Thank You for Holding

Every trade gets the magazine it deserves, roughly twenty-five years too late. I’ve now made one for mine: QUEUES — The Workforce Planning Edition, Issue No. 1, collected 1995–2010. Fifty-three pages, printed in phosphor green on office white, because that is what the wallboard looked like and some palettes choose themselves.

I should declare my interests, because the entire edition is one. I spent the formative years of my working life inside the machine it catalogues — first as a nineteen-year-old QA team leader with a formal instrument called a QACAR and no idea it was pronounced “quacker”, later as the person who set up the offshore centres the closing feature confesses to, and throughout as a member of the quiet priesthood that ran the Erlang C before the morning meeting and believed, genuinely believed, in the 80/20 service level the way other people believe in tide tables.

Filed as the call travelled

The house filing rule, third time proven: arrange the magazine the way the work moved. A photocopier files by speed, hot metal by the job’s route through the shop — and a phone call travels trunk → queue → agent → wrap, so those are the four sections. The Definity and the Meridian in the trunk room; the IVR and the wallboard census in the queue; headsets, handsets and the ethics of Service Observe at the agent’s desk; and in wrap, the material the trade never wrote down anywhere official — Service Level: A Theology (80/20, its heresies, and the denominator a professor called perverse), the adherence wars, and the 11:59 problem, in which a forty-four-minute call walks into a fifteen-minute reporting interval and CMS must decide what the truth is.

Running through all four sections is AUX 9 — the auxiliary code every centre had and no manual admitted to, here given the recurring single-panel treatment it always deserved.

The naming rules are the photocopier edition’s, unchanged. The machines get named — the Galaxy that started it all, the Periphonics cabinets, the AUDIX in an unexpectedly tactical role. The people mostly don’t. Where a story could only have happened at one identifiable employer, it is my story to own, and I own it. Everything else is a silhouette: a bank, a client, a Team Leader who was a bit better than everyone else.

The reference well

Readers who want the mathematics under the theology are directed to the reference well at the back of the issue, and to its longer-form ancestors here: the Erlang C, worked honestly, in Excel, in Python, and in SQL. The magazine quotes the formulas; those three pieces derive them; between them you can staff a Tuesday.

The issue is on the news-stand at photocopier.gethryn.com, beside the photocopiers it once counted the calls about and the hot-metal edition it is technically descended from. Corrections, war stories and wallboard photographs to the usual address. Your correspondence is important to us, and will be answered in the order it was received.