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

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zooterkin said:
Either way, I would be copying both managers to get them to sort it out. Somebody wasting my time by trying to get me to something which is not my job and is probably theirs is something my manager needs to deal with.
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She e-mailed the IT group, I just happened to be the one who responded, so my boss is at least in the loop.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Perhaps you're right, murder really is the wisest course here. Murder doesn't solve every personnel problem, of course, only most of them.
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And that is why there's a roll of old carpet, sacks of lime and concrete mix and a couple of folding shovels in a corner of the bottom car-park level.
The one with the dodgy cameras and lighting.
 
Wudang said:
<== <points at custom title>
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:thumbsup: :D
Though I suppose you have a PFY to help? Carpet is surprisingly heavy....

Anyway my personal solution involves a stretch of coastal cliff with easy vehicle access to 50m of the edge and deep water, a roll of medium mesh garden netting, an ice-pick and a couple of breeze blocks. Better for the environment.
 
So today I spent an hour and a half doing fifteen minutes of tech support for my elderly mother. Her habit of only writing down part of each user name and password for everything really makes things tricky. "I didn't think I needed the numbers part" she explained helpfully.
 
TragicMonkey said:
So today I spent an hour and a half doing fifteen minutes of tech support for my elderly mother. Her habit of only writing down part of each user name and password for everything really makes things tricky. "I didn't think I needed the numbers part" she explained helpfully.
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For some people that might not be a bad strategy. If they just need a reminder to remember the whole password it keeps it more secure than writing the whole thing down. That relies on it being enough to stir the correct memory though.
 
So after a long time doing job that didn't involve dealing with customers I just finished a secondment at a major national institution and I was handling phone calls. I soon remembered one of the basic rules, everyone thinks their call is urgent and must be escalated. No one seems to understand that if everyone's is urgent and high priority then no one is high priority.
 
Garrison said:
So after a long time doing job that didn't involve dealing with customers I just finished a secondment at a major national institution and I was handling phone calls. I soon remembered one of the basic rules, everyone thinks their call is urgent and must be escalated. No one seems to understand that if everyone's is urgent and high priority then no one is high priority.
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Dear User: yes, I could send you 4.5 million rows of data in Excel. The question is should I? What are you planning to do with all that? If for some reason you wish to read each and every row yourself and it takes you one second per row, then working 40 hours a week with no pause it will take you 31.25 weeks to read them all. Perhaps it would be more efficient to tell me what questions you're trying to answer using this data and I could get the computer to do the work. The computer likes that sort of thing, and we're friends so I'm pretty sure I can convince it.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Dear User: yes, I could send you 4.5 million rows of data in Excel. The question is should I? What are you planning to do with all that? If for some reason you wish to read each and every row yourself and it takes you one second per row, then working 40 hours a week with no pause it will take you 31.25 weeks to read them all. Perhaps it would be more efficient to tell me what questions you're trying to answer using this data and I could get the computer to do the work. The computer likes that sort of thing, and we're friends so I'm pretty sure I can convince it.
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Listen the only way to find out what Nedry did to the system is go through the computer's code line by line. It's the only way to get Jurassic Park back online.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Listen the only way to find out what Nedry did to the system is go through the computer's code line by line. It's the only way to get Jurassic Park back online.
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He should have commented his code. "--change X to Y in this block to undo cataclysm"
 
I so hate office politics and no matter how much you try you can't stay out of it entirely.

A few weeks back a large corner office for an executive position that got... made redundant got converted into a office with 5 cubicles. Right now two of the cubicles are occupied by two women who are bitter they no longer have their own office (and I sorta get the impression they don't like each other which doesn't help) and I was just given a ticket that another user was being moved into one of the 3 remaining cubicles in about a month. I went in there to just put eyes on the basic setup (power, network drops, etc) to kind of start getting a mental plan in my head and dear God the tension off of those two when I told them what was happening.
 
JoeMorgue said:
I so hate office politics and no matter how much you try you can't stay out of it entirely.

A few weeks back a large corner office for an executive position that got... made redundant got converted into a office with 5 cubicles. Right now two of the cubicles are occupied by two women who are bitter they no longer have their own office (and I sorta get the impression they don't like each other which doesn't help) and I was just given a ticket that another user was being moved into one of the 3 remaining cubicles in about a month. I went in there to just put eyes on the basic setup (power, network drops, etc) to kind of start getting a mental plan in my head and dear God the tension off of those two when I told them what was happening.
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At one of my former employers there was a lady who clawed her way up the totem pole, making many enemies along the way, and got herself a nice big office with windows and everything. It was especially galling to her foes because this particular lady's job meant she was only ever in that office a couple of days a week, the rest of the time she was elsewhere at other sites. But that nice big office --in a building with few offices-- was mostly unused...

...at first. It quickly became the room people would duck into when they needed to fart. The lady never understood why there was so much giggling when she was in the office.
 
One of these two originally had her own office at an entire other site and I'm honestly about 99% sure she's angry because she literally doesn't do anything and now has to pretend to work.

Like I've been providing this company IT support for almost 3 years now and I've got the general workflow and what people "do" in the broadstrokes pretty down pat even if the details are still so much Greek to me. And I have no idea what this lady does. And not in the sense that I know what she does but I don't understand it (this is a cancer clinic with a research department, like 99% of what they do falls into this category for me) but seriously on a functional level I don't know what she... like does.

She's in her late 60s and obviously been in this organization for a while so I'm assuming she yet another case of someone who was here before was a single business. As I've mentioned before the place I contract IT work for started out as about 7 or 8 independent cancer doctors who started a partnership and then finally formed a single company and every once in a while I run into one of these "You don't fit into any normal business hierarchy/workflow as I understand it, you don't belong to any established team or group, and your position doesn't exist at any of the other sites" people and I'm assume they are redundant/obsolete positions from the old days when these were all separate practices that somehow managed to stay employed. They seem to survive just by wedging themselves in as an extra step into other processes, never actually doing anything beyond being the "final approver" rubberstamp in this processes or a "Let so and so review it before sending it to so and so" step in this other process or stuff like that. The buck never even slows down near them, but always has to go past them if that makes any sense.

I've ran into a few of these types since I've worked here and they tend to be fairly problematic as users because they know on some level that they have to maintain the image of being important because they really aren't so they just show up and invite themselves into every process for face time and looking busy purposes and generating a lot of IT busywork is always high on their list of things to do. They are just always "there" but never doing anything but being in the way and putting their two cents in.

Like when the pandemic was real bad and most non-essential frontline care workers were being encouraged to work from home, they freaked out and fought it so hard because working from home it would become super obvious that they don't do anything. Like they have no metrics they can point to for what they do so they have to depend on their "presence" and that's way harder to do remotely.

The thing that kind of makes this almost a given fact to me is every time one of these "types" finally retires/leaves it's always the same. They make a deal about how they will miss them and how hard it will be to replace them and how all that... but then they don't replace them. Their jobs just got away and nothing changes. What few actual concrete duties some of them have have just get given to other people who can easily do them as a collateral.
 
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TragicMonkey said:
At one of my former employers there was a lady who clawed her way up the totem pole, making many enemies along the way, and got herself a nice big office with windows and everything. It was especially galling to her foes because this particular lady's job meant she was only ever in that office a couple of days a week, the rest of the time she was elsewhere at other sites. But that nice big office --in a building with few offices-- was mostly unused...

...at first. It quickly became the room people would duck into when they needed to fart. The lady never understood why there was so much giggling when she was in the office.
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Probably why she can truly say when she's there "My door is always open."
 
JoeMorgue said:
One of these two originally had her own office at an entire other site and I'm honestly about 99% sure she's angry because she literally doesn't do anything and now has to pretend to work.

Like I've been providing this company IT support for almost 3 years now and I've got the general workflow and what people "do" in the broadstrokes pretty down pat even if the details are still so much Greek to me. And I have no idea what this lady does. And not in the sense that I know what she does but I don't understand it (this is a cancer clinic with a research department, like 99% of what they do falls into this category for me) but seriously on a functional level I don't know what she... like does.

She's in her late 60s and obviously been in this organization for a while so I'm assuming she yet another case of someone who was here before was a single business. As I've mentioned before the place I contract IT work for started out as about 7 or 8 independent cancer doctors who started a partnership and then finally formed a single company and every once in a while I run into one of these "You don't fit into any normal business hierarchy/workflow as I understand it, you don't belong to any established team or group, and your position doesn't exist at any of the other sites" people and I'm assume they are redundant/obsolete positions from the old days when these were all separate practices that somehow managed to stay employed. They seem to survive just by wedging themselves in as an extra step into other processes, never actually doing anything beyond being the "final approver" rubberstamp in this processes or a "Let so and so review it before sending it to so and so" step in this other process or stuff like that. The buck never even slows down near them, but always has to go past them if that makes any sense.

I've ran into a few of these types since I've worked here and they tend to be fairly problematic as users because they know on some level that they have to maintain the image of being important because they really aren't so they just show up and invite themselves into every process for face time and looking busy purposes and generating a lot of IT busywork is always high on their list of things to do. They are just always "there" but never doing anything but being in the way and putting their two cents in.

Like when the pandemic was real bad and most non-essential frontline care workers were being encouraged to work from home, they freaked out and fought it so hard because working from home it would become super obvious that they don't do anything. Like they have no metrics they can point to for what they do so they have to depend on their "presence" and that's way harder to do remotely.

The thing that kind of makes this almost a given fact to me is every time one of these "types" finally retires/leaves it's always the same. They make a deal about how they will miss them and how hard it will be to replace them and how all that... but then they don't replace them. Their jobs just got away and nothing changes. What few actual concrete duties some of them have have just get given to other people who can easily do them as a collateral.
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A person in that situation CAN be valuable, if they desire to be--if they actually make sure they are a bridge between groups that don't have a lot of contact, if they take the time nobody else does in order to document institutional knowledge and genuinely promote best practices. But they will get nowhere if they aren't the real thing, if they're just inserting themselves without adding value, trying to preserve their position.
 
JoeMorgue said:
... They seem to survive just by wedging themselves in as an extra step into other processes, never actually doing anything beyond being the "final approver" rubberstamp in this processes or a "Let so and so review it before sending it to so and so" step in this other process or stuff like that. The buck never even slows down near them, but always has to go past them if that makes any sense.

I've ran into a few of these types since I've worked here and they tend to be fairly problematic as users because they know on some level that they have to maintain the image of being important because they really aren't so they just show up and invite themselves into every process for face time and looking busy purposes and generating a lot of IT busywork is always high on their list of things to do. They are just always "there" but never doing anything but being in the way and putting their two cents in.
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Back in the day I used to teach an MSc course in my faculty on the audit of business and IT processes and I used to fill it with these kinds of examples. They are frighteningly common in organisations that have grown by merger and accretions.

My favourite example was in a big big company that hadn't so much grown as congealed. One guy who'd been around since forever was responsible for approving all IT project budget requests over a certain amount for the whole EMEA region. In reality after sitting in in silence on numerous conf-calls he would keep the folders on his desk for a while and then sign them off without looking because the business-sector and country IT leads would have already reviewed and approved the requests. And at the same time the global CIO could choose to block any project for any reason at any time. So he contributed nothing but did have a beautiful company Mercedes convertible and a lovely chalet in the mountains.

And, as JoeMorgue would suspect, his position was discreetly abolished after he retired.
 
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