h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Not dissimilar to the Inanimate Conspiracy under discussion above, the Helpdesk Effect dictates that any software or hardware problem over which you have spent not less than 36 straight hours scratching your head, will mysteriously evaporate when you finally get through to a support technician - and *you won't have done anything different.*

Having been a helpdesk guy myself, I always found that you could just kind of ignore some calls, and they'd have automatically solved themselves by the end of the day.
But then again, 'users' were referred to as 'muppets' so...

Personally I find the phenomenon of the majority of IT helpdesk'ers' calling users muppets etc., quite interesting. I mean, surely if users were experts in IT as well as their own jobs they would be unusually clever and tired, but more to the point, the helpdesk people wouldn't have jobs...

I think that the majority of help-desk people are there to fill the gap between what a user/customer wants the software to do and is looking the listing up under something that the technical-writer didn't think of, or is wanting the software to do something it was never designed to do and the manual doesn't account for that, so the user/customer thinks that it damn well should and keeps looking for it.

In my experience, and mostly with PC-related software, the manuals are written by people that assume an intimate knowledge of the software already.....and the customer is frustrated by looking something up under a title THEY think it's listed under; case in point: Flash 4. I want to do a fade/dissolve with it. The manual lists a reference under FADE, which tells me that this is possible, without referring me to the location explaining HOW....I had to find that somewhere else. THAT's when the help-desk comes in.

And, for some reason, the country's entire help-desk resource is in the same place, which guarantees congested phone lines and long waits.

Fruitbat

It's not so much the fact that they have problems, it's more that they seem to delight in making things difficult for you to find out what the problem is:

User: My PC's frozen up.
Help Desk: OK, what were you doing at the time?
U: Nothing.
HD: What, you had no applications open, you didn't have any documents open or anything?
U: Oh, I see. I was in Word, I'd just asked it to print, then a message came up and it froze.
HD: What did the message say?
U: Can't remember. Sorry.

And so it goes on. All we want are the symptoms. It's like pulling teeth to get them, though.

I wonder if doctors get the same thing:

Patient: I'm not well.
Doctor: Where does it hurt?
P: Can't remember. Sorry.

I'd never have thought of that parallel with doctors.

The Helpdesk effect also happens without using a telephone, too... after people scratch their head enough, they shout me over, and I stand behind them, and they say "Look, you see, when I do THIS... oh. Oh, it never did that before."

Or how about a sentence, that should begin with the letter 'i' that *mysteriously* comes out in italic? They _insist_ that they haven't pressed Ctrl+I rather than Shift+I...