End of Day (in pirate) 19th September
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- End of Day (in pirate) 19th September
End of Day (in pirate) 19th September
Shiver me timbers! It be International Talk Like a Pirate Day - and today the good ship Plusnet has launched a fabulous new broadband product (Broadband Your Way Pro) whilst 'arrr'ing' and 'avast there'ing'. Some of thar crew be dressing the part. Aye, Cap'n Carol n'all, who be pacing the decks with a parrot on her shoulder - arrr! We be havin' a few concerned calls and tickets from customers regarding our themed logo. Ye be assured 'twas only a bit o'fun from our production team and there be no cause for alarm. We be a-customising our logo plenty in previous years and we be slackin'. It be time to get them creative juices flowin' again yer lubbers - arrr. A quick tour of thar galleon then: Customer Support Crew We too have been joining in with the TLAPD fun. The Call Centre is adorned with pirate flags and we even have our own parrot. Our resident pirate Taz is dressed in fully fledged pirate gear.. slightly worrying that he already had the outfit in his wardrobe. Top Reasons for calling the CSC today:
- New Faults - 20% No particular area or type, just a larger than normal number of new faults noticed today.
- Email / Router Setup 20% As usual, new customers having problems or who want some help regarding their router and email setup. Also still seem to be people who have changed their passwords following the auth issues the other day who are having problems with the new passwords.
- Prov 15% General prov updates, mainly due to incompatible products or current providers. No major issues with our processes.
- Logged Faults 10% Customers calling up for updates following SMS updates or other fault updates.
- Sales 10% Customers calling up with sales enquiries and wanting to sign up. Other Misc issues 25%
Comms Scurvy Dogs - arrr Today we've been putting up with Carol talking in pirate speak endlessly. We decided it would be amusing for us all to post on the Community Site with our new found Pirate names! It's been a pretty eventful day, with the release of Broadband Your Way Pro and the award of the camera to our Photo Competition winner (more on this tomorrow!). James has been setting out his stall in the Community Site, whilst speaking a fair amount with BT regarding some faults issues as well as attending a few meetings. Bob's been stuck up in Networks all day, so we haven't seen that much of him. Probably because there weren't any doughnuts today! Chris has been doing his bits and pieces in the forums as well as doing some more task work and prepping for the gaming party next month! Mand has been up and down the stairs like a yoyo and looking into our referral model for some project work that we hope to launch shortly. Here's to hoping for a slightly more normal day tomorrow! Marketing Brigands We scurvy dogs in Marketing have been heavily involved in PR and press activity following the launch of BBYW Pro. We've kicked off a project to resolve a number of issues affecting our referrers and will improve the information available to them. We have been doing some fantastic creative and design work for the website for some upcoming and very sweet product enhancements. We've threatened to keel haul a few bilge rats around the place but other than that we've enjoyed the fun of TLAPD and are looking forward to the next crazy PlusNet event ....Now where is Christmas? (give over won't yer? it be Halloween next - Ed) Finance Buccaneers Pirate Mark B posting for Finance today. Today the team have closed 32 customer tickets - leaving all of the finance ticket pools clear. Kate has started work on this month's payroll run - the most important job in finance! Jen has been on holiday today so Mark has been processing direct debit payments and has completed (after 2 months of work) the reorganisation of our supplier contracts. Niki has been going through our capital expenditure plans for the remainder of the year with the Network Director. Development 'Lubbers Working with rapidly developing technology is not very easy task. Recently we have encountered quite interesting bug in PHP handling of objects. Imagine that when you try to create new object and object construction fails, PHP will destroy this object, although it wasn't created at all. It gets even more interesting if you create your own object destructor and expect that it should do some extra work when the object goes away. Looking at PHP bug track it's not clear whether that actually is a feature or a problem. Having met such problem it makes you thinking what about project I am working on - have I used it? Will it work as I expect or will it break in the most unexpected moment? It's good that we have tests that will check written code. Networks Pirates Hi, my name is Simon Bedford. I have worked here at PlusNet for 8 years in total, split over 2 stints. I currently work within the Network Operations team responsible for the running and maintaining of our server infrastructure. Today I have been mostly working on our incoming mail platform in readiness for a major rollout tomorrow morning. This has included some bug fixes from previous versions, new functionality for the blocking of dynamic IP's and some improved scripting for updates and archives of our spam databases. All this will be rolled tomorrow morning as a new version of the software, along with some further improvements that my colleague Geoff Mitchell has made. The changes will help reduce overhead on our core mail servers and improve both the availability and efficiency of this platform. I have also been working on implementing a cluster of four admin servers across our Sheffield colo's that will aid us admin and housekeep our various storage systems and legacy services more effectively with minimum downtime. Web Team It's been Talk like a Pirate Day (like we've let anybody forget it - Ed), and in the Web Team we've embraced most of the events that have been going on throughout the business. Despite the fun of the day, normal work has continued and today we've rolled out avatars to the blogs here, just in time for Pirate Pete making this End of Day. We've also been continuing to work on the usual stuff - creating and updating support pages, content, designs and templates for new developments and some forthcoming developments for the Community Site and our internal tools. So, there we go then.. a busy day for me and the crew here at PlusNet. Until tomorrow then. Fair winds and smooth sailin' to ye - arrr! P-j