Support Department Temporarily Backed Up

by Tinu

Just had a new friend of the Free Traf­fic Tips fam­ily named Steve write me a mes­sage, when today, my first day of feel­ing less that 50% crappy for the last week, a gut instinct told me to check the Help Desk tick­ets  — where mes­sages go to when you write to ask@asktinu.com.

And I found out that since I’ve been gone, no tick­ets have been answered. None, as in zero, of the thou­sands of mes­sages that have been sent to me in the past week have been responded to — and on top of that, there are about a dozen mes­sages that have been in the queue since Christmas!

So first of all, if you’ve sent me a ques­tion or com­ment that war­rants an answer, and it was never esca­lated to me, I apol­o­gize. If you have an open ticket right now, feel free to respond to that ticket with the word “esca­late” to make it eas­ier for my new per­son to find and send directly to me. For the next week, all you have to do with an exist­ing ticket that hasn’t been answered is put the word “esca­late” in the mes­sage, and it will be trans­ferred for me to deal with by me personally.

But please under­stand, that means replies will not take place within a busi­ness day as they have before (unless of course you’re a cus­tomer or client, those are now han­dled by a sep­a­rate, 24/7 group.)  For those of you who don’t know, I have fairiy sev­era case of spinal degen­er­a­tive dis­or­der. It’s not a life-threatening ill­ness, but it’s way more com­pli­cated than pulling a mus­cle in your back.

I’ve tried just about every­thing for it, and a mix­ture of phys­i­cal ther­apy and med­ica­tion helps a lot.

Still, I have some rough spells some­times it’s hard for me to type, sit up in bed, that sort of thing. I’m telling you this because until I get some more help, there’s no way you’ll get a response in one busi­ness day.

I get hun­dreds of emails to that address every day, and there’s just no quick way of sort­ing the spam from the real requests for help, so some­one has to open each one and read it. Three peo­ple used to spend the bet­ter part of the day help­ing me with this. Now it’s just me. I’d appre­ci­ate your patience with this until I get a new staff in place.

Today’s my first day back after being back a week. Nor­mally that’s not a prob­lem, and some­one else will acknowl­edge your mes­sages and let you know I’m away. But the per­son I hired to replace the last girl that left, who also runs my temp staff, hasn’t been heard of since the day I last paid her, which is the day I last sent you an email.

I’m let­ting you know this so you under­stand that I lit­er­ally just heard about this, and I’m doing what I can to get caught up. That means the newslet­ter might be a lit­tle light again this com­ing week.

I also wanted to ask you for a favor.

I need to hire an intern or some­one to work on com­mis­sion until next month, who’d be inter­ested in learn­ing about this busi­ness in exchange. In May, this will turn into a paid posi­tion. If you know any­one who’d be inter­ested in such an arrange­ment, a self-starter who knows a bit about the web and can work with me vir­tu­ally 10 — 20 hours a week, have them con­tact me.

In future months, I’ll be hir­ing a temp staff of five peo­ple to take care of this sit­u­a­tion, but I want the per­son I teach my busi­ness to not to be some­one who really just wants a job, or some­one who has a pass­ing inter­est. I want to groom a suc­ces­sor who I can com­fort­ably out­source projects to in the future.

I’ve tried just about every other type of arrange­ment, so I wanted to do this before I start an intern search at some local colleges.

Thanks for any help you can give, and I’m sorry if you sent me a mes­sage that I didn’t get yet.