Yes! I Can Finally Feel Superior To Someone!

I don't talk much about my day job on this blog, primarily because we deal with a lot of proprietary information (housing industry, not medical industry, but similar principles) and I don't want to get into the habit of blabbing because it's easier to draw that boundary early than navigate fiddly ethical issues later. But the long and short of it is that I do technical support for home appraisers who are delivering reports on the value of homes. I regularly deal with people who have less technical expertise than I do...which is scary, quite frankly, because my knowledge of computers is woeful. I am not certified, I have no education on Microsoft and/or Apple products, and the only reason I'm able to do my job is that the software we use is proprietary and we had on-the-job training. When people's computer problems start getting away from our system and into the general, I have to basically tell them to find someone who knows what they're doing.

Except the other day, when I got someone calling to complain about how bad our servers were. "I've been trying to connect for the last half-hour now, and it gets all the way through to the end. Then it just freezes up for about fifteen minutes and finally tells me it's 'unable to connect to server'."

"Well, ma'am," I replied, "we're not receiving reports of any server issues on our end. The problem could be with your connection. Are you having any other issues accessing the Internet?"

"Look, I really don't have a whole lot of time to mess with this, okay? Can I just email you a PDF of the file? I've got a baseball game to get to, and it's already started. I've been sitting here in the parking lot for the last half-hour trying to get this stupid thing to send, and it just won't go."

"Um...ma'am, that could be your problem right there. These files are usually about five to ten megabytes of data. If you're trying to send it over a wireless connection--"

"It's the same connection I always have!"

"But what's your signal strength like?"

"I'm getting two bars of 3G."

Fortunately, once I explained to her that two bars of 3G wasn't really enough signal strength to send ten megs of data in a timely manner, she agreed to attend her baseball game and send the report when she got home. Nonetheless, I remain surprised at my job's ability to uncover people who make me look technically inclined. (Like the person I had to do a walkthrough for on "copy and paste"...but that's for another day.)

I Must Be Getting Desperate For Topics

The real reason my posting schedule gets a little bit sparse at this time of year has nothing to do with lack of time and everything to do with lack of ideas. I get so consumed by work that I don't really pay attention to the world, which makes it hard to write about things that aren't the financial industry's decision to spend years and years depersonalizing the home mortgage process and getting personal influence out of the home valuation process by putting barriers between the loan officers and the appraisers so they can't communicate...then start requiring references from a financial institution for all new appraisers. (As you can imagine, this is something I can talk a lot about.)

So at this point, I'm just going to tell you about a dream I had the other day. In it, I was watching a "lost" Eccleston episode of 'Doctor Who', and marveling at the sheer audacity of Russell T. Davies. Because I knew that while the casual viewer wasn't going to notice it, Davies had gone and made the story into a mashup of "Vengeance on Varos" and "Timelash", and was demonstrating that there was really nothing wrong with the ideas, only the execution. In it, the Doctor and Rose and Jack landed on a degenerate former colony where the inhabitants had developed a Roman-esque Imperial Court, and the Doctor was framed by the Emperor as the ringleader of the rebels (who didn't really exist--they were just a convenient excuse to crack down on people) and sentenced to the Mindlash. (As a subplot, there was a faction who planned to use the Doctor to assassinate the Emperor and then execute him for that. Not many good guys in this one.)

The Doctor, in turn, found out that the Mindlash was actually a piece of broken technology from the original colony ship, an artificial intelligence that functioned as the ship's psychiatrist. Unfortunately, this one had become rather severely degraded, and was convinced that the default state for "sanity" was the 17th century explorer Vasco de Gama. The Doctor was deemed incurably insane for not believing himself to be a Spanish sailor from the Age of Exploration, and the machine decided that the best way to "cure" him was to erase his brain patterns entirely.

I woke up before the end, but I'd already guessed it--the Doctor had been talking to the Captain of the Imperial Guard, who was a good man who knew that the Court had become too decadent to survive, and I figured that in traditional Ninth Doctor fashion, he was going to win not through direct action but by inspiring someone else to do good. But it was an awesome episode, full of jokes and twists and courtly intrigue. I wish you could have seen it.

Line Item: Hired Goons

Sorry about the slight delay in posting; I started a new job last week (yay!) and they've thrown me right in at the deep end on a big project, which necessitated lots of overtime this week. (I'm being slightly vague about the details because if there's one thing I've learned from being on the Internet, it's that no matter how innocuous your blog posts about your job are, you still don't want any identifying details about the job.) The big project involves collecting some information from all of our outside contractors in order to update the database.

Anyhow, I got corrected (I'm still a little too new to actually "get in trouble") because, when one of the contractors refused to provide the information, I passed word of that refusal along to the regional manager for that area. I did so mainly because the refusal sounded like it was "with prejudice", as it were, and I wanted them to know that they might have some angry contractors to soothe. As it turned out, though, people like me don't talk directly to people like him. There are channels to go through for that.

I apologized, like you do, and explained that I went directly to the regional manager because I'd been told in the email that "it is your responsibility to make sure the information is collected for every name on this list." As far as I was concerned, that meant I should do whatever I had to in order to get that update done.

I didn't say so at the time, but I did picture using comic hyperbole to make my point. "If I have to email the regional manager, I will. If I have to call the CEO and ask him to make a personal visit, I will. If I have to hire some goons to go out and rough these people up until they update their profile in our system, well, then, that's what I have to do." Pause. "Of course, I'd expect to be reimbursed for that. Do I have to submit an invoice, or...?"

Of course, I'd have to note it in the "Comments" section of their profile. "Goons hired, will contact when vendor roughed up sufficiently."