So I work in IT at a casino. We have on-call shifts after normal business hours and cover multiple properties.
The way the on-call works is that the caller calls the help desk and leaves a message. The message is then forwarded to all the IT staffs Blackberrys. Whomever is on call is expected to pick up the call. The standard call back time is 15 minutes, though we are usually way faster than that.
So last night one of our users called and left a message. They explained what the problem was. Being a user, they were sorta clueless. So clueless in fact that they couldn’t hang up the phone properly.
On the message you hear the actual problem, a short silence then the handset hitting the base followed by:
User:"I wonder how long it will take these fucking douche bags to get back to us.’
Some other person: “About 13 fucking years.”
About 30 seconds go by and then the phone is hung up properly.
About 2 minutes later the user calls back and leaves a message stating that they still had the problem and that, on the original call, there was someone talking in the background which we may have heard.
Did I mention that the Network Manager, Directors and the CIO get these messages as well? They get the calls and review them to ensure that us lowly network admin folk answer the calls in a timely manner.
Someone is getting a stern verbal thrashing this evening. The woman who left the message works graves. Her boss got a call from the CIO who heard the message first thing this morning.
OOPS.
I have the .wav file at home. I plan on writing a song and inserting the message into it. Ought to be fun.
Call back and say “Sorry about the delay. We were looking for a douchebag to have call you back. Then we realized that you had left the message, and well…we couldn’t exactly ask YOU to call YOU back now, could we.”
As an IT guy, I’m not. You’re hitting my pager at whatever ungodly hour, the fact I’m still employed here indicates that I almost always respond in 15min or less, and you still bitch about it taking forever? Well, maybe next time you won’t be stymied by the technologically awesome act of hanging up your damn phone.
I guess Mosier has never been in IT. The amounts and kinds of crap we have to put up with are legendary. On top of having to fix the normal, everyday stuff that breaks when you have large numbers of servers and workstations running, we also have to put up with the damned users and their cluelessness.
The users get pissed at us when things don’t work even when it is their own damned fault. (Why, yes, your computer is running slow. Of course, had you not downloaded every virus and piece of malware known to man we wouldn’t have this problem. Oh, your computer stopped working when you reorganized the cables because you didn’t like the way they looked? Well, the ugly blue cable is there for a reason. It’s the network cable and has to be plugged in*)
The problem got fixed in a timely manner. The callback was within 5 minutes of the original call. I wasn’t the on-call when this particular issue was called in, another guy had it that night but it was taken care of quickly. In fact, the longest the user will have to wait, assuming the first admin screws up, is usually 30 minutes. The way it works is that if the users don’t get a response in 15 minutes, they call back and the Network Manager takes it. If the Network Manager doesn’t callback in 15, the Corporate Network Admin get the call. After that it is the CIO. As far as I know, it has never gone to the Network Manager. I work with him everyday and would have heard about it if someone screwed up.
It is rather nice having upper management that gets what we do and backs us up. We have had other situations where other departments pulled some amazing crap. For example, I got a call one day from the F&B director stating that he needed me to move all of the F&B people to their new office, NOW! Of course, they didn’t give us any heads up on the move. The new office didn’t have any network installed. A call to my boss, then the CIO called the F&B director and gave him a short lesson on the proper way to enter an IT request. The other cool thing about this company is that IT drives a large amount of revenue and, therefore, the CIO has a lot of pull with the owners. You don’t want to fuck with our CIO.
Slee
*That PC had ~ 8,000 infected files on it. I formatted the SOB.
**True story. The user was rather high up on the accounting side.
I think I get what Mosier meant. The customer didn’t intend for anyone in IT to hear his comment. It’s the normal kind of venting we all engage in when we’re frustrated. He didn’t abuse anybody and shouldn’t be written up unless IT staff are also written up when they do the same thing. IT never makes a comment about the idiots whose stupid mistakes they have to fix?
It is kinda funny though. I did something similar a few years back when I thought I was on hold. I’d never abuse someone who’s fixing a problem for me, but swearing about the situation (to yourself) is natural.
Apologies for the mild hijack, but something very similar happened to me once.
My car was in the shop for service. I called to check on the progress. I was very polite. The guy who answered the phone asked if I could hold, I said yes. Then I hear: “Hey Chuck, this asshole wants to know when his car will be ready.”
Chuck came to the phone and answered my question. Then I asked him to put the first guy back on. When he picked up, I said, “Hi, this is the asshole again.”
He acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about. Yes, I spoke with his manager.
In a slightly different form, I saw something like this recently.
We’re working with one of our customers on a big project, which involves filling out a grant application. After a recent shared-desktop meeting (via GoToMeeting), we all hung up the phone and went on with our work. Except the gentleman who was hosting the meeting (a consultant for our client) forgot to shut down GoToMeeting. I glanced up at my second monitor to notice that he was writing an email, slagging my boss and me for being difficult and nit-picky. We had a good laugh over that, but we both wished would could have seen his face when I disconnected after he sent the email (a pop-up informs the meeting host when someone leaves the session).
Later, when the grant application came back with directions that pretty much vindicated us in spades, I wished I could acknowledge seeing his email and throwing it back in his face. But, they are our customers after all.
Nah, that’d be me.* I do the slot machine software engineering; IT doesn’t like us much 'cause we know computers and we like installing fiddly software, like high-powered debugging tools - and we always want some exceptions to the security rules
not really, of course - you’d be surprised at the software requirements - for security we’re tighter by a couple orders of magnitude higher than banking
