The IT group here

The BBQ Pit
1

Muthafuckin shitstains.

I called the Help Desk and asked them to set up an FTP drive for us. What they did was turn our existing shared drive into an FTP drive, and told us that all files older that 90 days would be deleted. NO! That’s not what we wanted! There are thousands of valuable documents that are years old that we need. I found this out through my manager who asked me to help out Lindsay who was in way over her head. She’s not even a tech person, she’s in billing.

So they fixed it – by changing the drive letter. NO! Is anybody listening? We want a new drive, that’s empty, as an FTP drive.

That was well over a year ago. Still working on it.

So I was told to create a new ticket asking for what I’d already asked for. But this time I had to fill out a lengthy request form with all sorts of information I don’t have. What cost center will be used? Who’s paying for it? How much data will it contain? I don’t fucking know! No one will give me the data until the drive is created.

So I filled out their fucking form, no thanks to the manager who knew all of the information but couldn’t be bothered. Yes, it did come up in my review that I called him useless. Because he fucking is!

But the drive didn’t get created. Because the ticket got cancelled, so I’d have to create a new ticket.

On and on this went, for a year, before the drive finally got created. But it wasn’t an FTP drive. Oh, I wanted that? I’d have to create a new ticket. And fill out a new form. Which I didn’t know the answers to. That got lost.

So I filled out a new ticket. But I didn’t hear anything back. I finally called yesterday to ask what the status is. The nice lady promised me she’d get back to me. Just now I got an e-mail telling me that I created the wrong ticket, and it was cancelled. So I need to create a new ticket asking for what I really want.

Have I been unclear on this? Have I not stated exactly what we need each and every time? How many more goddam tickets do I need to create?

Then I got an e-mail asking me to rate the Help Desks handling of my situation. Damn straight I filled it out. I just left out the words “incompetent slithering pusbuckets.”

2

I’m in IT and I would be a little confused by your terminology, but in any case we would have resolved it for you much sooner than a year, so your rant is spot on there. By “FTP drive” are you asking for a separate shared folder where you can FTP documents? Or do you need an FTP server set up? Is this something commonly used at your company? That would make it even worse…

3

I’m not 100% sure myself. We need a place to store documents. Yes, it’s on me to ask for what I want. But someone keeps telling me exactly what to ask for, so I word it exactly how she did, then she comes back and tells me I didn’t ask for the right thing.

4

I’m not blaming you at all. A 5 minute discussion would be sufficient to determine what you need. Bad on them.

5

And we’ve had that discussion.

6

Yeah, but it was over a year ago… :wink:

7

Two companies that I’ve worked for, both extremely large multinational companies that you would recognize:

First company: For anything IT related, and I mean anything, you fill out an online ticket. It goes somewhere. Nothing happens? You fill out another ticket. The situation is handled incorrectly? You fill out another ticket. They do have a help desk number. If you call about the issue you’ve created a ticket for, they modify the ticket for you that you’re not happy.There is no “IT person” that I was ever aware of. I needed a file deleted that was preventing a critical spreadsheet from opening; I didn’t have rights to the folder. I jumped through hoops to get someone to delete that file. It took over 3 months to get them to understand that no, I didn’t need rights to the folder, I just needed someone to select the file and hit the delete key.

Second company: You have an issue, you walk to the IT department where they have a counter that’s always manned. You talk to a person. Usually they can fix the issue right there. If they can’t, you get a ticket number and a person who’s responsible. Still not happy? You talk to his manager who’s on site.

I was a vendor for a large petroleum operator that had the same experience as the first company. They canceled the contract and fired the entire help desk department that day. They figured it would be worth the temporary lost productivity until they got a decent help desk vendor, and they were right. One thing I can say about the oil industry is that no one runs off incompetent employees with more alacrity.

8

The sell-by date hasn’t expired, though.

9

Part of the confusion might be your terminology. At a guess, you were confusing your IT helpdesk guy who might not be able to translate user-speak into IT-speak very well (and who might not be all that technical an IT person anyway).

What you seem to want is for them to either turn on or open up an FTP service on one of your servers, and then make the directory a share that you can use with a new logical drive letter. The way you worded this is confusing (to an IT help desk weenie), though I’m unsure why they would then want to delete files older than 90 days (my WAG on this is it’s an unimplemented policy that they hadn’t put in on the share you were using, and having noticed it decided this was an excellent time to implement it :p).

What you want is FTP turned on your server and directing it to a ‘new’ folder on that server, with a share (that you and/or your group) would have file rights to use and map too. At least, that’s what my own translation is saying. If you previously had FTP implemented, then it’s pretty simple. If not, then depending on your requirements (i.e. do you want to allow folks outside your network, say on the internet, to copy files to and/or from this FTP server? Other departments?) it might be a bit more complex. Not rocket science though.

All this I can understand. Someone in your organization is trying to demonstrate the true costs of IT back to the departments making requests. There is a cost associated with your request and your IT director or CIO (or whatever) are trying to project those costs to the other departments. They do this because departments (other than IT) tend to whine and complain about IT being worthless (they bring in no money after all) etc etc. The ticket thingy is to generate metrics to demonstrate to other departments and your CEO/BoD or whatever that they are doing stuff.

Did they give a reason why it got cancelled? Do you guys have access to the ticket system, or do you get ticket updates when you open a ticket? If no explanation was given as to the reason then I’d certainly be pissed about it too.

Again, do you have access to the ticket? If not, then you should agitate for that. At a minimum you guys should get ticket updates via email for tickets you create, so you can track progress. If your IT department isn’t doing that they are dumb, since it helps them as much as you in documenting what’s happening.

No idea about this part. Wrong ticket? WAG would be you created a ticket that would go to one sub-department of IT (say workstations) instead of for the one you needed (which would either be systems, infrastructure/security or whatever passes for these things in your IT organization). However, I can’t see why the ticket you DID create couldn’t just have been forwarded to the correct sub-department or folder area of the ticket system…unless your ticket system isn’t integrated fully for the entire organization.

I think you’ve been clear enough to get the work done, though a bit confusing, perhaps, to a lower level tech type. I can see your frustration, though.

lol…yeah, I can see that. There might be extenuating circumstances happening here, but if nothing else your IT department needs some help on the customer service end of things. :stuck_out_tongue:

-XT

10

Oh man, you have my sympathies. I cringe now when I hear or read “you have to create a ticket” which roughly translates into “we aren’t actually going to do anything at all”.

11

Yes and No, in that order. But you already knew that:

So why not put the person who’s defining exactly what you need in touch with the IT people?

12

That is presumably this person:

13

Yeah, sounds like you’re having a real dell of a time with tech support. Oh, by the way, if we can have those TPS reports on the FTP by Monday, that would be greeeat.

14

You’ve been asking for something for a year, and you still don’t know how to properly ask for what you want. Your IT guys might incompetent, but you aren’t winning any competence awards here.

15

You know, there laughing their asses off. Every time you ask them to do it differently, they will, but they won’t give you what you want. Now I could tell you the secret word that would get you the results you want, but I won’t. This type of stuff is the only fun we get in the IT world.

16

I’d have guessed one of 2 things, neither of which is what you describe. I was imagining a file share (on a SAN likely), which would be checked by a script, and anything deposited in it would be FTP-ed somewhere. Or the reverse; a directory in which inbound FTP traffic would be deposited so that people without FTP access can use the files. (what XT is describing, more or less; the execution might vary)

Sounds like your company needs some support analysts and/or systems analysts and business analysts to play go-between and translator between non-technical guys like yourselves and the propeller-headed technical IT wonks.

That’s what I do actually… both sides can be pretty idiotic; the propeller-headed IT wonks can be awfully pedantic about everything- what they’re being asked to do, who they’re being asked to do it for, and about the very procedure you’re using to tell them (“You didn’t fill out the form right.” type stuff) , while the business types can be completely unrealistic and uncooperative to a fault.

Our biggest problem where I work is that our sales cretins routinely sell services to our clients that we:

  1. Do not support and can not support. This one’s not real prevalent; it tends to bite them in the ass.

  2. Things that we can support, but with a Byzantine and extremely manual process. Usually we have a long-term project in place to support these things in an automated fashion, but they hear “project” and think “ready to sell” This gets us in a bind, because if we can’t support it, the pointy-haired executives don’t hear that the sales guys sold something we haven’t got working yet, rather they hear that IT dropped the ball. This kind of thing makes me want to stealthily kill the sales people in their beds at night.

  3. Non-standard variants on things we already do. Usually they sound easy, but for one reason or another, we don’t do it already because there’s some roadblock. Same level of pressure as #2 for the same reasons.

All three reasons rarely come with any negotiation with our management about time frames and priority; we have to usually play hardball and refuse if we want to be able to do anything but react to everything the sales cretins are doing.

17

A couple of years ago, IT upgraded my computer. Nice, right? Well, not so nice because my comp was doing what I needed and the upgrade meant that I couldn’t print labels on my very old Zebra printer.

IT’s solution was to make me buy a DYNO printer, which was pretty and fit on my desk, but TRIM didn’t get along with it. IT didn’t support TRIM, so the workaround was for me to log onto a comp without Windows 7 and print labels from there.

I complained to everyone about this, my Zebra printer is awesome and the desktop printer didn’t work.

Nobody seemed to be able to do anything about this. 11 months later, I sent ONE email to Zebra tech support. They emailed me back to say that they no longer supported my old printer, but that maybe I could find drivers at this link. I found the driver, but not being allowed to actually install it, I put in yet another ticket. IT emailed me back and told me to install the driver because they didn’t have time.

It worked. I got scolded because I installed the drivers without one of them watching.

18

They’re supposed to be on the same side.

Whatever this drive is for I would tell the boss to abandon this project altogether because IT’s asshattery has already delayed it by a year. I would also advise them that the entire IT department should be dismissed immediately with prejudice for holding up company business for a year just for shits and giggles.

19

I know who you are! The help desk guys told me about you. You know we can read your email right?

20

Wait - why doesn’t the first ticket simply escalate? Doesn’t the service desk environment have SLAs? If not then it’s essentially just a virtual trash can where requests and complaints get “filed”.

And as for the service desk cancelling and creating new tickets, that would… SHOULD reflect very negatively on their metrics. Another sign that they’re just using the service desk software to appease customers but it’s really just a virtual trash can.