Jay, the resource planner and the disciplinary

Tales from the Dark Satanic Mill

My friend Jay had a disciplinary hearing at work yesterday. I know Jay from work. I don’t socialise with him outside work but I think of him as a friend. I digress, as usual. The first I heard of it was when a mutual friend told me that two people from her team had been suspended. One was suspended because he was talking in an Asian language (she didn’t know which although from the demographic of my Asian co-workers, I would hazard a guess at Gujerati). The other was Jay and he had been suspended for telling a resource planner to “F*** off”. I actually think he should be commended, not suspended.

I suspect that all call centres (and the Dark Satanic Mill is a call centre, of course) have resource planners. When people work on telephones, you need somebody there to make sure that they are taking calls and not sat on “After Call Work” or whatever jargon is available to describe having your phone set to unavailable. Resource planners are a necessary evil but the job seems to attract people of the same ilk as Traffic Wardens.

Actually, my husband is a policeman (he introduced me to The Policeman’s Blog and couple of others I will have to mention). They now have a resource planner and guess what? He’s an ex-traffic warden. So apt!

Our resource planners are a mixed bunch but when your job entails ringing people up and telling them to go back on available or ringing their managers and asking them to tell them to go back on available, it tends to affect ones personality in a strange way. I suppose I’m trying to say that they end up power-mad individuals.

Well, back to Jay. We’re very busy at work at the moment and although he was suspended, he was allowed in to work overtime. Strange Alice-through-the-Looking-Glass-thinking. I had a chat with him and asked him the truth of the matter. He said that the resource planner in question had told him to terminate a call because he believed it was a personal call. He had refused to do so because it was not and he was not going to terminate a business call and it escalated from there.

I do think that if I had been told to terminate a call, even a personal call, I would have reacted in the same way but then, our resource planners seem to be a bit scared of me. When I’m on “After Call Work”, they ring up and say “Did you know you’re on ACW?” and I say yes or no depending on whether I knew or not. I frequently leave my phone on the “toilet state” and just tell them I had the squits. I’ve never been disciplined. I think the answer is I work in the complaints department, I’ve worked for the company since most of the resource planners were in short pants (or pigtails) and Jay doesn’t and hasn’t.

He had the union in to represent him yesterday so I’m hopeful that all went well and he won’t be so jumpy for much longer. He’s a good lad and a good worker and the company would be downright bloody stupid to sack him for telling some jumped-up little squirt to eff off!

Goodwill Jester 02 February 2007.