stupid work interface

Okay, I really didn't want to turn this blog into a work rant too much but this really pissed me off. I just got a call where the customer was having telephone problems. I just got my phone training a couple weeks ago (a whole other rant topic in and of itself) so I go to put in a service call for them in the telephone ticketing system. Even though I was trained in all this a few weeks ago this was the first time I'd ever gone into this system. First of all, as bad as I thought that the internet tool was, the telephone tool is way worse in terms of interface. For instance, to search by phone number, you have to put it in as area code and then phone number with no spaces or hyphens or it will complain that the phone number is invalid.

So I get in to the woman's account and put the trouble ticket it, all pretty straight forward. I hit save, internet explorer crashes on me. Now I'm running IE 6sp1 at work with all the updates for win2k so this kind of shit really shouldn't happen. We run into a lot of problems with our web based tools and different browsers (like Firefox, which a lot of agents in here like) so I stick to IE. It's also the main browser we support so it helps make me a better tech on the phone.

I did get off lucky, at least the woman's trouble ticket did get submited. But this really strikes me as something that shouldn't be acceptable for one of the main tools we use here at work, especially because I think it was a custom developed piece of software for us.

The other big annoyance was I was in the middle of typing up a really big blog and had just about finished it off so of course I've lost all of that.