Argh...

[amynnah.livejournal.com]

I don't know what it is in the air today... maybe it's the mini-icestorm we had last night. Maybe it's the fact it was 65 one day this week, and plunged to 25 a day later. But either way, had some doozies today from the users/customers/people we support.

Recap: I work Helpdesk for a hospital. Level 0 support.


Right off the bat... first call of the day was someone who announced to all and sundry that she was computer illiterate. Not a problem, I am gifted with an exceedingly patient nature. I attempt to take it slow with her. The problem was with her Outlook. It was offline, with a big fat "Offline" in the lower right hand corner. I told her to look for that. She can't seem to find it. Ut oh...

I attempt to tell her it's on the very bottom right hand corner of the Outlook "popup" Window (attempting to use terminology she can understand). No luck. I finally give up and remote into her PC. It was right where I said it was, so I hovered the mouse over it and pointed it out to her, for "future reference." I advised her to right-click, with the right mouse button, on it (while I was observing her). What was her response?

"You're talking computer at me! I don't understand!"

I asked her what hand she had on the mouse. Her right. Okay. I asked her how many buttons her mouse had. Two. I asked her what finger was on the far right of the mouse. Middle. I told her to press the button on that side. Doesn't she hit the scroll bar instead? /facepalm.

...I considered it a loss and just did it for her. I'm sure we'll hear from her again, but it's job security! :)



One of our beloved doctors whose patients help pay for all our jobs (well... according to him, he's the Sole Almighty Provider and Uber-Daddy of the Hospital, Up Above the CEO of the Place who Pays Our Paychecks and Pwnstars our Jobs) calls up demanding we allow him to stream audio from a radio station's website. As we all know, streaming audio and video is blocked by the policies of the place we work at, due to bandwidth constrictions. If everyone can stream audio and video, the really important stuff (such as the ability to pull up tests and open hospital programs) would be compromised. Anyone with half a brain-cell would know this.

The doc gets pissed because he can't access it. We tell him why. He doesn't want to hear it. Uber-Daddy becomes a screeching two year old whose pacifier was taken away. We at the Helpdesk were torn between telling him how to fill out a form to get the ability to listen to the radio and eat up our bandwidth, or talking to his secretary and telling her to buy the good doctor a pocket radio if he needed his omgmewsiks.

....we ended up telling him to fill out the form, along with instructions how to do so... he got even more pissed and told us that was our job... unfortunately for him, we don't have the information unique to certain departments required to fill out said form. We asked to speak to the secretary, and she ended up doing it for him. She was also sympathetic to the 'desk for having to deal with him...



This one was just... odd. Got a call from someone saying she could print. No, that's not a typo. Maybe she wanted a cookie? Originally I thought she was unable to print, so I remoted into her PC and checked it out. It looked all right to me, and I asked her if it was printing. She said, and I quote, "Yeah it's printing! Why are you asking me if it is!?" I determined that it was supposed to be printing, and not just randomly spitting out blank pieces of paper or the cursed hieroglyphics...

...as we said our goodbyes and hung up, the user completely satisfied with her working printer, I wondered why she felt the need to call tech support with a non-issue...


Oh, before I get jumped on by the person on here that makes my teeth hurt, no, we are not rude to our end users. We know they help us out with job security, and we actually enjoy our jobs. These calls were more, "BUH!?" than anything. I took the first and third call, the second one was a call from one of my Helpdesk co-workers.

Comments

[freakbarman.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you work for the same Health Care system I do contract work for. More then likely not though. I have a feeling the good Doctor exists in every hospital.

[bitterfun.livejournal.com]

"We at the Helpdesk were torn between telling him how to fill out a form to get the ability to listen to the radio and eat up our bandwidth, or talking to his secretary and telling her to buy the good doctor a pocket radio if he needed his omgmewsiks."

We've had to tell people at my company the same damn thing... except we don't actually block streaming music... We just don't support their f'ing Break/Fix tickets when they can't get it to work. We have a particular asshole that opens a ticket for his Sirius radio once every 3-4 months. The asshole works in a call center manning the phones... *FUMING FURY*

[amynnah.livejournal.com]

Oh God, we have a two or three... one was actually banned from calling us until she took anger management courses. She had all of the earmarks of a bad customer:
1. When angry, would get loud, and yell over you, even when you were trying to help her.
2. Did not listen when you were attempting to explain the problem.
3. Demanded answers we could not give.
4. Threaten to get us all fired.
5. Demanded to talk to our supervisor every time she called (even though we are always nice and helpful to her, as our supervisor knows) to complain how unhelpful we are.
6. Demanding someone to come down right then and there to help her (everything from checking/sending email to network outages which were already being worked on).

Oh yes. She's a doozie. Our supervisor actually spoke to her, face to face, and she went off on him... which prompted a call to HR... and now she has to take anger management before she can talk to us again.

[amynnah.livejournal.com]

::sighs:: Sounds like he's really fun to work with... :( We don't get them very often... most of our peeps are cool with not being able to access things not work-related. ;)

[freakbarman.livejournal.com]

Yeah we had one of those here. We are doing a company wide system replacement. They are upgrading all systems to company standards. HP dc7700 with windows XP and office 2003. Well this doctor had off 2000. She didn't like the way the new office looked and wanted us to rewrite the code. I tried to explain to her that we could not do that. The then proceeded to scream and yell and say that I wouldn't do it because I was lazy and the entire IT dept was useless. This doctor was a psycologist too. Unfortunately she was fired. I never got details, but I can guess why.

[amynnah.livejournal.com]

Jeez... if a head-shrinkah yelled at me, I'd consider telling her to go talk to one of her colleagues, take some Valium, and possibly a week off to go binge drinking in the tropics until she chilled.

I think your shrikah needs more help than any one person, or the whole of IT, can give her...

[heinous_bitca.livejournal.com]

Sent Messenger after them. ;)

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

Doctors, and some lawyers, seem to have God complexes in ways that I've yet to encounter from anyone else. I've also noticed that the users who are the most abusive via email and phone tend to clam right up when helping them in person. I guess the distance and anonymity provided by the internet and phone system provide them an avenue to release their inner Asshole that otherwise gets contained.

I admit, though, I've never had someone call in just to tell me that things are working fine. That...would be awesome, however. I think that would make my fucking day.

[falnfenix]

something tells me that last user is used to having a non-printing printer, and felt the need to balance her numerous calls of "ZOMGNOPRINTINGS" - i have a few who do that for me.

and the entitlement...ohhh the entitlement. we have one doctor who will remain nameless...she feels that it's OK to call us in the helldesk well after hours (hello, 10pm?) for personal hardware issues. issues that we don't handle in the first place. she actually had the nerve to bitch to our manager about the behavior of one of our employees - who she called, on a friday evening, while the employee was drunk at a party. employee wasn't sober enough to think "gee, maybe i shouldn't answer a number i don't recognize?"

it's been hellish here ever since that event.

[asbrand.livejournal.com]

Kinda reminds me of my first job down here in Atlanta.

We submitted dental insurance claims electronically for dentist offices.

Dentists are the *cheapest* bastards on the planet, bar none.

This was in 1997, two years after Windows 95 came out, and just before Win98.

We had dentists getting miffed that, no, we would not support your DOS 2.11 XT machine on 5.25" floppies. Sorry...



-Az

[valiskeogh.livejournal.com]

me werk in hospital tooo!!!

what do you guys have to put into the tickets for the tech's?

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a lot of hospitals need someone around who can tell the docs exactly which major organ they can shove their demands up. In person, if necessary.

I hereby volunteer.

[pixilated-serra.livejournal.com]

Lol. Pwned!!!!!!1

[benatwork.livejournal.com]

I work in a hospital as well, though I work switchboard. It's really fun getting griped aat by coworkers when I leave a floppy disk in the computer and they needed to reboot.. then lost three hours of productivity because they couldn't grasp, 'push the button in the front of the computer that isn't the power button.' and a tech finally had to be dispatched to demonstrate this advanced procedure.

Even more fun was the brand new web utility for looking up physicians, which was so badly coded that I finally had to call support and explain to them about the little error message that came up whenever somebody tried to search for a doctor with an Irish surname. Like, ohh, Doctor O'Neil.

That was the fastest I'd ever seen a web programming problem addressed.

[ghostdandp.livejournal.com]

Thats why I have a two tiered policy-
Almost none of my users get my company cell phone number. Infact, I can count the amount of users on one hand.
I will not pick up a call afer hours that I can not recognize the number for. Even if I recognize the number, sometimes I'll still let it go to voice mail. I have to do this all day, I'm not taking care of small issues at night.

Once at a old job had a user call me at 3am to tell me they locked themselves out. I learned my lessons then.

[10001110101.livejournal.com]

Right clicking is talking computer? A working printer as cause to call helpdesk? Makes you wonder exactly why we're giving these people computers in the first place.

And seriously, WHEN will people get it through their heads that their WORK computer is there to help them WORK, not jerk around online and download things they could just as easily get when they get home? The sense of entitlement is just... startling.

[amynnah.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that made me smile. :)

[amynnah.livejournal.com]

Mess is no longer speaking to me. :(

However, a very large, very angry Tauren Druid will be sent after them to go pound their faces in with his big ass mace. <3

[amynnah.livejournal.com]

I never understand why the God complex peeps never learned that basic little line of mom's advice: You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

If you're nice to people, they want to bend over backwards for you. It's not that hard!

And lady number three cracked me up. :)

[amynnah.livejournal.com]

::snickers:: We don't use hyphens or apostrophes in the usernames. Makes life soooooo much easier.

And yeah, we get those calls a lot. "Why does it say insert system disk!? I don't HAVE a system disk! Send me a tech nao!"

"Okay... uh... can you try checking to see if there's any disks in your PC?"

".....oh... thanks..." *click*

I sympathize... our switchboard calls us on occasion, and they take the opportunity to vent to us about everyone they talk to. I feel horrible for them, and try to send them cookies after particularly bad phone days.

[amynnah.livejournal.com]

We had this new application put out that will allow people to access W2's, vacation time, and paychecks at home online. It was put out by Payroll. After the 300th or so call in one day, when it was released live, we joked about sending one of the Helpdesk guys over to break their damned fingers for calling us instead of Payroll.

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

I like XKCD's take on the honey vs vinegar debate.

http://xkcd.com/357/

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

And then pressure the app writers to append every error and informational message with "If you require help, please call Payroll on xxxx".

I'm a long-time fan of having error and informational messages in a separate file which can be modified for individual organisations. The app generates a message code instead of a message; the subroutine for displaying it checks to see if there's a customised version of the message available and if not displays the default. As an advantage, each message box can have the message ID string somewhere unobtrusive and tech support can use that as a fixed pointer to their own reference material.

Ideally, TS would have direct or near-direct edit control over the master versions of the app message files, so they could add directions to the errors like "You're seeing this message because you don't have access to the Sales database. Call Norma on extension 8823 to get this fixed."