Well, as it turns out, I won't have to risk turning my wi-fi router into a brick just to get IPv6 connectivity again!
I'd like to call it a stroke of genius, but somebody else has probably already figure this one out:
For several years I have had an IPv6 prefix to allocate from for my home network and virtually all internal traffic has been IPv6 rather than traditional IPv4. Lately, however, I haven't had access to the IPv6 universe because my tunnel client doesn't like the fact that the OpenBSD host it runs on is behind a wi-fi router and on an IPv4 NAT.
Unfortunately, my apartment is in an older building and I only have one telephone jack and it's right near my front door. Tiny as my apartment is, it still meant cables stretching from there to my desk where my computers live. I got so tired of tripping over the cables that I went and got a Linksys WRT54G router.
The wi-fi router runs wonderfully. I can use my PocketPC with it, and with the router set to DMZ mode and forwarding all ports to my firewall machine there is no difference, IPv4-wise, as when the DSL modem was hooked directly the firewall.
Alas, no such luck with IPv6 connectivity. So while googling for brands of IPv6-enabled wi-fi routers, I find that there are open-source firmware updates for my router. It seems that the WRT54G uses an embedded Linux to run itself and people have made their own versions with expanded functionality. I even found a client specifically for my IPv6 tunnel broker, Freenet6.
So now I have to figure out whether I want to:
Decisions, decisions...
So today I get into work and what do I see in my inbox? Email wanting an explanation of the 88 hours I sumitted on my timecard and why it was there was overtime. In fact, there were multiple requests les less than a hour's span by the time I got through my 3 day weekend backlog of email.
Now I'm not exactly sure why it was called “overtime” as it was two weeks at 44 hours each, which isn't enough to qualify for the time and one half of "overtime". OK, my scheduled shift is 4 days at 10 hours each day (10.5 if you count the unpaid lunch), so maybe that's what my boss's boss was referring to.
So I say how yes, my shift does end at midnight but I am supposed to stay until the last agent finishes their last call and is logged out. Sometimes that is at 00:15 and sometimes it is 00:45, but usually it is by 00:30. So, an extra half an hour per day times 8 days is an extra 4 hours in two weeks. Because of that, on average I clock in a base amount of 84 hours every two weeks. Occasionally less if call volume has been light for a few weeks.
On top of that, given the nature of my job and how I have to be easily accessible to whomever, I have been told multiple times by my boss and my boss's boss that if it is too busy I am not supposed to go for lunch. Nor can I go for lunch or break unless I can get some other centre to remotely watch mine while I am gone. That is the basis of why why my position is the only one who is allowed to have food & drink on the production floor. Perk for having to eat while on duty.
So the last two weeks were busy, new software and watching Kelowna while my counterpart there has been on vacation, and I was not able to take a lunch break any day. So, again 30 minutes per lunch is an extra 4 hours in a two week period. An that is what made it 88 hours. While this is not always the case, nor has 88 hours been unheard of. Except for sick days (a whopping 3 total) My clocked hours for the past year and a half have consistently been between 82 and 88 hours each pay period and nobody has said anything until now. Indeed, there have even been a few 90 hour pay periods with actual real 1.5 time base wage overtime thanks to an agent being on a two hour long call that started 15 minutes before the end of my shift to which nobody said boo.
“Just because it's been happening doesn't make it right” replies my boss's boss, less than ten minutes after my explanation. “I would like it to stop immediately.”
So I reply that “sure, I can trim my hours to exactly 40 per week, but that means I can no longer stick around after midnight for the last agents to finish up their calls. In fact, I cannot guarantee that the queue will even be drained by midnight for me to announce last call to the agents before I clock out,” so could he please let me know how he wants me to do things from now on? After all, he was the one who told me that I had to stay as long as the last agent to logout and to not take lunch when it was too busy.
That was at 13:18 in my boss's boss's timezone, almost six hours ago. So I'm wondering — why no reply in less than 10 minutes this time?
Well, I can hardly believe it, but it's been 6 and one half months now since I started worked for Marusa Marketing/TeleperformanceUSA here in Cambridge.
In my last post about this I had just finished the firast day of learning lab which the two weeks after the training in which you have to get used to actually taking calls from customers but not expected to perform to production expectations (call length, number of sales, etc...). At that point I was pretty much in a "grit my teeth and bear it" mode simply because I needed a job and this was it.
But on the last day of learning lab, a Friday, I heard that a position in Mission Control (more on that later) had opened up. I filled out an internal application for that, emailed a soft copy of my resumé to the training manager as soon as I got home that night, came in on Saturday to specifically drop a hardcopy. On Monday, what was to have been my first shift on the production floor, I came in about 3 hours early, all dressed up with a tie, to try and get myself an interview for the position. The idea was to show that if I would do this much to try and get and interview then just think of what I will do if I get the job.
Shannon, the Mission Control person on shift right then, told the Branch manager about me and about an hour or two later she came into the cafeteria where I was sitting and said "My shift is done soon and when I leave we won't have a Mission Control for this evening. Kim [the centre manager at the time] said to show you what to do and let you be M.C. for the evening." So for 15 minutes Shannon tried to show me what I was supposed to do for the evening and then she left. Later they told me that the problems that night were some of the worst they had had since the centre opened, and by the time of my telephone interview later that evening to corporate head quarters Salt Lake City, Utah, I was feeling very overwhelmed and much like a chicken with its head cut of.
But I must have acquitted myself well because Chad, the person in charge of hiring me, told me that the interview was just a formality since I had proven I could do the job even after getting thrown to the wolves. I ended up working 55 hours that week, coming in early so that I would be there at the same time that Shannon was (her shift ended about 2 hours before min began) so she could show me what I was supposed to be doing. But I was glad — I was off the phones!
About three weeks earlier, the evening M.C. had come into my training class to fix some computer problem — so originally I had thought that Mission Control was the IT department. Ironically, I had said to him "I want your job". :-)
But it's not IT, not really. Mission Control's area of responsibility is basically making sure that the agents on the phones can continue to take calls smoothly and use the various software tools for that and for accessing the customers' accounts. To do that you need to know some systems administration stuff but there is an actual IT person who takes care of the LAN. Mission Control is also the liasion between the local centre and Sprint's über-Mission Control in Kansas City and the other TeleperformanceUSA centres running SprintPCS traffic. This is so Sprint can send out real-time directives to the centres and because problems which affect one centre can often end up affecting all centres.
All in all, even though the new position wasn't quite what I thought it was when I handed in that internal job bid on the last day of learning lab, it is something that I like far more than I would have felt about being on the phones. I am glad I have it.
If you get an email from an address like this FirstLast@invitation.sms.ac, don't even bother opening it. It is spam-scam crap.
It looked shady to me the first time I got one and as I have been getting more and more (and always from people on my MSN contact list) I decided to look into it. On one web page about it I found the following:
Also, some person by name of "Sean" has left what appears to be the exact same comment (cut & pasted?) in the followup threads of multiple blogs saying basically "Oh, if you'd just read the terms properly..." as well as insulting people who complain about sms.ac's spam-scam crap.
Not only that, but sms.ac has sent cease and desist letters to bloogers who had posted entries warning people about the spam-scam. Check the list of links below to see what others say about sms.ac.
Whatever you do, do not sign up with sms.ac!
Well, Bill Gates might have finally done it — said something to surpass his "640kB should be enough for anyone" bit. In an article on C|Net news, Gates said:
In terms of our agility to do things on the browser, people who underestimated us there in the past lived to regret that.
In response Ben Goodger, one of Firefox's developers has this to say:
Bring It On
As business savvy as Gates is, he's never been very visionary — as that 640kB line shows — and neither has Microsoft been so. Virtually everything they supposedly pioneered they copied from somebody else. What Gates and Microsoft did do well was utilize their economic leverage gained from being chosen by IBM to provide the operating system for the original IBM PC - the first widely popular home computer.
But Microsoft has never been about what the consumers want — or at least only insofar as it will get them some market share so they can force down the consumer's throat what Microsft things should be like. The 800lb gorilla of the software world but unfortunately not even half a smart as a chimp.
Gates's response to the mention of security and Internet Explorer is to bring up autoupdate and how with that you don't have to think any more. We've all known it for a while, but with that Microsft has finally revealed that they aren't about Where do you want to go today? but really We'll tell you what to think today.
Truly — our only hope is open source.
