That is different than the setup I’ve had at this and my previous employer. The laptop I was issued is the one doing the work, there’s nothing else to connect to (well, other than network drives and whatnot).
I still wouldn’t do it and I’d ask for a device to serve that purpose, especially as I don’t own (or want to own) a new enough computer, I think (I don’t actually know; it’s an ancient laptop running some flavor of Linux that my husband messes around with). Certainly wouldn’t spend my own money to upgrade or replace it just for work.
I did buy a comfy chair, rising desk, and a little stand to raise the laptop up. That’s just for comfort. I love my home office, but it’s 100% a work space and I avoid it the rest of the time (except for the laundry drying rack and the drawers where we store tape and glue and envelopes or whatever!)
My department wants to buy people computers for their work. Incoming graduate students can be weird though.
They’ll say the one they used as an undergrad is still fine. It’s four years old, we’ll buy you another. Many of them are just a bit shy asking the advisor they just met for money when I tell them we’re happy to buy something, I just need to know what account to charge it to.
Of course others go far the other way. They’ll spec out a nearly $3000 laptop that just runs some terminals to connect to the cluster. Or ask for a desktop for the office, a desktop for home, and a laptop for the bike ride between (I guess).
The university is a bit presumptuous about wanting to use our personal phones. Desk phones are gone, so work numbers now ring to Teams. Easiest way to answer is on a smart phone, which the university will not supply. If you don’t want to put Teams on your phone, then they’ll give you a $10 headset so you can answer on your computer. Similar with Duo. If you want to buy (your own or department money) a Yubikey, you can use that instead of Duo on your phone.
So putting a few work related apps your personal phone is the path of least resistance, but not technically required.
I’m a government employee. Anything personal that I use for work that could potentially hold data, whether a computer, phone, or email address, that could be liable to public disclosure requests. So I never use anything personal for work. I don’t want to give up my personal phone for weeks because someone right-winger wanted to troll the government or there’s some kind of investigation.
I have this issue. One of my Data Visualization people quit with a couple of weeks before the new hire started, so my plan was to reimage and redeploy the same laptop. New employee explained that they couldn’t do their job without a brand new i11 with 256GB (this is a mythical computer). I told them what they were getting - an AMD Ryzen 7 with 32GB - and they will “make it work”. 90% of what they do is in the cloud anyway.
Likewise. I can see and remotely operate my work computers from my personal machine. I can’t down load data or anything to my home machine. The work computers do all the processing drive mapping and what not.
When I remote in, I’m just seeing my work computers, and can operate them from my home.
During my last stint as a state employee (pre-pandemic) I worked remotely quite a bit, but using the same laptop that would sit in a docking station when I was in the office. The only personal equipment involved were the keyboard, mouse and monitor.
I called in because I could not connect to the VPN. I wasn’t asking the tech to hold my hand and get Mac software working, I just wanted to know if connection requirements had changed, or if it was down for everyone.
As it turns out it was down for everyone, thanks to CrowdStrike. That’s not what he told me. He said “Oh you’re on a Mac, so I can’t help you”.
That’s like pulling into a gas station to top off the water in your radiator and being told “you can’t pull that Plymouth in here, I only work on GM cars, so get moving”.
I guess it depends on whether or not your employer has a policy about supporting Mac systems. If they’re supported, then that IT person wasn’t doing their job at all. If they’re not, then you really are on your own.
It really isn’t. And unfortunately, your attitude isn’t unique. I often have employees I support that treat me as if I’m someone selling them a product. I’m not, I’m your coworker. What you’re missing in your analogy there is that you also work at that gas station.
I have the reverse complaint. The IT department at the university likes to call everyone else customers. We’re not your customers, we’re your coworkers and colleagues.
It’s generally not that big of a deal, but I do encounter those who say “customer” with the same contempt cops say “civilian.” Don’t they understand, in IT there’s already a word for those people, it’s “user”.
You seem to not be getting the point. It doesn’t matter whether they support Macs because AHunter did not ask if they support Macs. He asked if the VPN was down.
Similarly, if I pull into a gas station for water, and you tell me that you don’t service my car type, that is entirely irrelevant. He was not asking you to service his car. He was there to get some water, which he would put in himself.
I’ll add another one. I go to a burger restaurant and order fries to go with my chicken sandwich that I already have. It would be stupid if they then told me they don’t serve chicken sandwiches. I did not ask for a chicken sandwich. I asked for fries.
The fact that you do not provide service X is irrelevant unless I’m asking you to provide service X. If I’m asking you for service Y, and you do provide service Y, then it does not matter that I also am doing service X on my own.
In IT, like many other specialties is my guess, people often ask for what they think they can get, not what they actually want. So when someone like @AHunter3 comes along and asks if the VPN is down IT people are often primed to try and figure out what is really meant. “Is the VPN down?” is a lead in to trying to get corporate IT to help with a home internet problem, etc. “But I’m trying to connect to the VPN, so you have to help me, even though Suddenlink is experiencing a nationwide outage, and I have no internet.”
To strain the analogy: When you say, “do you have water?” what the mechanic hears is “fix my overheating Fiat,” to which the response is “do I look like my name is Tony.”
Of course none of that really matters, because if the VPN is down, the correct answer to “is the VPN down?” is “yes”.
It’s a bit of a fine line because they are both. Coworkers and customers. I’ve spent years in retail, and I also worked technical support for a software company, so I know what it’s like to have customers that are outside of the organization and have paid for the privilege of getting service from me. And it’s not the same.
But it’s also not 100% different. I use the same customer service skills and professionalism with my coworkers that I would with somebody who bought a product from my company. My job title where I work is literally “IT Customer Support”. My coworkers are my customers. My job performance is based mostly on how satisfied those customers are.
But it can be weird, especially when my boss is my customer. Sometimes it can feel awkward.
Also, we try to avoid the term “user” over customer because it’s impersonal and can even be considered a bit derogatory.
If you want to talk about weasel terms, later in my time at Toys R Us forever ago, we were instructed to call customers “guests” and coworkers “associates”. Now that was a bunch of bullshit.
If you can’t get a straight answer from someone in IT support for a simple question like whether or not the VPN service is having an outage, because they immediately focus on your system and won’t even address the possibility, they are shitty at their job. That’s something that should be reported to whoever their supervisor is or someone else up in the chain.
That’s pretty common, in my experience, with any department whose primary purpose is helping another department in the same company. I’m in quality assurance, and we regularly refer to the departments whose quality we are assuring as our “customers.”
Unfortunately groups have to do this when they work within organizations that do a poor job of tracking internal costs. Support teams aren’t directly revenue generating so when budget cuts come they are often first on the chopping block. By referring to the people they help as “customers” it can help remind folks that these internal support interactions actually cost money, but in principle should save the organization money in the long run because external support services can be crazy expensive.
It really isn’t a problem when people are thinking like that.
The problem comes when “customers” are the ones you extract value from while providing as little in return as possible. That is how many businesses see their customers, and it can also be how many service departments see the rest of the company, because
and high revenue = extracting value from the customers = department importance.
The IT department at my university used to have that problem in a big way. They were an obstacle that needed to be worked around to get anything done, and they looked to extract as much money as possible from other departments.
One example, which also can suggest the time period, was long distance calling. They charged 2-10 \times the normal consumer rate for long distance, which was a huge profit center for them, considering the actual cost was a fraction of the consumer rate. A much needed change in management took the millions that had been banked on overcharging for long distance and used it to upgrade the campus from CAT3 to CAT6 and fiber.
Of course they overcharged for long distance, we were captive customers that had no choice. Until near the end when calling cards became a thing, and departments would buy those to avoid IT’s rates.
My agency has had that problem in the past with our service desk staff. I’d like to think it’s getting better, because they’re focusing more on actual customer service (and I’ve tried to help by volunteering to be on interview panels for new staff in that position) but historically that’s a problem.
I try to be a lot more personal. I get to know my “customers” pretty well, joke around with them, talk about their families and stuff. Because they are coworkers too. I’ve known some of these people for almost ten years now. That’s one way that this is very different from a traditional customer service position, where you might have one interaction with someone and never see them again.
I’m basically the only person in my region who personally knows every single other employee because I end up spending time with them at some point. So I foster relationships rather than just fix problems. I need people to trust me and one way is to acknowledge that they are people and treat them accordingly.
That has made my job a LOT easier than it would be if I treated them like faceless drones and just fixed their computers so they’d go away.
If there is one item that frosts me it is this attitude. If I have a connectivity problem, after restarting the app (like Outlook), disconnecting and reconnecting my network connection, restarting my router, checking that my personal computer has access to the internet through my router, restarting my work laptop, I call the “Help” Desk and ask if the VPN connection is down. The person on the other end wants to walk through just about all the items I’ve just done until they finally decide to check the status of the VPN servers and tell me, “Oh, it looks like we’ve been having issues with that”. All because I’m a (L)user who couldn’t possibly understand the intricacies of connecting to the VPN I’ve been connecting to for ten years.