Hello Ubuntu Planet, it seems it was yesterday I joined Canonical’s Global Support Services team in Montreal, Canada. Two months already!
It’s taken some time to adjust to the new schedule, as I wanted to continue most of my involvement in several local advocacy and technology organizations and choosing to work the evening shift 3PM until midnight has proven a good choice. I can still hang out with the great minds at FACIL and Koumbit, among others, but I had to drop anything that took place in the evenings – including those requiring going out for only one drink, I swear after a meeting or a presentation. I can now join them after midnight 🙂
Jokes aside, it’s been an intense couple of months, working with many interesting and passionate people. It’s challenging to show up for work every day and just pretend not to be excited about everything we can make happen. There’s a sense of urgency, pragmatism and dedication I have rarely seen in other environments. Canonical is growing fast and there’s some pain involved into that, but it also means I get to be part of the growth and some of its planning. Working in a support position means I get to talk directly to real Ubuntu users and customers, but also offer assistance and help internally to OEM deals, packaging testing, product development, affiliates and partners registering in the marketplace, and much more. I have yet to memorize everyone’s timezone 🙂
When posting to Ubuntu Planet I’d like to answer as many questions as I can about supporting Ubuntu and working with Canonical. I’ll be presenting a Support Q&A session at the upcoming UbuCon in NYC, so I hope I get interesting feedback that I can also post here. Feel free to post your questions as comments to my blog entries and I’ll try my best to answer those every week. And if there are no questions, I’ll make up some 🙂
I’m interested to know about the demographics of your paid support customers, particularly whether you get many calls from the « home user » demographic. If you do get « home user » type calls, are many of them from non-technical people?
I’d like to know how you solve or support people problems. Are you on the phone most of the time, or do you have some lab to work on people’s problems ? Do you have many machines with every version of Ubuntu, mac OS and Windows installed and work on them to reproducve stuff?
I saw you at NY Ubucon last Friday (I was the one who had never used Ubuntu and had wanted to obtain an Ubuntu book). During your talk, you had said that you were interested in pictures of « Ubuntu » in interesting places. Here is a link to one. It’s not as amusing as the one in your presentation (at least, not to the guys in the audience), but in case you want to add it to your collection, enjoy!
http://bored.com/billboards/images/ubuntu_billboard.jpg