ML Starkey's Weblog: Service with a smile!
Providing Technical Support to Sun's customers and other topics

I have finally figured out how to tailor my blog. I'm still trying to puzzle out trackback. One of the links I added was for the blog of a tech support colleague located in the UK. Check out Emma's blog. She has made quite a splash even getting a comment from Jonathan Schwartz on her initial post. Very impressive. I am struck by how much the same and how very much different her work environment is from mine. Similaries include figuring out how your team operates and the joy of any instructor led training that you can get. But there's a major difference that I can see. I also find that while I also can have downtime between calls received in a shift, but I would never, ever in a million years post that fact on a company blog along with a request for "favourite sites to check in their spare minutes, or any suggestions of a way to fill in time?" Maybe it's my East Coast Puritan Work Ethic working overtime. Heck, I don't even post many blog entries during my work time.

I don't know about Emma, but I have plenty to do when I'm between calls. Even without my in-process cases and the resultant emails, phone calls, escalations and so forth, there's always any one or several of the following:
~on-line training requirement to fulfill or additional knowledge to pursue either through Sun's inhouse web-based training or independently via Google, Usenet, etc.
~a weekly or bi-weekly meeting (staff, case review, product life cycle, etc.)
~a colleague who needs assistance
~Knowledge Management i.e. publishing/reviewing Sunsolve articles and/or "Sun internal" help/info sites, depending upon your particular rank in the Services food chain.

Emma makes many points that are universal about phone support such as: it can be feast or famine with respect to workload; Solaris and the environments that our customers use it in can be complex to the extreme; getting the customer an answer quickly and resolving a problem is the "home run" of what we do. Make that a "grand slam". I look forward to more of Emma's blog.