Or "went" as one of my Swedish co-workers would say.
Sometimes IT can be fun, like when we get new technology to play with, but much of the time it can be a real downer. It is often a thankless job trying to make an often fickle OS play nice with the network. But we do it because thanks to Bill Gates, we have steady (well, as steady as it can be nowadays...) employment.
Sometimes we get an IT request that is so absurd, you are tempted to think it is a joke. Today, that happened. This is a true story. But before I can tell it, I have to give you a little background info, first.
The company I work for has many customers. The group I work with supports just one customer, one of the largest in their industry. This company has made a habit of buying up smaller companies that has technology it wants. Once purchased, the employees are absorbed or laid off. The assimilated employees usually go through culture shock as they try to grasp the way the parent company does business. You see, since they were smaller companies, they had their own IT department, local and on site, that did everything that was requested of them. As a matter of fact out of the three companies my customer has acquired in the past three years, two of them had IT departments two to five times larger than the industry standard. Needless to say, the mgmt of those companies were used to a little more "personal" support than what is normally offered. In other words, they are spoiled.
Now that they are part of the parent company, their local IT is mostly gone. The mgmt of these smaller companies now have to call the help desk like all the other employees. This is where my story begins.
A mid level manager from one of the acquired companies calls one of his local people for help. The local guy, not having any permissions to support IT like he used to can't really do much for the manager and tells him he will have to call the help desk. The manager goes ballistic. He wants to speak to a support person *NOW* and not the help desk. The local IT guy calls the account manager and tells him he needs help. Trying to make a good impression, the account manager passes the info on to my team (the wrong group to send it to since we only deal major high severity issues) and my colleague, being the good natured guy he is, calls the mid level manager. No answer. It turns out that he is traveling and is not in the office. Now worries, my colleague calls his mobile phone. Voice mail. He tries two more times and leaves messages. A couple of hours go by and my colleague gets a call from the local IT guy. My colleague and the local IT guy chat for a while and come to find out that the mid level manager has not called the help desk at all and does not have a ticket for his request. My colleague informs the local IT (remember, the local IT guy does not work for us...he works for our customer and does not have any admin permissions to their network) he needs to open a ticket to the laptop support team and they will contact the mid level manager directly. So instead of the actual customer opening the ticket, the local IT guy opens it for him with absolutely NO usable information in the ticket. No error message, nothing. There is not even a good description of the problem. Then we get the bombshell when we read the worklog of the ticket:
Ticket says, "Do not call him directly. You will have to have tech support call me (local IT guy) and give me the number they will be calling from. I will then forward this info to the customer so he can screen the calls.". It is also noted in the ticket that the mid-level manager is not to be contacted by anyone who is not the tech who can solve the case...he does not want his time wasted.
Our customer has purchased what is known as "VIP support". It is very special, dedicated support for the CEO, VP, and high level executives. Basically it gives them a local IT guy on call 24x7. At one time, local sites would submit people to be on the VIP list and since the pricing is per VIP, a large list became rather expensive, so our customer trimmed that list back to just a little over a hundred names (mind you they have well over 50,000 employees). Most upper management is excluded from that list so there is no chance a mid-level manager would be on it. But that is what this guy is expecting.
Now don't get me wrong. I don't want to see anyone go without support, but our customer has purchased a certain level of support and processes to match and that does not include anyone who thinks they are too good to talk to a help desk person the right to demand their own personal IT staff. Heck, I work in IT and I have to call the help desk when I have issues I cannot solve or do not have permissions to solve. Would I be happier with calling a Unix or Windows admin or the network guys directly? Sure I would, but I know I have to follow the rules. So does Mister mid-level manager.
I told my boss he is darn lucky my good natured colleague got the call and not me. I would have just told the guy (as politely as possible) that we had a help desk and he should learn to use it.
Okay, I feel better. On to the next bit of insanity that is called "my job".
Friday, August 21, 2009
Friday, August 14, 2009
Slacking Off Again
Has it really been over two weeks since I last made a blog entry? Wow, time sure flies when you are busy. Between church events, work, on-call, and family, I seem to be short of time lately.
This week I am on call and I must say that it has been the busiest week I have had since I have been in this role. It has even been busier than the time I was on-call during month end report closing when my TL/colleague was on vacation. THAT says a lot.
Not only has each day been busy but each night has brought on special challenges and long hours. Monday I did not get to bed until midnight. I had a church meeting to go to so my TL covered for me for a couple of hours but I took over at 9 PM and did not get to a stopping point until midnight.
I did not get to bed until midnight on Tuesday as well. On Wednesday my wife had an outpatient procedure on her leg and I was away from the office for three hours but when I came back I was incredibly busy. I was so busy that I did not get to bed until 4:30 the next morning. I was able to sleep for three hours and was up again at 7:30 AM with an emergency call. I worked it until 8:30 AM and handed it over to my TL. I asked him if I could grab a couple hours sleep and he graciously obliged. The entire time I was asleep he was busy and when I came back online at noon, I was busy all day until 9:30 PM. I was able to go to bed early and got about seven hours sleep before I got up and started my day.
Today has been calm so far...only one new issue. While it has not been resolved yet, it should be. Mind you we still have two other open issues from previous days (including the mail issue from hell that is almost a week old and counting) but the total workload and stress level has been much lower.
My only complaint that I have today is that customers tend not to follow basic instructions very well. Example - we have a customer who somehow corrupted an Excel spreadsheet and needs one pulled from backup. The restore team pulls the file and puts it on a temporary share that the customer can access. The restore team e-mails the customer and informs them that the file has been restored and where to find the copy. The customer for whatever reason does not respond to the e-mail for several hours. I step in and e-mail the customer and tell them the issue has been resolved and the details can be found in an e-mail sent to them from the backup team. All I ask is that the customer test the solution and respond to the e-mail sent to them by the backup team, CC'ing me in the process.
What does the customer do? E-mail's me directly asking me if this is the newest copy of the file and if not, can I get them the newest one. They completely disregarded the e-mail and did not follow simple instructions. I politely responded back and told them again what I needed them to do. They are doing that now. I hope.
This week has also been plagued with vast amounts of mis (or poor) communication. We (my group) has to communicate and coordinate "high severity" issues across many teams and sometimes to other IT providers (even to our competition since our customer has outsourced their IT support to multiple companies) and it amazes me that I have been getting better cooperation from a certain competitor (whose three letter acronym I will not divulge 8^) ) than I get from my own company. I have been routinely told that "it is not my group's problem" when I assign a case or request a certain team to assist or troubleshoot. I am not trying to air dirty laundry here but it always seems to be harder to do business with your own company than it is with others.
It reminds me of the time I worked for GTE Mobilnet (a cellular provider under the umbrella of GTE Communications) and had a problem with my home service (aslo with GTE). I called up the local support (back before everything went to India) and told them my problem and just happened to mention I was a GTE employee. When asked which office I worked in, I told them the Morrisville, NC off and the woman said there wasn't any office in Morrisville office. I laughed and told her that there was and I indeed worked there and had been for over a year. She asked me where in Morrisville and I told her and after I mentioned I was with the cellular group, she became very cold and said, "Oh, one of those people who are trying to put her and her people out of work." Needless to say my home phone service took days to get fixed, all because some 19 year employee of a dying company and industry was offended that I worked for a more cutting edge goup within the same company.
I didn't get good serviced that day from someone in my own company and that type of thing happens today all the time. I can call up my contact at our competition and present an issue to him and he (as well as his colleagues) will work it and report back to me most of the time. Take a similar issue that my company is resposible for and call up my contact to hand it over to him (or one of his colleagues) and I will get poor customer service and people who will not follow established processes because they either don't care or are two busy to help. The only difference in today and back in my GTE days is that the person helping me is not in danger of losing his job to my group. It is I who is in danger of losing my job to them.
This week I am on call and I must say that it has been the busiest week I have had since I have been in this role. It has even been busier than the time I was on-call during month end report closing when my TL/colleague was on vacation. THAT says a lot.
Not only has each day been busy but each night has brought on special challenges and long hours. Monday I did not get to bed until midnight. I had a church meeting to go to so my TL covered for me for a couple of hours but I took over at 9 PM and did not get to a stopping point until midnight.
I did not get to bed until midnight on Tuesday as well. On Wednesday my wife had an outpatient procedure on her leg and I was away from the office for three hours but when I came back I was incredibly busy. I was so busy that I did not get to bed until 4:30 the next morning. I was able to sleep for three hours and was up again at 7:30 AM with an emergency call. I worked it until 8:30 AM and handed it over to my TL. I asked him if I could grab a couple hours sleep and he graciously obliged. The entire time I was asleep he was busy and when I came back online at noon, I was busy all day until 9:30 PM. I was able to go to bed early and got about seven hours sleep before I got up and started my day.
Today has been calm so far...only one new issue. While it has not been resolved yet, it should be. Mind you we still have two other open issues from previous days (including the mail issue from hell that is almost a week old and counting) but the total workload and stress level has been much lower.
My only complaint that I have today is that customers tend not to follow basic instructions very well. Example - we have a customer who somehow corrupted an Excel spreadsheet and needs one pulled from backup. The restore team pulls the file and puts it on a temporary share that the customer can access. The restore team e-mails the customer and informs them that the file has been restored and where to find the copy. The customer for whatever reason does not respond to the e-mail for several hours. I step in and e-mail the customer and tell them the issue has been resolved and the details can be found in an e-mail sent to them from the backup team. All I ask is that the customer test the solution and respond to the e-mail sent to them by the backup team, CC'ing me in the process.
What does the customer do? E-mail's me directly asking me if this is the newest copy of the file and if not, can I get them the newest one. They completely disregarded the e-mail and did not follow simple instructions. I politely responded back and told them again what I needed them to do. They are doing that now. I hope.
This week has also been plagued with vast amounts of mis (or poor) communication. We (my group) has to communicate and coordinate "high severity" issues across many teams and sometimes to other IT providers (even to our competition since our customer has outsourced their IT support to multiple companies) and it amazes me that I have been getting better cooperation from a certain competitor (whose three letter acronym I will not divulge 8^) ) than I get from my own company. I have been routinely told that "it is not my group's problem" when I assign a case or request a certain team to assist or troubleshoot. I am not trying to air dirty laundry here but it always seems to be harder to do business with your own company than it is with others.
It reminds me of the time I worked for GTE Mobilnet (a cellular provider under the umbrella of GTE Communications) and had a problem with my home service (aslo with GTE). I called up the local support (back before everything went to India) and told them my problem and just happened to mention I was a GTE employee. When asked which office I worked in, I told them the Morrisville, NC off and the woman said there wasn't any office in Morrisville office. I laughed and told her that there was and I indeed worked there and had been for over a year. She asked me where in Morrisville and I told her and after I mentioned I was with the cellular group, she became very cold and said, "Oh, one of those people who are trying to put her and her people out of work." Needless to say my home phone service took days to get fixed, all because some 19 year employee of a dying company and industry was offended that I worked for a more cutting edge goup within the same company.
I didn't get good serviced that day from someone in my own company and that type of thing happens today all the time. I can call up my contact at our competition and present an issue to him and he (as well as his colleagues) will work it and report back to me most of the time. Take a similar issue that my company is resposible for and call up my contact to hand it over to him (or one of his colleagues) and I will get poor customer service and people who will not follow established processes because they either don't care or are two busy to help. The only difference in today and back in my GTE days is that the person helping me is not in danger of losing his job to my group. It is I who is in danger of losing my job to them.
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