Considering how long I’ve been working from home, I’ve been pretty lucky with my work systems and not having too many issues. From time to time, there have been some glitches, but for the most part, I can log in and do my work when I need to. The only big issue I remember is when our website went down for an entire day for my customer service job.
But lately, I’ve had some more work issues and it’s frustrating since I want to be able to work. For my customer service job, it’s not as bad since I am paid for the hours I’m logged in, no matter what. So even if I can’t do any work, I still get paid. That’s nice, but it’s also frustrating when all I can tell customers is that I cannot help them and that I’m sorry. For my other job doing data entry and event updates online, I only get paid when I can work. And being able to work has been tough lately.
Some of the issues with being able to work have been my issue. I couldn’t work the data entry job last week because it was so busy with my customer service job. I usually do my work between my customers, but there was honestly no time between customers. I was on the phone with one customer and using our chat feature with a few others for almost the entire shift each day. We know that Valentine’s Day is usually one of the busiest times and I think it was made even busier because of it being on a Friday and the start of a long weekend. So I just didn’t have the time to work and I was exhausted by the end of my shift and didn’t want to sit at my computer any longer. I explained the situation to my manager at that job and she completely understood.
And I think part of the reason she understood was that there have been so many things preventing me from working that job that were out of my control. I’m helping to enter events on a new version of a website and that website wasn’t built until recently. Then, once it was done we couldn’t enter any events because it wouldn’t accept any way we could enter times in the form. That issue was finally corrected at the beginning of last week, but I wasn’t working last week due to the craziness with the customer service work. I finally got back to it on Monday, and now it looks like I can’t log in to enter events and there may be an issue with my access to the backend of the site. I’m still waiting for an answer on how I can do my work, but I really hope I can get back to it soon so I can get some hours in.
And if that wasn’t enough, yesterday I had to deal with the website for my customer service job being down. Fortunately, it was resolved within the first few hours of work, but it was still frustrating that whenever a customer called we weren’t able to tell them much. We couldn’t even tell them if there were shows on the nights they were asking about because we couldn’t see the schedule. Most customers were understanding when we said our website was down and we couldn’t tell them much, but there were a few that questioned how we could be a legit business if we couldn’t answer basic questions. I understand why they wondered about us, but it was hard to try to explain why we need our website to see information when they refused to believe that I didn’t have everything printed out and updated or something. I’m just glad that the issue didn’t take the entire day like it did last time and we were quickly able to get back to normal.
I guess these issues are things you encounter when you work from home. But I’ve been spoiled with not having issues that often. I am used to my work systems to be working exactly how I need them to work and I don’t have a lot of options when they aren’t working. I don’t have somewhere that I can go in to do my work or a workaround that allows me to bypass the issue. I’m stuck waiting for someone to fix what I need to be fixed and I don’t have any control over it. I guess it’s a good lesson in letting go and not freaking out, but because it’s my job and I depend on the money it’s not easy to stay calm.
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