
Tales from TCP Towers (1996) - dedalus
https://web.archive.org/web/20050215200551/http://home.xnet.com/~raven/Sysadmin/Simes/
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chris_wot
Oh man. I did ISP work for an Australian ISP Microplex (later Optus Internet)
in the late 1990s to early 2000s. It was the most unprofessional, negative yet
strangely awesome period of my life. I also learned never to date someone you
work with, no matter how cute and nice they might be.

This seems almost precisely like this.

Edit: just realised that the lady I dated (or the guy who married her) might
recognize who I am as she was a geek like I am and her husband more so. He's a
lucky guy (I'm also very happily married!).

~~~
chris_wot
Feel I need to explain just how unprofessional the call centre was (given this
was over a decade ago, I think it's safe to say this now!):

* one of the guys used to answer the phone with "Microplex, Ghengis Khan speaking!" and nobody seemed to notice

* there was an infamous incident where male porn (well, with a telephone tastefully positioned over the model's male member) was printed in a staff magazine

* I remember a story told to me whereby they used to use 2DayFM as the hold music, but the queues were so long that someone called the radio station to complain and they actually put her to air, live... And of course all the waiting customers heard the complaint

* the wait times were so long that an old guy once fell asleep and my supervisor was called to try to rouse him, as he was snoring pretty loudly and the operator didn't want to hang up on him...

* dropouts were a problem, and due to time pressures one day a CSR told a customer it was caused by sun-spots, a fact that was reported to Australian Personal Computer

* 2nd level support were cowboys, but fairly awesome

* There was an incident where one of the reps stole the blue iMac, not sure exactly what happened but he seemed to have gotten away with it...

* someone used NetSpear on a customer in a misguided attempt to help them via remote support - they got fired...

* the marketing team ran an email competition, but completely forgot to tell anyone and 6 months later it was discovered that there were like 6,000 entries. Nobody won anything at all.

* telnet was being used for the billing system, which was some sort of text based Informix database. Eventually a security guy came in and realised the problem and ssh was used instead

* the accounts guys were crazy, one guy used a bin lid and stuck a toilet paper roll on the front, and used to run around the office with it stuck over his head screaming "exterminate, exterminate!", pretending to be a Dalek.

* this made another accounts guy wait till he was out for lunch, and then he took the guys headphone, got some chutney and put it into his headphone ear-piece. Not entirely sure how far it escalated after that...

* an amazing amount of porn were stored on the PC hard drives of the second-line teams computers. They used to swap out the hard drives when they thought they might be audited

* the y2k guys decided that a good way of fixing Windows NT machines was to take out DLLs that looked "suspicious", thus rendering some workstations inoperable midway through 1999...

* the amount of drugs, sex and alcohol was, by all accounts, fairly amazing

* to exact revenge on an unliked team leader, one guy filled up some condoms and put them in the supervisors desk drawer...

* that same guy defaced another CSRs home page, but only because the guy was entirely stats based and did anything to get rid of the customer (like anything!)

* another CSR wanted to decrease their call talk time, so they used to rub their headset microphone on their stubble and pretend the phone line was breaking up, then eventually ended the call mid-sentence

* another CSR would start many calls with an Irish accent, if things got a bit tricky they'd say they were escalating the call then come back on the line with their normal voice, claiming to be the supervisor

Yup, remarkable. Truly the Wild West days of Australian Internet. No idea what
was going on with other ISPs. I doubt Malcolm Turnbull would have let that
sort of stuff happen at Ozemail...

