techrecovery | Firing a user

OK, I was outta town for a few days, but it appears that several of ya wanna live vicariously though me and hear the story of Firing a User.

I used to do support for a large online university (fully accredited, it was the online campus of a real school) - started in student support, went to faculty support and ended with being a team lead/escalation point and Exchange admin (this is a big deal, the classes were built as public folders on an Exchange cluster and shared out as newsgroups. I had to make sure that happened right.)

Students, faculty and staff all have provisions in their contracts that says they'll be respectful and polite with staff.

So one day I get a call from a faculty member who'd called in earlier that day and broke her Outlook Express again - she'd changed a setting after she got off the phone with the previous tech and lo and behold, she was disconnecting from the Internet. That's what happens when you CHECK the 'Disconnect after sending and receiving" box.

Her previous problem was with an address book, the other tech didn't even go INTO that area. EU is CONVINCED the tech did it. Calls her every name in the book. Call started off angry (Yeah, you jacka$$es broke my computer again, Why the f*ck can't you ever fix anything?) and went from there. I politely reminded her that she needed to be civil or I couldn't fix her problem. That worsened it.

Fortunately, I was recording the call. See, $University's VoIP phone system had a 'record to voicemail' feature that we could enable, and I was logging all of this one.

I was able to get her to shut up long enough to figure out her problem and fix it, then she started off again, I again reminded her she was supposed to play nice, as I was playing nice, and got an earful. I let her know that her conduct WAS a terminatable offense, she continued to question my parent's marital status, my sexuality and my relationship with beasts of burden.

Finally, I was able to get in a word edgewise, told her that I'd revoked all her access, that I was locating a replacement for the three classes she was teaching and that her last paycheck would be sent post-haste. I wished her well and offered to fax her a copy of my official complaint, she declined and terminated the call

I exported the recording to my desktop, repackaged as an MP3, filled out my forms, sent them to the faculty managers, and her contract was terminated before I left for lunch.

My Burger King double cheeseburger, extra mustard extra pickles tasted especially fine that day.