Well, I just got back from an interesting day at work. Allow me to enlighten you all.
First of all lemme give you a bit of background on the situation. I work for a company in Northern California that doesn't really do anything. That is to say, it's 100% service based. We're an tech outsourcing firm. Some company needs people to debug some software, they hire us. A company needs competent folks who speak english to run a tech support phone center, they hire us. Generally we're a catchall for computer geek stuff. I started a few years ago with this company working on the Sony Online Entertainment account. Yes I realize some of you might be familiar with SOE, they're the branch of Sony that's responsible for all it's MMORPG's like Everquest and such.
Well I got pulled into this company as a temp gig because a couple weeks earlier someone had screwed the pooch on the whole pre-order process for Evercracks first ever expansion, Ruins of Kunark. I don't know many of you know the story, but thousands of orders around the world were either lost, shipped to the wrong place, had the wrong credit cards billed, were billed to much, were billed not at all or just plain didn't show up anywhere. To say the very least, it was a clusterfuck and a half and I (along with a few other poor souls) spent the next three fucking months sorting out the mess and getting these people their god dammed expansion disks.
So after that fiasco I was put over onto the Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN for short) team. Now MSDN is a thing software designers can subscribe too, and it get's them alot of beta and alpha release Microsoft products so that they can use them for test platforms. We were shipping copies of XP to people a year before it hit the shelves, and on DVD no less. Now the people who order this stuff are, as I said software developers and code writers...hardcore computer geeks. Now if you've read my earlier rant you know what I think of code monkies, and this is where it started.
Never before have I seen such a huge pack of slackjawed drooling yokels who couldn't find their asses with both hands and a map. I shit you not, I got hundred,
HUNDREDS of calls a day from these brainless retards asking me how to install the software we sent them. And keep in mind this is Microsoft software, a braindead chimp with a dick in it's eye could install this shit! But no, these Computer Science masters degree holding
fucktards don't even know how to properly imput a CD/registration key. It's there, printed on a fucking card in
big bold letters I mean how can you miss this shit, what are you blind!?
So yeah anyways, I put up with that bullcrap for a while, and I do mean a long while. And then back in September of 03 we get a new account from some Korean company called NCSoft. Now at the time I had never heard of these folks, despite the fact that they run the largest MMORPG in the fucking world. Well in any case, turned out they were doing a sequel to said MMO and were going to be releasing it in the US. For reference, said MMO is called Lineage 2, some of you might have heard of it.
So, because it's well known around the office that I'm a big fan of computer games, I get asked if I want to join the testing team that's being formed for this, mainly to doublecheck the translation job the folks in Korea are doing. Well I had never been a big MMO fan before but I still said yes. It was either that, stay on the MSDN team or switch over to Hewlett Packard tech support, and I'm sorry I don't give a shit about printers.
So I became a tester, and I've been doing it ever since then. First I did Lineage 2, then City of Hero's (god I hate that game, clipping errors from hell), never touched Guild Wars (thank god, otherwise I wouldn't be the rabid GW player I am now) and now I'm working on the next Lineage 2 expansion, then shuffled off to Tabula Rasa...maybe.
So as we all know, I go to work and play video games, and usually I'm not having fun while doing it but hey, 'sall groovy.
Now the office itself looks like your basic callcenter, since that's what most of the people there do. We're all in our little cubicles, each team has it's own little space on the floor. Now the team I'm on here consists of six people, five testers and a supervisor. Each one of us tests out a different aspect and the supervisor makes sure we're actually working. My workstation, well I think the thing was carved from stone by Fred and Barney, the thing has a hard time running NT 4.0 let alone the shit I'm working on. So the company made, what I think, is the greatest choice ever.
Instead of say, going out and spending the money on buying us top of the line rigs...which due to uniformity means they would have to buy a couple hundred of them, the powers that be decided that the few of us who are testing could just as easily do our work from home. That's right, you heard correctly, work from home.
So starting monday me going to work will consist of me rolling out of bet at whatever time I choose, log into the test server and put in a consistant 8 hours of work as monitored by NCSoft. No more having to deal with fucktastic coworkers, no more having to deal with company dress code. I've been outsourced to the extreme. To this all I have to say is....
Thank you, that is all.
