Got a lot on my mind tonight but it’s not really gelling into one cohesive story. I’m just going to let my fingers run as fast as my brain will let them across the keyboard and see what happens. I’ve got a good feeling about this.
I had a breakthrough at work this week. I’ve been very tense and anxious about my performance with basic tech support issues. I poked around, feeling the customer’s frustration. I feel things deeply. That led to me not being able to think through the basic steps and work toward a fix. I felt their frustration and it fed into my doubt. Wasn’t good. My brain was foggy, unfocused, dull.
Late yesterday afternoon, I had two different calls scheduled for customers with various problems. One of the clients was one I had talked to, tried to fix their issue, and had to end the call saying “I will need to research this and get back to you” and they very much gave me the impression they weren’t happy with that, for whatever reason. So I was already uptight about wanting to do well and solve the issue, as well as reverse the impression of incompetence I’d given previously.
On top of that, the client had added a second, unrelated issue, one with many potential causes and solutions. Thinking about working through all the steps to troubleshoot it on top of the other issue gave me time-pressure-anxiety, which should totally be a German-style compound noun.
On top of those, Thursday’s call had been a rescheduling from the day before, adding another layer of delay to the situation. I was caught up in a much-longer-than-expected site visit and was unable to live up to my word in calling on schedule.
The second client had what could be a very tricky problem involving their network connection from home, and I had enough experience to mentally enumerate the many potential causes of that kind of issue: home network, wifi, VPN, unstructured environment compared to an office setting… also the client was an engineer, and they are notoriously picky (said the tech support person, knowing our own reputation.)
My sense of duty forced me to make the first call… and within a few minutes I had demonstrated the solution to the first question for this client, and they had accepted it without argument. I pressed on, and being more focused and methodical, found the cause of the second issue almost immediately; they had two versions of the same software installed. After showing them, gently and diplomatically, that they would lose nothing when I removed the extra program, I found I’d also fixed the issue.
I’d scheduled 30 minutes for this, and I finished in 15 minutes. Easy peasy. I got to close two tickets with one phone call. Confidence returning.
The second call? When the client demonstrated the issue to me, I recognized the problem because I had been setting up VPN connections for this specific company last week and discovered that some settings didn’t stick until you set them twice. The call started at 4:04 PM; I solved the problem by 4:08 PM.
My swiftness impressed the customer; “that would have taken me weeks to figure out!” they said. Felt good. Closed another ticket.
I am good at my job. I just needed some wins to remind myself.