While running my SupportPress system for several months now it dawned on me that the  MySQL database that lurks just behind the scenes is collecting quite a bit of accidental detail on my coworkers that use the system. Nothing that would endanger anyones privacy, so quickly put that notion out of your head. What it does do is record the datestamp of when people enter tickets into the system. Generally people enter tickets right after they’ve identified a problem, of if they come to us, we start the ticket as the first thing we do, so again, the initiation of a ticket is in a general sense linked to just after the problem was detected and brought to our attention. For the remainder of this post, I assert that the datestamp on the ticket is when the problem occurred.

So with a middling amount of database skills and analysis under my belt I decided to run some aggregate queries on the data. Here’s what I found:

When I aggregate all the days of the month together and count how many tickets were initiated on which particular days I discover four notable days where things seem to on-average, go haywire: The 1st with 81 tickets, the 6th with 66 tickets, the 12th with 56 tickets, and the 23rd with 79 tickets. What’s really interesting about this dataset are the dates on the opposite side. The least haywire day is the 31st, with 11 tickets then the 28th with 20 tickets and the 3rd with 28 tickets. So now I can say, in general, that the 1st, the 6th, the 12th, and the 23rd are “Days That Suck”. The best day is the 31st.

I ran the same analysis but instead of days of the month, I used hours. In general the mornings are where people seem to have the most problems. 14 tickets at 7am, 201 tickets at 8am. At Noon the tickets drop by a hundred, then from 2pm to 4pm it rises gently but nowhere near the morning values and the afternoon peak comes between 4 and 5pm. After 6? The rush of tickets just stop. People don’t report problems when food is on the line. 🙂

The last analysis I did crossed day and hours together and counted the tickets. This had some interesting data in it, since I was just looking for any notable outliers. Hours and Days where the ticket level was say, more than 20 for that hour. Here’s some of the “Problem Days and Hours”: The 1st of the month at 10am and the 23rd at 10am.

What is to be determined from these really general findings? There are some cursed days at the office apparently. The 1st, the 6th, the 12th and the 23rd are really quite troublesome for people. Mornings are rough but on the 1st and 23rd, at around 10am the shit hits the fan.

SupportPress collects this data for as long as it runs and I’ve no intention of stopping so the further we go the more (or maybe less) pronounced these interesting bits of information will get. Those that work with me that also read my blog might have some insight or they may just find some of this helpful if they have spare vacation days to spend and are looking for some reason to not come into work.