I haven’t written anything for a while, because of the simple fact that I had nothing to say. The problem with being a writer is that sometimes you have nothing to write. I also have a day job, and sometimes it can keep me quite busy. Finally, an afternoon drive provided some inspiration. There’s a […]
Tag: HTTS
TAC Tales #20: Crash, burn, and exit
I’ve mentioned before that, despite being on the Routing Protocols team, I spent a lot of time handling crash cases in TAC. At the time, my queue was just a dumping ground for cases that didn’t fit into any other bucket in the High Touch structure. Backbone TAC had a much more granular division of […]
TAC Tales #19: Butt-in-Chair
This one falls into the category of, “I probably shouldn’t post this, especially now that I’m at Cisco again,” but what the heck. I’ve often mentioned, in this series, the different practices of “backbone TAC” (or WW-TAC) and High Touch Technical Support (HTTS), the group I was a part of. WW-TAC was the larger TAC […]
TAC Tales #18: All at once
The case came into the routing protocols queue, even though it was simply a line card crash. The RP queue in HTTS was the dumping ground for anything that did not fit into one of the few other specialized queues we had. A large US service provider had a Packet over SONET (PoS) line card […]
TAC Tales #17: Escalations
When you open a TAC case, how exactly does the customer support engineer (CSE) figure out how to solve the case? After all, CSEs are not super-human. Just like any engineer, in TAC you have a range of brilliant to not-so-brilliant, and everything in between. Let me give an example: I worked at HTTS, or […]
TAC Tales #10: Out to Lunch
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 […]
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 #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 […]
A CCIE Goes Home to Cisco
In this article in my “Ten Years a CCIE” series, I describe my experience going to work at Cisco as a CCIE. Unlike many Cisco-employed CCIE’s, I earned my certification outside of Cisco. A CCIE leads to a job at Cisco I returned to my old job at the Chronicle and had my business cards […]