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Suspended from Work? w00t!

Submitted by on July 19, 2013 – 6:23 pm
Jumping_For_Joy_by_bvswimmer33

So today I went into work, signed in for my mandatory overtime that everyone has to do, sitting in start of tour for 1 minute and my lead comes up to me and tells me to go into meeting. So I go into meeting and follow him to a conference room where the shift manager is at. Had me signed some paper, took my badge, and now I’m suspended for 3 work days and go back on Wednesday.

Am I sad about this? Hell no, just the opposite.

You can get most of my background history from here which tells you more about what I currently do for a living. What you don’t know (or, should I say, what I didn’t say on there) is the fact that the company that I work for is not a great company. Before the current company came in and bought everyone’s contracts we were hired to fix customer’s problems. No, not remote control or wireless issues, real major problems that involves the whole network causing the problem. The level 1 team is there to deal with grandma and grandpa with the wireless and input and remote control issues. We were able to push back on those calls when tier 1 tries to escalate it up to us since it’s not something that we are to support. That was way back in the days.

As time goes by, the path that AT&T took went for the worst.

We were all contracted out by different contracting companies but we were treated fairly. Every year we get 40 hours of contractor excused time off, regardless of your current attendance, and you gain more hours every month, again, regardless of your current attendance. Depending on which contracting company you’re through, you also get paid time off or double time if you work holidays. You also had the freedom to do whatever you need to do to fix the customer’s problems.

First thing that changed was taking all the calls, regardless of the issue, regardless if it’s valid for escalation, etc. Okay, not much of a change, I’ll deal with the stupid shit that tier 1 doesn’t what to do. It also didn’t helped that all tier 1 based agents was originally in the US only for this project now being outsourced to the Philippines so a lot of the tier 1 agents had no clue how the service even works.

The current company came in and bought everyone’s contract after AT&T made an agreement with them. The reason for this is because of Arizona state law that states that the maximum number of years a person can work for a company under a contract is 3 years, and at that time the company they were contracted for needs to either A) hire them on full time or B) let the contract expired and they’re no longer part of the project. AT&T was losing some good people so they decided to go with option C which is to hire a third party company to come in, buy everyone’s contracts, and have a contract with the company themselves with the employees being hired full time to the other company. Now the game changed, since now that we’re hired on as employees to a company that has a contract with AT&T, the contract can be renewed as many times as they want.

Mind you, when I first got hired many years ago, we were promised that we can become full time at AT&T, yeah, that promise was broken after 6 months of being there.

So, few months after the current company came and bought everyone’s contracts, AT&T started making the move to change all there’s “cost centers” into “revenue centers” meaning that we are now required to upsell on everything that we can, trying to make AT&T more money. Now when I first got hired on I was hired to fix problems, not sell shit. Plus as an agent we don’t care about the overall revenue that the company is making or losing, we’re just here to do a job, that’s for the managers to know. And they just keep putting it down our throats.

Also during this time, the overall customer service quality started going down the hill as we started getting more pissed off customers because of services not being fixed. And the big boom of IP-DSL service being released.

I’m still scratching my head over IP-DSL and why we are supporting it. IP-DSL is the same thing as normal DSL, just going through U-Verse platforms, using 802.x authentication, and offering faster speeds, why can’t the normal DSL agents just troubleshoot it instead? Nope, lets have the U-Verse agents troubleshoot it. Thankfully I had DSL experiences from when I was working at Volt at a 2Wire location so I was one of the very few who actually knows how to troubleshoot it a head of time while everyone else took awhile to understand it.

Mind you with all this new responsibilities there’s been no pay raise. most places will give you a pay raise of some sort for every new responsibilities tacked onto you.

So come 3 months ago, about 2 months after Click 2 Chat was moved to overseas and back on the phones, I started getting depressed about this job, being there for over 5 years, still getting paid the same. Done multiple different projects from supporting cVoIP only, to floor walking for the cVoIP team to working overnights, to floor walking for the new hire class and also doing Click 2 Chat over the last 5 and a half years. Not getting my 40 hours one year because of my attendance because the company wanted to be jerks about. It just too much for me and needed a vacation. That vacation finally came just today when they told me I’m suspended for 3 work days.

I acted like I was concern while in actuality I was happy, 5 days total (3 days of not being at work plus my 2 normal days off) allows me to just kick back and relaxed, heck I can even get shit done that I’ve been meaning to get done. The question is, would I want to go back to work? Probably not, I probably wish I gotten fired instead of suspended. But whatever, it’s a starting point. Am I concern about money? Not really, not at this point.

It’s simply amazing how being suspended is making me this happy.

 

Header picture from bvswimmer33 from DeviantART (found here).

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