It’s not a Friday! That means this isn’t almost my last task of the week, plenty more to do tomorrow and some more fun to be had tonight I’m sure before going home.

But before that, let’s see what we’ve been up to today and we’ll head first to Simon from CSC with the top 5 reasons for calls today:

1. Fault Updates – Customers calling in to chase their outstanding faults or to provide us with a update after being left a message earlier in the week and now only getting time to respond to these. As normal mainly the no sync or intermittent connection fault types being queried.
2. Router Set-ups – Always a popular one, setting up of their equipment for the first time, and most customers using equipment supplied by us, as well as the usual Netgear, Belkin and LinkSys models.
3. Email Set-ups – Customers calling in for advice on either how to configure popular email clients like Outlook or Thunderbird, or asking for general help on creating mailboxes, aliases etc.
4. Provisioning Updates – Customers who have signed up recently chasing activation dates or other information, no problems seen with hardware delays etc.
5. Billing – General billing queries, such as customers making outstanding payments, supplying new payment details or querying their accounts types in search of a better deal.

Over next to Martyn from Marketing:

It’s been a battle on the marketing desk today, as we took on the might of the air-con system. From sweltering conditions this morning, to Baltic blasts of icy wind this afternoon, we’ve had to deal with it all.

We’ve been working too of course. Chris has been contacting the gaming press to promote Broadband Your Way Pro, as well as writing some emails. I’ve been wrestling with Excel, putting together a huge plan for a forthcoming project, while Spencer has been working on some new ideas for our homepage. We’ll be back tomorrow, with shorts, flip-flops, balaclavas and scarves all at the ready for round 2 of Marketing vs Air-Con – this time it’s personal. (Ed: Not The Wrath of (Air-)Con!! then?)

Ben’s along next with the Development update

I’ve been looking into different Unified Modelling Language (UML) tools recently (with a view to standardising which tool we should be using at PlusNet), so to get the ball rolling, we had a workshop this afternoon in development with our very own UML guru Dan Kirkland. It was an excellent workshop, Dan covered all the main types of UML – use cases, activity diagrams, class diagrams etc, and it started some really exciting conversion about how, where and when we should and can be using UML in our development process. I’m sure more is going to come out of this so watch this space.

Everyone working on our Brightview Phase 2 project is busy bug fixing and we’re releasing our bug fixes in batched rollouts so Farhan is busy merging all the fixes together and getting them live ready for QA to pick up.

Myself and Rys are working hard on our latest project and the design document is making shape – we know the customer is always right, but some times they need a little persuasion to remind them what they actually want .

The Live Code Support team are really working well with their new Polish office, they’ve got the art of conference calling down to a tee, and they’re all experts at setting up Skype phone and video calls.

Ok, I’m off tomorrow, but don’t worry, everyone else will be here fixing those bugs and creating those exciting new developments you’ll be seeing on the portal in the not too distant future!

Colin’s going to tell us what’s been going on in Web Dev this Thursday:

There continues to be lots of bug fixing going on in Web Development but as well as that, the NADS Team have continued to roll out NADS with some improvements to the Manage My Mail interface on the portal.

While this has been on going, James has been working on improvements to the Flickr Plugin on the Community Site, as well as being taught interesting things about the PlusNet Codebase, and the ‘vim’ program from Colin and Rupert.

And lastly for today Matt has the Comms Team end of day:

Comms have been in the building today. Literally. Except Mand.

Chris has fuelled his day of ninja battles on the networks floor with orange flavoured (and apparently chocolate scented) Kerosene.

James has been subduing the beast that is the sales team, armed only with two sherbert dip-dabs and a mug of coffee (it was a double latte, don’t think we send our workmates off into the unknown without sufficient ammunition).

Bob has been searching for the meaning of life via the medium of random web pages and a magic 8 ball (you know those things are never wrong? The next few years are apparently going to be very interesting indeed, if Bob’s findings are to be believed).

Mand has been working from home today, we suspect because her daughter has mixed the sugar and the salt together. Rumour has it that she’s been trying to summon a hoard of nano-demons from Silicon Hell to sort them out again, but reports of her progress are few and far between. We’ve been able to smell the brimstone from here.

Finally, I’ve been trying to resolve a mathematical solution for the lack of tea but as yet haven’t found the answer. I suspect this is because Bob is not a constant. (Ed: Differentiate tea with respect to Bob to obtain the rate of change of tea and you’ll probably find that the rate of change is always zero, hence no tea).

And on that note we’re out of here for another day and will be back again once more tomorrow. I’ll be off home shortly and deciding what strange combination of food from the fridge and cupboard can make up a meal. No-one else seems to like the idea of rice with gravy strangely (and Yorkshire pudding, mushy peas and mint sauce), although there were a couple of votes for toast with sugar.

Bookmark to:

This entry was posted by Dave Tomlinson on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 6:41 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 response, or trackback from your own site.