The Dispatcher from the Black Lagoon

[Jimbo1]

Apologies to those who are of have been dispatchers.

This one is for dispatchers who. as you can tell rom the title, need their own horror movie.

Like the one who sent me 25 miles out of the way to a call because it was only just "right there" on his map!

Next!

[cobiray]

Your dispatchers know how to use maps??? Thats amazing!!!

[Tonerbomb]

what do you mean you can't work on that ? it's just another copier....... and your "right there"

[just a tech]

Had a dispatcher once that sent me out to a call about 1 1/2 hours away. Later, I was on my way back to the office and passed another tech. on the damn road. He had been dispatched to a call approx. 5 miles from where i was earlier !! So there ya have it. Two techs sent approx. 1 1/2 hours away to two calls 5 minutes apart. When I asked her about it, she said "well you were busy and I didn't want to bother you. He was at the office without any calls to go to, so I sent him". aaaahhhh !!

[blackcat4866]

How many techs does it take to change an exposure lamp?

How about two techs on the same call? And not a major PM, just a minor call. This happened several times. And we never got any sort of explanation, either.

[fixthecopier]

Dispatcher? You guys are so lucky. My calls are sent to me by whoever answers the phone when the call comes in. We have a large turnover rate with the ladies who work the front desk and we all know the joy of breaking in someone new. All of my regulars know they get quick service and to call back if I am not there soon. When things go wrong I blame myself because I know who I work with, I should have seen it coming, I could be better at my job.
On a day when my base was empty and I had nothing to do, I got to deliver a new machine to another town to a public housing office. I went to the adress on my ticket which put me in front of an empty house in a public housing slum. When I called the shop to find out why, It was that I was stupid, that was where the office was years ago, and I could have called the phone number on the ticket.
All of the buildings on base have I.D. numbers on them like 2-2445. On base you can dile the last 5 of a phone number to make contact, if the number is 432-5555, you can dile 2-5555. It is not uncommon for me to get a ticket to go to a phone number. The last time I caught it before I left the shop but they checked the computer and assured me it was correct. My follow up call to the shop was to inform them that to get to that location I would have to scale the fence at a highly secured area and the men on the other side with guns have already said they WILL SHOOT ME if I do.
Dispatch- Jerry I have a call for you.
Me - Where?
Dispatch- Fort Bragg
Me - I know dear this is the only place I work. Could you give me the location?
Dispatch- Building 2-1105
Me - Can you narrow it down?
Dispatch- What do you mean?
Me - That building is a city block long and three stories high, we have 12 machines in there.
Dispatch- Well what do you want me to do?
Me [ in my best Lumberg voice ] Yeah I'm going to have to ask you to go ahead and call them back. If you could do that, that would be great.
Before I carried a cell phone I left the shop, got about a quarter mile down the road and got the page to "call in when you get a chance". I went to my first call 10 miles away and called from thier phone. "You left your tickets here" is what my shop said. "why didn't you tell me that on the pager so I could turn around?" "We needed to tell you something". "{ loudly}Couldn't you have told me in person when I got my tickets?"
" click" then dile tone
How about this one.... Jerry did you get the page I sent you about the guy who wanted to buy some color printers? No I didn't, can I have the info? Um... I didn't write it down.
And yes lord it is not just a joke, we had a girl who would make copies of the document she was going to fax because she didn't want to send the original.

[laserman06]

I am really glad we do not have dispatchers. The customers call in and enter the information into our system. The call is sent to the assigned tech. We are responsible for our territories. We decide where we go and when. Who knows better than us about the machines we service. I mean if a customer calls in for jamming out of a single paper tray and one calls in for a code, who do we go to? I rank my calls on the situation and the needs of my customers. Our company is good about letting the techs run their territories. I really like that.

But, let me say I feel your pain. I have had to deal with a dispatcher most of my career. Almost as bad as sales people.

[Cipher]

Had a dispatcher once that sent me out to a call about 1 1/2 hours away. Later, I was on my way back to the office and passed another tech. on the damn road. He had been dispatched to a call approx. 5 miles from where i was earlier !! So there ya have it. Two techs sent approx. 1 1/2 hours away to two calls 5 minutes apart. When I asked her about it, she said "well you were busy and I didn't want to bother you. He was at the office without any calls to go to, so I sent him". aaaahhhh !!

Expensive judgement call considering the price of fuel nowadays.
Dispatcher's need to be smarter than that.

[Ollie1981]

I have had the experience several times of attending a machine in a "print room" style environment, getting ten or twenty minutes into the job only to have one of my colleagues arrive to come fix a machine not three feet away from the one I'm fixing.

The customer has told me there's a problem with both machines, I've told the office there's another call..........but meh.

If they want to pay the fuel costs for two engineers to attend the same site then fine.

[lkrsardis]

Had a dispatcher once that sent me out to a call about 1 1/2 hours away. Later, I was on my way back to the office and passed another tech. on the damn road. He had been dispatched to a call approx. 5 miles from where i was earlier !! So there ya have it. Two techs sent approx. 1 1/2 hours away to two calls 5 minutes apart. When I asked her about it, she said "well you were busy and I didn't want to bother you. He was at the office without any calls to go to, so I sent him". aaaahhhh !!

Sounds like Ikon before the automated dispatch system.

[blackcat4866]

I know you've got a few comments, Elle. Care to respond?

=^..^=

[WOETC]

Sent to a job at an address like 2466 Ipswich road. No street numbers on a major road with commercial properties. You finally figure out it's in the shopping centre with 40 businesses., and the name of the company is foxworth pty Ldt ( or something like that) whichj is the registered company name, not the Trading name, and no one knows who the hell that is.

[George J]

Our dispatchers is a joke ... I've seen it all, getting sent through rush hour traffic .... twice, driving an hour only to find that the place is closed that day, having 3 techs in the same town, getting send from one extreme end to the other because 'it's urgent' .... And then the dispatcher wonders why we take so long between calls.

The 'best' ones that I remember: Our dispatcher sends a tech to an older machine ... well the copier is in really bad shape. Drum, fuser, dev and transfer rebuild, you know the usual big maintenance thing. The tech is about to leave when he sees our driver: the lease on the machine ended that day and the machine was to be collected the same day ...

And I still remember the day when president Bush came to visit. Days in advance the news broadcasters were clear: avoid the place if you don't have to be there. Traffic would be hell, streets were going to be closed for miles, police and secret service everywhere.... Guess where I got sent that very day? In the building opposite of where the president was. Driving all the way there was fun in itself, but then being checked by traffic cops, regular cops, federal agents, security agents ... they were all there, even a van full of SWAT. Explaining why you have a suitcase full of pointy metal objects with you and 'no you don't have a permit' and 'yes I know who is comming' and 'Copiers ... you know those things that make copies ... ah nevermind' ...

The call itself was a joke, client couldn't find the piece of paper that was obviously pointed out by the machine.

[D_L_P]

My favorite was when the dispatcher made an appointment at 7AM for a call 45 minutes from my house, but didn't tell me. The customer came in an hour early and was pissed. I showed up about 8:10 and was just flabbergasted at her reaction to me being 10 minutes late.
She had to be somewhere by 11am and the ditzpatcher said she could have me there at 7AM. Apparently our ditzpatcher assumed we started at 7 and by just leaving a message saying "make this your 1st call" I'd be there at 7. Sad thing is I got more heat from that incident than her. I think my boss was too busy drooling to yell at her.

[Stirton.M]

I think I have it made where I work. The black and white guys all get dispatched from whoever gets the calls in any one of the centralized offices (one on the east coast, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver I think)...each with several people doing the dispatching. The field guys often get sent all over the place without any thought by the dispatchers on who is where at any given time. Cannot expect much, some dispatchers will get a call that is not in their city, so they may not have any clue where it is they are sending techs. Even the local dispatch people have no clue about the layout of the city they are in.

In the colour department, dispatch sends all calls to our "amigo" as I call him (a fellow tech) and he then passes the calls on to the rest of us, since he knows where we are and can direct us to where we need to go without the hassle of being all over the city in any given day. Usually I get Calgary south east. Sometimes we overlap, but that is fine, it cannot be avoided all the time. Unfortunately, I also do the majority of the production machines, so more often than not, I am traveling all over anyway.

In the past, years ago, we had one "queen bitch" who was quite vindictive to some techs. If she did not like you, she would either not dispatch you at all (which in those days, the number of calls a tech did went towards presidents club points), or she gave you the shitty jobs like toner dumps and the like. Thankfully the bosses finally canned her when they found out what she was doing.