Why do the IT People DO this????

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

I work at a city agency and that kind of reasoning is par for the course. In fact, I think it’s intentional. It keeps the inefficient bureaucratic machine grinding right along at the usual snails pace.

As I remarked to a co-worker of mine, ‘If half these people did their jobs, the other half wouldn’t have their jobs.’

22

Well, helpdesk, as opposed to local IT, or me, is likey not in the same country, or continet as you. They’re also the lowest rung on the IT ladder, the people who figure out how to support the customer beyond just following the script don’t stay helpdesk for long.

It’s very likely that hardware set ups are different from office to office, division to division and country to country. That, and if your company is big enough, they have rules they have to follow, often that includes keeping the ticket opener update via email. Email being superior to phone calls when it audit time comes around.

Personally, I try to spend time with as many types of users as I can, but I’m not helpdesk. It’s hard to explain to people why I want to know what the end users see, after all, I never interact with them, and I don’t support the app itself, just the machines it runs on. Getting the time, and often enough, the travel authorized was painfull enough before the resession started.

23

Yes, IT folks should behave in this way.

Typically, IT folks email instead of call/show up in person for one of the following reasons (in no particular order):

  1. High Workload. Your issue is important, but some other issue is even more important at the moment and we don’t have the resources to deal with both issues. People tend not to appreciate being deprioritized in favor of someone else. Firing off an email is a way of pretending to be address the issue without actually addressing it.
  2. Laziness. We simply don’t feel like dealing with you right now.
  3. Blindly Following Procedure. The procedures say to respond by email in this situation so we respond by email. Thinking is hard and can lead to unpredictable results. Thinking hard is no fun for us; management hates unpredictable results.
  4. Bogus Requests. We think your request does not merit attention but we aren’t permitted to tell you ‘no.’ We correspond via email in the hopes that you’ll forget about your request or give up.
  5. Paper Trail. We require evidence of our work, and email threads are usually convincing enough for management, rightly or wrongly.
24

Grr! Don’t get me started.

A couple of weeks ago I send a ticket to the help desk. I need this program installed on this computer

So now the IT guys are bouncing emails (copying me the whole time) back and forth to each other: *

“Bob, do you know anything about this program”

“No, I think this is John’s department”

“No, not me, this should go to Alex”

Alex to help desk: “Frank, I had the virus guys clean this up. You can close this ticket now.” *

Me: What in the holy fuck?!

So I send back an email: “The program I requested was not installed on the computer. Why was this ticket closed?”

The response I get back from the help desk: “What computer has the virus? Is it a laptop or a PC?”

Me: :smack:

How the hell does one go from “Needs program installed” to “Virus problems”?

(And no, the program I requested has nothing to do with virus protection)