Dear Users… (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people) Part 10

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We all work from home now. I enjoy the elimination of the commute but there is a distinct drawback in murder opportunities.
Indeed. Oh well there's always remote delivery of computer "upgrades".
Did you know it's relatively easy to modify a generic mouse to deliver an electric shock?
 
Don’t think of it as a list opportunity, think of it as a challenge to greater creativity!

Order that Russell’s Viper from Amazon and have it delivered to your co-worker’s house!

Counterfeit Facebook posts from a coworker where he calls the local biker gang a bunch of limp-waisted pansies!

Start a rumor that Jenny over in accounting is the one that ratted out Tony “Strangulator” Marcosi to the cops!

Have a Speed Limit 120 mph sign put up on your neighbors street!

Hire local kids to paint Eldritch symbols on your coworkers roof to summon the demonic swarms from the Tele-Tubbie dimension to devour their soul!

There are still endless possibilities for a suitably crafty and motivated murder-dispensator!


Sent from my volcanic island lair using carrier pigeon.

All excellent ideas, worthy of the BOFH himself.
 
Us: "Users. Supplies lines are a mess right now and supplies of everything are limited, especially things like PCs, laptops, phones, printers. Please try to take care of your stuff."

Users: "What's that? I didn't hear you I was too busy spilling coffee on my laptop."
 
One function of my role is to follow up incidents that are placed On Hold. If for some reason we need more information about an incident, we contact them and place the incident On Hold until they reply. This stops the SLA clock so we can't be penalised for waiting for them. We try to contact them again three days later if they haven't replied, then again three days after that. If they still haven't replied three days after the second contact, we resolve the incident with resolution code Caller Unresponsive. These followups are the task of the person on the late shift, which is usually me since I like working 1030 - 1900 and nobody else does.

All this background is to say that one of the most satisfying parts of my job is when I mark Caller Unresponsive on a job with *URGENT!!!* in the title.
 
Dear Users

There's ~400 users in the organization. Please give me full names in tickets. A first name or worse a nickname does me no good.
 
Dear users:

If you already have a ticket submitted for an issue, having additional tickets opened does NOT get your issue resolved faster.

In fact, now I have to spend time (in which I am not working on your issue) to find all the duplicate tickets you’ve opened, link them to the original, and close out the extras.

Not to mention that two different people may now be working your issue at the same time, which can greatly complicate diagnostics and troubleshooting.


Sent from my volcanic island lair using carrier pigeon.
 
Dear users:

If you already have a ticket submitted for an issue, having additional tickets opened does NOT get your issue resolved faster.

In fact, now I have to spend time (in which I am not working on your issue) to find all the duplicate tickets you’ve opened, link them to the original, and close out the extras.

Not to mention that two different people may now be working your issue at the same time, which can greatly complicate diagnostics and troubleshooting.


Sent from my volcanic island lair using carrier pigeon.

Same people that press the call button for the elevator again while waiting.
 
Same people that press the call button for the elevator again while waiting.

Or, worse, they're halfway up the building and waiting for a "down" elevator, but press the "up" call button in hopes it will bring the elevator to them faster. All that does is delay anyone going to the upper floors because now the car has to stop for a passenger who has no intention of getting on. :mad:
 
Then there is the number of times I'm in the basement with a cart and can't use the elevator because it's full of surprised people who couldn't be bothered to see that the arrow was pointing down, not up. Of course, if they hadn't pushed the down button to a floor they're not supposed to go to anyway, the elevator would have just bypassed them on the way down and and picked them up on the way up, getting them where they were going at exactly the same time without wasting mine.
 
Or pushing the button on a pedestrian crossing, then crossing anyway because the road is clear, completely oblivious to the fact that now you've pressed the button, cars have to stop and wait for nothing to happen.
 
Dear Users

There's ~400 users in the organization. Please give me full names in tickets. A first name or worse a nickname does me no good.

That's reminded me of one of my first jobs at a large company. I remember once having to hunt down someone called "Bob in accounts" as he has an issue raised by the FD because he apparently couldn't send the FD a report, no one in his department was called Bob or Robert or Rod or Rob.. asked for verification of the name got a rather nasty response in effect telling me how stupid I was and he wasn't going to do my job. It wasn't like I could physically walk into the accounts department and ask for Bob as they were in a different building miles away. Spoke to my boss, who explained that the FD was a **** but was the brother-in-law of the MD. I ended up having to email everyone (separately) in the accounts department to track down who it was who was having problems. Of course their name wasn't Bob, I can't remember what their name was but it was something like Neil - i.e. totally different to Bob. And there wasn't a technical problem, it was a Tragicmonkey special the FD wanted a report about something that wasn't in the data, not-Bob had tried to explain to him that they couldn't generate the report because they didn't have the data. But the FD wanted it so someone had to be at fault if he couldn't have it. Thankfully my boss at the time wasn't a complete arse and he did deal with it but I know my name was mud for quite sometime.
 
Dear Users

There's ~400 users in the organization. Please give me full names in tickets. A first name or worse a nickname does me no good.
I missed this. I get this all the time. We provide Premier Support for certain people - usually ministerial staff or the secretariat. These people have a special number to call which goes directly to the Premier Support team. If there is no-one from that team available to answer the call, we get it.

About 95% of the time, when they call they say "Oh hi, this is Jane, Ricky's EA." as that is sufficient ID. I'm sure the people in the Premier Support team know who Jane and Ricky are. They have only about a dozen callers in total. But I have something close to six thousand. I have no idea who Jane and Ricky are.
 
If I had Ultimate Power, I'd stop the capability that users have of logging incidents with us by email. They absolutely never provide any of the real information that we need to fix their problem. It always creates more work for us - we have to email them requesting additional information, they fail to provide it, we email them again to follow up, in a process that I have noted in an earlier post.

I just did a followup to an email that someone sent saying literally "My Chrome is not working". And that was it. That was the entire email. DETAILS PEOPLE! Come on!
 
If I had Ultimate Power, I'd stop the capability that users have of logging incidents with us by email. They absolutely never provide any of the real information that we need to fix their problem. It always creates more work for us - we have to email them requesting additional information, they fail to provide it, we email them again to follow up, in a process that I have noted in an earlier post.

I just did a followup to an email that someone sent saying literally "My Chrome is not working". And that was it. That was the entire email. DETAILS PEOPLE! Come on!

Hey - they tried - they could have sent "the internet isn't working"
 
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