Michael Jones
About Michael Jones
Responsibility. It's a life lesson that I learned when I was 14 years old. It was then that I started my first job, delivering newspapers to subscribers around my neighborhood. I was responsible for deciding to rubber band the newspapers or to put them in plastic bags to keep them dry. I was responsible for getting them to those subscribers by a delivery deadline. I was responsible to correct my mistakes. If I was going out of town, I was responsible to help hire and train a "substitute" to do the job in my absence. It didn't matter if it was raining, snowing, freezing cold or blistering hot, I was responsible. Customer Service. At 16, I left that job and was quickly offered a job in the newspaper office. For the next 4 years, and two newspapers, I was the person that heard from those customers whom had problems with the delivery of their newspaper. I had to empathize with those frustrated customers, and address the situation, be it having the delivery agent re-deliver the paper, or deliver it myself. Those core skills have been at the heart of everything that I've done since, from working retail, to being a technical support agent in a contact center, to my time in Information Technology. These skills are why "it can't be done" is not the answer that can be expected, at least without some explanation. At one company I was responsible for direct "ringdown" lines from other companies to a dispatch center. These other companies used an obscure technology that was not documented by our technology vendor. I took on the challenge of learning the little known about technology, and using obscure features in my employers system, I was able to bypass that telephone company equipment and make it work directly. It is these "thinking outside the box" challenges that I live for, and part of the reason I started learning VoIP technologies, and more recently SIP technologies to continue to be at the forefront of telecommunications industry technology.