Original Title -- "I Love My MUTE Button!"

My job poses a not so interesting, but fully worth pondering, stalemate. The thing that every technical support representative (TSR) hates most about his or her job is the very reason our job exists. Idiots call tech support.

Possessing the abilities of a well trained monkey, a mob of people, and probably monkeys too, manage to dial a phone number. They can see the shapes of numbers in a phone book, and recognise their familiar counterparts on the phones in their hands. They even have the precision motor skills to press the buttons in the correct order. Not surprisingly, some of them aren't as victorious over the phone menu. This may or may not be entirely the fault of their stupidity.

I have patience for ignorance; to a degree it isn't their fault. I don't have patience for somebody's inability to type something correctly that I have spelled out for them one letter at a time so many times that I am laying down on the ground with my eyes closed trying not to scream. I don't care if you've never used a computer in your life. All I ask is that you have the cognitive abilities to follow directions and answer some questions. I promise, the questions will be tailored specifically for your level of expertise.

It would be wonderful if only intelligent people called tech support. It's a shame that then I'd be out of a job. The need for hiring TSRs results from a high call volume, and there aren't enough intelligent people around to fulfill that requirement.

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Currently the whole report is done in Microsoft Word/Outlook; you take the previous day’s report; take out what no longer needs to be there and then copy the table, paste it in the appropriate section, and edit the content to be what is needed. That’s not so bad, right? Well it isn't, but it shouldn't be mundane and tedious and it could become a little trouble for the person doing it as they would be working the graveyard and not be too familiar with what has happened throughout the day and may miss things that would be good for the report.

Ideally I would like to create this project with a little PHP pulling data from MySQL outputting the content as ether HTML/XML and then styling it with CSS and using PHP to email those that need be in the loop. But right now we are just doing something that is quick and “easier”. We are using a program called Business Objects to tie into our Ticketing software with a plug-in, we can pull any data that we would like to see on the report and then format it to what we would like to see. I have not had a chance to sit down and see what the program can do for me.

So we make a template with HTML and CSS. Perfect! Looks good, the process takes a few minutes plus some manual rearranging once in awhile, but none the less it is nothing compared to the few hours. So what is the catch? Well like I said above ideally we would be using PHP or something alike but currently we are not, so we are still left copying the webpage and pasting into Outlook to be emailed to the various people and groups AND Outlook or Word is not recognizing the CSS, I would say it is half recognizing it. Some elements are being displayed properly others are being shown in a 36px font! Quiet ugly if you ask me. So now we need to find out if Word is just unaware of these tags or if it is possible to use them or do I need to go back to HTML4.0 :) to where I know Word will see the light.

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