It’s week 3 in the Support Driven Writing Challenge, and this week I’m posting about my thinking space. Let’s start out by establishing that I’m an introvert. I may be a bit of an extroverted introvert, but an introvert nonetheless. So naturally, being around people, or in social situations does not allow me to think easily. I’ll confess that the larger the group of people I’m around, the more taxing it is for me to sort through my thoughts.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I thought I was productive. I used a whiteboard (still do, by the way) for my todo lists, was running a Windows laptop for work, and that worked. When I moved to Texas and started working at Rackspace, things changed…drastically. First, my workload changed, and it changed how I had to approach my workload. I went from a workload that was so full of technical snowflakes (read ‘Unique and one-off issues’) and remote support (me logging into customers’ laptops and desktops), that any sort of automation was useless.
This post is the last in the Support Driven Writing Challenge series that I’ve been participating in lately, albeit a bit late. This post is about my workspace. As a fellow support driven community member and remote worker Chelsea noted, being remote means that I can work from anywhere. In my case, it’s mostly true (given that I work third shift). My space has been a place that I intentionally crafted to be a place that would make going from a first shift job to a third shift one tolerable, if not at least somewhat enjoyable.
Whew, I’m catching up on posting for the Support Driven Writing Challenge, and I’m fairly caught up at this point. So this week’s post is a ‘Day In the Life’ of whatever it is you do. Since I’m in my first ever third shift position, this should be interesting! The Schedule Before coming to DigitalOcean, I was in a ‘normal’ 9-5 position. Then, I flipped completely over to 3rd shift when I joined DO.
It’s week four of the Support Driven Writing Challenge, and sadly, I’m a bit behind what with the US holiday and the customary food coma. That said, let’s get cracking. The Ubiquitous Ticket Queue I’ll start off by saying that the most common way of supporting our customers at DigitalOcean (from a Customer Success Team standpoint), is via support ticket through our home-grown system. That’s where most of our work comes from, be it customer-initiated tickets, or automated tickets.
I’ve told pieces of my story in recent posts. You know, the ones about Homebrewing being a salvation, and moving to a role in Customer Success at DigitalOcean. I don’t think I’ve ever posted about the long, circuitous route that my career has taken. Perhaps it’s time to tell you the story. So sit back and grab a cup of joe…this ride is known to cause whiplash. Trust me, the trail from aspiring academic to customer success engineer is not exactly the smoothest.