This Job Would Be Better Without All The People

Our internal IT help desk does not like to do desk-side support, and they work in a locked area of the building to prevent drop-ins. They also hate doing phone support. Instead, they rely on chat-based support and being able to remote into employee workstations.

They have also, for security’s sake, implemented mandatory hard disk encryption which requires the user to enter in a password during the boot process long before the operating system is in control of the system.

One day, during password changing day, my officemate ran into an issue. She changed her password from the OS prompt, which is supposed to also change the boot password to the same thing. But when the system restarted, neither the new nor the old password worked and she was locked out. Since the system couldn’t boot, she couldn’t do a chat session for help and had to resort to the phone.

She spent over an hour on speakerphone hold getting the constant message that “Phone support requests are for emergencies only; users must use the chat support function for routine issues.” Finally, she connected to a support person, and they kept insisting that she needed to go to this specific webpage and follow the instructions to allow them to remote into her system. It didn’t matter what she told them about the fact that she couldn’t even boot the system, and it wasn’t connected to the network, they just kept reading their script. Why the script for, “My computer does not boot,” included the steps, “On the affected computer, go to this webpage and click this link,” is a mystery for the ages.

She finally lost her cool and snapped.

Officemate: “Honey, if I could do any of the things you are insisting on, we wouldn’t be having this conversation because my computer wouldn’t be broken. Either one of you comes down here, or you ship me a box to mail it back and I’ll give my boss your name as the reason I can’t get any of my work done for a full week.”

Eventually, someone showed up, was able to untangle the boot issues, and got her back to work. Unfortunately for the help desk, she was very vocal in her (dis)satisfaction survey and one of their managers ended up calling her for more information on her experience.  

On the bright side, her experience was hardly unique, and management got enough complaints that the help desk had to create a walk-in service center on-site that was crewed by at least two help desk employees throughout the normal workday. The help desk folks hate it because they have to interact with people in person all day long and can’t just leave them on hold, but the rest of us are glad that we can get faster service.