First Day at Boeing!

Ok, this is going to be a HUGE post, so let me sum it up first: I am so incredibly happy/excited, this job is... well, the job itself isn't that great, but everything put together leaves me feeling like a kid at Disney.

So this morning I was supposed to report to the Boeing Badging Office at 6:30am to get a temp badge. It's about 20 miles away, and not knowing traffic or anything, I was asleep at midnight and up at 5am, out the door at 5:45, and got there just about 5 minutes early. When I got there there were a few guys I recognized, particularly two who are about my age, so I fell in with the group and we got our badges. Our PERMANENT photo-hologram-magnetic-smartchip badges, good until September of 2007. This badge will get me through any Boeing gate, although it's probably only able to open the doors at our building. Still, that should enable me to make some private driving tours of their huge assembly facility in Renton, which I plan to take the public tour of as well (I hear it's really cool, the building is one of the largest in the world). So ok, that was cool, then we had to head back north about 5 miles in rushhour traffic to get to our building on Boeing property in Bellevue.

Our building is just outside the gated facility in Bellevue, which is unfortunate, I love flashing my badge at security guards ;) It's a nondescript 3-story glass office building with some really nice rocks gardens and forested paths around it with lots of benches. The first floor has a coffee shop in it, as well as most of our offices. Everything's cubes pretty much, but they're large, and the aisleways are named after local streets so you can find your way. Second floor isn't ours, some other group moved in and took it over. Third floor is where our classroom is. The entire building is filled with posters of various Boeing aircraft and projects, everything from the Super Hornet and 777 to an Apache cut-away and Sea Launch. I already asked, it's frowned upon to steal any of the posters :(

I guess I should tell you who "we" is. We are what's known as the Enterprise Help Desk. Basically, everyone who works for or with Boeing, or buys any of Boeing's products, gets a single number to call if they need any help. That's us. We could theoretically get stuff like "I'm driving around St. Louis and I can't find my hotel!", but for the most part it's simple technical stuff. Resetting passwords, getting connected to the internet, setting up archives in Outlook, etc. There are about 70 of us in Bellevue, about 70 in Renton WA, about 80 in St. Louis, and that's it. Oh, there's also some who work remotely from Philadelphia and Huntsville, but only a handful. Those 220 people handle an average of 5,000 calls a day or over 1 million calls per year.

I could go into a *lot* of detail about the specifics of our organization, our support structure, and out job, but since it's only first day and we haven't actually DONE any of it yet, I'm gonna stop there and just tell you how today went.

We started out with introductions of our instructors and a chance to get to know one another, then we were split into teams. My team is myself and the two guys about my age that I met earlier, Roarke and Mike. They're roommates and friends of 5 years, both went to Central (where Pat went after Riddle, and where many of his friends still are). Roarke wanted to program AI, so he majored in Philosophy and minored in Comp Sci and Networking. He wisely decided he didn't want to spend the rest of his life coding, so here he is. Mike majored in Comp Sci and minored in Networking. Both very cool guys, I'm happy to be on their team. The rest of the group (all 15 of us) are about as varied as you can get. Everything from people in their 40's who have managed huge networks to people like me who have no real experience whatsoever.

After those basics, we took a tour of the building and broke for lunch. After lunch, we spent a few hours eavesdropping on some of the current UA's (Universal Analysts) taking calls. This was REALLY awesome, because we used Netmeeting to watch their desktop and listen to the phone call, so we could see and hear everything that was going on, even when they remoted into the customer's computer. Some of the problems that came up were... someone needed help making an archive in outlook, another person needed help getting their laptop tunneled into Boeing from home, yet another person needed help putting a link to a presentation file on Boeing's network into an email, and the last one we listened to was setting up an email on a new laptop. This was *really* interesting listening to the calls, we listened to 2 Analysts with very very different styles, but both gave by far the best customer service I've ever heard from a helpdesk, they were very thorough in how they helped the customer with the problem and even went beyond that scope to help with other issues, sometimes without even being asked.

After that we took a break to stretch our legs and absorb some of what we heard, and then we rounded out the day with a look at Boeing the company, what they're doing, a history of the helpdesk, our chain of command, etc.

Some of the coolest stuff I learned today... first of all we will be getting phone calls from EVERYONE in Boeing. Including places like Phantomworks, and facilities in Texas that are so secret they can't even give us a call back number. While we get calls from everyone from office workers to the people who put the airplanes together, a fairly high percentage of our customers will be Engineers. In addition to the really cool people we'll be talking with and helping, we'll be encouraged to learn as much Boeing software as possible, even stuff like Catia that I would have learnt had I become an Engineer myself. Every day we get plenty of breaks, we only spend about 6 hours of the day on calls. Every week we get time to spend studying or researching or w/e, which we're even allowed to do while waiting for phone calls. We can also of course work on the training from home, since it's all web-based. We can also rotate through different positions within the EHD (Enterprise Help Desk) almost at will as soon as we pass the tests for them. The basic position is the UA (Universal Analyst), there's also XA's (Expedite Analysts, who provide info and look up answers to help the UA), EA's (Escalation Analysts, 2nd level Analysts who get the calls the UA's can't solve), and occasionally RA's (Research Analysts, a 2 week rotation where you do research to add info to the Knowledge Base known as BOSS). Ahh yes, BOSS. This knowledge base is the place where we can find answers to all our questions, from help with a technical problem to procedures for certain situations, it sounds like a really useful tool.

Anyway, brain is drying up, I'll get into more details of things as I get more hands-on time with them and understand them better. Suffice to say tho... this job is gonna rock, it's gonna get me where I need to go, and working at Boeing is like putting me in an all-chocolate candy store for 8 hours a day.