2002-09-25: A Typical Sannio Day

A Typical Sannio Day

Sep 25 2002 11:37AM

This was originally posted to Online Community Relations at uo.com.

Take us through a typical Sannio day. What's the first thing you do when you get to work? What's the last thing you do before you leave?

First thing I do is visit Www.reallifecomics.com, Www.pvponline.com, Www.smallstoriesonline.com, and Www.bobandgeorge.com. There are a few other online comic sites I go to at the start of some days, but I make sure to visit the four I mentioned everyday—these are my favorite ones. (I only hope that they can forgive me for whatever traffic I just burdened them with by mentioning them. :] )

While the comics are loading, I’m already reading work-related e-mails (internal messages, e-mails from Ultima Online players, UO-based e-mail lists, etc.), and soon I’ve finished loading up another few dozen pages (broken up into several smaller sets of about 8 – 12 pages per set—thanks NetCaptor!). These new pages are all related to UO and online gaming in general, and they include UO fansites as well as our official message boards.

This start-up phase of my morning routine also includes replying to any e-mails & PMs that need immediate attention. I’m not always able to get back to people in a timely manner, and every once in a while I miss replying back to some correspondence, but I try to answer as many as I can as soon as I am able.

All this starting up & catching up can take quite a while, but afterwards things get kind of loose and are less predictable as a daily schedule. I’m kind of a multi-tasking, non-linear thinker, and I think that comes out in my daily activities. Although I don’t do all the following every day, here’s a bunch of events that could happen throughout my day (or week), in no particular order:

• Event Calendar: I approve, modify, or reject submissions to the Ultima Online Event Calendar. I check the event submission queue at least once a workday, and often two or three times. (Note to event sponsors: include your e-mail address and check your dates!)
• New Player Haven: Our New Player Haven message board needs to be checked several times a day—it’s a fully moderated board and needs the community team to approve or reject posts therein.
• Game Wizard: Some help requests, especially those that relate to our message boards & forgotten passwords, come to the community team through the Game Wizard. I’m one of the people who help with that aspect of the Game Wizard, jumping in several times a week (sometimes several times a day) to help there.
• Patch Message Updates: I’m most often the person here who updates the patch message, and I try to do that at least twice a week. (I think the most updates I’ve done in one day was three, and the most updates I’ve made in a week was about eight.)
• Update Center posts: Several times a week I post FYI, Site News, Shard Issues, or Development Center articles. The information I post often isn’t something that can be stated casually, so I tend to do a significant amount of research & fact-checking before I can post any of these articles.
• Tuesday Q&A: Although this is normally only published into our FYI section on Tuesdays, it takes a few days of question-collecting, fact-checking, and proofing before it can go live.
• Scheduled Meetings: I can have anywhere from zero to four scheduled meetings each day, but it’s usually not more than one. These meetings are normally in a special meeting room, but sometimes they end up happening in someone else’s office.
• Unscheduled Meetings: I can have anywhere from zero to four unscheduled meetings each day, and these might include me getting some last minute information for a last minute post, or me wandering into someone’s office with questions, or me overhearing a conversation and jumping in at the end with questions or comments.
• New Things: I bring up a lot of ideas. I can’t stop thinking. I spew out all sorts of nonsense to anyone who will care to listen. Maybe one time it’s a thought about improving the Web site to Cynthe (our Online Community Manager) or Blackhands (our Web Designer), maybe later in the day it’s “storytime” for Kerowyn (our Online Content Editor) as I regale her with a tale of my youth, and sometimes I just spit out what I think would be a great way to improve our entire service to Cynthe or Greywolfe or anyone who’d walk past me in the hallway, and minutes later I’ll play my own Devil’s advocate and describe how my plan wouldn’t work (well, not completely ;)).
• Research, Research, Research: Players ask a lot of tough questions that I can’t answer right away, and most of the answers require me to do a bit of research before responding. Sometimes the research is incorporated into the meetings I mentioned above, other times I send out e-mails or instant messages, but most of the time (several times a day) I walk down the hall or to another level of the building and enjoy some face-to-face chats with my peers.
• Documentation, E-mails, Messages, Board Posts: Ideas, summaries, research results--all that information I’ve been checking on over the course of the day needs to be noted somewhere. Sometimes that means sharing my information internally with the rest of the team, while other times I’m posting or e-mailing players about what I’ve found out for them. This part of my job I have to be most careful about: if I say the wrong thing I might be inadvertently explaining an exploit, if I note something incorrectly I may have just confused thousands of people, and if I write too much I could have just bored our entire player-base to sleep. (That last part is trickiest for me most of the time. Consider this Team Comment. It was originally supposed to be a response to one of several questions, and it ended up being a novelette. Do I ramble? Perhaps…. ;)

Normally I work each weekday from about 9-ish in the morning to about 7 or so (although it’s not terribly uncommon for me to stay until 8pm), with a lunch hour sandwiched in there somewhere, usually starting at 11:30. I also check in on the boards sporadically in my off time—weeknights, weekends, and holidays.

So that’s basically my day. Well, most of the time. :]

Sannio Online Content Coordinator
Origin Systems

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