I work in tech support. I’m called in on a consult because the company’s internal programs aren’t working. I look at the input and notice they keep entering a dash.
Me: “You know this input cannot handle special characters.”
Client: “It’s not special. I use it all the time.”
I work in IT and I assist in tracking down issues and correcting them from various departments. The tickets are coded in priority from low to urgent, meaning that business is stopped.
I get an urgent ticket from the call center, which typically means phone lines are down, so I stop what I am doing to look at it. The request states that eighty calls in the past month have been routed incorrectly for [Product]. This needs to be researched and corrected immediately.
Eighty calls? I pull up how many calls this product receives each month: over 35,000.
I close the ticket and respond.
Me: “I show that members have the ability to select in the phone tree which department they wish to reach. If eighty members out of 35,000 calls reached the incorrect department — which is less than 0.23% of the call volume for [Product] — I would recommend that we put this in the monthly bulletin as a success case and see if we can get the same percentage in our other products. Thank you for sharing the good news with the IT department as, typically, we only see Urgent tickets for escalated items such as the phone system down in the call center.”
Sadly, it was not in the monthly bulletin, but it was brought up in my one-on-one with my manager to not copy the entire department on ticket responses.
I work for the IT department of a rather big company as a first-level tech. My job is to answer the internal IT-Desk helpline, open a ticket, make a first assessment of the caller’s problem, if possible, solve it if it is minor, and forward it to the right expert if it isn’t.
I answer a call with my usual greeting, which clearly states that the caller has reached the IT help desk, but I am interrupted before I even get to it.
Caller: *Loud and upset* “You need to come here right now! There’s a rat in my drawer!”
Me: “Pardon me? There’s what?”
Caller: “A rat! There’s a rat in my drawer!”
Me: “I think you’ve got the wrong number; this is the IT helpdesk! You want maintenance. Let me get you—”
Caller: *Interrupting again* “No! I need help! This is the helpdesk! There is a rat in my drawer! Now come and help me, you lazy f***!”
Me: “And what am I supposed to do with your rat? Does it need software updates? You want a new casing for it or maybe a mousepad to make it cosy in your drawer? I can’t help you, madam! Call maintenance!”
The caller falls into expletives, yelling ugly derogatives at me before I can even try to give her the number for maintenance.
I don’t have to stay on the phone with abusive idiots who don’t understand that IT doesn’t have to play nice here, so I just disconnect the call and block her number for thirty minutes so she can’t immediately hassle a colleague. I am now lost as to what to put into the ticket I have to write for every call for documentation. Finally, I just put, “Caller tried to report a rat in her drawer. Directed her to maintenance.”
Every employee has a personalized caller ID that automatically attaches their tickets to their individual call in the system, auto-filling their names and positions as well. I don’t write in about the swear words and derogatives in detail as I think she was just scared of the rat, but I flag her as getting abusive anyway and hit the button to save the recording of the call which would otherwise be deleted as soon as I closed the call.
The next day, I get called into my boss’s office. Inside is a smug-looking woman leering at me, one of the department heads, and my boss.
Boss: “Well, we’re here to clear up an accusation against you. Mrs. [Caller] here insists you’ve cursed at her, belittled her, and refused to help her with a simple issue. Can you clear that up for us? I would have looked up your logs, but [Department Head] insisted on talking through that issue.”
Me: “Well, I insist on listening to that call right now; I saved it to the ticket just in case. Before that, we’re not talking about anything.”
I see Mrs. [Caller]’s face go pale, and she opens her mouth, but before she can say anything, my boss, who must have pulled the ticket with her name already, hits play, and the call recording blasts from his speakers.
After the whole fiasco plays, everyone is silent until my boss turns to the woman and says sweetly:
Boss: “So, what was it you wanted from us for your rat? The hardware or the software update?”
The department head is red as a tomato. Between clenched teeth, he apologises and shoos the woman out of the room. My boss is grinning from ear to ear.
Boss: “Sorry for that scene. I would not have allowed this to happen to anyone else, but I know you can take it. That moron, [Department Head], is just newly promoted and already trying to push his weight in a really inappropriate way. His whole department nowadays behaves as if they’re everyone’s bosses, and they need a little pushback. And I needed a witness.”
I assured him it was all okay and agreed to go on and put in a complaint against both with Human Resources along with my boss. The next time I got that woman on the line — this time for an actual IT issue — she was very meek and subdued.
HR listened to the call, and I know she got a warning not to treat colleagues that way.
During the next meeting with my boss, he dropped that the department head was demoted again. He hadn’t even lasted a month.
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I work in internal IT for a retail company. Lately, a big portion of my job has been password resets. We have an SSO (single sign-on) system which means almost everything uses the same password. We have the ability to check the status of their accounts — is it locked/unlocked, how long until it expires, etc. We can’t see the password itself or what the user might be entering. I have a user call asking for a password.
User: “I need to set up my password so I can sign onto the computer.”
I check the account and see that there was a password set about a week ago. With the SSO, for some reason, everyone half knows what to call it, but most of the employees don’t seem to understand what it actually means or entails.
Me: “I’m showing that your password was just reset last week. It’s the same password you use for [System].”
User: “I’m not trying to sign into [System]. This is my first time, and I’m trying to sign onto the computer, but there’s nothing that says [System] on the screen.”
Me: “You use the same credentials that you use to sign into [System] to access the computer.”
User: “I don’t see anything that says [System] here. I’m trying to sign onto this computer for the first time.”
Me: “I understand that, but you still use your [System] credentials to sign in. I show a password was set on [date], so that’s what you’ll want to use.”
User: “Today’s my first day. I have no idea what that is.”
Me: *Headdesk*
I realize that I’m going to get nowhere with her, so I go through the process to verify her identity and get her a temporary password. Meanwhile, a manager or someone walks in, and the user kind of lowers the phone and starts half-whispering.
User: “Oh, yeah, Service Desk is helping me get signed in. She keeps saying that I set a password on [date], but I never did.”
Manager: “Yeah, you did. That was when you did [various pieces of paperwork].”
User: “I never did that.”
Manager: “Yes, you did. We filled out [various pieces of paperwork] so you could start.”
User: “No, I never did that.”
I finally got her signed on and everything, but I felt sorry for that manager. I hope it was just a case of early morning/no coffee versus the user actively forgetting doing paperwork, but who knows?
I worked at a tech help desk in 1995. Some of the people I dealt with really struggled with technology.
One time, I saw a lady try to use a mouse like a sewing machine pedal — on the floor, with her foot. She called the help desk to complain because the mouse cable wouldn’t quite reach the floor.
We also had one computer’s CD drive destroyed by the user using the tray as a coffee cup holder. They said they thought that’s what it was for.
We had another user who kept reporting that their floppy disk drive was malfunctioning and losing their work. We replaced that drive three times and finally caught them pinning their disks to the wall with a fairly strong magnet to keep others from using them.
The 1990s were fun.
