No freaking kidding....

[patgund.livejournal.com]

The Register had this rather interesting article:

IT: the world's most stressful profession

Some of the letters sent to them were even more interesting:
Brentford: home of the suicidal IT professional
Brentford: home of the suicidal IT professional

"It seems easy, doesn't it, to explain to someone how to do things with a computer? "Please drag the files from the zip file to the folder you created on the desktop." "Ah... how do I drag files?" In a few minutes' time, you're going to be talking this fun lover through deleting keys from the registry. A riot a minute.
The stress in IT comes through the fact that you're talking to people who in all other aspects of what they do [that you can observe] display excellent skills and talent. Only, when they start working with computers, and more so when the sticky brown stuff hits the fan, they acquire the density of neutrino matter. There's no way to make them do the most simple of tasks. Operations that cost mere seconds to complete now take 30 minutes to an hour. And you have all that other stuff that your boss wants you to take care of. He simply won't believe it took you 45 minutes to help Mrs. Lafferty navigate the website to find a piece of information. They admit they don't know anything about computers and yet they know their computer better than you do, they don't believe you when you tell them something is going to happen or they won't accept direction from a lowly tech [a double bladed axe should be mandatory for IT support for managers]. And they lie to you.
An American bomb disposal specialist knows that when he screws up he won't live long enough to feel the pain. The IT worker knows that the pain will not go away. The bomb disposal specialist knows that the bomb wants to kill him. The IT worker knows that the user wants to drive her/him insane. Bomb disposal specialists have it easy."

Comments

[darkblade1.livejournal.com]

Man, isn't that the truth!

Most days I've taken off weren't for vacation. They were just to recuperate from awful days!

[abstrak-tokatl.livejournal.com]

heh.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

The experienced IT worker knows a thousand and one cunning ways to get clueless fools off the phone, or at least how to reduce the stress of talking to them.

(Of course, this usually works better in a corporate environment, although there are still tricks for dealing with the general public.)

[d-l-leonine.livejournal.com]

Yea...ever since my unexpected departure from Time Warner I've been wondering if I even want another IT position. 5 years on the phone with starfish was way too much. I mentioned yesterday in my journal that I've even lost 10 pounds in the month since I was sacked. It has really made me thing about what kind of stress I was really under, even though I thought I did a good job of playing it off.

[major-error.livejournal.com]

oh so glad I'm what's considered Tier2/deskside.
There's nothing quite so satisfying as telling the user to "step aside, let me handle this."

I suppose the level of stress is also proportional to the number of 'people' supported. Having started off in a position whose best estimate of local users supported was 10k, and now working for a business with just over 1/100th of that, I can honestly say that there's far less stress in my job...

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

I loved it when it was just me supporting 100 people. Six months of training them to click a 'repair' icon I placed on their desktops FIRST, before calling me, and my workload dropped about 90%.

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

It's all the goths and emo kids pushing that average up ya know.