

So, the bucket... Typically, there are 50-60 tickets in the bucket at any one time. Some are easy to solve and you can get rid of them in an hour. Some are sent directly from hell and stay in your own bucket (Yes, we have our own personal buckets, too.) for several months. For quite a while, there were at least 130 tickets in the bucket, on an on-going basis. This sucks. It means you're busy all the time. You can't stop. You just keep working and working and working and you feel like you're accomplishing nothing, because they just keep calling in more tickets. You feel guilty going to the bathroom.

Then we have days like today. I have three tickets in my own bucket, and am waiting for those people to get back to me. And there are no tickets in the Level 2 bucket, so there are no more tickets to take, so I can wait for more people to get back to me.

So, there's nothing to do. I'm planning on a long blog posting for the post-sushi afternoon.