With summer in full swing, things have been growing more hectic with life, and work as each day slowly passes by and for the remainder of July and most of August it will only continue to get worse. In my little world of Corporate Tech Support, there are three of us at the corporate office in Novi, one of whom is the man in charge and spends most of his time juggling meetings and conference calls. We also have one person on site at all of our plants (5 of them left - down from 9 four years ago when I cam on board) who manage the day to day PC and printer support for us and can be our hands and eyes for server support should it be required. Considering we have just over 500 desktops in use on any given day and well over 150 servers company wide this is a pretty skeleton crew by most corporate standards. In fact, we use to have two more on staff here at corporate back when my primary role was Novell support and Altiris management. Ahh, those were good times. I could spend days on end digging to the bottom of some annoying glitch in Altiris or a new patch for Novell and only have to handle one or two user issues occasionally when the other guys got overwhelmed. Now my day is filed with user calls for tech support ranging from "I forgot my password" and "I can't clear the paper jam in the printer" to more complicated things like "my pc won't boot" or "I can't find the file I just saved." Long gone are the days of surfing through the Altiris and/or Novell online forums looking for the solution to an issue we are having. No more can I spend time resolving or investigating how to take care of something that is not an absolute necessity. My role has gone from proactive to Fire fighter and occasionally I am afforded time to check out some new patch or feature of Altiris they have released.
It's been a little over two years since our staff was obliterated by cutbacks in an attempt to make the company payroll match our lean growth. In that time I have grown accustomed to the pressures of a limited tech support staff, and even learned to cut my boss a little slack when he freaks out over little things we simply don't have time for these days. We have managed to schedule vacations so that there is always two of us in the building at all times, and we have managed to all get some time off when needed. That all ends this week! As of next Monday, I will be a 1 woman tech support staff for the first time in the history of this company. My co-worker is off on a two-week trek to visit family in Manitoba and North Dakota, and my boss will be MIA for at least the first week. Against our better judgment a software upgrade will begin next week requiring my boss to be in meetings from 8am Monday morning till 6 or 7pm Friday evening, almost non-stop. this will mean he sends any requests to me via an e-mail on his cool new phone, and that my only way to reach him will be to do the same, or interrupt a meeting, my choice.
I can handle the workload that will come with this staffing level, that I am sure of. What I don't know is if our users will handle the answer of "I will get to it as soon as I can" should they call while I am in the middle of things. That is an answer they have never hear from us before. Even after our staff was sliced and diced a few years back, we never told them they had to wait for service, we just found ways to get it done. With three people that was an option. With just one, I won't have that luxury.
Let the countdown to my time off and next vacation begin!
13 working (17 calendar) days till my next 3 day weekend
27 working (31 calendar) days till my next VACATION!
Now if only that didn't mean that I was counting down what little was left of my summer!
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