Wackyfish

I just spent about two hours with Fortuna, one of our lead customer service agents here at EPC. Basically I just sat with her and watched her work on the new system. She had some new tasks to do this week (Meter Change request processing to be specific) and she is not feeling terribly confident about her abilities. And when I say abilities I mean everything from how find her way around our AS400 system to how to type and use the mouse.
Anyway I started out the session by prompting her at each step what to type, press, change, click etc. After the first hour she began to feel a bit more confidant and was running the bulk of the job without my prompting. I then only chimed in when she felt stuck or there was something new she hadn’t seen before. At the end of our time together I was basically just observing.
We (well she really) processed and closed about 15 Meter Change service orders. And she is feeling much more confidant about her abilities. I gave her homework of playing solitaire on the computer at least twice before she went home to help with her mouseing skills.
I have to say the whole teaching/tutoring/mentoring part of my gig is pretty darn neat!

On an entirely different note… I spent most of the morning prior to the above session attempting to figure out why we had no Internet connection (well we had one but it kept dropping for no good reason). Turns out SamoaTel (monopoly phone company here) was trying to take our lease line back. We paid them, but they thought they should get it back anyway… funny eh. The real sad part is that this happens quasi frequently.