Adventures in Telephony

(1) At work yesterday, called an equivalent Government Agency in another city, a small one, and the provided contact number was actually for the agency director, who happened to be sitting in his office with exactly the people I needed to talk to, having exactly the conversation I had wanted to have. This did not go well. I was on the phone for an hour with some extremely friendly Iowans who were really curious about lots of things I couldn't really answer because (among other reasons) I frankly hadn't really done my homework. I'd gotten complacent after a series of eventless calls where I asked my question and was promised a relevant fax in return, so that this time around I neglected to check our own management software to see what the deal was with the case in question, assuming it was as cut and dried as the others. It was not. I hemmed and hawed and sounded rather foolish, I fear. But the Iowans, being - I take it - Iowan, were extremely nice about the whole thing, and I got to drop some "this is how we do it in the big city, where our program serves 100x as many people as yours does" knowledge on them. Said knowledge being, essentially: "Honestly, we have so many clients that our resources don't really allow us to be quite so investigative or diligent."

(2) At another agency I was transferred four times in order to reach the person I needed to talk to, who let me pose my question and appeared on the verge of answering it before deciding that, hey now, she didn't actually have any way of knowing I was who I said I was, and could I prove it? This threw me off rather a lot, so I took her suggestion of faxing her something with an official coversheet, and I agreed. Unfortunately, our coversheet isn't actually terribly official, so I didn't hear back from her. My boss - and I should have thought of this myself - suggested (after much laughter) that I should email her, because maybe she wouldn't assume I'd spoofed a domain name. This was successful.

(3) Today I called what I can only assume was a very small agency, and received a recorded message that ran as follows: "Thank you for calling the [Local Government Agency]. Unfortunately, we are not able to answer your call at this time. Our hours of operation are [a window within which I was definitely calling]. Please try again later." This is unprecedented. I don't care how small they are, I'll forgive them not having a phone tree or IVR, but they don't have voicemail?

(4) This evening I was in a slightly frazzled mood, my home phone rang, I answered it, a guy with a Mexican accent informed me that he was calling from a survey company in Hollywood, and I promise I usually say something like "Sorry, I'm not interested," or "I don't have time, and a good time to call back would be, well, I'd rather you didn't," but I just hung up without saying anything. Five seconds later my phone rang again. Coincidence, right? No - same guy. Now I'm a little annoyed (well, more so), and I hang up again without notification. I'm walking away when the phone rings again, and I pick it up and say "Hello?" only to have whomever called me hang up on me. And then my phone rang again, and I picked it up without saying anything, and it instantly went to dial tone. And then in the next few minutes there were three occasions where it rang only once, and I didn't answer it. I've been told that random rings can be the result of electrical spikes in the phone grid, but I'd rather think that the telemarketer guy, for whom I do feel some level of intrinsic sympathy (he didn't draw up the business model, and everybody's got to eat) was angered at my rudeness and taking out his frustrations on me. Sorry, ese.

Yeah, Rub It In, Whatever

Hey, would you like to go to this concert?

Yeah, sure!

Would you like to go by yourself?

Don't really see a problem with that, no.

Would you like to go by yourself, on Valentine's Day?

I ... oh ... sigh. Never mind.



There's one broken and one functional Youtube link at the CSO page, but the functional one is also seven minutes long and starts with a few minutes of stage patter. So instead of Mariza, here's a taste of the true Queen of Fado; this is just scratching the surface, but it's a nice short video if a bit one-dimensional. This sort of thing was on in my house a lot growing up:

Frying Pans, Fires, Overdramatic Metaphorical Cliches

One of my complaints about my job at the law firm was that in effect I really had two jobs, and I greatly preferred one of them; I was a sorta free agent assistant for the litigation and (especially) labor attorneys doing whatever projects came up as I was free to take them. Some of these came by assignment, sort of like a blind date, but over two years I developed working relationships with some of the attorneys, who would routinely come to me if they needed something done, and I usually tried to accommodate them. My other job was to maintain the filing for the bankruptcy group, a job which I hated intensely (no reflection on the actual people working in the bankruptcy group). There were secondary consequences to the problem, but in essence there you go.

And now I once again have, basically, two jobs; one is doing the monthly reporting to our Government Agency overlords, and one is doing the day to day work of being a compliance analyst (although we still haven't done much that's truly compliance, because of shit I might talk about obliquely some other time). I thought when I took the job that I'd really enjoy the writing and reporting aspects and that the compliance stuff would be kind of a drag. In practice, though, I've come to dread the reporting and if I don't love the compliance work it's more interesting and less...something.

For one thing, the reporting winds up being kind of isolating. I'm fond of my little compliance group, and when I'm working on the reporting I become detached from them because they have nothing to do with my reports. I interact with them much less and worry about my own shit and nag other people to give me information in a timely manner. I sort of like the communal teamwork aspect of what we do; even if we aren't literally working on the same thing, it's all interlocking pieces of a puzzle, and we can commiserate and make jokes about the weird stories we discover and say things like "Wait, who are you working? Jane Johnson? That sounds familiar. Let me...yeah, no wonder she's not returning your calls, she's on my deceased report." You know, good times, teamwork.

For another thing, the reporting's cyclical nature means that my mood, at least as it pertains to work, can be tracked on a predictable monthly swing and since my productivity is directly related to my happiness (at least in a work-focused sense), I'm most productive at the antipode of my reports' due date. Lately I start worrying about the reports even at the antipode, though; the specter of having to start collecting information and synthesizing it into bite-sized information packets so it can fit into the stupid predetermined template I was handed by the powers upon high once again tarnishes the enjoyment of not actually having to do it for two weeks.

There's also a sense of treading water, because if I skim the report for August and compare it to the one for December I don't feel like we substantively covered any new ground, made progress, improved our performance and solidified our position. The concerns feel as repetitive and cyclical as the writing process.

I just wanted to complain for a moment.

On the compliance side, I've been having to call sister Government Agencies in other cities to work out some of our issues, and let me tell you, there are some weird Interactive Voice Response systems out there; there's one that hangs up on me if I don't make my menu selection within five seconds, which is problematic because none of the selections remotely correspond to my needs. You'd think there would be like a special secret phone line that the agencies could use to talk to each other, but there isn't, and "If you're calling from another government agency, please press 8" has not yet manifested as an option. I spend a lot of time on hold and getting transferred by people who don't know who I need to talk to, but are pretty sure it's not them. (And on a pure professionalism standpoint, one of the published numbers for a particular agency in downstate Illinois, a number listed as the appropriate contact information on the website of the federal agency to which we all ultimately answer, goes to a voicemail for "Greg [Lastname]". I hung up assuming I had the wrong number, because "Greg [Lastname]" didn't bother to specify that yes, I'd reached the [Illinois city government agency]. Greg turned out to be a nice guy and I suspect that he might actually have been the boss, though we didn't clear that up.