I’m still crying over last night’s football. And judging by the submissions for today’s EOD I’m clearly not the only one.

Without further ado let’s see what have been the important items for us today..

Let’s start with Brad in the Customer Support Centre

A similar day to most, lots of people generally being busy and trying to recover from last night’s football disaster! But we’re not going to let that spoil our mood!

Top 5 reasons for calling the CSC today have been:

1. Email Setup 15% – A lot of callers today trying to configure their email program for their new PlusNet email address or new mailbox
2. Router Setup 15% – New customers who have migrated over to us or brand new Broadband users who need help putting in the correct username
3. Logging Faults 10% – Customers who have had some connection problems. No pattern identified but faults raised to be investigated
4. Sales 5% – Quite a few perspective customers who are interested in our Phone + Broadband deals
5. Router Updates 5% – There are still a few customers who have not received their router due to a backlog with our suppliers.

I know this is the update you’re waiting for so I may as well get it out of the way.. Tell us about tea Matt in Comms:

In order to be able to use more than fifteen words to discuss you-know-what, I shall instigate a code word. The code word is ‘cupcake’. I have thus far been the only member of the team to make any cupcake today.. (snip.. enough already! – Ed)

So, today we’ve all been helping the CSC out as there are a fair few tickets in the pools so we’ve been on double target. Aside from that, I have looked at several problems and have also been foruming as normal.

Chris, meanwhile, has been doing much the same – meetings, tickets, forums, the usual malarkey. James has also been about in forums – thinkbroadband and the community site mostly, trying frantically to catch up with the heroic post count of Mr Vaughan. Mand has been working from home once more, with the recontracting and the tickets and the problems it’s been a busy day for us all.

Now, the mystery that is Bob. We know of his prowess as a gunner, but what does he do on the Networks floor? Is he even there, or is it merely a hi-tech robot Bob ‘policing the relays’ (an innocuous phrase, that) while the real Bob dons his sunglasses and black suit and goes out there to protect the earth from the scum of the universe?

We may never know. But I intend to find out. Possibly over a cup of cupcake. Maybe that’s why he never makes it… apparently caffeine is deadly to non-carbon-based life forms. According to wikipedia, anyway.

Alan, one of our fabulous DBAs in NetOps has this comprehensive summary for us:

Me: monitoring our DB servers, and working on monitoring improvements, planning some overnight maintenance work for next week
Patryk: dealing with portal server problems
Sarah: working on problems mainly, and some planning for maintenance work due next week
Michael: supporting the development test environment
Adey: getting secure access for finance department. and monitoring a replaced service module on ERXes
Dan: RIPA Request, Tickets, mail policing, Abuse, dspam
Duncan: working on p1 problems
Matt: tickets, mainly traffic management issues, deciphering packet captures
Rizwan: house keeping, change controls for mail platform, compiled new version of dspam and now adding a new package to the build server

The Platform Team have been doing all this:

Ian: billing & cronhost migration planning, and misc other operational assistance tasks
Josh: documenting our systems
Denis: working on implementation plan for old network kit removal, getting access for some data migration testing from mssql functional spec for HTTP filtering
Martin: Writing up some notes for mail install and network monitoring
John: DB design review and MySQL upgrade preparation
Mark: Improving some internal processes, specifically for MaxDSL upgrades
Geoff: Mail platform, Radius stuff
Nigel: Code reviews

And, even Networks management have been busy

Jason: Been to see the destruction process that we will be using for the secure destruction of hard drives! The company that will be doing this has very good security controls in place to protect the data before destruction. All employees are security checked, drives are held in a secure area and are security sealed and then shredded into a million pieces. A large bank also uses this facility. Sounds very timely in light of this week’s news!
Lee: Network kit removal, PCI and other planning, departmental planning and admin, Ellacoya improvements.

All this while coping with the many ad-hoc requests that come our way, and of course working as one of the best teams in the business!

Darren in Products has this to report:

Its been a quiet day here in Products, not because of lack of work, but our one and only Shaun C (the c stands for churn) was working from home (finally.. day without abuse!).

I have spent most of the day chasing BT over hardware orders and this involves keeping various departments updated on the progress. I have also been working on various smaller tasks and developing my SQL skills.

Rich has been feeling under the weather today; he even bought two boxes of Kleenex in for good measure. Aside from feeling ill Rich has spent all day working/testing our new VoIP platform.

Dave has been working on tickets, helping Rich with VoIP testing. He has also been looking at broadband signups that haven’t been activated and determining if there are any gaps in our processes.

Chris in Marketing:

Today in Marketing we’ve been brainstorming ideas on how we can promote BBYW Pro further and working hard on the Christmas promotion we hope to launch next week.

I finally hit send on this month’s newsletter so if you’ve not yet seen it you should expect to receive a copy very soon.

We’ve been investigating the possibility of some changes to the signup journey and doing some content work for an upcoming direct mail campaign.

I’m going home soon to send my CV down to the FA – I can’t do a worse job than McClaren can I?

Still fresh from a day counting them, Mark in Finance spills the beans:

Today Finance have been working on clearing the month-end file review, and balance sheet reconciliations. Kate has been preparing payroll. Alex has been processing customer direct debits and sorting out customer direct mandates. We have closed 141 tickets today, with only 60 still to work. Everyone is just starting to come to terms with last night’s football result! (You speak for yourself – Ed)

And last, but by no means least.. over to Gary in QA:

Its been another very busy day here in QA pushing on with the Madasafish project and running around generally getting things done. We have been testing bug fixes and making sure everything is ship-shape.

Paul has been forging ahead testing problems today and also testing some new equipment to make our portals more resilient.

Unfortunately the vending machine is still out of Rib ‘n’ Saucy Nik-Naks and the kitchen staff are refusing to fill it up with more as they like to upset me *sniffs*, So in true corn-based snacking fashion the Nik-Naks are out and the crispy-bacon crunchies are in, ha! (Let’s hope this doesn’t signal the start of a tea-like saga.  Comms is bad enough – Ed)

And a final last word from me..

We actually got around to counting the money we’d collected from staff for the International Talk Like a Pirate Day and Halloween fun and daftness.. we raised almost £450 for Children in Need so that’ll be off to the bank shortly; and I’m grateful for all our staff who contributed so generously with their time, humour and of course, dosh.  Nice one everyone!

Until tomorrow.. pleasant dreams. Just try not to think about the football.

 P-j

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This entry was posted by Peter Jackson on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 7:52 pm and is tagged with and is posted in the category EOD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a reply below. Pinging is currently not allowed.