EA Update

I wasn't wrong; its now 00:18 and the pressures just begun to drop off. I haven't stopped taking closing calls since 11:00. The problem is that the message line over-rides everything so you get stuck listening to garbled messages whilst engineers can't contact you and so they leave even more garbled messages. I'd love to get my hands on the person who designed this new system and get them to use it for a night. Yet another example of something designed by someone who doesn't really understand what it is that the people they are designing for actually do!

Now That's A First
After we'd cleared the backlog I was expecting the overnight EA jobs to start hitting my terminal but this wasn't to be! For the first time ever, when I've done it anyway, we didn't issue a single EA from 1.30 until 7:00 when we finished for the night. I kept waiting for a late one to arrive just before close of play but it never came. It'll probably be another five years before that happens again.

4 November - My First Night of Nights on Nights!

Tonight I joined the JDM overnight team at BGS. We work four nights on followed by four nights off; yes that does mean you can get 12 days off  every time you book four days holiday. If you want longer it doesn't work out quite so well because to go to 16 days requires you to take 8 days leave although of course this then automatically becomes 20 days because at the end of the 16 days you start your four days off1 Keeping track of holiday, I'm told, can get confusing. As I've just returned from one I think I'll leave this subject now to another day.
The teams is comprised of:
John - The Manager
Starkey
Duncan
Amit
Carol
Jane
Hasmukh
Ash
Bharat
Prash
and
Myself,
We work from 10PM through the night until 8AM next morning dealing, in the main, with overnight emergencies involving water leaks and such like. There are two specialist jobs overnight that we take turns doing. One is known as manuals, the IT system goes off-line after 10PM to update so all calls afterward until 6AM are recorded in ink on manual worksheets. These need to be collected sorted and eventually faxed to the appropriate centre before 7AM. In winter this is apparently a big job. The other special job is dealing with issuing emergency jobs to over night stand by engineers. This can involve a lot of diplomacy if you wish to avoid getting your ear chewed off by an irate engineer. I enjoyed my first night and everyone brokre me in gently. I will shadow the special jobs quite a few times before going solo. The team seem to be a good bunch although I haven't met hasmuhk yet as he is away on holiday.