Well the world appears to have survived the Hadron Collider thus far well at time of writing anyway, can’t guarantee it will still be here when you get round to reading this.

So have our development team been building a large particle accelerator in basement or Comms constructing an escalator to the clouds? Let’s find out in today’s exciting edition of the Plusnet End of Day. Anything can happen in the next half hour…

First today is Rami from the CSC:

A fairly busy day at the CSC today, it is the last day of our early shift pattern for Team A.
Calls were of different patterns, but still the most frequent inbound calls were in regards router setup.

Team A, we’re all excited for today’s team night out after work, plans are set and everyone is ready !

Today’s Top 5 issue for Team A call taker were:

1. Router setup: Existing customer calling to report that they’ve lost connectivity, apparently the details on their routers have been deleted. So we were either talking the customers through the router configuration or advising the customer with the correct details as some of them have done this before.
2. Email setup: customer calling to report that they are unable to send/receive emails, most of these calls were resolved by confirming the mailbox details or rectifying the firewall issue.
3. Order updates: customers calling to report that the hardware is now in hand but not sure if the account is active yet. These type of calls are usually short as we can quickly check the order progress on the broadband ordering system.
4. Speed issue: customers calling to report a slow connection. Most of there issues were the usage restriction as the customer been using the connection for gaming or iPlayer very excessively.
5. Fault updates: Customers calling for an update on their open fault. Most of the callers has been advised to retest the connection as our faults investigation team liaised with the supplier to make changes on the line to stablise it.

Next is Chris from the Comms Team:

Short ‘un today.

[16:04:20] [Chris Parr] Today I have been mostly in meetings and dealing with problems
[16:04:36] [Bob Pullen] Today i have been mostly drafting emails and looking at spreadsheets
[16:06:52] [James Bailey] Today I have mostly been complaining.And Jesse has been mostly eating roasted chickens.

Mark from our DBA team is next:

In DBA corner we’re continuing with the mammoth task of reviewing what seems like just about every piece of sql in the place for potential improvements (Ed: want to take a look at some of my SQL Mark? I’m sure there’s plenty of scope for improvement).

Elsewhere in networks, plans were drawn up for some future projects, some new kit was racked up for service consolidation, and improvements were made to the backup scripts package.

Work on problems and documentation continues apace, while formmail and the wireless network have proved sources of dismay for some among our team.

Over now to Phil from Marketing:

In the marketing control centre, Spencer is delighted to be at work today. He was very worried about yesterday’s LHC experiment. Very worried indeed.

We’re one week into an online banner campaign, which is cool because it’s the first time Plusnet’s done such a thing on this scale. The reports have started coming in and the team is tweaking the website path in response to feedback. All this plus sending emails, colour-coding spreadsheets and holding conference calls. Remember – tomorrow’s Friday

Penultimate update for the day from Rys in Development:

Bit of a quiet one down here in Development today, as a good few in the department are either on holiday, getting married (get in, Simon!) or taking some time in lieu for working overtime recently.

Bill gave a quick presentation on code profiling and debugging using XDebug, Ben and I attended a quarterly review for the team we’re the developers for, some of us had our Dev Departmental Objectives meeting, and we all got on with projects.

Things are winding down on the project I’m working on, since we’re now code complete and on live, although not customer facing quite yet (later this month for that). Business as usual really, although maybe a little quieter down here because HR have recently joined us in this part of the building, hehe!

And lastly for today Ian’s asked me to put a few words in from Products:

We started a trialing a Mobile Broadband service this week aimed at customers with faults on their fixed line broadband. Ultimately we can see this being a valuable service for some customers. Broadband is increasingly being seen as an essential service for many people and when faults happen it can cause considerable inconvenience so being able to offer a 3G backup service is a natural evolution to the 0808 backup dial service we currently offer to customers with connection faults. Expect to hear more on this as the trial continues.

And that’s all for today folks, sadly it’s not Friday today even though I’m seem to normally end up post the EOD on Friday which is slightly confusing my brain as half of Tuesday I was thinking it was Wednesday so we’ll be back tomorrow with another installment for your appreciation…

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This entry was posted by Dave Tomlinson on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 6:46 pm and is tagged with and is posted in the category PlusNet News. 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.