Snake snake snake snake snake!! I've written a little Limerick today, to commemorate the fact that I drove to work instead of catching the train. The thing is, I live in Manchester - and the quickest route to Sheffield is the (dangerous) Snake Pass. Are you ready...? There once was a road called The Snake Where terror lay in its wake The road was all hilly So please don't drive silly Else you'll crash and end in the lake Enough ridiculousness and on with the show... Hello from Jake in the CSC...
Despite being a really busy Thursday, we've managed to keep our longest wait call within the new target today. So a good start to the shift for Team A (maybe it's because I'm back after my annual leave?) (I love modesty! Ed.) We've mostly had calls today as follows: 1) Router setups - customers needing a hand with the new Thomson routers or in need of their router settings, though these can lead to... 2) Authentication issues - where the router is in sync with the local exchange but not connecting to the Internet. 3) Fault updates - if you can't get online and check email, or the online tickets, you need to call us for updates, so we've been having calls on this. 4) Email setups - the new(ish) Vista Mail often generates calls for help setting up. 5) CGI - there seem to be quite a lot of websites being set up at the moment, most now using PHP or Content Management Systems, HTML only sites seem old hat, and so we're fielding queries on this. They're most commonly about accessing and uploading to the CCGI webspace. Have a nice eveningJake
Thank you for that update... now we have Chris from the Faults Team:
I'll be reporting in for the Faults team down in CSC today, since I'm the newbie this week! Andy got the short straw, picking up the oldest tickets and making sure they're all having work done on them. Most of the rest of the regular team worked to chase up the faults already raised to suppliers and needing engineers/further checks etc. Adeel's just off home having had a tough day working through any escalated and home phone faults and making sure they get sorted out. We've got two newbies on the team today too (including myself!) so we've been following up on the training yesterday by investigating new faults and making sure our customers know what's going on! We've also had Mike Trevor with us for parts of the day so that we can give some advice on a particularly difficult fault he's dealing with personally. Lots of work, lots of fun - good day so far, plenty still to go!
Sounds very productive Chris and a great focus there on helping out our customers. Rys from Development is up next:
Today's been one of those days that's flown by, simply by virtue of being so busy. Feels like I only just walked in the door, but it's closing in on the end of the day. Stuff that's occupied me today includes learning the technical side of how we do unit testing and TDD (Ed: test driven development) at Plusnet. The project I've been working on for the last 6 months or so has been a testable one, but since it's been a project we've done with a development partner, it's not been completely connected to the way we do things in-house. I'm working on a solo sub-project now, so it's time to get stuck in with PHPUnit, our continuous integration system and our in-house framework's test runner. Elsewhere in the department we've got Henry working on CPE auto configuration (TR-069 published by the Broadband Forum, if you want to look at the technical details), which will let us auto-configure a customer's router out-of-the-box, without a support call or the user entering the configuration data. The CWMP protocol is just SOAP over HTTP, so he'll be using our app dev framework for that. Everyone else is either working on a project I can't talk about, or they've got their head down and I've not heard much!
Thanks for that update Rys - I know how busy you are cos we're working on the same project - can't believe it's home time already - but that's a typical day at Plusnet Towers for you. Finally we have Mand in Comms for you:
Short and not overly sweet today, but I'm trying to hit a deadline, so we'll make it up to you with some Friday fun tomorrow.
Thanks Mand! I am off home now, with a Snake to negotiate on the way. Eek! Have a good evening, Ali McGowan