What makes you happy ? » Work

Gatwick to Houston

Mark — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 22:38:28 +0000

On his left wrist is a watch the size of a rock. Above that is a poor – probably done by a friend – ‘Bear’ tattoo.
On his head, covering the not-quite shoulder-length black hair which is tied back into a small pony is the obligatory baseball cap. It is – naturally – on backwards.
The beard is not short, it’s not long.
He’s no stranger to sitting at the bar – you just know that.
To his left on the seat is a tin of Skoal to satisfy the nicotine craving and through the flight (the 10 hour flight) he fills bottles with the hawked up residue.
Inside his head his tubes are clear – I know this because he is clearing them at least once a minute – noisy sniff + noisy cough.
When not sniffing and snorting he is snoring.
When the food arrives it is unceremoniously shovelled in. He asks for two meals – I could have done without the replay.
He typified so much that I find annoying. Which is my problem I know – he did nothing wrong but he was the noisiest person on the plane, and he was sitting within arms reach of me. I thought that having a seat free to my right was a good thing but it was a pity there was no-one there is absorb the noise.
If it wasn’t for the fact I had a fantastically bad headache I’d have gone nuts.

A mouse-free week

Mark — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 13:33:55 +0000

I use the mouse a lot. My typing technique is poor. I spend a lot of time doing both of them. This is not good and has not been for a while. When I’m out with the dog some of the field gates we walk though are extremely heavy things made of tubular steel. One day I caught my hand across the knuckles as it closed and the knuckle of the right middle finger caught the brunt. So combine that with the first 2 and it became time to change.

This week the mouse is unemployed. I’m just using the Wacom tablet for all things mouse. And I’m again trying to learn to type. I’ve got some way to go on that. And when I’m working I’m using MacBreakZ to make me stop. This is all very good but the side-effect is it’s taking so much longer. I’m hoping it gets faster.

An excellent password widget

Mark — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:42:36 +0000

I give out passwords daily when they have been lost. I used to just make them up when I started and the event was rare, then I started using a dashboard widget. I forget the name of it, but I had to click generate on the widget, then ctrl-a (or double click) then ctrl-c (or right-click > copy). It’s only a few keypresses but I’m all abut saving clicks where I can these days. And now I have RPG (Widget Edition). What I did in several links I now do in 2. Excellent. And I can change the number of letters, exclude o 0 1 l and that makes it more excellent.

Making lists

Mark — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 01:17:52 +0000

For ages I’ve been trying to get a grip on the jobs I do. The main one is answering support tickets obviously, but there are some other small tasks which still need doing every day. I am hopeless at remembering some sorts of information and these little tasks fell right into that gap. Because of this I was not getting a routine going and not having a routine can really mess up your day – even when working from home, maybe more so in fact. So I started making lists – post-its, notepads, an image stuck on the desktop, reminders on calendars and nothing worked. My workload seemed more because of the disorganisation. And then one day I went to Backpack for something that happened to be stored there and nowhere else. It has lists.
For the last 2 weeks I have tried to get back into some sort of routine and I’m getting there – this week has been (mostly) smoother than previous. The pages at Backpack I can use so the laptop also can get at info and I have a daily todo and a weekly todo. And it’s working – and because it’s working I want to keep using it – it doesn’t feel like it’s effort to use. (It’s one of my home pages and it’s in the bookmark bar along with everything else work related). It’s an account I got and never really thought I would use. If – and only if – it’s still as useful I’ll upgrade at the end of January as the calendar would be cool and some space that is not on the host I have would also be cool. And if I can remember to keep my mobile charged (I probably spend less than £20 a year on calls/texts which is why I forget) I could use the reminders. Useful place. (And it has OpenID signin too)

Halving the workload

Mark — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:58:40 +0000

Firefox does not fill the screen. There is always a slice down the left for irc and IM. Everything else is piled in the same place as Firefox and tabs are what I do. Downstairs the monitor could open about 10 tabs and stay single row (I really dislike tabs that scroll off the screen. Multi-rows here all the way). So I’d ctrl-click 10 tickets, work my way through, close them all except the first, reload, repeat. The view I have shows 50 tickets at once, so if I saw 50 tickets that would be five ‘goes’ (I think the default view was 20 tickets, but then having 50 to do meant over 2 pages of tickets and that makes it seem so much more even though it’s the same). Now I’m upstairs I can use the larger monitor – and it can open 21 tickets without breaking to the next row. So I still open until the screen is full of tabs, and I still work my way along, close, reload, repeat but I’m doing it so much less. And it feels like less work. Which is good.

Creating smiles

Mark — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 11:32:33 +0000

There is a job opening at Automattic for someone else in Support. When I started we had less than 200,000 users and we now have 7 times that number. On the day I was made a mod at the wordpress.org forums Matt gave me the title of ‘Support Maven’ – a word I had no idea about so I went and looked it up – “A person who has special knowledge or experience; an expert.” and that title has stuck. It’s not a bad title and it looks okay on any forms I may have completed. But I like the new job title so much better:
“Happiness Engineer”

Motivation – the important word

Mark — Sun, 20 May 2007 23:26:55 +0000

Lifehacker has a post “How do you stay productive when you work from home?” and in the post they have this:

Self-employed folks and telecommuters will tell you it takes some time and effort to discipline yourself to get things done when you work from your own couch. Got any tips and tricks for actually working from home when you work from home?

They missed a word – Motivation.
Everything is effort without motivation, be it at home or in a workplace.
If you don’t enjoy what you do then motivation will be harder and harder to come by.

If you are lucky enough to work at something you enjoy – like me – then the location is immaterial.
Motivation has to come from within.

71,707

Mark — Wed, 02 May 2007 14:48:12 +0000

That’s the amount in japanese yen that the accountant wants so he can do some sums.
£300 in real money
and all he will do is a few sums. He had better make it so Gordon B sends ME a cheque.
Happy? I don’t think so.

Know any damn good helpdesk software?

Mark — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 14:27:21 +0000

I am after suggestions for helpdesk software to help me do my work at wordpress.com
I don’t want to dismiss or have a go at the program I’m using right now because it’s been part of the learning curve and it has enabled support to scale – a year ago when I started there were less than 200,000 users and Thunderbird did the job for me. Now we will hit a million blogs inside a month – we passed a million users already. At some point Support will need to be more than just me and in that respect the less software gets in the way the better it is.
Right now, the program I’m using needs another screen for a tag to be created, the ticket screen to be hard-refreshed, the ticket needs to be saved to make the tag ‘stick’ and then I can reply. Lot of clicks. I have my doubts on the search and the items below in what I don’t want are there.

So, what do I want it to do….. here’s my desired workflow:

When I open the ticket I can – from the one screen –
create / assign / remove tag(s)
assign / change an owner
send the ticket to another category
reply and send.

I need

replies, and all replies to replies, to stay together.
user history
a really good search by any element
mass actions

What don’t I need:

Knowledgebase building
Any billing integration
Contacts / articles / downloads
Any extra stuff for large support teams

Does it have to be Web 2.0, ajaxy, open-source and any other ‘cool’ factor? No.
Does price/license matter? Not yet but they do not equal good necessarily.
Am I after something built to a spec? No.
The deciding factor? It just has to work. But it has to work very well – I can be picky.
Support is very very simple – people want answers, you supply them. That’s it. So the software should let me do that quickly and effectively.

I’ve probably missed something from the above so if I remember I’ll add it.

Weekends off.

Mark — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 15:31:56 +0000

Pre-nursing I worked mainly in the pub trade. Unsocial hours and day off on Tuesday. When we ran the pub it was 24/7. Going into nursing it was shifts. Hopefully 3 days on, day off. That didn’t always work but every day was essentially the same – another working day. Weekends off were every 3 weeks if I was lucky and they were spent catching up before the next 3 weeks started. So for 19 years I didn’t have weekends off. Doing all the WordPress work – and .org and .com – was also a daily job. After all, someone somewhere is always blogging. But then a little while ago Support at .com closed for the weekend. I had weekends off. I had what could be said to be a normal working pattern (we’ll skip the hours during the week) but I have 2 days off together each week. And I really like it. I never thought I would like it but that was associated with the crowds out shopping, with the commuting that the weekdays would bring, with the regular hours. But I don’t get those last 3 things, I get none of the tedious stuff either side of work – and I still get weekends off. That’s pretty cool :)