User filed fake trouble tickets to take helpful sysadmin to lunches

Make life better for yourself

Whilst browsing the helpdesk tickets for second line support, I spotted one that should have been accelerated. A user for the test stage of Windows XP to Windows 7 migration had an appalling experience and wished to revert to XP -- not impossible, but horrible for us to implement. The user was an important manager who had been chosen for the stage by a project manager in a misguided attempt to show our competence. In a positive way.

I transferred the ticket to myself and identified that the user had an administrative assistant (i.e. hero in this anecdote). She confirmed that the user struggled with Windows and told me what he needed to do, how he did it and how we (IT services) could make it better for him. We (she and me) arranged for a visit from a different member of the second line support team than the one who had messed up his PC. We picked someone who could perform a technical review and talk about the transition. There was a small backroom team on stand-by to sort out problems. We contrived a special request for a third member of the second line support team to visit his home to ensure that his new laptop worked with his broadband connection and wifi -- and that our user knew how it worked, vaguely.

At a bit of expense, we converted a test user who hated Windows 7 into an advocate. And the admin assistant learned a bit about how to get IT services on her side.

It was an expensive exercise but one that was important to the credibility of a project. Could we have given similar support to other users? On several more occasions, I arranged for senior managers to be treated similarly at work (without home visit). I hope that the lessons I learned were passed down.

Sometimes, you get a good one...

One academic bought me a rather nice bottle of wine, and one user bought me the Dilbert "Hands-On Manager" mug after walking him through a difficult issue.

Most of the time, the students would say thank-you at the end of the year with a big bar of Fruit and Nut. I didn't have the heart to tell them I had a nut allergy, but my colleagues did well out of that arrangement.

Why so much anger?

It shouldn't be your job to calm anyone down.

They need to get a grip on their misplaced anger. Totally unprofessional

Expensive London Hotels

I generally get offered a decent breakfast & lunch when I get to them! But having equipment in the basement where the kitchens are located, generally puts me off food for a week!

Servers next to freezers, cables in false ceilings & open racks with food on the top equipment, kind of puts me off!

had a client who was at wits end with a problem

guy was losing his sh*t over a problem that "you *ssholes can't figure out!". To be fair it was a critical system, but in the beginning days of "the dot com era" there were lots of people with a little money, great ideas, and in spite of poor stress management and interpersonal relationship skills, decent people.

Resolved the problem (intermittent power loss) and spent awhile demonstrating WHY it was critical the UPS remain plugged into a certain outlet, made sure to demonstrate exactly what happened when it got moved to a lower rated one, and did so making sure the guy understood it. Let his rants run by and when he'd gotten that out of his system, he understood the problem, and apologized.

Also apologized with $300 in cash undeclared to my boss. And none of our future call outs to his company resulted in any bad attitude for at least as long as I remained with that outfit.

Thank You gifts

I've had quite a few thank you gifts over the years for helping customers out. The most memorable ones have been the customer who sent me a bottle of quite good whiskey wrapped in an unused baby's nappy and a bottle of Absolut Citron Vodka from a grateful PA when I helped her set up the stand at a show when all I was asked to do was set up a laptop for her to show a looping PPT presentation.

Them were the days, alas I don't get such get thank you gifts anymore however they do let my manager know which helps with my end of year review .. and salary uplift conversations.

I work on a service desk...

And I get thanked almost daily.

It's rarely any more than a quick 'Thanks!' on the phone, occasionally an email to my boss or whatever tho.

I guess it's because I do my best to not be little anyone, even if they don't have any IT knowledge...

I ate all the pies

In the early 90s I worked for a SOP software and hardware seller as support.

We had one food manufacturer customer in the Black Country that made savouries (dead pigs went in one end of the factory and savoury delights came out of the other). Accounts had a 286 CP/M multi-user server with an DK511-8 (5 1/4" 80MB) as the HDD. As many older viewers will know, these were quote prone to going pop.

One month-end this happened again. I arrived mid afternoon on Friday to find the Hitachi drive had failed. The accounts manager was most upset that they couldn't generate invoices etc. Usually this meant new HDD and rebuild - approx a days work with tapes, discs config sheets etc. A colleague had told me after a previous rebuild that he'd got away with swapping the control PCB on the drive. I tried this and - miraculously - the system came back up.

The company was really grateful, and I was rewarded with 2 boxes of Steak & Kidney pies, Pork Pies, Scotch Eggs and a few other tasty treats. If I remember, the repair lasted about a year, which was pretty good going for the time.

The past is a foreign country.

A number of jobs ago, I used to do on-site service for small companies. One place I went to was a furniture store, and we did their POS systems. I was called out to fix one of them, and they hit me with the old standby of 'while you are here, can you fix this other one?" I figured, what the hell, I'm getting paid anyway, and it was on covered equipment, so I poke at it, and got it working in a couple minutes.

Now, we were not allowed to accept tips, but this time, I was forced to accept it as a good will thing. $20 for plugging a cable into the correct port and fixing a POS that was down for some time prior to that? I'm good!

Back in the OS/2 days of the 1990's

My best buddy at work would map his print spooler to the hot chick in accounting's PC. Needless to say every time he want'd to chat her up he'd kick off a large "test print job" bringing her machine to it's knees. He was always waiting by the phone for her call.

They are married with two kids now...

re: Has a customer ever apologized to you

My incident revolved around an auditor. He had a distrust of the mainframe where I worked. Whenever he called I was honest with him to a fault. Our security system was not IBM's but another one. He was always calling up and asking questions like why did I access this specific data set. I informed that that was part of my job as when a drive was just about to go, I would move all the data off of it to one that was ready for use. That way I told him there would never be calls at 0300 about a drive failing. I was also responsible for all the DASD on the system. It was typical for me to do hundred+ datasets at a time. He was suspicious of me. for some reason. I was installing maintenance on a copy of the system and all of a sudden I was seeing thousands of loggings of datasets that were *mine* (well they belonged to the system). I watched as the logging went up to 3000 or so. For the sake of good relations, I called him up and asked if he wanted to see what I was doing. The listing for applying maintenance can grow rather large as practically every system data set is updated, it was 6 foot high. I put it on a paper cart and took it up to his office and said where do you want me to go through this with you. He was surprised that the listing was so large.

I went through each update and why it was logged. I think his eyes glazed over as I went through every fix that went on. I asked him after 50 pages if he wanted to continue. and he said well could I come back later, I said yes. The next day he called me up and asked if I could start again. I said yes. I got a cola and went up there prepared to start up again. Sitting at the conference table was a VP and our security person and I thought oh no I am getting fired. I asked him if he wanted to start over and he said yes, I was not happy to repeat myself but I thought if I was going down for something, it wasn't what I was doing as it was part and parcel of every day on the job. So I explained the process of how IBM sends out fixes and a little bit on how they are packaged. So I started at the first logging message and what was going on. This was way over the VP's head but the security guy grasped the fundamentals and understood vaguely what was going on. He was getting into it pretty good and the VP fidgeted looking for a way out. I asked the security guy that what I was doing was normal and he said "yes". With that the VP got up and walked out of the room. I asked the auditor if I should continue and he said no. The auditor and the security guy got up and left. So I took 6 foot of paper back to my desk to go through by myself and was done in 2 hours as I knew what if any issues I had to look for.

After that I never was questioned about anything I did. The Auditor actually warmed up to me and apologized for getting me into the situation. He thought I was doing something I shouldn't have and he saw tha it was normal for me to update system data sets on a not currently used system.