Reality Has Arrived

Oddly enough, the reality of my employment situation hit me like a brick at 4AM this morning. As I lay awake in bed listening to the soothing tones of gentle rain, my chances of going back to sleep were heading toward nil as I realized that the proposed timetable for alleviating our work burden was completely unrealistic. Since the buyout, I've been assigned the new chore of being on-call every other week. No big deal huh? Without additional incentive and with only one other very overworked person to split the duty, it's a big deal.


Knology has a fully staffed 24-hour call center in Augusta, GA that handles the vast majority of their service calls. I understand that some calls are answered in Huntsville but I believe that most technical calls, especially after hours, are routed to Georgia. So why aren't they taking the calls? Unfortunately, our system will have to be standardized with Huntsville to allow Augusta to take over. Until then, after 5PM on weekdays and all weekend, I wait somewhat patiently for an email to arrive (just got a new BlackBerry from them today) and then take care of business as needed. Although it was obviously scoffed at by management, we historically haven't returned calls after 9PM.

The call load is light after 9PM and, even if there is an outage, we don't normally receive enough calls to identify it as such until the majority of people start rising in the morning. Usually the calls start pouring in around 6AM when the cable is out. Besides the occasional problem at an individual home or a gamer nerd having issues at 3AM, call volume just isn't high enough to justify the loss of my beauty sleep. Knology has insisted that our current call center (which only collects information) actually call us if an outage is identified or if a customer is irate, no matter the hour. Thanks.

Since it's winter, I don't go out much anyhow. I usually pack on ten pounds while sitting in front of the television or the computer but spring will soon arrive and my thoughts will turn to other things ... like having a life of some sort. I might want to attend a drag race and they don't schedule those around being on-call. We suspected and it's being confirmed that there's no way that this transition can be completed by spring as hoped and there's no way that I can be on-call for six months to another year. Even with some additional compensation that hasn't been offered, I don't think that I can commit half my month to technical support for an extended period of time. I am thankful that I still have a job but I'm at a point in my life where I definitely work to live, not live to work. I'll just keep looking for another job. Sigh. I need some eggnog.