The Glade 4.0

Easy mistake to make, Stathol.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

The really entertaining thing, is after having worked in IT/CS, when I call a place for IT or CS, I never have a bad experience anymore. Even after calling places that are rumored to have awful CS.

You know how I do it?

I'm nice. I say please and thank you, I smile and laugh and tell the person on the other end what they need to hear. I treat them like a person. Even when I have to escalate, I'm still nice and pleasant. I treat them as a human being doing a thankless job. Same for retail clerks. I smile and treat them with kindness. If there's an issue, and I have to talk to a manager, I say something like "I know its not your fault, but I think I need to talk to a manager on this. If you could please get one for me." Then they put their manager in the frame of mind to be helpful. Instead of "Hey boss, I have this total douchebag that is trying to get a free something for nothing" I get "Hey boss, I got a guy needs some help with such and such. He's been really cool about it, and I just can't help him because of x reason. Perhaps you can do something."

More flies with honey than vinegar. A smile and a kind word go miles further than anything else. ESPECIALLY with IT/CS personnel. Just because its so rare.

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Holy shitsnacks!

But one that I had avoided making until now -_-

"With great power comes great responsibility to make sure you're clicking the right button."
-- Moderation Forum description

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Unless they're fruit flies.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Someone should take that up with IT.

Aratain my point is that its management decisions that degrade service and FORCE the 1st level support to go through a checklist. Trust me they don't like it either because they don't get to use their brains or learn any new skills which could help them with a better job.

They HAVE to treat you like call 23 of a 76 call day because their raises and very existence are based on getting that 76 to 80 to 95 REGARDLESS of the level of quality. In truth their job is to treat you as a number and get you to hang up as quickly as possible - problem fixed or not - that is their job.

If you want them to treat you like a human you need to get upper management to treat them like humans and hire them to be thinking creatures.

They aren't required to give you your definition of service - in fact doing so is likely against what they are required to do. They are their to do their job which happens to be treating everyone the same and reading off the checklist.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

It's a developer issue, not an IT issue. Whoever designed the interface shouldn't have stuck the administrative Edit button beside the Quote button.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

All you're doing is explaining why IT sucks balls.

I don't dispute the reasons (nor does it much make a difference to me since my only involvement is on the results side).

This is precisely why our company has NOT outsourced tech support. They're trying to walk a tightrope between efficiency and quality service. They're not doing a terrible job. There's a reason our first line agents are paid so well -- they hire real (and generally competent) techs. There are still reasons those real and competent techs might misdiagnose a problem. All forms of intelligence ultimately rely on pattern recognition. The rarer exceptions do get less impressive results.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Great thread, folks. Until today, I never knew what a pessary was. Just ... Wow.

I'm lucky to be free-form IT support (and technically Escalated Support, but a promised re-org never really fleshed that out). I suspect our new owners, though, might go the script route. Rumor has it (we know next to nothing about how they do their IT) that if they can't solve an issue in a half-hour, you get a new hard drive shipped out to you. Can't wait to see how that goes over. Should be interesting.

Darkroland - is that you in my head? Interesting comment about personality types and their responses.

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This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

I find it easiest, when dealing with level 1 support, to simply lie to them. Not about what my problem is, that doesn't help, but about anything else they ask for. Can I reboot my computer? Sure. (Wait) Okay, it's rebooted. Can I reboot my modem? Sure. (Wait) Okay, it's rebooted. What OS? Windows XP SP3. Can I click $A_BUNCH_OF_STUFF? Sure. (Wait) Okay, I'm there. What does it say? $BLAH. You can't solve the problem and you're escalating? Okay.

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Yeah, that works especially well with script monkeys, where their only interest is in following the script. They don't care whether you actually did it, they just have to ask the question, so they'd prefer if you lie to them anyway.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Yeah, that's pulling entirely from first hand knowledge. There's a definite personality type in I.T., and if you are a type that is going to get frustrated and take it out on a client (I.E. direct your rage outward instead of inward), then you are not going to last long. There are simply too many occasions for that to happen.

Much better to keep it all inside and take it out on people passive-aggressively.

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Holy shitsnacks!

The only reason I never went on a killing spree is that I got fired before I hit the breaking point. And god damnit, I am so thankful for that firing. Worst job I ever had and you couldn't pay me all of the money in the world to do it again. I can deal with people in person, but over the phone...I just can't do it.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Also, this gets people fired. At least where I worked. You couldn't escalate more than a certain % of calls. Like, 20% per day. If you had more, you had to have proof that you weren't trained for the call.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

If I'm calling in, it's a problem that the helpdesk people are not trained for. Rest assured, I'm not getting anyone fired. At least, not in my personal dealings.

Professionally, I don't think I've gotten anyone fired. Due to restrictive IT policies, I will occasionally turn in a spate of helpdesk tickets for things, when I get torqued enough to want to bother with doing so. Mostly, however, I just work around IT with my linux system.

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Drugs...Lots of drugs...Has helped me from killing and blowing up entire stores..I have walked out on a lot of help desk jobs and so glad not to be doing help desk anymore.

Of course, IT has all I have done for the last 14 years and since my first real job. We just recently outsourced our Level 1 Help Desk to India, and that has involved even more drugs! It use to be internal, Phenomenally they had issues they would walk over and ask a level 2 guy, we then outsourced to an American company, it got worst, but not that bad. Now since going to India *head explodes* my work load has tripled and my team cut in 1/2.

We dont have 'script monkey's, but if a Kmart store calls and says register is hung at W008, all our helpdesk has to do is type in W008 and it gives step by steps to fix it. Our knowledgebase consists of steps to fix it, not what to ask, there will be hits for certain situation's such as Registers going slow or PC's going slow. But just about every store complains about the accents and cannot understand them...

But if we dont have a 'solution' for it, the help desk is usless. Im still 'technically' a help desk I just dont get incoming calls..

Accenture support best support!

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Most of the tickets I get from our help desk are completely useless and I usually have to find out what the problem is on my own. Instead of putting a description of the problem, they put dumb **** like "port security authentication." One, there's no authentication, so that makes no sense. Two, stop saying everything is port security. In fact, you're banned from ever saying that term again. Just because the PC can't connect to the DHCP server and automatically assigns itself a 169.etc IP, it does not mean it's port security. They all seem clueless on the basics of how computers talk to one another...

Now if I can just get our older version of the Cisco LMS to work with the new Java...

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

My top two favorites:

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This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.

Foamy I have a font size 38 of "Kindly do the needfull" on my desk as motivation.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

That makes perfect sense. Why rely heavily on a diagnosis of the problem from an individual who can't figure out how to solve the problem?

He's either really good at diagnosis but doesn't have the training or equipment to solve (rare) or he's started down the wrong path.

I actually got busted once doing this. He turned out to be a highly over-qualified checklist monkey.

He actually said at one point: "Yeah, as soon as I get through the required checks, I'll solve your problem."

Nice enough fellow, but you could sense that he hated his job.