Talya wrote:
Arathain Kelvar wrote:
I'm not IT. I see IT as something similar to working at the motor vehicle administration. Someone's got to do it, the job sucks, you deal with assholes all day, and because your job sucks, you suck at your job.
I rarely have a good experience with IT. They tend to "diagnose the problem" waay too quickly, assume I don't know what I'm doing, and as a result of their lack of listening, either don't solve the problem or take forever to solve the problem.
YMMV.
Aizle wrote:
I think you're lumping all of IT with first level support.
There's some truth to both of these statements, especially "Someone's got to do it, the job sucks, you deal with assholes all day, and because your job sucks, you suck at your job." The simple fact is, the vast majority (think more than 90%) of first-line's calls are cookie-cutter tickets they see at least a dozen times a week. Of those, more than half won't be an actual technical problem, but user incompetence (that most helpdesks don't actually support. That's what the training teams are for.) Meanwhile, the poor helpdesk agents are being appraised on how quickly they can get off the call (most of them have a very strict "average talk time" metric they have to meet), and the fastest way for even the best of them to get off the call is assume the averages, and only investigate more closely when it becomes obvious that it's not a normal call.
Then they usually escalate to me. And half the time, it's still likely the user's own incompetence. What the hell does HR do to screen people's computer usage skills, anyway? Get them to identify a computer in a photograph? Scratch that, a good third of them can't even do that. (Ask them to turn off their computer, they'll turn off their monitor.)
My response when they ask why it is that I, a second level tech, cannot walk them through their complex excel spreadsheet creation:
"You are the driver. I am the mechanic. Do not ask me how fast to take the corner. I am here for when you have a mechanical failure. You need to know how to drive."
Taly's got this on the nose. I'm second tier triage support for a VOIP provider, and I can't tell you how often I'm doing tier one support for our partners (that are actually selling the service). My job here is to diagnose the issue, and either fix it, or pass it on to a tech. I'm fairly good at what I do. I can fix quite a bit of stuff, and I know what's going to take bloody forever to fix, and kick it up the chain.
A lot of first tier support is working off a checklist, and *must* work through the checklist. If they get monitored and didn't work the list, they get in trouble. No matter how inane it seems. The quickest way to get through the tier one guy is simply to cooperate with them. Be patient and polite, and you'll be far more likely to get to where you need to be to get a problem resolved. If you're an *** (like 90% of the people that call) techs go into defense mode and will passive aggressively take out their frustrations on you. We talk to people all day, we know our rules, and we can get good at getting people worked up into a froth just by saying *no* and sticking to them. I've done it. Just follows the rule of "don't piss off your waiter". We're providing a service to you, and while you don't have to kiss our asses, it does behoove you to be somewhat professional and polite to us.
I remember when I worked for a cable company in their modem department, I had a guy cuss at me, call me every name in the book, and yell and rant and scream that I wasn't helping him, that he had already done everything I was asking him to do, etc. So, after ranting about how important he was, and scheduling him a tech to go out, I reset his cable modem every hour or so
for the next three weeks. And I had a good friend do the same thing when I wasn't there. Was it a good thing for me to do? Not really. But at the time, the ******* deserved it. He was a bigshot "day trader" and full of his own self-importance. 3 weeks later, after having called us multiple times (I kept an eye on the service notes, and I wasn't the only tech he called and abused, he had done it before me, and after me), he finally cancelled his service. I cheered a little inside.
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