This post is the third of a series of posts describing what we do on a daily basis. If you’re interested in reading more you can follow the tag #a8cday. Here’s my day as a Happiness Engineer.

When I applied for the job of a Happiness Engineer, besides falling in love with the title right away, I didn’t really know what I was expected to do. After the last few weeks (mostly during my trial, and about a week of full time employment), I realized that this title is so wide in what it encompasses, that it’s difficult to sum up. To help people who might want to work with us, Automattic employees will be casting their day’s of work in their personal blogs, under the tag #a8cday – you’re welcome to read up about it!

Generally speaking, Happiness Engineers help out in many ways, including writing Daily Post and Hot off the Press articles, speak at WordCamps, write up the support docs, answer questions in the public forums and private forums posts, as well as private Live Chat support. I’m assigned to the latter, and therefore most of my day involves around answering chats and helping WordPress.com users with whatever they need.

Wednesday

So today I had a later start – was pretty exhausted from yesterday. Woke up around 9:00. Got up from bed around 11:00. Yep, I was lazy today. Woke up, had my morning breakfast and coffee, while writing yesterday’s post since I was too exhausted last night.

I actually felt like today was a little more tiring, since I did a lot less reading, and had a lot more difficult chats than usual.

12:30 – Officially signed onto Slack / P2s / Olark – and started taking chats and following up on new mentions in between chats. I was planning to watch another HE Training video later on today.

14:00 – I had around 15 chats by this time, and followed up on some tickets from the day before. I took a small break for lunch, and another coffee break.

14:30 – Got back online, and started taking more chats.

17:00 – Made myself a big pot of green tea to keep myself going. The first thunder of this year has struck, and got me all excited (I love the rain, and we don’t get enough of it in Israel!). Was a bit disappointed when I looked outside and it was like hot sweat falling from the skies. Oh well!

19:00 – Started preparing towards the end of the day, looking through any unresolved issues or tickets, while taking chats in between. Also had a little snack (I feel guilty. Had a bunch of cake).

20:00 – Live Chat team Google Hangout. Caught up on the team’s agenda and talked about the new Helpshift features. Lasted about 40 minutes. After the meet, I’m writing up today’s post.

21:15 – Sign off for the day, but still lurk around from my phone.

Today’s day was pretty simple, but not as expected. I had quite a few difficult chats today, and learned to use our Mystery Charge Search (yep, we had something called that). Gonna start paying more attention to those as similar things arise. Helped a couple of users set up custom HTML widgets using our text widget. Plus all the usual, but the chat flow seemed to be a little slower and more difficult today – which is great. Helps me learn new things!

So that’s it for today 🙂 Expect tomorrow’s post.