<High-Fives Wolfman>
Having run into my own fair share of people who are best defined as continually incurring the ID-10-T error code, I laughed my ass off reading that. 
Back when I worked in support, the Sales dept was the bane of my existence. I got a call from one of the worst ones once that went like this.
Salesguy: So, I have a guy here that needs to be able to track his inventory and know when he needs to reorder and stuff like that.
Me: Ok, if he’s got the **inventory tracking application **, it does all that. If he doesn’t know how to use it, set him up with the training group.
Salesguy: He doesn’t have the inventory software. I sold him the Purchase Order application. I told him that you could make it do what he needs out of it.
Me: Uhm, the Purchase Order app tracks a company’s spending. It doesn’t generate invoices or you know track inventory. He needs the Inventory Tracking software.
Salesguy: Nah, he doesn’t need all that. I really think you can make the Purchase Order program work for what he needs. Here’s his number, call him and see if you can help him.
Salespeople are the darlings of my company so you pretty much have to humor whatever bizarre notions they got into their head. Otherwise, supervisors would get involved and you end up getting your hand slapped and wind up doing it anyway.
I called the customer and he was actually cool about it. He told me that he was sure Salesguy had just made a mistake and sold him the wrong product and all he really wanted was to get switched over to the right one which put the ball right back in Salesguy’s court.
Also of Production, Quality, Research and Logistics. The only reason they’re not usually natural enemies of Maintenance is because Maintenance is back-end: in companies that sell Maintenance, Sales is a natural enemy for Maintenance.
Based on your writing skills and being a Doper, I can tell why: you’re too logical. SAP’s documentation is 100% salestuff. It says “it is possible to create a production plan,” but not, never, ever, ever, how.
If you want to know how, they say, you must sign up for this, this and this course (costing 6000$+ each plus cost of stay), hire a team of consultants (many of whom can’t find their arse while sitting on the potty) and give them your left gonad plus the right kidney of your firstborn child. If no firstborn children are available, your own right kidney and half the liver may be accepted instead.
Nava, uncertified SAP consultant.
Thank you very much What Exit? for the defense, and that is largely correct.
She apparently hardly ever uses the system, and has done this numerous times… doesn’t log on for 6 months, or a year, and then needs to run a report and can’t seem to understand that Id’s expire if they’re not used. This is my first time dealing with her, but mentioning it to my boss yesterday I got the backstory. Apparently the user really is an idiot in this case, who has had this explained to her several different times.
While I do not ACTUALLY wish for her to die in a fire, it is frustrating to see users who remain clueless, despite being educated repeatedly.
Invariably, they are mad at us for not being able to “fix the problem” right away.
I want to be What Exit if I grow up. Being on the bottomest rung of the IT ladder kind of sucks.
btw: Princhester, if you think a user forgetting a password is some rare instance that only happens if they don’t log in often, you CLEARLY have been working with the elite users of the world.
For the longest time all it took was a user changing their password on a Friday and they would forget by Monday and disable themselves. I’ve trained our users pretty well and the worst ones have actually been let go in our recent and past layoffs.
In defense of Tristan, also - users are very good at tricking techs.
They call up and give you a command (retrieve my password) in a very know-it-all sort of way to set you down one path. If you follow their path, they get more and more pushy about how something is totally broken and you both get fixated on fixing the problem. It’s all complicated by them yelling in your ear.
Once you get a moment to actually give it a thought (as opposed to just following their orders) you usually come up with that key question such as “when was the last time you logged in?” and only then do you realize they have been blinding you to the real problem the whole time.
Trust me - if Tristan’s answer to “I can’t log in to my account” was “when did you last log in?” every single time, the problem would never be that the account expired. This is just the evil way in which the world works.
Cripes, this just laid me out! So true, and I have used SOX requirements to escape from a big load o’ stupid.
And I definitely dance with the stupid: I’m in Sales IT. As if that weren’t enough, my company’s ERP system is Oracle, but we recently acquired a couple of companies who run SAP, so, lucky us - we now have BOTH Oracle and SAP. :smack:
I’m in the reverse boat - our company uses SAP and just bought another company (roughly a quarter the size) that uses Oracle. This is our second go round with an conversion from Oracle - just so looking forward to going through that again.
I’m the functional IT support for the SAP ERP - I get to translate what the business wants into specs or instructions for the programmers. Thankfully the lines are blurry at our company - several of the programmers know the business extremely well, which can be a godsend. And management knows that I know what I’m talking about, so often I can convince them that some of their bad ideas are, well, bad.
I don’t think I’d enjoy being in a sales support IT role so much… inhouse customers are bad enough, outside ones are scary.
As to SAP… eh, it’s a system. Yes, it’s huge and clunky and vague - but once you learn it, configure it and customize the hell out of it, it’ll get what you need done done. Of course the first couple of years till your company gets to that level aren’t much fun.
Right. So she was not doing something particularly idiotic to your knowledge, but you called her clueless anyway. Luckily for you, some fresh backstory proved your initially baseless judgment to be correct.
You got this from my posts how?
So now we have one poster defending Tristan’s namecalling on the basis that the user may have broken procedure that we have no evidence even existed, and another saying that asking the obvious question shouldn’t be done because by some weird metaphysical rule if they did it wouldn’t be the obvious question. You do realise that by the same weird metaphysical rule, if it was this user’s invariable practice to tell the tech that they hadn’t used their account for a year every time they had problems logging on, the problem would never be that the account had expired. That would be just the evil way in which the world works.
You guys really aren’t doing such a great job of convincing me of anything other than that lame is all ya got.
So the user is to blame for not knowing to tell the tech something that the user probably doesn’t know is relevant, while the tech isn’t to blame for not asking about something they should know is relevant?
Look, I don’t care as much about this as it probably seems, but I find it hard to see how Tristan comes off looking any better than the user in this. It’s fun to have a particular skillset and laugh at those who don’t have it. But yanno, when I started out in my profession (which is service based) I used to make sarcastic comments to superiors about clients who didn’t give me the information I needed to do my job, and I got rebuffed. I was told that it wasn’t up to clients to know what I needed to know to do my job, it was up to me to ask appropriate and detailed questions.
Reviving a 5 day dead pit thread to nitpick a minor point and saying you don’t care much? Priceless!
I’m sorry your bosses were dicks but helpdesk sucks bad enough as it is. If you don’t get to grouse about users with other IT folks it would probably make you crazy. I still think a reasonable intelligent person would think to mention they had not used the system for an extended period. In fact I know users that I consider closer to airheads still would let me know that they were having trouble signing on but they hadn’t used said system in over a month. So yes, not using a logon for over a year seems like something a user should be expected to mention.
Now I am not helpdesk, it is only a small portion of my job but even my worse salespeople have never went a year without using a sign on and suddenly need it. So no, I don’t think it is something most IT people would think to ask and yes I do think it is something a user should mention.
Finally I think you are acting like your old bosses in this thread. **Tristan **is getting to compare IT battle stories and you’re just trying to piss in his Wheaties.
Well, it’s our procedure that I’m talking about, not Tristan’s. And yes, if you break procedure, you might get called names. Not to your face mind you, but appropriately behind your back (imagine common users doing this all the time, they deserve it, and it’s just joking and bantering between coworkers to get through the day). Big deal.
Learned that at the ripe old age of 19 when taken out to an account with the salesman. He promised them things that the computer could not physically produce. I stated as such in front of the client. Nothing said until later when we got into his car and I got a royal baking. Of course, my smart assed and angry response was to tell him not to promise fantasy results to the client, because we’d all look bad when we couldn’t produce the physically impossible.
Of course, our asshole owner’s response was that it’s the salesman’s account and he can promise them that the machine will produce rainbows and gold from thin air if that sells the account, and we the programmers would just have to do the best we could and take the blame for any failings so as not to make the salesman look bad. :smack:
Of course, that was the same guy who;
A> Bought out an electric typewriter sales company in 1982. <snerk> and
B> Had all but one of the employees of that company (all female) quit immediately because of his reputation as a sexist pig.
This thread makes me really happy that we’ve got a sales guy who keeps regular contact with us in Operations and makes it a point to know what we can and can’t do. We have another sales guy who doesn’t keep in contact, and every. Single. One. Of our problem customers come from him. All he cares about is making the deal and fuck what happens after, while the Good Sales Guy cares about getting customers who will keep giving us business.
Salespeople are the natural enemy of nearly every part of the organization, with the exceptions of (a) the part of the balance sheet labeled “revenue” and (b) the executive leadership that craves that revenue like heroin yet fails to understand that the increases in the other parts of the balance sheet, specifically the bits under under “expenses,” are required by the organization in order to cope with the sales department’s antics. This basic disconnect accounts for a large fraction of the dysfunction in the average organization.
Haven’t been posting much this week, too busy. Not sufficiently interested in this thread to post, till I got bored yesterday evening.
They weren’t dicks. They are (now) colleagues and partners. They knew about client service and professionalism. I am now the boss. I would and do say the same things to my juniors. Don’t get me wrong, my bosses were not dicks about it: it’s just something that they had to explain to me about my job.
Right back atcha. The reason you can’t win on this point is that everything you say about the user just makes it look worse for Tristan. The more you talk about how this user should have thought to mention they had not used the system for an extended period, the more you are emphasising that it was an essential point that anyone who wasn’t clueless should have known to be important. The more that is true, the more Tristan should have known to ask about it. Heck, in his last post he admitted that users not using the system for a long time and getting locked out and not realising why they were locked out was a known problem. He’s the tech guy, but he didn’t think to ask about it.
Listen to yourself. “Worst salesmen” Why the heck should a user be “worst” because he doesn’t need to use a system that he doesn’t need to use? Why should they use the system more than they need to use it? Is this some moral point that I missed in my upbringing?
It is fundamentally absurd to suggest that it is wrong of a user to use a system only as much as they need to.