This was exactly my work philosophy! Sadly, I sometimes had to battle clueless overlords to practice what I preached.
This gets me, too. I mean, it’s so much easier for the help desk to just say, “sorry, it’s networking’s problem,” and close the ticket. It might not get you working, but it’s true, and there isn’t anything the help desk can do to fix it. (To defend them a very little bit, user reports of problems will often come in before the dashboard shows something is down.)
I provide a bit more bespoke tech support to my department, so the email chain will often be something like:
Them: I’m having trouble connecting to the VPN.
Me: You obviously have enough connectivity to send email, can you tell me some more about the symptoms, is it authenticating, or does it stop before it gets there?
Me, 10 minutes later: Just got a notice that the VPN is down.
Diagnosis on connectivity problems can be a bitch. If your Outlook isn’t working, the problem could literally be anywhere between your chair and the server someplace that happens to hold your email. Are you clicking wrong? Did the datacenter in Oregon lose connectivity? Is the corporate VPN busted? Did a routing problem separate your ISP from half the internet?
It also can be hard to trust what users say. Even when they’re not actively lying, the “Outlook problem” might be because they decided to check email while waiting for the power to come back on…
That’s someone who is bad at their job.
One of the most important things a person can do if they do support professionally is LISTEN. If you do not pay attention to what a person is saying, and make assumptions, you are going to suck.
Let me add, I get this often where I work. Someone will contact me and ask if the VPN is down. I will tell them no, when it goes down I will usually know right away because us in IT are constantly chatting in Teams.
But I don’t dismiss their question either. Because sometimes the VPN will go down.
Holy hell, this is the gospel truth.
Oh yeah, this is true. Troubleshooting these things can take a long time. Usually my approach is to picture the whole process as a chain, and work one link at a time. (Heh.) Like, can you get to an outside web site? No? Okay, how are you connecting, are you on WiFi or are you using a cable, or do you have a cellular connection? And so on.
Oh, and if someone has done any of that stuff already, I absolutely do not dismiss their previous troubleshooting. I appreciate it, because that will save us time. I am not going to walk them through everything again from scratch. I don’t have a manual I am reading from step-by-step that I have to follow. I think some of these cases people are describing, where they are talking to someone in support and they force you to go back and redo things you’ve already done, these are not actual support folks who are knowledgeable about computers, these are people following a script and don’t know how to deviate from it or aren’t allowed to.
And I know these people exist. At this point in my career I get asked to be on interview panels at my work, and sometimes people who get interviewed to fill support roles at our agency are revealed at some point to have previously worked at a job like that and don’t have any real experience. Which is a disservice to them, and also a disservice to us. No, we are not hiring you to read from a script. We don’t even need a person to do that, a web site or a phone tree or heck, even AI can do that stuff.
Yes, and it takes experience to be able to recognize that. I will sometimes have to circle back to what a person said and ask for clarification. The cool thing though if you have a job like mine and take the time to build relationships with folks, they aren’t going to lie to me. They don’t have any reason to. I will tell someone flat-out, I don’t care what you did, you are not going to get in trouble, just tell me and we’ll get it fixed. Your dog chewed up your power cord? First, is your dog okay? Cool. Next, we have a no-fault warranty with Dell so they won’t care, I’ll report it and get a replacement.
If someone just tells me the wrong information as a mistake, I can usually figure it out eventually because other things won’t add up. And I don’t get mad, FFS I am a technician and they aren’t, it’s my job to know these things, not their job. If they call something by the wrong term or misidentify something or make an inaccurate assumption that is fine, it’s my job to figure that out.
Our networking group fixed a problem, and signed the message
You should be good now.
Sorry for any covariance.
At least I didn’t get any correlations with the fix, “we’ve corrected the error, and network faults are correlated with the probability of divorce.”
Are they complaint with applicable laws and regulations, though? I see a lot of documents on my job about how things are definitely complaint.
(Compliant)
Came back to reread this thread. The weird thing is that they quietly reverted back to supporting older versions of MacOS. I’m back to connecting from my native OS. I discovered it by accident. Just futzing around, not expecting it to work. But the protocol launcher made the connection and I’m connecting from MacOS X. Much nicer to not have to do it within the wrapper of a virtual machine.
I pit our HR department.
We all need to go through DEI training. That’s fine. It’s on LinkedIn, which I loath to create an account. OK, Whatever, I’ll do it.
HR - “Oooopsy. We added two extra letters to the link that we sent and did not know it would break the link.” They sent this to 500 people.
I am unamused (I’m in IS). You want US to go to training. Tell you what, YOU FIRST.
You had to create a LinkedIn account just to do required training? That should not be necessary, unless your employer regularly uses LinkedIn for this sort of thing.
We have LinkedIn Learning available at my agency for people who want to take advantage of it, but it’s all elective. Our mandatory stuff is shared on an internal state site. It’s weird to suddenly require people to do something on LinkedIn.
It does seem odd to encourage employees to visit a site through which they can find outside employment.
LOL, well yeah, that’s true. 
Maybe less weird for my work since we are all public employees, the culture is a little different and if people want to move on to better opportunities they actually get support for that. But LinkedIn Learning, from what I remember when I used it, isn’t focused at all on finding you a new job, it’s literally just a library of online training modules. And LinkedIn isn’t primarily about finding jobs, but rather about professionally networking with people. It’s pretty handy even if you have no intention of finding another place to work, and can be beneficial for an employer to have employees active there (depending on the employer and the nature of the employees’ jobs).
Yup.
There is myself and a few others that can’t do inhouse training. I suggested to just send us a .pdf. Or a link to the video. Nope.
And the training is mostly about - Furthering your career, How to lead others. How to transition into other opportunities.
Been there for 32 years. Retiring in about a year. None of that applies to me. I felt like telling them to ‘GET OFF MY LAWN and OUT OF MY COMPUTER’.
What it comes down to is HR and the Attorneys doing a CYA.
I’m still allowed to be aggravated by it though.
I’m afraid not, at least not until you’ve gotten the qualifications for that by taking the suggested online course.