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

Why so much sympathy for help desk people? Our help desk has recently been renamed "Response Centre". This is appropriate as I have never known them to help me, only respond.

For instance, I ring the desk to report a problem. No one is there so I leave a voice mail. If I'm really lucky, they call back on the same working day. When I am finally contacted and have to deal with the you are just a stupid user routine - yes the computer is on, yes I have tried to reboot- there is a lot of head scratching and umming and ahing culminating in "I'll get back to you". Wait 1 week with frustration building and no help. Finally a call..... it is from the administrator of the centre wanting to know if the problem has been fixed and if it can be closed in their records.

This experience of mine is in no way unique and is not just limited to the company I work for. My theory is that there is such a shortage of trained IT people that they will stick anyone on the desk as long as they have used Windows before. I'm sure there are some good help deskers out there but I have yet to meet one.

Thankyou for reporting the problem. We'll get back to you, real soon, we promise.

Anyone who actually knows enough about what is going on inside the box to make a really good help desk staffer (ie one who can cope with problems that aren't already on the menu) is probably off earning heaps more money being a programmer or so busy doing help you'll have to wait in line. How much are you willing to pay for help?

;^)#

Probably because so many of us have spent hours in an earnest attempt to help someone, only to find out that the answer we were given to a question we asked in the first 3 minutes was either not honest or wrong. Thus we find we've spent hours trying to hunt down a simple problem that would have taken us 10 minutes to fix.

This is not to say there aren't many knowledgeable users being frustrated by totally incompetent help-desk personel. I've been on both sides of the story, and I can sympathize both ways. Frustration is a two-way street, though, and when you're getting paid barely over minimum wage to deal with and fix problems from hostile users for eight to ten hours per day you sometimes get the urge to repeat the classic (briefly mentioned above):

"Do you still have the box your computer came in?"
"Yes. Why?"
"I'm afraid you're going to have to pack everything back the way it was and send it back. For a reason, you need to specify, 'I'm too stupid to use a computer.'"

Of course, if you actually do that, you're fired, but the temptation is there, nonetheless.

I must admit, I have to stir this up a little bit! We have Floor Support and we have Help Desk Support. The Floor Support are contractors and therefore, the longer the string out a job the more they get paid!!??? Although they are very good I must admit! The help desk support are probably on a minimum wage, which is sad, but it is strange that no matter who you talk to the IT Help Desk are usually the most unhelpful people in the company. I can sympathise with their frustration with the Stupid User but in my experience, if IT gave you half a chance to explain what the problem was without firing "Is your PC switched on" at the user you are very lucky! It works both ways! I think all Stupid Users and all Stupid IT people should be fired into space. As for the w****r who has still not got back to me about my lap top he deserves to be boiled alive!

I requested a laptop for use whilst travelling abroad and they told me fine not a problem. I asked for remote access so I could dial in and use E-mail and the Network and I was told - I am sorry we are not signing off on Remote it costs too much money. I said how am I going to get into the Network - where the files that my boss is constantly working on back in the office are kept! How do you expect clients to contact me in the States, when the Co won't sign off US access on the mobile and I do not have access to E-mail. The answer was "Well you can dial in at your desk all you need is a Network Cable!!". I replied with well Hell Blow It, I will take my desk to the States with me then shall I??

THAT'LL WORK WON'T IT

Yours sincerely

Frustrated, but definitely not STUPID user!

As I said, it does work both ways.

As for your problem, that sounds more like a management decision... and we all know what that means.

True, you are quite right - in fact most of the the Stupid Users, tend to be "Management". Its funny isn't, they use us as rungs to get up the ladder but once they are there, they find out all of a sudden they have forgotten how to use a computer, they have forgotten where the fax, the printer and the photocopier are, and ask where they should put money in to get their cup of coffee! Wouldn't I like to tell them!

You're right, your problems are not unique. However, at one company where I worked part of the problem was down to lack of staff. One IT support guy was supposed to work exclusively on our floor, but there were so few IT support staff that he spent most of his time working elsewhere. However, lack of IT support staff does not excuse what happened to a colleague. She phoned them with a major problem that was preventing her from doing any work. They said that they would send someone round as soon as possible. Several days and umpteen phone calls later she ended up working out a fix for herself. Several weeks later they phoned her up and asked if it was still a problem. Aarggh!!! They seem to have the philosophy that if a problem is ignored it will either fix itself or go away.

At the same company, the IT manager had a habit of making decisions on IT policy without consulting any of the people that actually used the PCs to find out if the new policy would work. Most of the time it didn't. I once found a Dilbert cartoon that summed up the situation so accurately that I enlarged it and gave it to the IT support team. They loved it and agreed with the sentiments completely.

Again, management decisions. Companies promote the idiots to management so the people that know something can get the work done.

It sounds like the Peter Principle, which states that people rise to their level of incompetence. However, this technique was originally applied in Japan to get people OUT of positions where they screw things up. In this country we seem to promote people INTO positions where they can screw things up.

Not really... it's the same principle here. You'll find most of the time that the lower echelons just do what needs doing and -tell- management they did it just how they were told. When things run smoothly, no error reports get generated, management thinks their will was done and so keep their noses in their offices making up more silly rules to be broken, the peons go about business, and the fate of the world is saved once again.

Unfortunately that doesn't always work. As a software engineer I have worked for several companies that develop 'generic' products; i.e., we don't have a single customer to tell us what they want. (Often these products are a mix of hardware and software.) We have to wait for marketing / management to decide what they THINK the customer will want and then develop it. While we are waiting we sit around and twiddle our thumbs (but at least we get paid for it). Then we have to develop the product in timescales that are too short. (Now you know why some software products, or products with software in, are buggy!)

I know that my fellow software developers and I would love to go ahead and write SOMETHING, and then tell marketing / management that it was what they wanted all along, but I don't think we would get away with it!

Spend your down-time developing cute little login programs for the Market guys' computers (you know.. the ones that appear to blow up their systems but really just pack it all into a nice little compressed, hidden dir?) then offer to develop ways to prevent that happening again.

Thought I'd throw in my two cents [pence] worth. The company I work for uses "push" to install or upgrade software on our puters. Since most of the company are not in IT, I suppose this works reasonably well for them. But for us in the development area this has been a disaster. The "pushes" are automatic, replacing files and dll's at will. This has frequently resulted in total corruption not only of development tools but occasionally of NT as well.
However, we [all three of us in my particular department] have given ourselves administrator status over our workstations. If we waited for the help desk to 'help' we could wait for up to a week. Sit and twiddle our thumbs I suppose. Instead we usually can recover NT [again, the help desk's response is to reformat and reinstall everthing], we reinstall anything else that they managed to mangle and get on with our lives.
Sometimes I wonder who needs help more, us [the user's] or them the help desk.

Hmmm... Interesting question.

Q: How can you tell when a house has a teenager living in it?

A: The clock on the video isn't flashing.

This is a development of an issue first raised by, I think, C P Snow, many years ago regarding the disparity between the arts and sciences. Note also that on the radio it is felt necessary to explain what the Internet is whenever a report refers to e-mail, whereas it is automatically assumed that one has a nodding acquaintance with the Bard, major poets, classical Greek, Latin and so on.

The exception is sports commentary, where ignorance is worn as a badge of pride.

It's provable that people earn more the less they know.

Knowledge is Power
Time is Money
Power=Work/Time

substituting:

Knowledge=Work/Money
Money=Work/Knowledge

Thus Money is inversely proportional to Knowledge
QED

I've heard that there was someone who was having problems with disks losing the data on them. Turns out they'd been sticking them on the fridge with magnets.

Someone else rang a help-line to complain that the automatic coffee-cup holder on his computer was broken.

We've established that (in a round-about way )

C.P. Snow - 'The Two Cultures'. And also 'Science and Government'. c. 1959. See also Flanders and Swann making a rude retort (sic) in At the Drop of a Hat. Nothing changes, does it? Or, for the literary minded, 'plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose'. And you can put your own cedillas in.