Support from a remote office - useless or useful?

I'm back in Roseville, MN for a week's worth of training, so I can (hopefully) go back to Seattle and start supporting this hugely complex product. My friend in the UK, also my coworker, has basically been doing what I'm about to start doing - supporting a product from many many many miles away from the larger organization without the benefit of someone in a cube next to him he could pester when problems inevitably arise. I'm pretty sure he had my desk phone number on speed dial.... and man I would have hated to have seen that phone bill :-)

Since my previous employer was acquired, I've been tasked with integrating myself into the acquirer's organization while at the same time continuing to support the products that I've been supporting for almost four years. Being thrown in the fire this week (aka, taking phone calls) has reminded me greatly of what it was like when I first started in phone support those years ago. It's a nerve-wracking experience to learn all the little gotchas and features of a version 6 product. Luckily, it seems that most customers are using either v5 or v6, and the two are similar enough for me to barely get by. At the same time, the training I had three weeks ago was for v6, so sometimes it's a bit of a shock to see the differences between the two versions. There's still a lot of "please hang on as I ask a co-worker" in my phone calls. It's going to be worse when I leave from here.

I wonder how successful this remote tech support thing is going to be. Am I constantly going to be phoning the home office for help, or will I eventually learn enough to get by. Will I be kept up-to-date as well as the people in Minnesota, or will I be one (or a few) steps behind?

Seattle's a good place to find support talent, and part of me hopes that they'll try to expand the support organization out there. But Minneapolis is, as Nicole told me this week, the most literate city in the country so I know Seattle's got some competition.

Any other support monkeys with remote support experience? Any suggestions?

802.11g signal strength informal testing

A buddy of mine in the UK recently purchased a 15" Apple PowerBook G4 (Aluminum). I have this same computer. We're both noticing some pretty abysmal signal strength numbers from these computers, so we're trying to figure out the culprit. Is it the built-in AirPort Extreme cards? Is it the base station? (He has an Apple Airport Extreme BS, I have a Netgear WGR614.) Luckily, I happen to have a PC card 802.11g adapter (in addition to the AirPort Extreme card), based on a Broadcom chip, and made by Buffalo. So, here are the informal numbers from iStumbler, going through each channel available to me.

broadcom pc card:
channel strength
1 59-60
2 73
3 53-55
4 73
5 73
6 74
7 74
8 49-52
9 73
10 53-59
11 50

apple airport extreme card
channel strength
1 54-56
2 68-69
3 68-70
4 52-54
5 71
6 56-58
7 70-71
8 69
9 69
10 70-71
11 58-59


So, it looks like I'll stick with channel 7. Hopefully he'll be able to find a better channel for him. I was originally on channel 11.

It's funny, though. Watching iStumbler, my signal strength on channel 7 is dropping. It's now down to 56. I don't know why...

Back to Roseville for a week...

Yep, more training. I leave Sunday and will be done on Friday. Hopefully this'll be the last of the training for a while.

So, anybody in the Twin Cities wanna show me around a little? Please? Anybody?

Back home now...

Yep, so Minnesota was cold. Very cold. It's funny how at first, it doesn't feel that cold, but then the cold just kinda sneaks up on ya and tightens your skin. It's uncomfortable.

Minneapolis was pretty boring. I drove around looking for things to see/do but didn't find much. I did see Lost in Translation, watched a lot of Scrubs episodes, and read through most of the periodicals I brought with me.

Training went very well. Now comes the hard part - supporting the product from 1400 miles away from the main support group. It's going to be a challenge to say the least. I still have much to learn about the product before I'll be really any good at supporting it. And, it looks like I'll be going back to Minnesota in a couple weeks for more training, and actual call center experience.

So, back to the old schedule - 5am to 2pm. It's a schedule I can't stand and I'm going to do everything I can to get on a more normal schedule. 7am to 4pm wouldn't be so bad.

So hooray, back in Seattle, where people don't talk nearly as funny as they do in the midwest. Ya sure, you betcha.