**Me **(client): We have a problem and we need you to fix our [insert doesn’t work message here]
Vendor IT guy: Yeah, just fill out a ticket on our on-line trouble report system and we will get right to it.
Me: We hired you because you said you could quickly fix our problems and your trouble ticket system is an incomprehensible time stealing mess.
Vendor IT guy: Sorry, can’t work on it without a ticket
Me: I talked it over with my partners and we decided that one of the criteria for hiring the guys we plan to replace you with is that we could call them directly in an emergency.
Vendor IT guy: I will fix the problem and enter the ticket myself then.
Me: Thank you very much
And they thanked me later for my input in improving their trouble ticket system. I actually use it now.
Exactly. We’re not in the business of ripping off customers, we’re in the business of saving lives. If the IT department would rather laugh at us than doing something so simple as creating a shared folder, then they indeed deserve to be fired.
I get requests like this all the time. I don’t laugh at patients and coworkers, I help them. If they don’t know what they’re doing, then I take the extra steps to figure it out and help them understand.
If I instead laughed at them, then I would expect to be fired.
Exactly. I assumed that a ticket would go “Code Red” or something after a certain amount of time. My guess is that the metrics went to someone then gathered dust. I was amazed that such a large corporation was using such a broken system.
Ah, would that I had the power. My guess is exactly what you said: The system wouldn’t get fixed until someone with power felt the pain. Another way the system was broken was that no one, including my boss (a senior vice president) apparently knew who to complain to, another reason she was worthless.
One of the IT guys eventually screwed up and sent me an e-mail with his phone number in the signature line. I used him as my personal little help desk, daring him to tell me to use IT protocol.
The person in question put her cell phone number in her signature. I called her while she was on her way to work. I told her that I was done with creating tickets and that this problem should have been solved over a year ago and just make it happen. To her credit she was very apologetic and promised me it would be solved today.
Largish legal firms are pretty good with competent employees, too. Things are usually too time sensitive and frequently have BIG money riding on them for someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing to be dicking around.
You know how you’re patiently waiting in line for your turn at the customer service desk at a physical store, and some angry person rushes to the start of the line and demands to be served immediately because they’re more important than everyone else?
Yeah, yeah. That’s you, buddy. The pushier you get, the less I want to help you. I want to help the nice, patient people first. Now, if you file a ticket and label it with the highest priority, I will go look at it immediately to see if it is actually an emergency, and if it is, I will drop a lower priority ticket to help you. But you do not get to butt in line.
My coworker is currently tied up by people who call her and want their problems fixed right now and will continue calling back multiple times a day. Meanwhile, she doesn’t get a chance to help the nice people who email her requests and wait patiently for a response. Those people who call and want their non-emergency problems fixed immediately go to the top of the Shit List.
Don’t even get me started. What I really want is to access the data from an XML call. But no, they “can’t do that.” Instead they will copy and paste the data into a word document, then FTP it into the shared folder that doesn’t exist, where I can retrieve it and put it somewhere where code I haven’t written yet will turn it back into data.
Yeah, it’s colossally stupid. Several people have dropped the ball on this.
An XML call to what? that is another nonsensical concatenation of jargon.
I seriously hope this is not sensitive data, or if you can name your Org please I would like to prevent them from serving me.
The fact that you are moving forward with this is more seriously an issue, I would not complain about the competence of the IT department when you yourself are implementing this process. If this task “saves lives” like you inferred above I would say this is seriously bordering on criminal negligence.
This is probably overly harsh, but the point stands. BubbaDog’s company has certain IT requirements, and once they make their requirements clear it’s up to the vendor whether they’re going to meet them or not. If the vendor chooses to take on BubbaDog as a client, they have to figure out how to prioritize stuff their own work internally. There’s no reason for BubbaDog to worry about that process at all - that’s one of the things he’s paying the outside IT vendor to do.
