Chapter 1 - Reset

"Thank you for calling Malibu Fitness Health Help Desk, How Can I Help you?”

Adam frankly didn’t give a shit how he could help the person calling. Infact, he didn’t care about helping anyone. To him this was a job and nothing but a job. Sure the idea of someone on a "help desk" is to "help" someone while they are sitting at their "desk". To Adam these were just disembodied voices at the other end of the phone with problems and the sooner he could get them off the phone the better.

The problem was typical. Forgotten password - the bane of every helpdesk analyst’s existence. Adam was annoyed at these calls but honestly couldn’t fault people for them. He was a geek himself with lots of passwords to remember and forget.

"Category: Intranet, Subcategory: Password Reset"

Close Ticket.

There is mechanization to humanity you feel when you are forced to log every action and every problem you solve. Adam had done this over nine thousand times in the two years he'd worked at Malibu. At times he wished he knew the exact figure but the company had moved between three different support systems so he would never be able to get an exact number.

"When I hit ten thousand I’m out of here." Adam pegged his average ticket count at about 20 a day right now, which means he’d be hitting the mythical ten thousand mark in about 50 days.

Tech support is the fabulously dreadful career they don’t tell you about in college. There are really good reasons these jobs are being outsourced to the developing world. The life of a helpdesk analyst is boring, stressful, and you slowly go insane after a while. No self-respecting American cubicle drone would want to do this without a good dosage of self-hatred thrown in. Day after day is the same cycle of work. Log into email, log any tickets from emails overnight. Check the voicemail; log any tickets for new voicemails. Open the ticket queue, check for issues needing followup from the night shift. Sit and wait for people to call. Helpdesk work was the crappy job you put up with for years before you got to figure out what you were good at in IT.

The official policy of Malibu Fitness was to answer all helpdesk calls live and on the first two rings. Adam knew this was impossible, and the policy was complete bullshit. His ticket queue was always full and he always had something to do. On a few rare occasions he had actually managed by some miracle to bring his ticket queue down to absolutely zero. It never stayed there for long.

Adam hated the repetition of the job but was thankful at the same time. Malibu Fitness was a small company and as such his boss, the director of IT, did not have a clue how to implement best practice IT procedures or run a helpdesk. The man came from automotive garage store management and had someone fallen into the tech sector. The lack of experience or technical grounding showed.

Adam had done a lot of reading on the topics of call management and customer management. With some positive ideas and proposed changes he could probably increase the efficiency of the entire service desk by 200%. The problem is nobody in management cared about these ideas and as a result Adam didn’t care. He intentionally let the phone ring longer then two rings just to spite his boss. Every night he knew his boss looked at the telephone logs for the incoming calls. In Adam’s sick little world he took great accomplishment in knowing on some printout somewhere the incoming calls read 0:04 to pickup instead of 0:02.

Adam stared at his ticket queue trying to figure out what he wanted to do next. Part of the problem of this job was he wasn’t supposed to really figure out what he wanted to do. He was simply supposed to do what was listed next as ranked by priority. Endless meeting after endless meeting his department debated "severity levels" or "urgency levels" or how to prioritize the support calls. Adams opinion and response times wildly varied from his boss' all the time. Somehow his boss expected the service desk to not only fulfill the "service level agreement" (SLA) objectives they'd set for returning calls but to also somehow process every incoming call on the second ring.

“When do we get to go to the bathroom, eat, and breathe?” Adam once asked during these meetings. He knew he was a snarky asshole at times with this attitude. The sad thing is everyone knew he was right but was just afraid to say those things to the boss' face. Adam was cocky because he knew most people at the company liked him, respected his skill, and he felt they were damn lucky to have him. This often created moral conundrums for Adam as he debated the merits of his own ego and self-righteousness against servitude and “what’s good for the company” corporate hierarchy and “proper” behavior.

At rare times, picking up the phone on the second ring was possible. When Adam was feeling motivated he could really kick some ass and knock the tickets out of the queue. There’d been busy days where Adam had taken 70 calls in a day while his coworkers had taken 20. His coworkers didn’t like those days very much. Unfortunately, Adam felt extremely unmotivated most of the time. He had always suspected he’d been lowballed on his salary for this job and had recently paid $29.95 for the custom Salary.com appraisal. It turns out he was right. Add to that Adam’s logic of “it’s a fucking company that runs gyms; no one is going to live or die if I don’t answer this phone call. We’re not launching spaceships here." The potential of someone dying was there, because those storer employees were pretty dumb and often mistake the IT department for the nurses on staff. Theoretically Adam thought, someone may drop dead on a treadmill, accidentally call him instead of a nurse, and because the call goes to voicemail they die. Adam hopes the store employees would be smart enough to dial 911 in that case. But then again, these are the same very people who once called him to ask what they should do about an overflowing toilet (The answer was of course, “ Find some towels and a plunger, call a plumber".)

Adam once read that the industry standard for Helpdesk turnover rate was something like 100% per year. In his head this meant in the two years he’d been at Malibu he should have at least left twice and found himself another job. He really hated the company - loathed working there.

The next call came in about seven minutes after Adam had closed the ticket from the forgotten password. During those seven minutes Adam did what he usually does, which was sit around, staring at his cubicle walls, listening to his MP3 collection and pondering his god forsaken decision to work for the company.

“Thank you for calling Malibu Fitness help desk this is Adam speaking, how can I help you today?”

That was long winded, he thought. He usually went with the shorter version "Hello this is Adam speaking, how can I help you?” or when he was really annoyed “This is Adam speaking”

“Hi Adam Speaking.”

Groan. He had heard this joke about a million times …

"I’m having problems ringing through the new nutritional supplements that just came out, they’re coming up at $29.99 in the computer but they should be $34.99"

Adam thoroughly enjoyed these calls. Mostly because it underlined his chief complaint of the company and his department. No one ever told anyone else what the hell was going on. Case in point: the new Gingko Biloba Vitamin E supplements. Adam did not know what unholy marriage Gingko Biloba and Vitamin E were doing in pill form, but he now knew they were being sold in the stores. He had heard through the product guys a few weeks back it was hitting the stores soon so this wasn't a complete surprise. Adam made sure to keep an eye out on all paperwork on peoples desks, posted in cubes ... it always proved useful to be in the loop and pay attention.

Nonetheless, this pissed him off he wasn't told. On its own this was only one phone call, but if this one store doesn't know I'll have 50 other one's calling me today thought Adam. The highly sophisticated central pricing database, otherwise known as he folder full of excel spreadsheets was missing a price for this particular store in The Dalles.

The Dalles - what is this, Oregon Trail? The geographic trivia joke of his youth fleeting, Adam refocused. He always thought it was extremely funny that the name of the place he worked for was Malibu Fitness and it was based out of an office park in a Pittsburgh suburb. The nearest store to Malibu was 300 miles away and not even in the right state.

Adam navigated through the Folders to Pricing/Oregon. Everything on the server was organized by state and then subfolders full of documents related to their stores. Adam hated this idiotic "system" and he knew the company needed a document management system. He had made this point over and over but nobody listened. He once spent four hours organizing all the folders on the server so he could find things only to have his coworkers and boss screw up the system in less than two weeks.

"price list 1104 new.xls"

"What the hell is this?", Adam thought

Price list 1104.xls
price list 1104 new.xls
price list new.xls

Excel claims another victim. Adam's boss loves Excel.

He hated when this happened. People would update the pricing spreadsheet and save it under a different name. Even worse, the names never made sense. The document management system Adam championed for would fix this kind of problem by marking the revisions and allowing people to note revision changes will keeping the document in one place.

Adam opened all of the spread sheets and scrolled through the columns looking for "vitamin e gingko Biloba". Every sheet was in a different format thanks to the efficiency hound boss of his who kept switching around formats of the sheet every time they decided to "improve" their installation procedure. Adam got sick of this formatting hell about three weeks ago and redid the entire template to match the exact way it appeared within the computer. If you print the list it looks the same as it does on the screen. What a crazy, novel concept. The idea was quickly vetoed.

Vitamin c pills..... Vitamin d.... no Vitamin E.

Nothing in any of the spreadsheets. Adam couldn’t find the pricing and didn't have any emails from the district manager. Its possible James has the price but he was working 2-11 today and wasn't in yet. Adam's boss had made James the go to guy in charge of allpricing. James had a bad little habit of storing all the important documents on the desktop of his computer so nobody else could ever get to them. It's possible the documents would be on James's computer, but Adam didn't care enough to try. That would require actually getting up and going the extra mile.

"Ok yes, I found your pricing sheet here. I do see that it should be $34.95, I apologize for that error lets get that fixed for you"

Adam hadn't found the pricing. He had no idea what the pricing was. He figured $34.95 was so much as fair for this bottle of snake oil as the next. Besides, what makes him any less qualified then anyone else in the company to decide what that bottle of Vitamin E Gingko Biloba magical herbal extract should cost?

Adam spent three minutes clicking his way through the interface screen which should have taken 15 seconds if a developer had ever actually bothered to try using his own code for more then a minute and finally got the price fixed.

"There we are $34.95. Anything else I can help you with?"

"No that's all, thanks! You guys are great... you know if I'm ever in the office I need to stop by and see you guys!"

"If I’m ever in the greater Oregon area, I'll stop by and say hello."

Adam knew this was complete bullshit. He would never randomly find himself on the west coast and if he did the last place he'd want to visit on would be a "Malibu Fitness" store.