End of Day: 12th September

[#1]

Good evening all - time for the final EOD for this week. Apologies for the lateness but I had to swim home from the station as Manchester appears to be experiencing a rare UK phenomenon known locally as torrential rain. So it took me a little longer than normal to get home. I was so wet when I got in that I put myself on a spin cycle. Anyway, I feel much better now so here we go with the EOD. Oh and top marks go to Kelly for his link below. You'll see when you get there - no leaping ahead; just make sure your sound is switched on! OK - CSC up first:

Hi there, this is Jase. Another busy day in the CSC, with an unusually large volume of calls for a Friday morning, or so it seemed. 1) The most frequent inbound calls were regarding router configuration: This was a mixture of setups for Plusnet-supplied equipment, and hardware supplied by third parties prior to the user migrating to us. 2) A steady flow of sign-ups today, with customers calling to take up the great offers we have on combined Phone and Broadband packages. This has been driven forward by the quadruple referral bonus that referrers can earn. 3) Next came a lot of order updates: customers calling to configure the router that they've just received when the order is not yet complete. 4) In forth place was email configuration: a lot customers calling to configure email on their computer. Most of the callers have tried to configure it themselves but need help so we have to remove the account and reconfigure the email. 5) Lastly, speed problem: many customers are calling to report a speed problem, some of us are checking the DSL status and IP profile. Mostly it's caused by the internal wiring causing drops in connection.

Next up Jen from HR:

Here's our few snippets to give you an insight into what the HR department have been doing this week... Gem managed to make it successfully back into work Tuesday in spite of losing her phone and purse over the weekend. Anyway, she got stuck straight in with Development consultations and has done a shed load of employee relations stuff too. Barbara and I have been getting together all the interesting bits of training everyone said they wanted to do in their performance reviews. I've also been ploughing my way through all of our written documents and web pages to try to update it with our new ‘Tone of Voice'. (I'll post again when it's all up and running!) Barbs managed to successfully co-ordinate the moving of our files from the top floor to the bottom, which was a hefty job. She needed a well-earned cuppa at the after spending most of Monday getting them all back in order. Meanwhile, we've been adjusting to life in the reception area which is starting to feel like the hub of Plusnet to me now (either that or Piccadilly Circus). I'm in a good mood anyway as my house sale has finally gone through! Who knows what next week will bring...

Thanks Jen! Now it's over to Ben Walton in Development.

Today has been a bit of a hectic day for me down here. We're missing our Indian friends who are celebrating the Onam festival. Onam is the biggest festival in the Indian state of Kerala and marks the homecoming of legendary King Mahabali. Before this week I hadn't heard of the Onam festival, but it looks fantastic, I'm sure they're having a great day. Click here for more information about Onam. I sure will be later today. As well as missing my Indian team today I am also a man down here, Rys my team mate has caught the dreaded lurgy, so he's been off a couple of days, I wish him well, especially as he has two days of work to catch up next week 🙂 [Ed: slave driver!] I'm also in the process of moving house, so I'm kinda fed up with boxes at the moment, and stairs. So really, with my latest project going live, and the phase 2 sections of that kicking off, it's been a busy one for me this week. As for the rest of the gang, Seb and Ben have just had a sneak preview of the new journey for the account change process, which they seem really excited about. The design team have been working really hard on these, and I too cannot wait to see what they have been up to. We're also updating our line checker to incorporate 21CN into the results. We use this to assess the speed that may be available on a line, so there's some buzz about that going on here. A few of the guys have also been trialling Magic Draw (a modelling tool) in the last few projects we've been working on, and so far everyone I've talked to about this can't get enough, they really love it. I can't wait to be working on the next project now. Have a good weekend everyone!!

Next up...

Hi Jason from the Networks team here..... So what has the team been up to this week?? Well Lee and his team have been working on plans for the 21CN deployment. This will allow us to deliver faster broadband to our customers. Lee has also been working on our asset management system along with Kevin. Making sure we know where everything is... Kevin has also been working with the team on our new Data Centre proposal. Over in Net Ops we got some sad news that one of our esteemed engineers, Riz, is leaving to go and work in that small village down south called London. On a brighter note this has enable Mat to be promoted... Well done Mat!

Thanks Jason - over now to Comms! I think James may have had too much coffee...

Wooooooooooooooooooooweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee it's Friday! Friday means pub, which means beer, which means late night, which means tired on Saturday. But we don't mind! Bob's been spending his day complaining. No really. He's been complaining a lot, but I think that's just because he's been totally run off his feet doing some email sends that have taken him ages. He's had a few meetings too, whilst polishing things off by looking at some problems. I've been drinking too much coffee, as you can probably tell [Ed: I wrote my comment above before even reading that!]. Apart from that, I've been taking a few phone calls, diving into the forums and doing a bit of project work. Chris has been looking at problems. He also wrote an email, bless him. Although that email was part of a problem fix, so it doesn't really count. Now click here for today's link. Byiiiiiieeeeeeeee, James.

Finally it's the Web Team. Thanks to Kelly for this...

Hope you enjoyed that... let us know what you think of Kelly's approach! Thanks very much for reading and have a great weekend! Ali McGowan