Can you imagine what it is like to operate a call centre if none of your landlines are working and when you try and contact your supplier’s support line by mobile it rings out?
Now I like to think that I’m a fairly lay back sort of guy, but after nearly five days and still without phones my patience was really stretched. But let me tell you about my first week back and see what you think.
Of course the global recession is being blamed for just about every problem we encounter these days and I guess we will have to become accustomed to companies abruptly ceasing business, but 21st century complexity does not help.
Admittedly we operate online but with only eight active phone lines (up to 30 extensions) to our small office in downtown Wollongong YOC have to monitor and pay, electronically or by phone, the following communication related accounts each month (only the first two are handled by the same supplier):
1) Land line rental including local calls
2) Fax lines and diversions
3) All non-local, 1300 and mobile calls diverted by software
4) Mobiles
5) High speed data line
6) Commercial grade backup data line
7) Major web hosting services and email, DNS etc
8) Minor web hosting service
And ALL of these services have to be up or we simply can’t operate efficiently.
Most of these providers have websites and most have robot driven call centres (yes, I know that’s not their real name .. but they aren’t human are they?), and when you finally make contact with a real person they sure as hell have great difficulty understanding that if just one service goes down for any reason at all, we’re, like the economy, ‘buggered’.
To rub salt into the wound, during the week I received a text on my mobile to call a number. When I called the number, several times, and finally got through (after selecting from a menu, being advised the call would be monitored for quality purposes and then queuing for an operator) they insisted I provide my date of birth and various other personal details. When I protested that they had called me on my private phone not the other way round and “why should I provide details?’
Well you can imagine the response - I guess with no phones and a virus I was definitely well past the post-holiday ‘feeling good’ period!
Talking about the virus, I didn’t get the ‘config’ variety that’s in all the newspapers and targets networks but I somehow attracted my very own nasty piece of malware; as I would.
I say, I attracted it - by that I mean it was not emailed to me so I must have inadvertently had the program downloaded when I accessed some website, and since I spend my life browsing I’m not exactly sure which one, although I do have my suspicions.
The symptoms would seem to indicate that the worm/bug, whatever, was locally made since it diverted all my Google queries (in IE7 and Firefox) initially to a Sydney based domain which then promptly re-diverted them to a range of travel or tourist related websites – all in Australia.
I did my own investigation and detected the guy seemingly responsible, and the company he worked for, who incidentally was part of, or operating, a tourism Affiliate program. And to be frank I feel like exposing, or reporting them to the authorities, since after a day and a half trying to locate the critter in my machine myself I finally had to pay a couple hundred bucks for a virus guru from the UK to get my PC cleaned up.
Affilliate programs are when high traffic websites allow third party adverts to be run on their properties – they share in the revenue gained from advertisers involved with paid search often called ‘Pay per Click’ or PPC programs – but the point is the adverts run are meant to be relevant to the host websites.
Of course YOC’s own SMARTPAGES is active in Natural or Organic search these days but I certainly wouldn’t want to be paying for my traffic on pay per click basis.
I mean I could search for any topic on Google and the first four links would direct me to a travel site, and it was particularly sneaky because the search queries stayed as per normal (I know I check a number of queries everyday) but the hyperlinks showed the final URL although you wouldn’t normally look – I didn’t.
So, all in all, I’d say it wasn’t the greatest week I’ve had …but, what do you think?
UPDATE: The office is finally back to normal; and yes I am over it! | 
