mellowtigger: (peace)
mellowtigger ([personal profile] mellowtigger) wrote2025-05-18 07:48 pm
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theme song: Otter's Cozy Cafe Vibes

Today's theme song is just mood music for background play. No words, just soft jazz music and the image of an otter as barista at a coffee shop.

Why this choice today? It was shared amongst coworkers on Friday, and I just learned of it today. My supervisor also sent me a message that May 15 Friday was my 2-year anniversary at work, but I was away as part of my "weekend" schedule at the time, returning today as my "Monday". This song is meant to help provide a calming counterbalance to what I've complained for 2 years is a highly stressful job position. As evidence of this stress, I learned today that the guy I trained in October for this job is moving back to his old job. So, after half a year he decided that his former department was better for him. I'm sorry that he didn't want to stick around, but at least he's still staying with the university.

Click to read an itemized example of why this job is stressful...

Why is this job so unusual, so stressful? It's different from any tech job I've had before. People call a phone number, expecting to get the experts in whatever topic they selected. Instead, they get me. Questions that I might have to answer at a moment's notice:

  • "I'm a customs officer at airport [x]. Please connect me (not during regular work hours) to the Designated School Official who can provide I-20 confirmation. No, I can't wait for a callback. I need to stay on the line to maintain the authentic connection. If I can't confirm, then I'll send the student back to their country of origin." (I wrote documentation for my coworkers on this rare but high-stress phone call.)
  • "How do I install and/or purchase software title [x] on this computer?" (The answer is different for every software title and every department or computer, resulting in permutation explosion on not-well-documented processes.)
  • "Someone has been sending me email, but I don't see them. What's wrong? No, I don't know if I'm using new Outlook, classic Outlook, or web Outlook. I just click this button. How do I tell which browser I'm using?"
  • "Hi, I'm UPS delivery. Where should I drop off this package (after regular work hours) for person [x]?"
  • "Please connect me to the coach of the sports team [x]. I don't know why you can't do that. What's so hard to find their number?"
  • "Why is TicketMaster not getting me my football tickets?" (Usually, this problem results from somebody requesting tickets before they were even assigned their university email, so TicketMaster has wrong email information.)
  • "I'm not computer literate, can you help me fix my multifactor authentication?"
  • "I can't get into building [x]. Who can let me in (after regular work hours on a weekend)?"
  • "Why is the Microsoft portal insisting that I install Copilot right now and not letting me just view my email?"
  • "I submitted my course assignment in Canvas, but now I'm getting a zero because my work is not there! What happened to it?" (We're the support team for a product that we never use unless we get a ticket for it.)
  • "I got a new phone, and now I can't login for class, I can't get into my dorm room, and I can't pay for food on campus. Help!"
  • "My Adobe Acrobat interface is messed up, not looking like it should. How do I get the old interface back?" (We're the support team for a product that we don't even have licenses to run.)
  • "I uploaded an image to Copilot, to make it generate accessibility captions, but the image shows up as black so I get no text from it. What's wrong?" (We're the support team, I think?, for a product that nobody knows how to use.)
  • "How do I export my list of subscribers from Listserv?" (We're the support team for a decades-old product that we don't use unless we get a ticket for it.)
  • It's always interesting getting stuck between an overbearing parent and a child who doesn't want the parent to access their information, while the parent demands we help them access the student information. Paying bills and seeing grades are different systems with different permissions, and either way there's not a lot I can do to help (but sometimes yes), even though people call us first.
  • While answering the phone line, I might simultaneously get a webpage chat wanting immediate attention, and I need to at least click a button to acknowledge incoming emailed tickets too. Fast-paced context-switching destroys productivity, you say? Surely not! ;)

Basically, we're the 311 information line for a city (over 100,000 students, faculty, and staff). At some point, we get every question... including wrong calls meant for a similarly-named university or a related-to-the-university healthcare system. We get calls meant for other departments but come to us first. We get calls for areas with VIP lists who want different treatment. It's permutation explosion for everything, no perfect documentation for it, and callers reached me expecting to find the expert on whatever topic is at hand, so they get frustrated when I hesitate.

So, I've mentioned for 2 years how stressed out I get, I'm losing my trainee to his old job soon, and coworkers shared this nice stress-relieving music for jazzy vibes.

Enjoy the music. Peace. :)

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rebeccmeister: (Default)

[personal profile] rebeccmeister 2025-05-19 05:54 pm (UTC)(link)
Thank you for sharing that enlightening list of examples!

I'm kind of not surprised, and you have 100% of my sympathies for coping with that impressively wide range of demands.

I suspect you know far more about University operations than almost anyone else at the institution!
mellowtigger: (absurdity)

[personal profile] mellowtigger 2025-05-20 04:05 am (UTC)(link)
I've tried to imagine similar phone-contact jobs, and I can think of only 2. Both of them would be far more stressful than this one, with even higher stakes: 911, and the FBI. I'd rather have this job than those. I'm old enough to remember long, long ago when there was an information line at libraries, where you could ask them questions, any questions, and someone would find an answer for you. That feels like this job, but with much lower stakes. I wish that was still a job. I'd take that job, but AI these days can already replace that skill.
rebeccmeister: (Default)

[personal profile] rebeccmeister 2025-05-20 04:41 pm (UTC)(link)
I believe there may still be librarians doing that job in some places! But I haven't gone back to check. My favorite Seattle alt-weekly used to have a couple editors who would call over to the county library whenever they got stuck on tracking down certain types of information. AI would be a horrible substitute for a real human being for the kinds of queries that get fielded by those lines.

And, yeah...definitely better where you are as compared to 911 or the FBI...but on the other hand, I suspect there's better training at least for those other sorts of call lines!
darkoshi: (Default)

[personal profile] darkoshi 2025-05-20 08:32 am (UTC)(link)
That does sound very stressful.
mellowtigger: (exercise)

[personal profile] mellowtigger 2025-05-21 12:32 am (UTC)(link)
At normal jobs, you 1) learn the thing, 2) practice the thing, then 3) do the thing that you were hired to do. Here, it's not like that. There's no "learn the thing", except for using the tools to find answers, knowing which knowledge repositories are most likely to have the specific answer you need for the question at hand.

On the plus side, they say that mental exercise helps delay things like dementia. This is definitely a huge mental workout pretty much every day.
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