Feedback on yesterday's slacker graphs

Feedback on yesterday's slacker graphs

Yesterday's post about spotting long periods of idle time elicited a few feedback comments already. I will expand on some of the points raised for the benefit of other readers.

It's certainly possible that someone would have work that was part of their job that had nothing to do with the ticketing system, but that was rare. For the most part, a support tech's job was to sit there, take calls, work tickets, and keep the customers happy.

Once in a while there would be some kind of "meta" work like interviewing a candidate or writing some kind of internal tool. These were the exception, not the rule. That means that while one day might be an anomaly with tons of idle time, the rest of their days should look strong.

This did not hold up for the slackers. They slacked every single day. They simply did not know how to crunch tickets.

Worse, some of them were sneaky. They'd purposely cherry-pick tickets out of the queue. They'd open a ticket, read through it to make sure it was easy, and only then they would assign it to themselves and "work" it. That's flat out unacceptable.

Compare that to the honorable techs who will just grab a ticket, any ticket, and make sure it gets done. It doesn't matter if it's a trivial matter like reciting some bit of knowledge to a customer, or something huge like troubleshooting a problem nobody's ever seen before. The good techs will jump in and handle everything.

Oh, and incidentally, none of the techs profiled in yesterday's post were me or based on me. I had the day off. The epic ticket cruncher shown in #5 was modeled on a friend of mine who would do that kind of work on a regular basis.

He was simply unable to be mediocre. We need more people like him.