When you work at TAC, you are required to be “on-shift” for 4 hours each day. This doesn’t mean that you work four hours a day, just that you are actively taking cases only four hours per day. The other four (or more) hours you work on your existing backlog, calling customers, chasing down engineering for […]
Category: TAC Tales
TAC Tales #9: Left Hanging
When I was still a new engineer, a fellow customer support engineer (CSE) asked a favor of me. I’ll call him Andy. “I’m going on PTO, could you cover a case for me? I’ve filed a bug and while I’m gone there will be a conference call. Just jump on it and tell them that the […]
TAC Tales #8: The problem with data
My job as a customer support engineer (CSE) at TAC was the most quantified I’ve ever had. Every aspect of our job performance was tracked and measured. We live in the era of big data, and while numbers can be helpful, they can also mislead. In TAC, there were many examples of that. Take, for example, […]
TAC Tales #7: “Just slam it in!”
When I first started at TAC, I wasn’t allowed to take cases by myself. If I grabbed a case, I had to get an experienced engineer to help me out. One day I grabbed a case on a Catalyst 6k power supply, and asked Veena (not her real name) to help me on the case. […]
TAC Tales #6: The best organization tool ever
I’ve come back to Cisco recently, and I think I can say that I haven’t worked this hard since the last time I was at Cisco. I remember my first manager at TAC telling me in an interview that “Cisco loves workaholics.” In an attempt to get more organized, I’ve been taking a second crack […]
Tac Tales #5: MWAM
New Year’s resolutions are made to be broken, and I haven’t been keeping up with my resolution to do more blog posts. Now that I am back at Cisco, I am focusing on programmability and automation, and I do have a lot to say. However, in honor of my return to Cisco, I thought I would […]
TAC Tales #4: Airline Outage
I don’t advertise this blog so I’m always amazed that people even find it. I figured the least-read articles on this blog were my “TAC Tales,” but someone recently commented that they wanted to see more… Well, I’m happy to oblige. The recent events at United reminded me of a case where operations were down […]
TAC Tales #3: GSR
Shortly after I went to work at TAC, my first team, which was dedicated to enterprise customers, was dissolved, and I ended up on the Routing Protocols team. The RP team supported both enterprise and service provider customers, and I had zero experience on the SP side. There was quite a learning curve ahead. One […]
TAC Tales #2: How to troubleshoot
The case came in P1, and I knew it would be a bad one. One thing you learn as a TAC engineer is that P1 cases are often the easiest. A router is down, send an RMA. But I knew this P1 would be tough because it had been requeued three times. The last engineer […]
Tac Tales #1: Case routing
Before I worked at TAC, I was pretty careless about how I filled in a TAC case online. For example, when I had to select the technology I was dealing with in the drop-down menu, if I didn’t see exactly what I had then I would go ahead and pick something at random and figure […]