I work for a major Australian ISP, handling dialup and ADSL technical support. Right now I’m working the graveyard shift, which is eleven pm to seven am. Between two and seven, there’s only 3 of us here.
In the last three nights that I’ve been working this shift, there’s been 3 outages. One on the first night that affected ADSL in one state, one that knocked out dial for three whole states yesterday and the third (tonight) that’s affecting ADSL in another state on and off. All three we only found out about because customers rang in to tell us there was a problem.
The first ADSL outage was fine. It was a genuine fault, nobody saw it coming. Also, it wasn’t a fault on our network, but on that of the wholesaler that we deal with. But the dial outage, which was scheduled for ten hours last night, AND which was on OUR network, was not noted down on any of our system tools as pending. We only found out as all of our dial customers from the 3 states started ringing in and panicking because their dialup calls wouldn’t go through. It was only after our Team Leader raised merry Cain on the engineers that we even got a notice about it. And the same thing has happened again tonight with the second ADSL outage.
Call handling time is one of our major statistics. For customers who can’t connect to dialup or ADSL, if we have no notification of an outage then we have to troubleshoot the whole call, until the problem is resolved or we cannot go any further at all. This can blow out a call to anywhere up to an hour or more if it’s a bad problem. If we’re notified of a scheduled outage before it’s supposed to happen, then we can reassure customers that it’s a problem on our end, and let them know when we expect it to be repaired. Max call time, <90 seconds.
So to engineering, the wholesalers and lead techs - FUCK YOU. If you know about it more than an hour in advance, fucking tell us so we don’t have customers riding our asses for wasting their time troubleshooting a problem that’s ours in the first place.
Thanks.