I love three day weekends. Three consecutive 24 hour periods of hanging out with friends and family, finishing projects, and all around laziness.
A wicked summers-almost-over barbecue with the whole family, working on my stereo install in my car, and lounging around at home were on my agenda – but not dealing with people who forgot that this was the end of the month, and that they needed to pay their bill to us (or they’d get shut off).
Background: I’m a systems and network admin for a wholesale ISP. We provide dial-up, DSL, hosting, etc. Some of our wholesale customers use their own RADIUS system for authentication, some use a managed system on our side. It’s in violation of our contract with the wholesale ISP to activate accounts/tinker with the accounting functions directly for a subscriber in our managed system, and it’s impossible for me to activate an account on a system that they manage.
There’s something about a three day weekend when the calendar month rolls over that makes our wholesale customers forget to do little things like paying their bills. I can’t take it out on the poor technical people who have to call me; they’re usually just reacting to customers yelling at them. It’s their management, bookkeepers, accounts payable, whoever is responsible in their organization that has dropped the ball. What irks me the most is that we notify people if they haven’t paid NUMEROUS times before shutoff — and it doesn’t help. And that’s what causes my cellphone to ring non-stop this weekend.
Since the ISP’s tech folks don’t usually know that their management has neglected our invoice, it simply looks like a massive technical issue as their retail customers can’t log on, and they call our emergency outage paging system, which patches them through to me – which is when I get to inform them that their boss never paid us. Most of them, I can turn back on right away and have them take care of it on the next business day. There are others that are persistently late, and that I need confirmed payment from to turn back on. Of course, the person who handles that is out of town for the holiday, too. Great.
Better than the wholesale calls, though, are the retail customers — who aren’t supposed to be calling us at all. They usually come across the NOC phone number by stumbling across it in WHOIS, or by talking to the phone company (who gives our contact info as the service provider for their DSL, since they’re unaware of our wholesale program), or when given it by the wholesale partner. Note that a wholesale partner doing the latter is grounds to have them stuffed into a cannon and shot at the Earth’s sun. Oh, and I can’t forget to mention that part of the telephone IVR greeting says that if you’re an end-user, to not use the emergency paging system. They never listen and proceed to the paging system anyway.
The fun really begins when they get connected with me; the end users want to argue with me about how they are consistently on time with payments, and this is unfair, and how they’re going to go to another service provider — even after I’ve explained that I’m at a wholesale/upstream provider level and have no access to the accounting and user login functions for their service provider. Yes, they might be the perfect customer or they may have been turned down mistakenly, but it doesn’t change the fact that I cannot do anything for them. Yet, somehow, I’m expected to turn them back on, offer a credit for an account that doesn’t belong to us, and publish a three page letter to the local newspaper apologizing for the actions of one of our customer.
I’ll get right on that first thing tomorrow.
This all brings to mind an old statement I first heard several years ago said by a co-worker to a member of the sales department:
“Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.”
Complaints, Network Admin, Systems Admin headdesk, lusers
