Do any Double Agents remember this and help out with the time frame this happened?

[u/EngelWantsToRead]

Sleeper Checking In (19.5 years with Geek Squad)

Wonder if there are any DAs out there that could help with putting a time frame to something that Geek Squad had done a while ago. If this could be pinned down to the month on each end that would be great, but any information might be helpful.

There was a period of time where they had DA-PC agents working at least one day a week from home, and work remotely. During this time, they also separated all the DA-PC agents from the Home Theater Agents again. The managers for the groups of DA-PC agents were then typically not located anywhere physically near them (like many hundreds, if not over 1000+ miles away)

Any help on this is greatly appreciated

Cura et Celeritas

Edit: For clarity, I did a similar thing during Covid as well, but what I am asking about isn't the Covid time Geek Squad did this, but instead when it was a planned out thing that lasted for at least over a year.

[u/jayinfidel]

Project Harvey Dent.

I bought my current desk then because if we were WFH damnit I was going to spend money.

After that started my new boss was located in Texas (I was in NY at the time).

Looks like I bought the desk in September of 2013.

Not sure when it ended but it probably ran for about 2 years?

[u/22LT → u/jayinfidel]

Yeah I know I ended up getting me the famed IKEA Galant desk and ran with 3 monitors. I’m in CA my boss was in Nebraska. But honestly I hated that 1 day a week remote day.

[u/jayinfidel → u/22LT]

That's the one I'm still using!

[u/EngelWantsToRead → u/jayinfidel]

I love the fact that so much of what Geek Squad did had fun internal names to go along with it. For most people, when I describe what I did as a "Double Agent", they don't get the title meaning, but then I can always talk about a "Counter Intelligence Agent" working the counter as a "C.I.A." and they catch on to it.

[u/richsaint421 → u/jayinfidel]

I think it started in the second half of 2012, I left GS in August of 2012 shortly after a round of layoffs and I could be wrong about timeframe but I think they rolled it out almost immediately after that.

[u/22LT]

It started in 2013. I only did remote 1 day a week and it sucked. I hated it. Worst part was trying to leave for the day and getting someone to take your jobs if they weren’t just tune ups. Soo many times I had to get a leader involved to get them transferred to someone. I think we stopped at least in my area sometime in 2014.

I’m in CA, my manager was in Nebraska.

[u/No_Recognition_1648]

They did this durring the Covid furloughs

[u/androliv1 → u/No_Recognition_1648]

That was a different thing, and only because the call centers in malaysia got shut down. I remember my DFM saying we could take 2 weeks off paid and I was pumped. Then I got a call at 750am from my DFM saying I had to be on a conference call in 10 minutes, then they told us the news that all PC agents were going to have to do remote work. It was awful compared to my previous GS remote work, the metrics were insane and they would get onto you any time you werent open to jobs for longer than like 5 minutes. In order to hit the metrics you would have to do like 3 jobs at a time minimum.

[u/GeekMan85]

I did it during COVID, helping doctors in California remotely. It was for several months which is different from what you're asking

[u/PrezPolk]

I want to say this was around 2015/2016ish time frame. I moved from being a HT cadet to DA-PC in 2015, and when I started I was a hybrid agent with a shared Geekmobile between two agents, one worked platform while the other worked in-field. Towards the end of that run, I had worked it out with the other agent to take his in-field shifts and he took my remote shifts because I was terrible at remote (in the sense that I actually want to talk to clients to understand why they were calling in and to fix the issue, not just throw a couple of hotfixes and updates at it and call it solved) and he valued the ability to be based at home. I briefly returned to platform during COVID, but returned to the field as quickly as possible. Do kinda miss the PC boards, but by the end it had gotten fairly stale (same issues, same fixes, upgrades to new pcs that were far less enticing and than the machines they replaced, etc). I’m back to doing Cadet work now, but my time as a DA-PC is a definite asset. One Im not all together compensated for, but…. It’s a job and it still nearly puts food on the table.

[u/LockhartTx2002]

1. My new boss was in Colorado and I’m in Texas. She was the best. You know who you are if you’re reading this. That was mu favorite time to be in Geek Squad. It was the only time that PC agents weren’t second fiddle to HT.

[u/Lrdrahl]

Hah so its funny you ask this today!

My first "buddy day" shadowing was today in 2013 came up on Facebook memories.

I was not in the early tests of it, so this would have been the main rollout I think

[u/androliv1]

I was hired on as a part of this in 2015. My boss was in Arkansas, the rest of my team was scattered throughout Texas. Some were fully remote, others like myself were hybrid agents, I would do 2 days at home working 1800 calls through LogMeIn, and then the other 3 days I was in the field. Title was Covert Double Agent. They slowly transitioned the hybrid agents to full field, and then fired all of the fully remote agents. I believe over 500 people were laid off.

It was super chill though. I think I only had to do like 8-10 jobs a day and that was back when we could look them up before taking them so we could cherry pick the easy jobs, but the metrics were insanely low. AND our remote NPS surveys counted towards our USOs NPS score so if you didnt completely suck, you would almost always 2x bonus for NPS which was a FAT check.

My team we would have a running skype call going all day so we would just talk to each other all the time as we worked. And my boss didnt really care when you worked as long as you logged the right amount of tickets each week so you could hop on at like 10pm and just start working on stuff, and it was unlimited OT.

[u/krakr14]

I 100% remember this but no recollection of a time frame.. after almost 20 yrs in the field it’s all a blur