Alice in Government Land, Part 4 - problem resolution

We arrived to work this morning fresh from the weekend with urgent instructions from all sides NOT to sign in. It wasn't a wild cat strike. On the weekend, Management had installed an upgrade to our system - or perhaps a downgrade - and our lines were no longer working properly. Calls rang right through without going through the interactive voice relay (the "Maze"). Only Telus could repair it and they don't work weekends.

So we sat idly for the better part of an hour until a co-worker from Administration came by and casually said, in a resigned manner, "I guess you can sign on now." It turns out Telus let about 50 calls through and we were advised to deal with them until there were no more calls in the queue and then sign off again. But the more calls we took the more calls there were in the queue. This continued until the callers were waiting 20 minutes before being answered.

Finally, after an hour of this, we were advised to just take the callers' phone numbers and we would call them back, just to clear the queue. That didn't make sense since we'd have no time to call them back later as we are short-staffed as it is, but not making sense is par for the course when Ottawa is involved.

It wasn't as simple though. Every caller claimed to have only a simple question and taking their names, Social Insurance Numbers, issues and verifying their phone numbers was like pulling teeth because they didn't want to be called back later; they had waited 20 minutes and they wanted answers now. After an hour of "taking numbers" there were still dozens in the queue. Management threw in the towel and told every agent to get off the lines without taking another call, something that would have made sense to do 2 hours earlier.

An hour later, while I was on lunch, every team but my team was told to get back on the lines. This mistake wasn't noticed for half an hour so you could say I had a rather easy day of it, the part that wasn't frustrating, that is.

I am glad I had emailed a chuck of my novel to work on during my breaks before I left home this morning. I managed to revise more than a page and half when I had doubted I'd even get through a paragraph or two. Tonight I massaged the changes into my existing text. I have revised up to page 328 of the 354 I have written so far. The story, which began in the 1850s, is now up to March of 1882.