Work our cares away! in OD

Style points for anyone who knows where my title comes from.

I’ve been threatening (sorry, promising) to let you know about the wacky world of my work for a while now.

After todays nonsense, here it is.

My work is… frustrating. In many, many ways.

First of all, what I’m doing. I assess files for Bank of Ireland to check for PPI mis-selling. This was a big thing over here, that people had been sold PPI on loans, credit cards and mortgages that they didn’t need. In ROI, the Central Bank of Ireland wrote to every household and told people not to complain then ordered banks to investigate to see if it happened.

Bank of Ireland contracted Firstsource to do this for them. It’s the first time they have outsourced anything and that fact is glaringly obvious.

We do not have the tools we need to do our job. One of the things we need to do is work out if the customer was in public or private sector employment at POS. This can be easy if they, for example, worked for McDonalds or for the Department of Defence. However, if they worked at a school or a nursing home, not so much. Unfortunately, we don’t have access to Google so to find out we have to either ask our team leader (who does have limited Google access) or request further information.

I can’t send emails which is also something that would be useful. That’s because they are ultra hyper paranoid about customer information being stolen. We’re not allowed any electronic devices on the floor (in theory, we have been allowed by the ops manager to listen to music unless BOI are in the building).

In fact, they are so paranoid, that for a while we were getting the cases when someone flew over from Ireland with a hard drive in a case. Not very useful for us. I understand the need for some of this stuff, but they are going over the top.

This hard drive thing led to a situation that has continued to this day. My work is the very definition of the phrase hurry up and wait. We’ll go without any work at all for 2-3 weeks at a time, during which I generally write or read (ignoring the no books on the floor rule). Then we’ll get a metric fuckton of work through which, of course, will need to be done ASAFP. Which is great if you like over time like me (at the moment I’m saving for a trip to see Nessa monster for my birthday) but it is annoying. We could be getting this stuff earlier, not be sat bored to tears with nothing to do and then not being rushed, but that doesn’t seem to have clicked with them, despite them paying extra for our downtime.

All of this is is when we understand what’s happening.

Now, I did my training for this role back in March. Since then, I estimate that around 95% of my training has been changed or is ignored completely. Most of that happened within the first couple of months. You see, no-one had touched these cases before us. So, no-one in BOI knows how to work cases. They mention things we should be looking out for and then decide it doesn’t matter. They change the way we work saying it’ll make things easier, that it’ll mean we’re actually working cases right through rather than them going to PTEC (the clinic that decides on cases we can’t finish. More on them later) which makes things more complicated and has the opposite results. We make jokes about how long it’ll be before it’s reversed.

Take the last couple of days.

There’s a specific type of loan which the team I’m on, and only us, have been trained for.

Now the process for working these cases is broken and always have been. We got quite a few of these cases through on Friday and proceeded to work them. Yesterday, the decision was finally made to stop working these cases until the process has been fixed.

Today, we started getting PTEC decisions back on the ones we worked. Now, PTEC decisions are works of art. If said art is made by a five year old with ADHD and hopped up on more E numbers than you even knew existed. When they are not bothering to explain why they made the decision they did (which is kinda essential when you have to explain that in your notes on the case) they make a decision on one thing you referred the case to them for but not the rest.

So, we’ve been told to rework the cases in question based on these decisions that may not actually apply once they’ve decided how the cases need to work. We’ve also been told that under certain conditions we can request further information to discover if the customer(s) were employed at POS. We had to go through all the cases and see if this was needed and, if so, request the information.

When doing this, there are, of course, quite a few cases that haven’t been touched. You’d think that we’d be told just to leave them, right?

How much of this entry have you actually read?

What we had to do is find the files, see if they need this information and request it anyway.

For a case we’re not allowed to work. Where the additional information might soon be superfluous.

Yeah.

I thought I was bitter, jaded and cynical before. This job has made it much much worse.

And this is before I get into the ridiculousness of the quality department. Which I’m applying to join. It’s an extra 2 grand a month and if I’m on that team they can’t piss me off.

So, that’s my work. There’s a reason we’re all nuts.

Will