It's funny because I don't care any more

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Having five working days left in this job after seven years, I find that it's easier to just ignore the problems I've been complaining about all this time, declare them Not My Problem Any More, and laugh at the people who have to deal with them.

Case in point: Our helpdesk team inbox. Because of several management screwups involving staffing levels, amount of incoming useless crap, and competence levels, we currently have about ten days of email backed up.

It's really, REALLY funny to have a quick scan through the oldest items and find "Urgent! Must be completed for presentation tomorrow!", "This site has dropped off the network, please investigate ASAP", and "Please set up these twenty new users to start work on Monday".

Even more fun are the emails where the user has clearly sent it to the wrong team. I've suggested to management over and over that we should be scanning the mailbox daily for these and handling them ASAP, but who listens to me? So somewhere there are guys sitting on their thumbs, assuming that their problem is being dealt with, and the only reply they're going to get after ten days is "Sorry, you sent this email to the wrong people, sucks to be you."

But hey, guess what? NOT MY PROBLEM ANY MORE. BWAHAHAHA.

Comments

[majicke.livejournal.com]

I figure it is the user's problem for ignoring the "emails have a 3-5 day turnaround" reply email that they get automatically.

And if they had the sense to actually go to the Helpdesk's intranet page first(also on the reply email) - then they'd probably get the answer within about 30 seconds..

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, the autoreply. The one where -

1) People ignore it.
2) People reply to it despite it saying in huge red letters DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL.
3) People read it and believe the turnaround time message, despite the fact that it has only borne even the slightest resemblence to reality on rare occasions, and even then only by chance. Comes of being a political number set by people who have no idea what it's like on the front lines, and reviewed/changed apparently randomly.

I've put in a ticket to have the autoreply agent give an accurate indication of the current wait time on each reply. Not that it will ever be implemented, but it's just one more thing to point out.

[mouser.livejournal.com]

1) People are stupid.
2) I put a bad return address so if they TRY they get a "Who the HELL are you trying to send this too?" message.
3) People are gullible and helpdesk management are lazy. Can't help with that one.

As for most (not all) of the ones you list (and I get as well) "Lack of prior planning on your part DOES NOT constitute an emergency on my part."

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

Our email auto reply tells them 24 hours to a reply but, since we devote one person from our 15 man helpdesk, they usually hear from someone within 2 hours, except on Monday mornings, when the email person is playing catchup from the weekend. Then it might be the afternoon before they hear back, depending on how much mail there is.

This past Tuesday (Labor Day off), I got a call 1/2 hour after we started up:

I emailed in a support request for conference room xyz 20 minutes ago and haven't heard from anyone.

Well, there is a 24 hour turn around on email requests. What trouble are you having?

Whine, whine, whine, yadda, yadda, yadda

I'll send a ticket in to tech support.

I'll wait outside the room for the tech.

I'm afraid that the tech support unit responds to tickets in the order received and Tuesday morning after holiday can be busy. They will be out there within 4 hours.

But, but, I'm really important and my boss will think I'm a dumb fuck for not checking out the conference room last week, for not scheduling a tech to be here in advance, for generally being a clueless moron with a title, yadda, yadda, yadda... (paraphrased-I'm checking LJ, eBay, etc. while she's chewing her liver)

(after she winds down) Here's the CIO's suggestion email address for how we can improve our service. Thank you for calling.

*CLICK*

[sigurther.livejournal.com]

Geeze, sounds like you need a new position filled just to check the friggin' email queue. What a world.

[majicke.livejournal.com]

except we currently have about 40 staff(mostly inexperienced) with another 15 starting soon..

For some reason management keeps throwing people at us, in the belief it will fix everything. It won't.

[jecook]

Ah, the "Mongolian Hordes" approach.

That only works if the bodies being hired have a clue, and get cheat sheets as they walk in the door and breifings by the staff already there on what to do.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

As an interesting side note, the weekend shift seems to have actually got off their asses for once and cleared the backlog on the mailbox. I'm actually impressed.

Unless, of course, they did what we've had happen a couple of times, and 'accidentally' just deleted everything in there.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Which doesn't work for us anyway. Despite years of management's best attempts to turn us into a nontechnical call centre, people need a minimum of three months (and more likely one year) to become proficient in supporting the hundreds of systems and in-house programs we're the contact point for.

Back in Ye Good Old Days (tm), our hiring policy specified a minimum of three years previous experience supporting a multi-thousand-user environment before applicants would even be considered. These days, it's "can you turn up Monday?"