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".
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