No time to blog

Argggh ! Most of the Customer Service Representatives here at work did not come in so I'm swamped :(

Starting to cool off

As I left my house this morning to go to the office, I was pleasantly greeted by the cool weather when I stepped out of my apartment. I was already anticipating that today would be a pretty HOT day since last week temperatures were off the charts. I thought, would I prefer walking to work in extremely cold or hot weather ? I sweat like a pig and pretty much my whole outfit is drenched in perspiration once I get to work EVERY day during Summer.

I often try and bring an extra shirt so that I would only be humiliated for the first 1 minute from the time I enter the office, to the time I get to my cubicle and to the bathroom to change shirts. If it were winter, I would be wrapped in at least 4 layers of clothing and I immediately head to the coffee machine to get myself a hot cup of joe to defrost myself.

All in all I would say that I would want to have a colder weather as compared to a hotter weather. Getting sweaty isn't pretty and for me, ruins my concentration specially if I know at the start of the day I stink already.

So anyway pretty bizarre call I got in today. This lady called our 1800 number and the first thing she says if we can ship the glasses by today so she can get it by tomorrow. I tell her that normal processing time takes a few days and we don't do over night shipping. She begged me if I could do something about it but I told her it was out of my hands. Her voice started to crack and suddenly she burst into tears. She was sobbing, telling me that she just broke her glasses a few hours ago and that she needed glasses badly. I asked her what was wrong and she told me she was getting married tomorrow! She was afraid she could not read a speech prepared by her family for her to say during the wedding. I told her that usually, she just has to repeat whatever the priest would say but she kept on saying "No I need to read it, golly gee I need to read it" No one in her town could make glasses that fast and she didn't have contacts. I told her to calm down and try going to Walmart and check out the ready made glasses there and see if there would be something that might fit her.

In the end she thanked me profusely for listening to her story and told her she would be ordering glasses from us soon. Awww

Later

Weekend Getaway

So it's the weekend again and we just got paid this week so I'm planning to indulge myself in a swimming expedition at the lake near my place. They built a water park over there and I'm pretty stoked since it's been a while since I had a dip. Some of my friends who I haven't seen for months are flying in from out of town so it should be quite interesting.

So anyway work today is pretty stressful. Not a lot of calls again but what makes me and Baby Jesus cry a little inside is the amount of time our database loads up per query. Honestly this program can't be any slower ! It takes 10-15 minutes just to query customers and more often than not it takes around 2-3 queries per person. It's frustrating because I've had a handful or angry customers who wanted information fast and they could not understand why it takes so long to just double check some details with regards to the status of their order.

Honestly I could burn in hell with all the excuses I've made just to cover up for this slow program.

But look on the bright side, there must be a reason as to why the database is getting bigger. Check out my flow chart !

Bigger Database = Slower Access time

BUT

Bigger Database = More orders

SO

More orders = More $$$

THEREFORE

More $$$ = More Salary ??

... oh yes I went there lol

Later!

Pretty Quiet Day

Today was pretty quiet. Not a lot of calls, but a lot of emails. The weird thing was that the internet at work was pretty busted up as well. Pages kept timing out, and stuff like that. I'm currently writing my blog entry on Word hoping that I can be able to post it later.

Anyway we had a visitor today, the girlfriend of Leo visited our office since she's visiting from the UK. It's pretty cool how her accent just makes everyone glance every time she says a word heavily pronounced in the British accent. One thing I noticed was she and Leo pronounced words the same way like EyeBuyDirect , Aspen , picture, and a lot more.

It's cute how people tend to have an effect on how you speak, there was one day a few weeks ago that I think I got a lot of calls from people from the south, that at the end of the shift, I had a temporary slang which was awesome but quickly faded away the next day. Lol.

Well anyway weekend's coming up again and I think I'm pretty much stoked as I might be apartment hunting since the lease on my place is expiring at the end of September. I'm trying to hook-up with some of my roommates friends from out of town and hopefully we'll be able to get along so I won't be blogging homeless by September :P

Laters

Officially bringing food to work

I've finally given up take-outs and deliveries for my meals taken at the office. Our office is situated in an area that there are not a lot of restaurants available for lunch and dinner as well. We only have a 24-hour Kwik-E mart and some little canteen that serves G R E A S Y Chinese food which shortens your life with every viand taken in.

I took it upon myself to buy a steamer / griller last weekend in order for me too cook my own food going to work. Today I had a lovely lunch of steamed chicken breast topped with curry-powder with vegetable medley ala Gabby. I'm trying this whole new eating healthy craze since I've been eating JUNK for the past 8months of 2007.

Anyway work today was pretty busy and I got a few inbound calls from France. First 2 calls were okay since they knew how to speak English but the call after that was killer. We spent a good 10 minutes trying to understand and explain to each other what the concern was. The lady eventually said something along the lines that she would ask a friend to give us a call to explain the situation better. Friend called 5 minutes later but his English was not that good as well. There was a lot of giggling in the background as the guy struggled to speak in English. A few minutes later a different voice came on with English that would make Baby Jesus cry. The giggling intensified and I couldn't help but laugh as well with the situation. The conversation turned more casual after I just told them to email me the concern as it would be easier to just translate written French.

Call took about 25 minutes total and we just talked about how they found out about our website and how much the French love us Americans. Lol.

Later.

Small World

Today I had one of the most interesting calls during my work tenure here at EyeBuyDirect. A customer called our 1-800 number to double check her prescription from a previous order she had made. Since it was a pretty old order, I had to dig it up from our archives which took a while since our database was going through some maintenance work. We got into quite a bit of a chat, talking mostly about how it was pretty great that company like ours existed to save people literally hundreds of dollars with regards to their eyeglasses.

I found out that she studied in the same school I did and apparently we were classmates in a Major class I took up a few years back. It was so surreal since we chatted about this certain professor who people gossiped a lot about since he had this eccentric attitude which was pretty much offensive to most of the female population in that class. I didn't notice that our chat had lasted around 15 minutes and my manager was already staring at me since he overheard our conversation and was giving me the "evil-eye". I hung up the phone with a smile on my face.

This is one of the things I love about my job. It is so real and human that this is what Customer Service is all about. It's about connecting with people and offering a certain service that you and only you can give. It's just a bonus that we had that conversation but it was so genuine that , that pretty much made my day ( aside from the fact that we got our salary today woohoo! ).

Later

New eyeglass frames coming soon!

We just received a shipment of A LOT of new frame designs which should be out in a few weeks! I'm getting excited since a lot of these frames look really cool and out of the ordinary. I'll probably be able to provide you some updates if you leave a comment with a link to your blog or perhaps send me an email at gabby.ebd [at] gmail [dot] com so that I can include your name in future discounts ( up to 15% ! ) and announcements of frames offered only to valued customers of EyeBuyDirect.

Anyway, today was pretty much a normal day save for the fact that there was a lot of good feedback in our BizRate page

http://www.bizrate.com/ratings_guide/cust_reviews__mid--143709.html

It really warms my heart that we get to help a lot of people save a TON of money just by providing a service that is DUE to everyone. I mean people earning 10000% mark-up is just a heinous crime, it should be up there with murder! Anyway I'm looking forward to this weekend as me and my friends are going to this safari and it should be fun.

Later