14th May 2009

[#1]

I had a nice chat with Maurice, David and Mike from the Plusnet Usergroup last night.  Thanks for that guys.. good feedback there.  It's always good to catch up.  You know, I'm sure they'd be more than happy to tell you what we get up to, and how you can get involved, if you fancy it, in the forums. It's late, so let's crack on and have a look at what the folks here at Plusnet Towers have said they've been up to today.   Ben in the CSC: Team A have been on shift this morning to answer your calls, and we've done nearly a thousand before 4pm when I wrote this EOD. Our top five issues for calls are as follows: 1. New faults We dropped a few pipes shortly after midnight so a lot of people needed to power cycle their routers to regain their connection. Add a normal number of synchronisation faults and a smattering of speed faults and this is pushed to #1. 2. Fault updates Our faults team work flat out from 8am to 9pm and leave a lot of messages when they can't get through to customers. As such, the Support Centre fields the calls when they're returned. 3. Router setups Wireless and wired setups are all thrown in here as customers often need a helping hand to get their new routers set up. 4. Email settings We offer free email addresses with our broadband accounts so we're often called on to help customers create new mailboxes or set them up. 5. Provisioning updates Lots of new orders mean lots of new customers eager to get online, often after receiving a router a few days before their broadband goes active.   What a cracking update.  Well done Ben that's most informative. Who's next?  It's Mark from 'Web Dev': Hello readers! It's Mark here from the Web Development team. Well, Thursday draws to a close, you can almost see the weekend peeking at you from the far end of Friday. Looking across the team, I'm seeing high levels of calm. I asked Phil what he'd done today; he looked at me sagely and tapped his nose. I think this means that Phil's doing stuff we can't talk about yet. James told me that he'd redesigned the interface for a new manual invoicing tool. I think there might be some union issues with James designing anything. Who gave him access to the design team's coloured pencils? Sam told me he *could* tell me what he'd been doing, but then he'd have to kill me. I'm here writing this End of Day report, so you already know I didn't find out. Gary has been doing Code Reviews. I know this to be a fact, as some of them were mine. Nice one Gary! He really knows his HTML onions. I've been working on problems, so has Nick and Andy. Although Nick tells me that he's been sneaking into the Community Site Support Library (ssshh!.. that's still a secret - Ed) to do some further work. Curious! I'll take a peak at the library to see what he's been doing. Colin, our coding wunderkind has been working on integrating a new HTML look in to some code that was written badly years ago (by him!). He's also been doing some general helpful things for the team. That's our Colin! 'Helpful' could be his middle name. Other team members have been flying round the office, leaping into meetings, so I've been unable to check what they've been doing today - although it probably featured quite a lot of running around and hiding in meetings.   OK. Lovely. You can tell he's a writer can't you?  As are this lot (so they claim).. Yes it's time for Comms.  Here's Chris: Comms, comms, comms, comms, comms, comms, comms, comms. You know those words that make less sense the more you repeat them? Comms isn't one, as we always make sense in comms. So what have we all been up to in comms today? James has been doing his comms thing in the forums and suggesting that a quiet Matt is a happy Matt. I'm not so sure, as we're all happy on comms. Matt's been sending a multitude of emails from comms, as well as handling some problems. Mand has been doing the comms side of problem management as well as being around the forums and doing some comms style training. I've been doing some comms typing and also some comms problem management. I've also been trying to fit the word comms into this EOD as often as I can. I'm impressed as I've said comms 20 times now.  Finally here's the comms (21) commic for the day:   Thanks Chris. You know, they do these commics in their own time.  Bonkers, but quite jolly are they not? And I have been looking at Excel a lot today. Excel makes your eyes go funny after a while.. Do you ever dream of small oblong boxes? P-j