Thursday - I Know Best

Our backlogs are getting larger by the day. This isn't help by Anne's genius strategy of focusing on the time-consuming older complaints. After all if you've got a 2000 item backlog and want to get rid of it, why clear 200 items a day when you can clear 20 difficult items even though we are receiving 50 new ones daily? You do the maths.

Of course Anne and Gary do not see this and if I try to explain this to them, they just exclaim "that we have to do it," and then threaten "the severest of implications" if we don't. Anne then started bemoaning the low volume of calls processed by the team.

"They're averaging 10 calls a day each," Anne said. Although I was in the firing line, her aim was at all of the team leaders. "We take 180 calls a day. The average call length is 8 minutes. They only spend 90 minutes on the phone each shift. What are they doing?"

I didn't think it was a simplistic as that. This was the problem with bean counters taking over a company. Especially when those bean counters didn't really understand the work they were counting. I felt like Einstein would have done if his bosses had told him that the stars are fires burning behind a black curtain.

"The calls don't come in all at once. And although the average call length takes 8 minutes, the true amount of time spent on the call is once its over." I said.

"Like what?" asked Anne.

Dare I say it? "Well they have to complete their timesheet to record what they've done for 8 minutes and then log the call on our system. And that's before they even start to deal with the call. Investigating the background, collating the information. Documentation. Making further calls. Calling the customer back."

"The logs and timesheets have to be completed," said Anne repeating her mantra from the bean counter's bible. It didn't matter if it was right or not. It just had to be done and that was enough. I knew that if I challenged it any more she would suggest that I come up with a better solution. I could. But I don't have time on account of the the bean counting that I have to do.

Gary helpfully tried to help. But didn't really. He had no experience of the work we did or how we did it. He was a boss and could only ever be a boss. Most of the time he kept quiet but sometimes his boss instincts came into play like a teenage hormonal urge forcing him to demonstrate his boss qualities.

"Perhaps if the teams' could log the calls when they take them," He said. "That way they'll be doing twice the work in the same amount of time."

I almost offered to insert broomhandles into their rectums as well but I'd already done too much harm to my career in this meeting.