When this happens, you must call our IT department which will then proceed to repeatedly insult your intelligence and waste your time by making you reboot the computer and check the cable connections, despite the fact that you just read off the damn error code and it takes them about 30 seconds to look up your account and see that the account is really locked. The IT department does not believe that your computer monitor is correctly plugged in, you must check it. After this, the IT department will require you to provide the answers to your security questions before they will help you, even if you know the representative personally or even if you visit the IT department in person with ID.

Your ire is misplaced. The IT people don't care what passwords you use. It's the CIS people who come up with this stuff. The IT people are just challenged to implement, enforce and support it.

This.

People in IT hate the password complexity rules even more than the end users, because we have more passwords that are affected by them. Information Security is not IT.

Your IT People are not insulting your intelligence by asking you to do these things. They are not making any assessment of your intelligence. They're simply playing the odds. Its a cheap bet with a high potential payoff. And they've seen it pay off enough (because like it or not, 'is it plugged in' really does need to be asked sometimes) that they do ask the question. Stop getting your panties in a wad about that.

You're servicing the problem, possibly in the most effective way, but you're not servicing the customer.

If a particular method is fast and effective, then, actually, yes, they are servicing the customer. The customer is not the caller. The customer is the line of business that has negotiated the SLAs with IT and helped set budget, headcount, and performance targets, requiring IT to do "more with less." Meeting those negotiated SLAs is more important than not pissing off a few oversensitive people with effective methods that may insult your prideful intelligence.

Hey, it's the business side that's decided "We're only willing to pay for 12 people, but we need you to be able to answer 80% of 600 calls in a day within 20 seconds." (Part of the Service Level Agreement contract with the Helpdesk.) You get what you pay for.

As for disdain for customers/callers, anyone with at least half a brain and regular contact with people has disdain for most of the human species.

No, this is just adolescent "I'm smarter than other people" nonsense, and in any case, no matter how justified you think your disdain is, its still a reason people don't want to talk to IT people.

Pretty much no one on earth is in any position to have any sort of disdain for the species in general. No snowflake is that special.

Your acceptance of the status quo/normative and authority disqualifies you from having any valid opinions on the subject. It's not adolescence. It's misanthropy. Misanthropy is, itself, a virtue. :p

Hey, it's the business side that's decided "We're only willing to pay for 12 people, but we need you to be able to answer 80% of 600 calls in a day within 20 seconds." (Part of the Service Level Agreement contract with the Helpdesk.) You get what you pay for.

As for disdain for customers/callers, anyone with at least half a brain and regular contact with people has disdain for most of the human species.

As individuals, I have very little against most people in particular, but as groups, we are worthy of nothing but contempt. As a group, human beings sheep that never gives thought to things in the abstract, they accept every axiom with which they are presented, and participate without self-reflection or introspection in the routines with which society expects them. Thinking is no virtue to human society. People live like the animals we are, most never deigning to rise above and assign meaning to their pointless lives. These are the people who have made "reality TV" profitable, "Pop music" popular, and logic something that people view with suspicion.

Any one individual who stops to speak about such things can often do so respectably, and I don't hate the presence of individuals so much, but as a group, I hold humans in utter contempt.


Or, to put it in the popular vernacular:
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." ~ Agent K

As individuals, I have very little against most people in particular, but as groups, we are worthy of nothing but contempt. As a group, human beings sheep that never gives thought to things in the abstract, they accept every axiom with which they are presented, and participate without self-reflection or introspection in the routines with which society expects them. Thinking is no virtue to human society. People live like the animals we are, most never deigning to rise above and assign meaning to their pointless lives. These are the people who have made "reality TV" profitable, "Pop music" popular, and logic something that people view with suspicion.

Any one individual who stops to speak about such things can often do so respectably, and I don't hate the presence of individuals so much, but as a group, I hold humans in utter contempt.


Or, to put it in the popular vernacular:
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." ~ Agent K