Transcript
The person disappering meme. It has the caption: “Users when you call them 30 seconds after they sent in a critical ticket with no information (this will come up in the quaterly survey.”
The user failed to respond to repeated contact attempts at X, Y, and Z times using Teams, Slack, Zoom, Whatsapp, and SMS. As such I will be lowering this ticket priority to Low and closing the case with User Not Responding (or if you want to be cheeky, User resolved the issue themselves)
“I came back from my vacation, why isn’t my issue fixed?”
That’s why I always appoint someone else as my contact person in these cases.
lowering this ticket priority to Low and closing the case with User Not Responding
Can’t repro.
This is the way.
More like:
- You file a ticket
- crickets
- IT replies at 2am asking more info.
- IT closes the ticket at 4am because you didn’t respond in 2 hours.
- 9am, you try to reopen the ticket, but the ticket workflow doesn’t allow the ticket to be reopened
- You file a second ticket
- rinse and repeat
- My boss sees that I’ve closed 2 priority tickets in a timely manner thus meeting quarterly goals
- He gets executed during the next quarterly staff “restructuring”
- The king is dead, long live the king
- I see our new goals are for even faster close time
- Babylon falls, the wheel turns
Should’ve just dug ditches for the army at least I’d be staying fit.
Well at least I’m not the only one who’s been through this.
Also like:
You open a ticket with all the information you can provide. The ticketing system sends you an email confirming what you’ve sent.
IT: “What is thing.file?”
???
Send them exactly what you put in the ticket body again.
I’ve decided that’s a stall tactic. It’s like asking you to pull forward so they can get you fresh fries.
They don’t want or need to know if you have version 2.13.45 or 2.13.52 installed, they’re bouncing it back to you to game the metrics. The faster you answer their stupid question, the dumber said questions get because they have all of the relevant information already.
Ever notice how they only ask one question at a time? Why not ask all 4 or 5 at once?
I used to ask all of my questions at once. The overworked folks would only ever answer the first one. So… One at a time it is.
Users usually only answer the last or first question, so sending multiple questions doesn’t work.
As soomeone who works in IT I can guarantee you it’s not a stall tactic. Our ticketing software is, in fact, so garbage it would take us four times as long to get the information from our system as it would to ask you for it.
People don’t have the patience to read all of your text and only answer the first question.
You file a ticket crickets
If there’s a delay, it’s now because IT people are trading “WTF is this guy’s malfunction” questions over slack instead of walking to a colleague’s office and asking “WTF is this guy smoking? There’s no machine with that name”.
Understand the tax where we delay when people get the most basic information - what is the name of the thing that is broken? - wrong and thus the ticket sits in the “Fuck this guy” queue is actually accidental, and it’s because IT makes an actual effort to collaboratively render the word salad in the ticket into something with a “what’s broken”/“where is it”/“how to show it breaking” format (‘why we fix it’ and ‘when you need it’ absent in a NON-suspicious way) and trim all the fat on that bad steak.
Also, if you say ‘just’, I’m gonna refill my coffee before I read further because trivializing someone else’s work is rude and I wanna not hate you. If you write ‘the below problem’ or ‘the ask’ or ‘the spend’, also, I’m gonna need more coffee. It’s just my quirk, but it’s best to pretend we both graduated secondary school.
Out of office message already set, they’ll be back to work in about two weeks.
My boss at the shop where we maintained AT&T Unix used to have a trick:
- immediately when the ticket comes in, call the reporter to verify the asset, branch, release name, to get the single most important piece of information confirmed. This was usually within 3 minutes, virginia, because before outlook e-mail was reliable and fast.
- the user wasn’t there. This was 10:31AM
- de-escalate the ‘red alert’ ticket to ‘not important’.
- reporter calls back
- “if this was important, you would have had your phone on you.”
The bullshit filter was strong on this one.
