Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Day Two: The Ticket Deluge Continues...

I realize that as a junior sysadmin I will get the grunt details simply because my skill set in *nix is rather weak. I will be given account creation, deletion, group adds and removes, shell changes, etc because those tickets can encumber the better admins. I also manage our ticket queue and dispatch the "Site Specific" tickets that require the customer be called with 60 minutes of it being submitted. Usually, the workload is such that I can do some project stuff and have it not interfere with my grunt work. The past two days have changed that. I have been getting a lot more account admin stuff than normal...2-3 times as much. I am not complaining...it keeps me out of trouble, and it does make the day go by faster. However, when the TL gives you stuff to do and you get requests from project people across the pond, you find yourself with a lot of things to do in a small amount of time. I guess I could pawn some of this stuff off, but why? It is not hard, just time consuming.

I guess the other reason why I have been busier is the fact I have been going on fact finding missions for some of the other tech's to free up some time for them. I call the customers back and try to decipher the cryptic and often phonetic verbiage in the tickets. Some of them have been quite amusing. One said, "Customer call to inform Internet Explorer is locked in Meth". I always wondered what IE's problem was and now I know...it has a meth addiction.

I have also gotten a few cases back from the help desk that have messages in them akin to, "Customer states issue has still not been resolved". Duh! You know why it has not been resolved? You data entry is HORRIBLE. I had no idea what the customer wanted on some of them and on others I had little if any customer contact info. I have also been getting a LOT of duplicate tickets for the same issues and the help desk is not realizing this. SO I send the cases back with "This is a duplicate, please refer to ticket #1,345,678.

If these were new help desk agents, I could understand, but a couple of these guys have been there 2 years.

No comments: