Dear Users… (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people) Part 10

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arthwollipot said:
If I had Ultimate Power, I'd stop the capability that users have of logging incidents with us by email. They absolutely never provide any of the real information that we need to fix their problem. It always creates more work for us - we have to email them requesting additional information, they fail to provide it, we email them again to follow up, in a process that I have noted in an earlier post.

I just did a followup to an email that someone sent saying literally "My Chrome is not working". And that was it. That was the entire email. DETAILS PEOPLE! Come on!
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They don't do a whole lot better on the phone, either. I can't count the number of times I've heard "is the internet down?" when, after some digging, it turns out that the user is getting a password error logging into some website. "It won't do anything!" somehow means "When I try to log into my RDP session, it says bad username or password."
 
I've come to the sad conclusion a lot of my users don't WANT their problem fixed. They want to sit there and play on their phones because "their computer is down."

It literally takes, what 30 maybe 60 seconds to actually put 10% effort into even halfway describing your actual problem. Not doing is intentional.
 
JoeMorgue said:
I've come to the sad conclusion a lot of my users don't WANT their problem fixed. They want to sit there and play on their phones because "their computer is down."

It literally takes, what 30 maybe 60 seconds to actually put 10% effort into even halfway describing your actual problem. Not doing is intentional.
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I used to suspect this of many programmers I supported. Well, more what I'd call coding clerks to frank.
One CIO, who I could happily drown in swimming pool of hairy caterpillars, decided to have a "just pick up the phone" campaign telling every drooling halfwit to "just pick up the phone and call random IT people who may be busy trying to restore a service that just crashed but hey, maybe instead they should be answering random halfwit's question that can be answered with polite variants of "RTFM" or "Why didn't you ask your chief programmer" knowing the answer was going to be "I am the chief programmer". I used to bend a paperclip and insert it into the phone hook so it looked like it was on hook but wasn't.

At <big bank> they set up a webpage for users to report IT incidents with required fields. I don't care it was a bit poor, it bloody worked and I could tell them to write something semi-articulate there. And I could just return it as "insufficient information. Please add network address and maternal grandmother's blood type" but most of the time there was enough there to start to understand the problem, especially as the records went to the Service Desk first.
 
So one of my users has basically the inbox from hell. Literally 76 subfolders, most of them with 1-10 subfolders under that, some of them with their own subfolders under THEM, and a complicated set of nested rules to sort e-mails into the proper folder/subfolder/sub-sub-folder in various ways (some e-mails go to one folder, some go to multiple, some get highlited, etc)

The problem is she wants all of her underlings to have the same inbox setup. I can save the rules and import them into new inboxes easy enough but there is, as far as I can figure, no way to save a template of subfolders and left clicking on their inbox and selecting "create new folder" is too complicated for them to do without IT and by do without IT I mean have IT do for them, so every few weeks I have to sit at a computer and manually create close to a 100 variously nesting subfolders one by one.
 
JoeMorgue said:
So one of my users has basically the inbox from hell. Literally 76 subfolders, most of them with 1-10 subfolders under that, some of them with their own subfolders under THEM, and a complicated set of nested rules to sort e-mails into the proper folder/subfolder/sub-sub-folder in various ways (some e-mails go to one folder, some go to multiple, some get highlited, etc)

The problem is she wants all of her underlings to have the same inbox setup. I can save the rules and import them into new inboxes easy enough but there is, as far as I can figure, no way to save a template of subfolders and left clicking on their inbox and selecting "create new folder" is too complicated for them to do without IT and by do without IT I mean have IT do for them, so every few weeks I have to sit at a computer and manually create close to a 100 variously nesting subfolders one by one.
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Could this be scripted using PowerShell?
 
Blue Mountain said:
Could this be scripted using PowerShell?
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Probably but it's a case of "No let's do the single most convoluted and difficult and inefficient way because it's easier for you."

I could do a shared mailbox in 10 minutes that would accomplish the exact same thing but they don't want it that way.
 
Yalius said:
They don't do a whole lot better on the phone, either. I can't count the number of times I've heard "is the internet down?" when, after some digging, it turns out that the user is getting a password error logging into some website. "It won't do anything!" somehow means "When I try to log into my RDP session, it says bad username or password."
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The difference is that on the phone we can ask them questions and do our best to prize out of them exactly the information we need in order to proceed. Yes, it can sometimes be quite difficult to do so, especially if the caller has a heavy accent, but this is why it is a skilled job, and probably shouldn't be entry-level.
 
Wudang said:
I used to suspect this of many programmers I supported. Well, more what I'd call coding clerks to frank.
One CIO, who I could happily drown in swimming pool of hairy caterpillars, decided to have a "just pick up the phone" campaign telling every drooling halfwit to "just pick up the phone and call random IT people who may be busy trying to restore a service that just crashed but hey, maybe instead they should be answering random halfwit's question that can be answered with polite variants of "RTFM" or "Why didn't you ask your chief programmer" knowing the answer was going to be "I am the chief programmer". I used to bend a paperclip and insert it into the phone hook so it looked like it was on hook but wasn't.
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This is exactly why Service Desks exist.

Wudang said:
At <big bank> they set up a webpage for users to report IT incidents with required fields. I don't care it was a bit poor, it bloody worked and I could tell them to write something semi-articulate there. And I could just return it as "insufficient information. Please add network address and maternal grandmother's blood type" but most of the time there was enough there to start to understand the problem, especially as the records went to the Service Desk first.
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We have one of those. They don't use it.
 
In other fun news, there were literally no T1s in the queue from 1830 to 1900 tonight. I had to remember how to add myself to the T1 queue so that calls wouldn't be bounced.
 
Mandatory fields in tickets often miss the point. I once filed a case with IT because we had connection problems from our Unix lab to some IT service. The T1 support person on the phone insisted they had to note down my PC address, even though it was totally unrelated to the problem at hand and they wouldn't listen to my objections.

My problem got handled, but a few hours later I got a call back from the engineer on my case and who was seriously confused about why my PC address was listed in the ticket and what the problem was with it?

I'm around long enough that I even predicted to the T1 person that this would happen...
 
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