I’d like to start off with a special announcement. Our very own Carol, Customer Service Director is 21 today! Sorry Carol – We’ve got pictures of you out in South Africa!

Onwards we head to the slightly more usual departmental updates:

We start with Ben, from Development:

Hello from the Development department. It’s my first time writing the department’s end of day, so bear with me – I’m new!

For Phil and myself (the newbies!), this week has been full of meetings, reading documentation and asking questions constantly. Anything that can get us up to speed as quickly as possible has been the motto for us. Slowly but surely we are getting there (Well that’s our thoughts – and we are sticking to them). We have both managed to get our Alpha boxes up and running so we can actually look at the code and start to wade our way through it, so we have more knowledge of the structure. We both had proud moments when we fixed our first bugs, and are now waiting to get it checked by the QA team. Exciting stuff, but in the meantime I have been shadowing Rys (my mentor) watching his project rollouts.

Around me I can see everyone working really hard on the projects we currently have running, bug fixes and rollouts. There are some huge deadlines looming so everyone is working their hardest to finish their tasks off. Even with all this workload, everyone has made us feel very welcome in the department. Great stuff! Back to fixing bugs and reading documentation.

That’s it from me.

A somewhat comical update now, with Aaron from Networks:

Fresh as it comes off the teleprinter …

Mike’s giving the City a lifeline by working on our backup sledge.
Josh is a lost soul living in a fishbowl, documenting and implementing the BV transition.
Ben and Duncan are fixing broken things, and agreeing with others how they should go about fixing broken things.
Russ is spring cleaning.
Rizwan is on watch duty, rifle in hand, ready to take down any gremlins.
Ian is adding to the live platform, testing the sound etc.
Michael is also making staging improvements, ready for the aforementioned gig.
Kevin is championing Parbin to Neil.
Neil is fortifying knowledge and loving Parbin..
Matt & Dan are fortifying wine (port requests.. sorry) and loving tickets.
Lee & Carl have attended the LINX meeting (London Internet Exchange) who are seeing Beijing-like traffic growth and appear to be about to build more highways.
John & Denis are taking care of business.
Richard is fighting spam – red adair style.

Me? Aside from the usual stuff I’m also wondering why will not is “won’t” and the past tense of that is would not. Reckon it should have been “win’t” to start off with, but I didn’t get consulted.

Mike, from the CSC:

Its been a lively morning in the CSC today with all hands on deck. Calls have been coming in fast however we have managed to keep the longest wait down to 6 mins 56 seconds.

On a side note, We would all like to wish our Customer Service Director – Carol Axe a very, very Happy Birthday from the Customer Contact Center. We hear she been having a great time in South Africa eating birthday cake with our colleagues across the pond.

CSC Top 5 19/03/08.

1) Username and password queries – This seems to have creeped its way to number one. This tends to be users using the incorrect format (i.e. using the @realm for e-mail authentication or attempting to connect to ADSL without the realm). Nothing generic about these calls.

2) Fault Updates – User calling for updates on DSL & Logged faults. This is normal everyday calls and not out of the ordinary.

3) Sales calls – User have heard about out awards, nothing really much else to say about this apart from that we have a sales team that work 9AM – 9PM and have really helped with getting the longest wait down.

4) E-mail setup – Again, this is not out of the ordinary however we have seen a slight increase in this today. The querys come mainly from new users who have signed up on the phone as they don’t get the option to print the e-mail settings.

5) Billing Queries – Mainly customers querying why new accounts are cheaper than the legacy accounts they are subscribed to. Just a customer education matter.

Thanks for reading.

Marketing, with Chris:

We’ve been in brainstorm mode today here in Marketing – investigating different advertising opportunities and promotional ideas. I’ve also been preparing an email which I plan to send tomorrow and have looked after the pressroom and marketing enquiries. This has kept me pretty busy with a variety of enquiries about our uSwitch and ISPA success. We’ve also been recovering from our web analyst’s leaving drinks last night – this involved a very large order of bacon sandwiches this morning!

Bradders, normally of CSC fame, provides a QA update:

Hello from down here in QA! Guest editor today, helping out the team and seeing how this department works – all good stuff!

Today we have been doing:
Catherine: Testing open problems, actioning Change Controls with Networks.
Brad: Testing migrations of MAAF accounts and testing problems.
Gary: Regression testing the staging platform, documenting projects, testing projects.
Craig: Regression testing and testing problems.
Gavin: Testing migrations of MAAF accounts, QA wizard.

Matt from Comms, brings us this:

What have the comms team been doing today?

Chris:
Networks change controls
Comms clean up work
Forums
Chris is also waiting to hear when his very limited edition black cherry and french vanilla pepsi will be arriving.

Bob:
Forums
Problems
Bob has also taken delivery of what must be the spankiest ipod case I’ve ever seen. It’s Italian leather and came in packaging more befitted to a Tiffany necklace. Even better, it put a big fat scratch down the front of his ipod when it went in for the first time…

James:
Looking after the sales team
Forums
Various tasks
James has also been arguing with George over who has the better name, and teaching him (and me) the meaning of sesquipedalianism.

Matt:
Tasks
High usage customers
Problems
Development change controls
I have also reinstated the arguments over who makes the tea today. Just so you’re abreast of the situation: it’s still not Bob.

Mand:
Meetings (lots of these)
Projects
Problems
And finally, Mand has been dressing down today rather than turning up in her usual smart shirt and tie. We’re not sure why, but then if you didn’t have to wear a shirt and tie to work every day, would you still do it?

So that’s it from me. Stay tuned for the pending James vs George naming poll.

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