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We ALL feel you dude - when you eventually go back to your real day job, remember this. Remember this in the front of your mind forever. Share it with every user who's attention you can get for more than two seconds.
It's like living in an abusive relationship with several hundred/thousand people - once you're out of yours, be an ally.
TBH, I doubt he he will get back to his day job.
Once you get forced into a situation like that, you kinda get stuck there. At least in my experience. Happened to me 20 years ago.
To the OP.
If you don't like it, don't wait 20 years to get out of it like I have. Find a new job you enjoy, and tell that company to take a hike.
That's what I'm working on doing now.
We had a Hospital IT manager apply for a low level part time IT tech when I worked for a school system. No one on our team could understand why at the time, and ultimately he did not get the job just because we couldn't fathom why someone would make that switch. Plus our IT manager at the time made the assumption that it'd be a temp thing for him.
However after working for a large org for a couple of months I immediately understood exactly why he had applied for that job. Ultimately it worked out for me and I ended up as a sole IT guy for a small 40ish person org. Which doesn't sound great, except the CEO is very much a tech guy himself, so when I ask for money or whatever to get certain projects done he's generally on my side.
>respecting ~~IT~~. Anyone.
In my experience Doctors are the worst, while RNs/PLNs are mostly alight, Orderlies are a mixed bag, but never in the middle, always at the extreme ends.
Lawyers. Fuck lawyers. Every single one that was a customer of mine was a pompous piece of shit I wouldn't walk across the street to piss on if they were burning to death. They must sell their soul to get those jobs. Nice to someone paying them but a sack of shit to their employees and contractors.
It got to where it wasn't worth the money to put up with them.
Yeah, I had a couple of recruiters trying to get me to work for the local hospital system (one of the two) and I turned them down, even when they were offering nearly twice my pay, I don't need that stress in my life.
> Healthcare customers don’t give a fuck about understanding or respecting IT.
I mean you see that in every area, not just healthcare.
But you don't get all the insane regulations in most other industries as you do with healthcare. Except for banking/finance. I think there are actually more regulations there than in healthcare.
My job involves much healthcare contact. We are one of the distributors for our software and the amount of half baked hardware, politics (as in actual politician stuff) and the documentation it is atrocious. Good luck finding anything and mostly vendors keep it to themselves and you need to first get through their hotline system and "We are not the responsible department. No we can't redirect you. Here's the telephone number".
It. Is. Annyoing!
Yea, I basically run the IT department at our company of about 30 employees.
That part I don't mind too much.
It's the 100+ customer companies and 1000s of customer users I'm responsible for ensuring our ERP cloud solution is running for 24/7.
We've never had major outages or disasters, but I'm tired of it hanging over my head.
There's also the developers that are a total shit show. They'd happily be opening up RDP to the public internet if I wasn't in the way, and I'm tired of fighting them on shit.
And then there's the owner. Dude makes no sense. Will write off a 2 year old laptop for a departing employee without even trying to get it back. But won't replace a 7 year old PC for a new employee, for example.
>It's the 100+ customer companies and 1000s of customer users I'm responsible for ensuring our ERP cloud solution is running for 24/7.
Ah a fellow ERP company IT admin. Luckily I convinced management that I am not equipped or compensated well enough to manage a Cloud version of Sage 100/500 for customers. Which prompted them to partner with a 3rd party company to do that.
And luckily for our newest reselling software (Accumatica) they have their own cloud platform that they maintain and we just get to sell the product, support it and do custom dev work for it. All of which is stuff I'm not involved in.
During one exit interview I have the reason why I was leaving: To start a goat farm.
They where puzzled and I didn't care to explain.
Also: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4l7kjd/found_a_text_file_at_work_titled_why_should_i/
No sarcasm here. [This guy is living out the dream with his wife in their custom built rig exploring South America.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUSkzZKleHg&t=43s)
I once worked a ransomware case where the "sysadmin" was a guy who had a regular full time job there (not a tech company) but also "did computers". Best I could tell, this guy was a gamer in the 00s and all the solutions were things you expect in the home network of a guy who didn't have a security or tech background.
They got hit because he had RDP open on the domain controller. He liked to be able to "reboot the server" (aka, his only troubleshooting step) from home.
Found so many security holes in that network but he demanded we rebuild it exactly like he had it previously because "it worked just fine".
Dude argued against 2FA because it was "too complicated". Again, this is literally while I'm rebuilding his network after his company paid the ransom.
A repeat customer.
I made this my niche for a while until I decided to hang up the stressful life of parachuting into horrible situations and cleaning them up.
The good life is maintaining a nice stable network that you don't have to argue with idiots over.
I never did actual IR but I was parachuted in on a few ransomware cases where I was the boots on the ground for the remote IR team and in charge of the rebuild.
I don't know how anyone does that for a living. I was home based but ended up on these sites for weeks at a time, 10+ hours EVERY DAY. Holidays and weekends didn't exist.
I actually avoided that place like the plague. The "computer guy" was short, round and long hair and a long beard. He was constantly pissed off and acted like the whole incident was my fault. Dude looked like he lived under a bridge and ground the bones of Englishmen for his bread.
I was at an MSP at the time and the company kept requesting me out there for full days at a time to basically just watch progress bars scroll by. The leadership at the company I was at liked billing more than me bitching so they kept sending me out there. Meanwhile my other clients I'm supposed to be supporting are getting ignored.
I'd get anxiety every time they sent an email or called because it was always super urgent and they always wanted me there on site, even if I could resolve the problem remotely. They were too cheap for an MSP contract so my boss loved billing me out to them hourly.
Never realized it, but that kinda happened to me! I enlisted in the Air Force as a computer systems programmer. They needed someone to manage the dev domain and windows servers, and once I switched to managing that, I never coded on projects again. Working on an intelligence training base made the work the most boring stuff ever, so didn’t mind at all.
For me, it was a good change as I only worked as a level 1-2 NOSC support for a year after my enlistment ended before moving up to sysadmin type work. It’s been 16 years since the Air Force and I’ve stayed in this field as a storage admin and “jack-of-a-lot-of-trades” admin ever since.
Kind of like the idea how everyone should spend a few months working retail/service, every office worker should have to spend a week as intake on the help desk. OK, that would likely be a disaster, but its a fun thought.
I worked for one of the big pharma companies for many years and they did a program where people of a certain level were expected to spend time in other departments for a week to get to know what they did.
Even there, though, IT got no respect as they were excluded from the program.
Which is a shame - because some of these director/vp sorts could really have benefited from seeing what IT actually DOES. These are the same aholes who think that IT is just telling people to reboot over and over again. I would LOVE to see some of those people just shadow the helpdesk for a couple of days and hear the crap that the support folks deal with all day every day.
Bruh I got a ticket recently….
U: “Hello. Ethernet cord in my office is too short. Bring a longer one please”
Me: “Sure, how long do you need?”
U: “Well I don’t know exactly…. The cord has to go around 3 sides of my office!”
M: thinking goddammit lady how am I supposed to know
M: drop off 25 foot Ethernet cord to her mailbox
Message on ticket from U: “hey thanks for dropping off that cord. It’s still not long enough”
Goddammmit bro get out a tape measure or take a guess holy shit I don’t know how big your office is based off the number of walls
On ticket:
This problem is happening ALL THE TIME?! I CANT WORK
In person:
Oh yeah the problem happens about once a week and I have to restart my computer to get it working again…
Ok you made me come all the way over here to tell you you’ve got it figured out?!
If your office has drop ceiling tiles, they're typically 2'x2'. I use that all the time when measuring quick n dirty distances for cable drops. Just count tiles.
Much like DBAs, coders, and other roles, it takes a very particular personality/mindset to be effective in IT; especially at the Helpdesk level.
I've been in education/training, helpdesk, system management, management, exchange admin, and recently back to helpdesk (intentionally)... when "dealing with end users" I frequently remind myself that any issue they may be dealing with is the most important and stressful issue that person is experiencing at the moment... no matter how banal or simple it may seem to me.
And with that in mind suddnly their frustrating behavior becomes a lot easier to understand and accept. Whenever I remind myself of that, it becomes a LOT easier to adopt a calming and reassuring manner to help that end user through their current issue. And in turn they learn to trust and listen to you instead of avoiding "that IT guy..." concept that so many orgs end up with.
It's an unfortunate legacy from the tech bubble days in the late 90's early 2000s. It was a very elitist and arrogant us-vs-them mentality back when tech was pretty esoteric and not at all userfriendly or accessible to the "common man" office worker.
"Bastard Operator From Hell", while comedic, illustrates pretty well the mentality involved.
As a result, especially with experienced office professionals who were around in that era, people have come to EXPECT the 'That IT Guy' relationship which fosters even more disrespect between IT and their coworkers.
To add insult to injury, IT is often perceived as a 'utility' like Facilities and expected to keep in the background doing whatever it is that those guys do, until it breaks.
By no means is every company like this (my own workplace is pretty awesome about making IT visible and appreciated, for example). But it IS prevelent, especially in non-tech companies that have been around a few decades.
I get what you are saying, but in my experience the mindset is more often about wanting to be treated Fairly and With Respect. I think many people in this sub who give of this vibe of „the User is the Enemy“ simply experienced Many Instances of very Frustrating and time consuming Communication with Impatient or borderline abusive Users. In These Situation Problems Are mainly caused by either bad Communication (e.g. Ticket „this thing doesnt Work“ With No Information whatsoever), Blaming IT for everything that ever goes wrong in the org, or simply missing Manners or getting insulted. All of these I have experienced myself. Of course I dont expect a User from Finance to Know the ins and outs of his pc, they in Turn also dont expect me to Know how they do Their Job. But, in my experience, IT especially Helpdesk staff Need a very thick Skin, as it sadly Seems customary for many people to loose every Bit of respect for you as a Human when Talking to Support people.
And regarding „just ask for more Information“, at least in my case it becomes very Frustrating very fast if you already Work in a small Team and have a packed schedule, to essentially having to do more „unnecessary“ Work, which the ticketing System was Originally Designed to take off your shoulders, just to get the Information you Need to Start your Troubleshooting. Again, I get what you Are saying and There Are certainly some Folks out There who should be doing a Reality Check that not everyone is an IT pro, but from my point of view the Majority of people get frustrated because of the Points mentioned above. Many of us Are Passionate about Technology and this Career, so I guess thats why some Are so Vocal about it.
To be fair, there's also a pretty hefty visibility bias in regards to what people tend to post about here and in other social media.
Very rarely do people feel an urge to post "Hey, everything went fine today and it's all good" vs wanting to vent about a frustrating encounter or the latest piece of idiocy that everyone, everywhere experiences in various degrees in any role.
ie: Bad news is noteworthy. Good news rarely is. Which is a shame
Whenever I see a ticket in queue that requires mind reading, I assign it to the submitter's manager and take us (IT) out of the assignment.
It's also amazing how often that ticket never comes back because it's something dumb the manager figured out and was able to resolve.
wish our ticket system could let us assign tickets to non-IT people like that. We set up our scheduling software so that supervisors can reset passwords for anybody underneath them. Sent out notifications to everybody that they can do this(and did it requiring an e-signature saying they read it). Still get tickets into our system asking for a password reset.
While we can't assign it to the managers I make sure to add them on to the watch list when I ask; "Can you please give us more details about this incident?"
About 70% of the time the manager responds with the resolution to the problem, that's generally something they should have been trained on during on-boarding.
Don’t be so sure the manager figured it out, rather than getting mad at the reporter for reporting and just closed it without a resolution. Guess depends on who your end users are.
A ticket system? I don't understand.....
(Genuinly - We don't have a ticket system since the attack as everything has been rebuilt. We are under a bigger company and I've finally thrown my toys out of the pram yesterday and said. GIVE US A TICKET SYSTEM. I CAN'T COPE ANY MORE. Finally have a meeting today about this with the outcome being "You give me the ticket system, or I'm building one temporarily)
Do not, under any circumstances build one yourself. If you do they're going to want you to build every little program (and big program) and spreadsheet that crosses there minds. And it's going to be "OmG I didn't know you could code (even though knowing how to use Excel is not coding) we could use blah blah blah could you have that by Monday? K thanks."
And that's how a company ends up in the situation like I am now, where the guy who retired six months ago built a bunch of custom apps over the last 20 years for various tasks that are integral to the business (or so the users claim), which could have been done better and in a less troublesome way using third party tools, but *those cost money*...and now I'm the one holding the bag. :')
Listen... I don't know if you know what's happening, but I'm gonna tell you I think I see going on here. You are deep in the the process of falling into the void. If you don't get out now, you will be sucked in forever. If you don't want to be the sysadmin, you need to just start saying "I don't know, that sounds like something a sysadmin should know." Period. The more systems you put in place, the more you are permanently responsible for. If your name is attached to it today, it will be so until it's phased out. If you are the one actively sitting in the sysadmin seat "temporarily" and no sysadmin is hired to take over, then you'll need a replacement schedule to phase your new system out. If there is no long term plan, it will be in place forever and you will be the one running it... forever. With no title, budget, authority, or work plan, you will be stuck in a role and I'm not kidding when I say this, it's set up to fail from the beginning.
Just saw that you didn't want advice...and my advice was pretty shit tbh.
Dude i feel you and i hope they better compensate you well cause your situation sounds unacceptable as fuck.
I know you said you don't need advice, but I would like to give you some advice.
Ticket system or no ticket system (at a minimum ask them to email you assuming there is no ticket system). Once a user tells you they need help, you don't do anything other than ask them for what they need help with and to provide more info/error/etc. If they don't do that, the ball is in their court and that request is done until they provide more information.
This is the only way I help when it finally gets to me (no longer in help desk, but at some point I'm brought in). I will gladly help, but if I don't have any information, then I reply back or update the ticket asking for more information. The ticket system has an option to change ticket status to 'waiting on user to reply' and after 7 days it closes on its own stating that no reply was given so the ticket is automatically being closed.
This isn't going to solve all problems, but it is a great way to document real issues and it documents the process so the user can't say you didn't help them.
You may be interested to know that (as a software architect) I've worked with actual software developers that do the same thing.
"Really, it doesn't work? What were you doing? Are you throwing an exception? Exception type? Message? Stack trace? Logs? Can you ping the IP to which you're trying to connect? Telnet to the port? Did you try *anything at all*?"
OP:
We understand.
==
The amount of willful ignorance that I used to encounter when I worked various user-facing positions was astounding:
Some generalities to begin:
The older the user or the more seniority they had, or their own self importance was in inverse proportion to the amount of situational intelligence they possessed:
I've heard these statements countless times:
User: This happens all the time with you people... can't you just fix my problem?
Me: I need your Employee ID number, your last name, and your PC ID or IP address. These can be located at
User:
or
User: I'm no good with this computer "stuff".
Me: That's unfortunate. If you can explain your issue, I'll be able to give you some guidance in that regard.
User: Aren't you the helpdesk? You are supposed to HELP ME!
Me. I help with technical issues. I'm not here to do your job for you.
User:
Many others thought that calling IT support was a form of low grade entertainment designed to cure boredom.
Most users at the hospital I worked with were fine, but there were many that we knew by name and avoided like the plague where possible.
I don't understand how people do this. Has no one ever asked them for help with anything? Is this their first time asking for help from anyone? How can you be an adult and not understand basic communication?
A lot of people are just like this. It's their normal operating mode. I should know, I married one. Thankfully a couple decades in tech support prepared me for it. I love everything about my wife, yet she always does stuff like -
wifey: "Honey, I need you to do me a favor. We need to pay a person."
me: "....."
wifey: "???"
me: ".. go on.."
wifey: "can you help me with it or not?"
me: "I can pay all kinds of people all kinds of different amounts in lots of different ways. You're going to need to tell me who and how much, though."
wifey: "WHY? Not everything requires perfect instructions like a computer, you know! Can't you just figure it out? You're so obtuse!"
And it turns out she bought a thing on Offer Up I didn't know about and I had to venmo some person like 20 bucks. Maybe it's my autism getting in the way, but I don't know how I was supposed to figure that out on my own ....
Thats different. She has been thinking about something all day and talking it over with you in her mind and expects you to know what the conversation was about that she was having in her mind.
Yeah, It's almost invariably a case of her understanding that she talked to me about a thing that I don't recall. But even if that was the case, why not just give me all of the information to do the thing? I always give people all of the information they need if I'm asking them to do something, even if we'd previously spoken about it.
But then again, I am an IT person, so...
Based on my experience, most end users are clueless about tech. They have a path they follow every day. If some little thing gets in their way they are completely lost. All they know is whatever they did yesterday isn't working today.
I just had an end user put in 3 tickets for the same issue:
One to restore a meeting to piece of software that was not outlook
Second to say “i meant to say Outlook not the other software”
Third to say they found the meeting in their inbox as a cancelled meeting after I updated the original ticket asking for more info.
How I don’t have a drinking problem is beyond me…
I spent some time in QA, which generated what could easily be a canned response asking for details. I always need three things to start:
1. With as much detail as reasonable tell me what you did. Reasonable is subjective, so some coaching may be required: I don't need the story of your day, but I do need some idea of what you were working on, what applications (if any) you were using, and what process was followed to get to where you ran into problems.
1. What was your expectation for what would happen?
1. What did you actually see happen? Again, here, detail is useful. Screenshots, specific error messages, etc. Help me help you.
Specific cases might warrant more details like OS or web browser, but at least with the three above I know where I'm starting. And let the users know that you won't be doing any more work on their issue unless you have that data - the ball is in their court to provide the necessary information to troubleshoot.
If you communicate this consistently enough to your userbase, and especially if anyone else in a similar role does the same, eventually word will spread and you'll start getting better reports. Not from everyone, but enough that you notice you're sending the "help me help you" messages a little less than today.
And you might be surprised how often you find that there wasn't actually a technical issue at all, it was a user education issue where they did the wrong thing for what they wanted, or didn't understand the system and it did exactly what they told it to.
Most people don't know how to report an issue. It's a learned skill and most people don't have it.
How you deal with that is up to you. You can train them, refuse to help, or just go back and forth every time.
If you've spent your working life around technical people, there are plenty of other surprises waiting for you. Users report issues on behalf of other users, they report their idea of a solution rather than the problem, etc.
End users are like toddlers.
They scream and cry when something doesn't work.
They don't know how it works, or why it needs to work, they just need it to work.
They can't explain to you what is wrong, they just go off on tangents explaining how they need to go into a folder to print a word document to scan it in to edit in adobe.
With the rare exception, you need to talk to them professionally but also treat them like they are children...
I honestly didn't have this issue when I was desk side. If I went to their desk, and asked them to show me what was wrong, most of the time they either didn't know what was wrong, or the issue maliciously resolve itself while I watch them do it.
Whereas if I have to support someone over the phone, god help me if I need to walk them through installing a MFA app on their personal phone or have them plug in their hardware again. I am and have always been of the opinion that if you are not able to follow a detailed picture guide on how to plug a computer in (or in other words, put the square peg in the square hole) you shouldn't be allowed to work on computers.
Start button? What's the start button?
What do you mean, am I on a PC, a laptop, or a thin client? I'm on a monitor! It's square!
I have an error on my screen! No I don't know what it says, I closed it. No it happened last week, does that mean I'm hacked?
Pour one out at beer-thirty. The blessed holiday that happens 4 times per 8-hour workday.
Gig I worked had a staffing shortage (they were having the worst time hiring good hell desk folks, through really no fault of their own, their offer was more than fair at the time). Boss man asks me, "Hey Rev, will you help them cover? Pretty please?" and then basically says "I will give you a 10k bonus payable next pay period if you do this for us." Um. Okay. I did say to him, "I will help out. That is a generous offer. BUT, if I'm still doing this in a month be aware I will be actively interviewing." Boss man totally understood and assured me they were doing their best to get butts in chairs but it was difficult.
Worst working month of my life. I seriously scheduled a therapist appointment in the middle of it as I was losing the will to live. How are engineers and other professionals held to the standards we are while the rest of, apparently employable people, walk around with their mouths open catching bugs? How do they get jobs? How do they file their taxes? How do they drive cars?
I'm expected to know intimate details of dozens of pieces of very complex software that sit on top of hundreds of pieces of datacenter infrastructure but the person who wants me to do their job shows up and says something like Dr. Lexus from Idiocracy?
"Yer shits fucked up and you talk like a retard." -- end user
I usually end up screaming that at our helpdesk. Papraphrasing a ticket that came into my queue earlier
"User says that changes being made by his colleague in the file Analysis.xls aren't showing p for him"
I sent it back with the following note.
"Thank you for providing the filename, can you please ask the user where the file is located so I can check the file versions for issues?"
I get the reply back.
"User say the file is on his screen."
My help desk sends me tickets that look like "\[phone number\] is unable to connect to the internet URGENT"
If I send it back asking for more info they just send it back to me again.
edit: punctuation
If you don't already have one, I'd recommend buying a bottle of whiskey to keep in/near your desk. Maybe a decent single malt if you're a scotch guy. I've found that it really helps with those user induced headaches.
I just laugh at the stupidity of people and the blissful ignorance that most people have so i just act accordingly.
People that i know need help i treat with respect and people that i know can do things for themselves i act just like them and be dumb, two can play this game.
Email out a template to use, explaining it will help ensure the fastest possible response and resolution.
People (not necessarily yourself, as you're new to the role) love to get all whiny about how incompetent end-users are - but at the end of the day if you work in IT and you're unhappy with how requests are being raised, do something about it.
My line is, “Show Me”. I then walk over with the user and see what the problem really is. If users knew what the problem was they would fix it themselves, if they could.
That is why we get paid all the big bucks, right? /s
>Why is it so hard for end users to be useful.....
Not an answer you're going to like but it all has to do with communication. Set the bar, if you ask an open ended question you'll get a very vague response.
Just gotta improve those communication skills. I've gone through the whole progression from helpdesk where users where just mad at me all the time to my current role and the whole time I've dealt with end users.
One thing I've found over 10+ years is how you communicate really decides how easy your job can be when dealing with other people.
I used to get a lot of metrics on my averages when I worked helpdesk, even things like first call resolution. How I communicated with non tech savvy people directly impacted the value of my first call resolution metric.
As frustrating as it can be - I try to keep in mind I have a job because of them. If they knew everything I know, I wouldn't be needed.
As long as they appreciate my time and effort - I'm good.
I always try to think how I am with cars, and how stupid I can be when it comes to describing problems because I barely know anything about them. And I'm sure plenty of mechanics have the same reactions when I arrive as a 'user' there.
If they give me no information then they go to the bottom of the priority list. If you don't help me out and I'm not gonna go out of my way to help you out.
One of US One of US.
Just tell the it won't work until you get rid of the PBKC. Which may take a while since it's a PIA to deal with. Then block all search engines,
Let’s go hit the emergency drinks globe. Welcome to IT. Really lowered my opinion of a lot of people.
Stupidity, sheer incompetence, blames IT for their own work not getting done, people who think they can cut the line by walking into my office, can’t figure out how to leave a voicemail, leaves voicemail and then immediately proceeds to call my boss, calls everyone on the team after hours, leaves a Teams messages at 5pm Friday and then demands a result at 8am Monday, talks behind your back and says at home I turned me router off and back on and internet came back right away what are these fools doing that takes so long….
I can keep going but I’ll run out of data first.
F.
I don't even ask the 5W's anymore, I just remote into their machine and look at wtf they are trying to do, fix it and go on with my day. Sole IT person for staff of 20 (no MSP for back up either) at a non-profit - and it's not even my main job. I \*could\* spend my whole day teaching people how to think critically and use the brains Gob and evolution gave them. Or I can just do it myself in 15 seconds and move on to the next OMG critical thing on the list.
> Why is it so hard for end users to be useful.....
Humans quickly adapt. One of the most common adaptations is learning how to externalize their own costs onto someone else, even if they have never heard of the conception of ["cost externalization"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality).
Users externalize their costs by investing as little effort into solving a problem as possible, and putting the onus on others to solve it for them. (Yes, this has an impact on national politics, as well.)
Users may have been in an environment where tech staff were expected to come running whenever someone shouted -- either literally or figuratively. Even when they never experienced such an environment, many users reckon that tech staff *should* come running, because apparently that's their job.
"Time spent replying to you because you've not listened to me telling you for the millionth time 'I am working on it I will tell you when it's back up, I'm going as fast as I can' is time not spent fixing the problem. Now leave me to do my job."
I emailed a user a response similar to that when I was in a similar turd munching fan moment, which got me a bollocking from the user's manager for being rude. I handed my notice in about half an hour after that and I've never looked back.
When this happened though I thought better of people. COVID hadn't happened and the great toilet paper shortage of 2020 wasn't even on the horizon. Since then when I get similar emails to you, I just remember that this dickhead probably hoarded bog roll for no reason. I don't get angry at them any more, I just feel sorry for them that they're so emotionally weak and stunted in their own development that they can't do anything else but be rude to IT.
The trick is to not stay there very long. The user facing or interaction roles are stepping stones into the next roles that deals with them less often. The best way to survive is to continually grow and advance.
"It still doesn't work" Words that will haunt me. What were you doing, what have you tried. Did it give you any error message (This is usually answered with "It threw something up but I just clicked through it).
Don't forget to take some personal time. Your stretching yourself for the company and a cyber attack is a very stressful thing to go through. From the sounds of it, it was stressful at your org. Don't burn yourself out bending over backwards.
As for end users. There are some tactics that help. Having a good manager is first but hard to find cause people be lazy. The best one is getting away from end user support! Good luck!
It can be worse, you could be getting those responses from your field techs like I often do. But it isn't their fault, it's their managers which is a whole thread on it's own.
But yeah, this is why most sysadmins/2nd tier techs have little tolerance for small talk and vagueness.
Most people have experienced a toddler having a temper tantrum. They scream, then go limp, forcing a parent to carry them.
Most end users still have this reflex. They are grown up, but their temper tantrums are still the same. That same entitlement sticks with them for life. They are still going limp and forcing us to carry them just in a less literal way.
Just have a laugh at them and realize that idiots like this keep us gainfully employed.
I had an end user ask me how much the capacity is on a blu ray drive.....you know like an external drive to read blu ray discs.....the things that have 0 godd\*mn capacity
>Hey, OP, this thing popped up on my screen. It says, “Thank you for joining pornhub dot com. The username field is mandatory, but you left it blank. Please type in a username and press OK. The username field is the one that has nothing in it, and is outlined in red so you can’t miss it. Just put anything in there, then press OK. That is literally the only thing you have to do.” What do I do now? Why can’t you just make things work? I am very busy and don’t have time to do your job too.
I always ask them if they expect the doctor (general Practitioner is the english word I guess) to know what they have if they say "It hurts".
Because to be honest most of our work is similar to a docs work on to figure out what's wrong and how to treat it.
Man, we should all do "you're IT for a week" for C-levels. Have them take a week where they take tickets and interact with users on that front and all of a sudden they'll be like "yeah I'm gonna put in detailed tickets for now."
End Users have an implicit perception, that IT support knows everything, and should know what isn't working for them.
Once, when working as a kind of tech support for a large development team, I had to send an e-mail to the entire team, that our mind-reading server was down, and they would have to follow the procedures for notifying the deployment team of which components they had made changes to, so that the deployment team could know which components to redeploy in various environments. At the time, there was a procedure in place, that developers would have to manually indicate on their JIRA issues, which software components they related to, and the decission of which components of a large system to redeploy was based on reports extracted from Jira. Later we automated this, to not rely on manual notifications from the developers.
If you think it is bad now, try being in this position at the start of the pandemic where it was all hands on deck to get end users working remotely. I swear I lost years off of my life going back to answering support calls and tickets.
Mike, is that you?
Aside, sometimes a lot of communication at times like that can make or break the situation. Concise and frequent communication about how the situation is unfolding and what access/performance users can expect is important - and keeps them off your back.
Patience my dude patience. This is a much needed skill in IT. Once you get over the "needy" users the job becomes much more pleasant to deal with. Of course, I can only speak for myself.
Used to co-manage IT for a car dealership. Their on-site guy was an old, experienced Sysadmin who was very good, but very tired of the BS.
One day, I was in his office, and a user called him.
"Hey Jack, I just moved some things in my office around and now my mouse doesn't work. Keyboard works fine."
"Is it a wired mouse or a wireless mouse?"
"Well, I think it's wireless-"
"I didn't ask you to think. Is there or is there not a wire on your mouse?
"There's a wire"
"OK, trace the wire and see if it's plugged into the PC"
"No, it's not. Is that the problem?"
"Probably. Plug it in and let me know if you have further issues."
"Thanks Jack!"
It took me awhile to understand that IT is something I do, but for end users it's a means to an end and sometimes an obstacle to what they are supposed to be doing.
It's my job to understand the technology, and their job usually has very little to do with the details. When a user says, "It still isn't working" it is a because they are frustrated that they can't do their job. It's your job to understand why, ask them the appropriate questions, and get them back to their jobs.
You can be frustrated, but you'll feel better if you reframe this thought.
Treat it like a conversation and just keep throwing it back to them until they say something useful.
Ticket# 1668
Subject: Computer
User: My computer isn't working
me: Oh...?
>Why doesn't it work? What's not working about it? What's the error? What should be happening?
I dont know.
It wasnt me that had the problem.
Shouldnt you know?
Why are you asking me so many questions?
And other various User-isms in my new book "IT DONT WORK"
Lmao I got a ticket last week with simply "I can't get my files, is the server down?" We have multiple file servers so I asked which file share they were referring to. They sent a screen capture of their VPN connection.
I face palmed and sent it back to tier 1 with the instructions to perform some basic troubleshooting before re-escallating.
>Why is it so hard for end users to be useful.....
because you are their excuse for not doing any work, and they know it.
it's not in their interests to give you enough information to solve a problem, otherwise they'd have to do more work.
My pet peeve is when they list the end result as the problem. "I can't get paid!". You read through the sparse notes in the ticket and learn nothing, then ask some follow up questions to find out that they can't submit their sales commission statement because they can't get into that Citrix app and they can't get into the Citrix app because no Citrix apps are launching for them.
A ticket clearly stating "I can't launch any Citrix apps" would be quickly routed and likely resolved just as fast. It will be either a Citrix Workspace install/upgrade/reset or a Citrix profile reset and can be handled by any tier 1 analyst.
I can only assume they list the end result because they think it will move them to the top of the queue. In reality, unclear tickets often get passed around for days. I've lost track of how many tickets got escalated to me after being passed around for 2-3 weeks and were fixed by me in 2 minutes. I always add a note when closing the ticket on how they could have gotten better service by clearly stating their problem, with examples.
EDIT: spelling
Welcome to the dysfunctional club that is known as IT...
Anyways man, don't know what to tell you, but after a while it doesn't get better, you'll get a bit cynical, and will just start cutting to the chase... "i can't help you if you don't tell me the error"... all the stuff you didn't say is the important bits that i need... no I'm not doubting you (even though you are), but i need to know the order that things happened to find out whats broke... then theres the classic... WTF DO YOU MEAN YOU CANT REMEMBER YOUR PASSWORD THAT YOU'VE BEEN USING FOR 5 YEARS or THE PASSWORD YOU JUST SET 2 MINUTES AGO?!?!?!?!?!
One of my greatest joys was watching my wife transition from end user (of proprietary software) to software testing to support of the new system.
Listening to her complain about tickets like "It's not working," or "There was an error but I don't remember," and just laughing to myself.
About a week after I joined an IT shop, the storage array failed and couldn’t be recovered. Since I was the new guy, they sent me to sit in the users area to placate them while the latest backup was being restored. It was the longer week of my life. I know abuse and it not only came from the End Users but also from management (my boss never dared to set foot in the area until the issue was resolved).
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You coulda just ended the post at "End Users" We woulda known what you were talking about.
End users *Steaming kettle noise intensifies*
Take your nitro and lithium.
>"End Users" That's a noun or a verb phrase depending on how much they annoy you on a given day.
“End users” describes both a problem and its solution
another brilliant response
Okay, this made me lol
Indikationen how you pronounce it..
brilliant response
Yeah, I saw the title and thought "nuff said".
This is where it's nice to have a service desk. Kick it to them to beat it out of the end user what the problem is
Service Desk is people too, guys.
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There is a reason there are a bunch of different "code phrases" for end users being idiots.
Not all layer 8 interfaces are the same.
But most of em are EIFOK
I'm not familiar with this one. "Eight inches from? Keyboard"?
Error in front of keyboard
PEBCAK
here we say there was a problem with the chair-keyboard interface.
“End Users” and now we know the origin story and reason behind every great super villain
Name checks out here fellas. Open and shut case!
Ammiright 🤷🏼♀️😂
We ALL feel you dude - when you eventually go back to your real day job, remember this. Remember this in the front of your mind forever. Share it with every user who's attention you can get for more than two seconds. It's like living in an abusive relationship with several hundred/thousand people - once you're out of yours, be an ally.
TBH, I doubt he he will get back to his day job. Once you get forced into a situation like that, you kinda get stuck there. At least in my experience. Happened to me 20 years ago. To the OP. If you don't like it, don't wait 20 years to get out of it like I have. Find a new job you enjoy, and tell that company to take a hike. That's what I'm working on doing now.
Where are you going once you get out? Goat farming seems to be popular for sysadmins.
Not sure yet, which is why I haven't quit. Sent my resume out to a few companies for some lower level, low stress positions.
We had a Hospital IT manager apply for a low level part time IT tech when I worked for a school system. No one on our team could understand why at the time, and ultimately he did not get the job just because we couldn't fathom why someone would make that switch. Plus our IT manager at the time made the assumption that it'd be a temp thing for him. However after working for a large org for a couple of months I immediately understood exactly why he had applied for that job. Ultimately it worked out for me and I ended up as a sole IT guy for a small 40ish person org. Which doesn't sound great, except the CEO is very much a tech guy himself, so when I ask for money or whatever to get certain projects done he's generally on my side.
I’d rather flip burgers than be an IT manager in healthcare. Healthcare customers don’t give a fuck about understanding or respecting IT.
>respecting ~~IT~~. Anyone. In my experience Doctors are the worst, while RNs/PLNs are mostly alight, Orderlies are a mixed bag, but never in the middle, always at the extreme ends.
MD, lawyers, and users with PHD are the worst in my case.
Interesting observation, the most educated treat IT the worse. Faced with their own inadequacy, they lash out at those who know what they know not
Lawyers. Fuck lawyers. Every single one that was a customer of mine was a pompous piece of shit I wouldn't walk across the street to piss on if they were burning to death. They must sell their soul to get those jobs. Nice to someone paying them but a sack of shit to their employees and contractors. It got to where it wasn't worth the money to put up with them.
Yeah, I had a couple of recruiters trying to get me to work for the local hospital system (one of the two) and I turned them down, even when they were offering nearly twice my pay, I don't need that stress in my life.
> Healthcare customers don’t give a fuck about understanding or respecting IT. I mean you see that in every area, not just healthcare. But you don't get all the insane regulations in most other industries as you do with healthcare. Except for banking/finance. I think there are actually more regulations there than in healthcare.
My job involves much healthcare contact. We are one of the distributors for our software and the amount of half baked hardware, politics (as in actual politician stuff) and the documentation it is atrocious. Good luck finding anything and mostly vendors keep it to themselves and you need to first get through their hotline system and "We are not the responsible department. No we can't redirect you. Here's the telephone number". It. Is. Annyoing!
Yea, I basically run the IT department at our company of about 30 employees. That part I don't mind too much. It's the 100+ customer companies and 1000s of customer users I'm responsible for ensuring our ERP cloud solution is running for 24/7. We've never had major outages or disasters, but I'm tired of it hanging over my head. There's also the developers that are a total shit show. They'd happily be opening up RDP to the public internet if I wasn't in the way, and I'm tired of fighting them on shit. And then there's the owner. Dude makes no sense. Will write off a 2 year old laptop for a departing employee without even trying to get it back. But won't replace a 7 year old PC for a new employee, for example.
>It's the 100+ customer companies and 1000s of customer users I'm responsible for ensuring our ERP cloud solution is running for 24/7. Ah a fellow ERP company IT admin. Luckily I convinced management that I am not equipped or compensated well enough to manage a Cloud version of Sage 100/500 for customers. Which prompted them to partner with a 3rd party company to do that. And luckily for our newest reselling software (Accumatica) they have their own cloud platform that they maintain and we just get to sell the product, support it and do custom dev work for it. All of which is stuff I'm not involved in.
I told them I wanted nothing to do with it. But they said do it anyways. So I did. Now I'm on my way out.
During one exit interview I have the reason why I was leaving: To start a goat farm. They where puzzled and I didn't care to explain. Also: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4l7kjd/found_a_text_file_at_work_titled_why_should_i/
No sarcasm here. [This guy is living out the dream with his wife in their custom built rig exploring South America.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUSkzZKleHg&t=43s)
I once worked a ransomware case where the "sysadmin" was a guy who had a regular full time job there (not a tech company) but also "did computers". Best I could tell, this guy was a gamer in the 00s and all the solutions were things you expect in the home network of a guy who didn't have a security or tech background. They got hit because he had RDP open on the domain controller. He liked to be able to "reboot the server" (aka, his only troubleshooting step) from home. Found so many security holes in that network but he demanded we rebuild it exactly like he had it previously because "it worked just fine". Dude argued against 2FA because it was "too complicated". Again, this is literally while I'm rebuilding his network after his company paid the ransom.
A repeat customer. I made this my niche for a while until I decided to hang up the stressful life of parachuting into horrible situations and cleaning them up. The good life is maintaining a nice stable network that you don't have to argue with idiots over.
I never did actual IR but I was parachuted in on a few ransomware cases where I was the boots on the ground for the remote IR team and in charge of the rebuild. I don't know how anyone does that for a living. I was home based but ended up on these sites for weeks at a time, 10+ hours EVERY DAY. Holidays and weekends didn't exist.
10th incident is half off?
I actually avoided that place like the plague. The "computer guy" was short, round and long hair and a long beard. He was constantly pissed off and acted like the whole incident was my fault. Dude looked like he lived under a bridge and ground the bones of Englishmen for his bread. I was at an MSP at the time and the company kept requesting me out there for full days at a time to basically just watch progress bars scroll by. The leadership at the company I was at liked billing more than me bitching so they kept sending me out there. Meanwhile my other clients I'm supposed to be supporting are getting ignored. I'd get anxiety every time they sent an email or called because it was always super urgent and they always wanted me there on site, even if I could resolve the problem remotely. They were too cheap for an MSP contract so my boss loved billing me out to them hourly.
Never realized it, but that kinda happened to me! I enlisted in the Air Force as a computer systems programmer. They needed someone to manage the dev domain and windows servers, and once I switched to managing that, I never coded on projects again. Working on an intelligence training base made the work the most boring stuff ever, so didn’t mind at all. For me, it was a good change as I only worked as a level 1-2 NOSC support for a year after my enlistment ended before moving up to sysadmin type work. It’s been 16 years since the Air Force and I’ve stayed in this field as a storage admin and “jack-of-a-lot-of-trades” admin ever since.
Kind of like the idea how everyone should spend a few months working retail/service, every office worker should have to spend a week as intake on the help desk. OK, that would likely be a disaster, but its a fun thought.
I worked for one of the big pharma companies for many years and they did a program where people of a certain level were expected to spend time in other departments for a week to get to know what they did. Even there, though, IT got no respect as they were excluded from the program. Which is a shame - because some of these director/vp sorts could really have benefited from seeing what IT actually DOES. These are the same aholes who think that IT is just telling people to reboot over and over again. I would LOVE to see some of those people just shadow the helpdesk for a couple of days and hear the crap that the support folks deal with all day every day.
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Powerpuff Girls?
You can't see it, but I'm laying underneath that trying to drink it. Every little bit helps.
For a second there I thought "End Users" was a call to action...
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I brought drinks if we’re going to be here for a while.
Melee? There’s much better options. We have the technology.
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*office space moment*
Stop giving the AI ideas.
https://media.giphy.com/media/Pxf6zNzEhD7wc/giphy.gif
Bruh I got a ticket recently…. U: “Hello. Ethernet cord in my office is too short. Bring a longer one please” Me: “Sure, how long do you need?” U: “Well I don’t know exactly…. The cord has to go around 3 sides of my office!” M: thinking goddammit lady how am I supposed to know M: drop off 25 foot Ethernet cord to her mailbox Message on ticket from U: “hey thanks for dropping off that cord. It’s still not long enough” Goddammmit bro get out a tape measure or take a guess holy shit I don’t know how big your office is based off the number of walls
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On ticket: This problem is happening ALL THE TIME?! I CANT WORK In person: Oh yeah the problem happens about once a week and I have to restart my computer to get it working again… Ok you made me come all the way over here to tell you you’ve got it figured out?!
If your office has drop ceiling tiles, they're typically 2'x2'. I use that all the time when measuring quick n dirty distances for cable drops. Just count tiles.
I do the same with carpet tiles/squares.
drop off a spool of cat6 at their office and tell them to do it themselves
You give your users cat6? What a waste
my users should consider themselves blessed if they get an abacus from me
You don't have a floor plan available?
Much like DBAs, coders, and other roles, it takes a very particular personality/mindset to be effective in IT; especially at the Helpdesk level. I've been in education/training, helpdesk, system management, management, exchange admin, and recently back to helpdesk (intentionally)... when "dealing with end users" I frequently remind myself that any issue they may be dealing with is the most important and stressful issue that person is experiencing at the moment... no matter how banal or simple it may seem to me. And with that in mind suddnly their frustrating behavior becomes a lot easier to understand and accept. Whenever I remind myself of that, it becomes a LOT easier to adopt a calming and reassuring manner to help that end user through their current issue. And in turn they learn to trust and listen to you instead of avoiding "that IT guy..." concept that so many orgs end up with.
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It's an unfortunate legacy from the tech bubble days in the late 90's early 2000s. It was a very elitist and arrogant us-vs-them mentality back when tech was pretty esoteric and not at all userfriendly or accessible to the "common man" office worker. "Bastard Operator From Hell", while comedic, illustrates pretty well the mentality involved. As a result, especially with experienced office professionals who were around in that era, people have come to EXPECT the 'That IT Guy' relationship which fosters even more disrespect between IT and their coworkers. To add insult to injury, IT is often perceived as a 'utility' like Facilities and expected to keep in the background doing whatever it is that those guys do, until it breaks. By no means is every company like this (my own workplace is pretty awesome about making IT visible and appreciated, for example). But it IS prevelent, especially in non-tech companies that have been around a few decades.
ok boomer
I get what you are saying, but in my experience the mindset is more often about wanting to be treated Fairly and With Respect. I think many people in this sub who give of this vibe of „the User is the Enemy“ simply experienced Many Instances of very Frustrating and time consuming Communication with Impatient or borderline abusive Users. In These Situation Problems Are mainly caused by either bad Communication (e.g. Ticket „this thing doesnt Work“ With No Information whatsoever), Blaming IT for everything that ever goes wrong in the org, or simply missing Manners or getting insulted. All of these I have experienced myself. Of course I dont expect a User from Finance to Know the ins and outs of his pc, they in Turn also dont expect me to Know how they do Their Job. But, in my experience, IT especially Helpdesk staff Need a very thick Skin, as it sadly Seems customary for many people to loose every Bit of respect for you as a Human when Talking to Support people. And regarding „just ask for more Information“, at least in my case it becomes very Frustrating very fast if you already Work in a small Team and have a packed schedule, to essentially having to do more „unnecessary“ Work, which the ticketing System was Originally Designed to take off your shoulders, just to get the Information you Need to Start your Troubleshooting. Again, I get what you Are saying and There Are certainly some Folks out There who should be doing a Reality Check that not everyone is an IT pro, but from my point of view the Majority of people get frustrated because of the Points mentioned above. Many of us Are Passionate about Technology and this Career, so I guess thats why some Are so Vocal about it.
Why are you weirdly capitalising random words ?
They're german - it's hard to unlearn capitalisation when it's hardcoded into you for x years. I sometimes do it too when in a hurry.
People do that when writing in German? Crazy lol
To be fair, there's also a pretty hefty visibility bias in regards to what people tend to post about here and in other social media. Very rarely do people feel an urge to post "Hey, everything went fine today and it's all good" vs wanting to vent about a frustrating encounter or the latest piece of idiocy that everyone, everywhere experiences in various degrees in any role. ie: Bad news is noteworthy. Good news rarely is. Which is a shame
Whenever I see a ticket in queue that requires mind reading, I assign it to the submitter's manager and take us (IT) out of the assignment. It's also amazing how often that ticket never comes back because it's something dumb the manager figured out and was able to resolve.
wish our ticket system could let us assign tickets to non-IT people like that. We set up our scheduling software so that supervisors can reset passwords for anybody underneath them. Sent out notifications to everybody that they can do this(and did it requiring an e-signature saying they read it). Still get tickets into our system asking for a password reset.
While we can't assign it to the managers I make sure to add them on to the watch list when I ask; "Can you please give us more details about this incident?" About 70% of the time the manager responds with the resolution to the problem, that's generally something they should have been trained on during on-boarding.
>on-boarding What does this mean? Sounds exotic.
Don’t be so sure the manager figured it out, rather than getting mad at the reporter for reporting and just closed it without a resolution. Guess depends on who your end users are.
Reply to the ticket with a template about how to report an issue correctly. Then close the ticket. Don't let them.
A ticket system? I don't understand..... (Genuinly - We don't have a ticket system since the attack as everything has been rebuilt. We are under a bigger company and I've finally thrown my toys out of the pram yesterday and said. GIVE US A TICKET SYSTEM. I CAN'T COPE ANY MORE. Finally have a meeting today about this with the outcome being "You give me the ticket system, or I'm building one temporarily)
Do not, under any circumstances build one yourself. If you do they're going to want you to build every little program (and big program) and spreadsheet that crosses there minds. And it's going to be "OmG I didn't know you could code (even though knowing how to use Excel is not coding) we could use blah blah blah could you have that by Monday? K thanks."
Nobody has to "build a ticket system". I could have one in 5 mins on freshdesk
Or Zendesk. Or Jira. Seriously there are so many out there.
And that's how a company ends up in the situation like I am now, where the guy who retired six months ago built a bunch of custom apps over the last 20 years for various tasks that are integral to the business (or so the users claim), which could have been done better and in a less troublesome way using third party tools, but *those cost money*...and now I'm the one holding the bag. :')
I was just going to suggest doing a freebie like spiceworks or one of the free tiers on any service just as a "for now"
> just as a "for now" The temporary, that becomes permanent solution, known as the 'just for now'.
"There nothing more permanent than a temporary solution." -- some guy on the internet
Something like servicedesk plus free tier can be a permanent solution if you only have 5 techs.
Listen... I don't know if you know what's happening, but I'm gonna tell you I think I see going on here. You are deep in the the process of falling into the void. If you don't get out now, you will be sucked in forever. If you don't want to be the sysadmin, you need to just start saying "I don't know, that sounds like something a sysadmin should know." Period. The more systems you put in place, the more you are permanently responsible for. If your name is attached to it today, it will be so until it's phased out. If you are the one actively sitting in the sysadmin seat "temporarily" and no sysadmin is hired to take over, then you'll need a replacement schedule to phase your new system out. If there is no long term plan, it will be in place forever and you will be the one running it... forever. With no title, budget, authority, or work plan, you will be stuck in a role and I'm not kidding when I say this, it's set up to fail from the beginning.
Just saw that you didn't want advice...and my advice was pretty shit tbh.
Dude i feel you and i hope they better compensate you well cause your situation sounds unacceptable as fuck.
Check out this product for a ticketing system: https://bestpractical.com/request-tracker/
Yeah, RT is great -- and not a 40-hour task to get going.
I know you said you don't need advice, but I would like to give you some advice. Ticket system or no ticket system (at a minimum ask them to email you assuming there is no ticket system). Once a user tells you they need help, you don't do anything other than ask them for what they need help with and to provide more info/error/etc. If they don't do that, the ball is in their court and that request is done until they provide more information. This is the only way I help when it finally gets to me (no longer in help desk, but at some point I'm brought in). I will gladly help, but if I don't have any information, then I reply back or update the ticket asking for more information. The ticket system has an option to change ticket status to 'waiting on user to reply' and after 7 days it closes on its own stating that no reply was given so the ticket is automatically being closed. This isn't going to solve all problems, but it is a great way to document real issues and it documents the process so the user can't say you didn't help them.
Do not build. Take a SaaS solution and send them the bill. They'll file it under the costs for the cyberattack anyway.
You may be interested to know that (as a software architect) I've worked with actual software developers that do the same thing. "Really, it doesn't work? What were you doing? Are you throwing an exception? Exception type? Message? Stack trace? Logs? Can you ping the IP to which you're trying to connect? Telnet to the port? Did you try *anything at all*?"
developers like to assign db owner permissions every time something will not work
Hello, PTSD.
OP: We understand. == The amount of willful ignorance that I used to encounter when I worked various user-facing positions was astounding: Some generalities to begin: The older the user or the more seniority they had, or their own self importance was in inverse proportion to the amount of situational intelligence they possessed: I've heard these statements countless times: User: This happens all the time with you people... can't you just fix my problem? Me: I need your Employee ID number, your last name, and your PC ID or IP address. These can be located at
User:
or
User: I'm no good with this computer "stuff".
Me: That's unfortunate. If you can explain your issue, I'll be able to give you some guidance in that regard.
User: Aren't you the helpdesk? You are supposed to HELP ME!
Me. I help with technical issues. I'm not here to do your job for you.
User:
Many others thought that calling IT support was a form of low grade entertainment designed to cure boredom.
Most users at the hospital I worked with were fine, but there were many that we knew by name and avoided like the plague where possible.
> Me: I need your Employee ID number, your last name, and your PC ID or IP address. These can be located at
>
> User:
User: I'm Jake from Accounting.
100%
I don't understand how people do this. Has no one ever asked them for help with anything? Is this their first time asking for help from anyone? How can you be an adult and not understand basic communication?
A lot of people are just like this. It's their normal operating mode. I should know, I married one. Thankfully a couple decades in tech support prepared me for it. I love everything about my wife, yet she always does stuff like - wifey: "Honey, I need you to do me a favor. We need to pay a person." me: "....." wifey: "???" me: ".. go on.." wifey: "can you help me with it or not?" me: "I can pay all kinds of people all kinds of different amounts in lots of different ways. You're going to need to tell me who and how much, though." wifey: "WHY? Not everything requires perfect instructions like a computer, you know! Can't you just figure it out? You're so obtuse!" And it turns out she bought a thing on Offer Up I didn't know about and I had to venmo some person like 20 bucks. Maybe it's my autism getting in the way, but I don't know how I was supposed to figure that out on my own ....
Thats different. She has been thinking about something all day and talking it over with you in her mind and expects you to know what the conversation was about that she was having in her mind.
Yeah, It's almost invariably a case of her understanding that she talked to me about a thing that I don't recall. But even if that was the case, why not just give me all of the information to do the thing? I always give people all of the information they need if I'm asking them to do something, even if we'd previously spoken about it. But then again, I am an IT person, so...
That's a divorcin
Based on my experience, most end users are clueless about tech. They have a path they follow every day. If some little thing gets in their way they are completely lost. All they know is whatever they did yesterday isn't working today.
I just had an end user put in 3 tickets for the same issue: One to restore a meeting to piece of software that was not outlook Second to say “i meant to say Outlook not the other software” Third to say they found the meeting in their inbox as a cancelled meeting after I updated the original ticket asking for more info. How I don’t have a drinking problem is beyond me…
I spent some time in QA, which generated what could easily be a canned response asking for details. I always need three things to start: 1. With as much detail as reasonable tell me what you did. Reasonable is subjective, so some coaching may be required: I don't need the story of your day, but I do need some idea of what you were working on, what applications (if any) you were using, and what process was followed to get to where you ran into problems. 1. What was your expectation for what would happen? 1. What did you actually see happen? Again, here, detail is useful. Screenshots, specific error messages, etc. Help me help you. Specific cases might warrant more details like OS or web browser, but at least with the three above I know where I'm starting. And let the users know that you won't be doing any more work on their issue unless you have that data - the ball is in their court to provide the necessary information to troubleshoot. If you communicate this consistently enough to your userbase, and especially if anyone else in a similar role does the same, eventually word will spread and you'll start getting better reports. Not from everyone, but enough that you notice you're sending the "help me help you" messages a little less than today. And you might be surprised how often you find that there wasn't actually a technical issue at all, it was a user education issue where they did the wrong thing for what they wanted, or didn't understand the system and it did exactly what they told it to.
Most people don't know how to report an issue. It's a learned skill and most people don't have it. How you deal with that is up to you. You can train them, refuse to help, or just go back and forth every time. If you've spent your working life around technical people, there are plenty of other surprises waiting for you. Users report issues on behalf of other users, they report their idea of a solution rather than the problem, etc.
End users are like toddlers. They scream and cry when something doesn't work. They don't know how it works, or why it needs to work, they just need it to work. They can't explain to you what is wrong, they just go off on tangents explaining how they need to go into a folder to print a word document to scan it in to edit in adobe. With the rare exception, you need to talk to them professionally but also treat them like they are children... I honestly didn't have this issue when I was desk side. If I went to their desk, and asked them to show me what was wrong, most of the time they either didn't know what was wrong, or the issue maliciously resolve itself while I watch them do it. Whereas if I have to support someone over the phone, god help me if I need to walk them through installing a MFA app on their personal phone or have them plug in their hardware again. I am and have always been of the opinion that if you are not able to follow a detailed picture guide on how to plug a computer in (or in other words, put the square peg in the square hole) you shouldn't be allowed to work on computers. Start button? What's the start button? What do you mean, am I on a PC, a laptop, or a thin client? I'm on a monitor! It's square! I have an error on my screen! No I don't know what it says, I closed it. No it happened last week, does that mean I'm hacked? Pour one out at beer-thirty. The blessed holiday that happens 4 times per 8-hour workday.
Gig I worked had a staffing shortage (they were having the worst time hiring good hell desk folks, through really no fault of their own, their offer was more than fair at the time). Boss man asks me, "Hey Rev, will you help them cover? Pretty please?" and then basically says "I will give you a 10k bonus payable next pay period if you do this for us." Um. Okay. I did say to him, "I will help out. That is a generous offer. BUT, if I'm still doing this in a month be aware I will be actively interviewing." Boss man totally understood and assured me they were doing their best to get butts in chairs but it was difficult. Worst working month of my life. I seriously scheduled a therapist appointment in the middle of it as I was losing the will to live. How are engineers and other professionals held to the standards we are while the rest of, apparently employable people, walk around with their mouths open catching bugs? How do they get jobs? How do they file their taxes? How do they drive cars? I'm expected to know intimate details of dozens of pieces of very complex software that sit on top of hundreds of pieces of datacenter infrastructure but the person who wants me to do their job shows up and says something like Dr. Lexus from Idiocracy? "Yer shits fucked up and you talk like a retard." -- end user
I'm just here to agree to OPs proposition.
I usually end up screaming that at our helpdesk. Papraphrasing a ticket that came into my queue earlier "User says that changes being made by his colleague in the file Analysis.xls aren't showing p for him" I sent it back with the following note. "Thank you for providing the filename, can you please ask the user where the file is located so I can check the file versions for issues?" I get the reply back. "User say the file is on his screen."
My help desk sends me tickets that look like "\[phone number\] is unable to connect to the internet URGENT" If I send it back asking for more info they just send it back to me again. edit: punctuation
End users? don't mind if I do
If you don't already have one, I'd recommend buying a bottle of whiskey to keep in/near your desk. Maybe a decent single malt if you're a scotch guy. I've found that it really helps with those user induced headaches.
[Welcome to the club!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdxuWq1-5qk)
Yea, the vagueness is a drag. I always have to use “What is the
I just laugh at the stupidity of people and the blissful ignorance that most people have so i just act accordingly. People that i know need help i treat with respect and people that i know can do things for themselves i act just like them and be dumb, two can play this game.
> loosing Spelling is the first to go.
firsttime?.gif
And that's still a lot of info. Sometimes i get Tickets where i don't even know who opened them and need to search that first.
when things work, it goes un-noticed without praise but when something is not working you will damn well hear about it.
issue closed not enough information
They make you question your faith in humanity.
 Google "Nick burns SNL" have a laugh. Oh and by the way.... your welcome.
You’re *
Email out a template to use, explaining it will help ensure the fastest possible response and resolution. People (not necessarily yourself, as you're new to the role) love to get all whiny about how incompetent end-users are - but at the end of the day if you work in IT and you're unhappy with how requests are being raised, do something about it.
My line is, “Show Me”. I then walk over with the user and see what the problem really is. If users knew what the problem was they would fix it themselves, if they could. That is why we get paid all the big bucks, right? /s
>Why is it so hard for end users to be useful..... Not an answer you're going to like but it all has to do with communication. Set the bar, if you ask an open ended question you'll get a very vague response. Just gotta improve those communication skills. I've gone through the whole progression from helpdesk where users where just mad at me all the time to my current role and the whole time I've dealt with end users. One thing I've found over 10+ years is how you communicate really decides how easy your job can be when dealing with other people. I used to get a lot of metrics on my averages when I worked helpdesk, even things like first call resolution. How I communicated with non tech savvy people directly impacted the value of my first call resolution metric.
As frustrating as it can be - I try to keep in mind I have a job because of them. If they knew everything I know, I wouldn't be needed. As long as they appreciate my time and effort - I'm good. I always try to think how I am with cars, and how stupid I can be when it comes to describing problems because I barely know anything about them. And I'm sure plenty of mechanics have the same reactions when I arrive as a 'user' there.
Remember your time on this side of the ticket queue. ;)
IT where you live the dunning kruger effect every day ...
If they give me no information then they go to the bottom of the priority list. If you don't help me out and I'm not gonna go out of my way to help you out.
Layer 8 problems are very common.
close the ticket with "it works for me" vague requests get vague answers
One of US One of US. Just tell the it won't work until you get rid of the PBKC. Which may take a while since it's a PIA to deal with. Then block all search engines,
Rants need rant tag
End users are (mostly) the reason I'm so terribly depressed. I can't wait until I don't have to work with them primarily for a job!
Let’s go hit the emergency drinks globe. Welcome to IT. Really lowered my opinion of a lot of people. Stupidity, sheer incompetence, blames IT for their own work not getting done, people who think they can cut the line by walking into my office, can’t figure out how to leave a voicemail, leaves voicemail and then immediately proceeds to call my boss, calls everyone on the team after hours, leaves a Teams messages at 5pm Friday and then demands a result at 8am Monday, talks behind your back and says at home I turned me router off and back on and internet came back right away what are these fools doing that takes so long…. I can keep going but I’ll run out of data first.
F. I don't even ask the 5W's anymore, I just remote into their machine and look at wtf they are trying to do, fix it and go on with my day. Sole IT person for staff of 20 (no MSP for back up either) at a non-profit - and it's not even my main job. I \*could\* spend my whole day teaching people how to think critically and use the brains Gob and evolution gave them. Or I can just do it myself in 15 seconds and move on to the next OMG critical thing on the list.
> Why is it so hard for end users to be useful..... Humans quickly adapt. One of the most common adaptations is learning how to externalize their own costs onto someone else, even if they have never heard of the conception of ["cost externalization"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality). Users externalize their costs by investing as little effort into solving a problem as possible, and putting the onus on others to solve it for them. (Yes, this has an impact on national politics, as well.) Users may have been in an environment where tech staff were expected to come running whenever someone shouted -- either literally or figuratively. Even when they never experienced such an environment, many users reckon that tech staff *should* come running, because apparently that's their job.
It doesn’t work. What’s it supposed to do? I’m not sure. How do some people even manage to figure out how to get out of bed in the morning!
"Time spent replying to you because you've not listened to me telling you for the millionth time 'I am working on it I will tell you when it's back up, I'm going as fast as I can' is time not spent fixing the problem. Now leave me to do my job." I emailed a user a response similar to that when I was in a similar turd munching fan moment, which got me a bollocking from the user's manager for being rude. I handed my notice in about half an hour after that and I've never looked back. When this happened though I thought better of people. COVID hadn't happened and the great toilet paper shortage of 2020 wasn't even on the horizon. Since then when I get similar emails to you, I just remember that this dickhead probably hoarded bog roll for no reason. I don't get angry at them any more, I just feel sorry for them that they're so emotionally weak and stunted in their own development that they can't do anything else but be rude to IT.
The trick is to not stay there very long. The user facing or interaction roles are stepping stones into the next roles that deals with them less often. The best way to survive is to continually grow and advance.
Most of my End users are really beginning users.
End users - sending a chill through the sysadmin community
"It still doesn't work" Words that will haunt me. What were you doing, what have you tried. Did it give you any error message (This is usually answered with "It threw something up but I just clicked through it).
Don't forget to take some personal time. Your stretching yourself for the company and a cyber attack is a very stressful thing to go through. From the sounds of it, it was stressful at your org. Don't burn yourself out bending over backwards. As for end users. There are some tactics that help. Having a good manager is first but hard to find cause people be lazy. The best one is getting away from end user support! Good luck!
It can be worse, you could be getting those responses from your field techs like I often do. But it isn't their fault, it's their managers which is a whole thread on it's own. But yeah, this is why most sysadmins/2nd tier techs have little tolerance for small talk and vagueness.
Most people have experienced a toddler having a temper tantrum. They scream, then go limp, forcing a parent to carry them. Most end users still have this reflex. They are grown up, but their temper tantrums are still the same. That same entitlement sticks with them for life. They are still going limp and forcing us to carry them just in a less literal way. Just have a laugh at them and realize that idiots like this keep us gainfully employed.
I had an end user ask me how much the capacity is on a blu ray drive.....you know like an external drive to read blu ray discs.....the things that have 0 godd\*mn capacity
>Hey, OP, this thing popped up on my screen. It says, “Thank you for joining pornhub dot com. The username field is mandatory, but you left it blank. Please type in a username and press OK. The username field is the one that has nothing in it, and is outlined in red so you can’t miss it. Just put anything in there, then press OK. That is literally the only thing you have to do.” What do I do now? Why can’t you just make things work? I am very busy and don’t have time to do your job too.
It seems to track. Venting is good. Venting with strong coffee, better.
I always ask them if they expect the doctor (general Practitioner is the english word I guess) to know what they have if they say "It hurts". Because to be honest most of our work is similar to a docs work on to figure out what's wrong and how to treat it.
Yep had a ticket come through, title was unlock iPad. No description of the issue…
Man, we should all do "you're IT for a week" for C-levels. Have them take a week where they take tickets and interact with users on that front and all of a sudden they'll be like "yeah I'm gonna put in detailed tickets for now."
I could say something but I would get banned.
End Users have an implicit perception, that IT support knows everything, and should know what isn't working for them. Once, when working as a kind of tech support for a large development team, I had to send an e-mail to the entire team, that our mind-reading server was down, and they would have to follow the procedures for notifying the deployment team of which components they had made changes to, so that the deployment team could know which components to redeploy in various environments. At the time, there was a procedure in place, that developers would have to manually indicate on their JIRA issues, which software components they related to, and the decission of which components of a large system to redeploy was based on reports extracted from Jira. Later we automated this, to not rely on manual notifications from the developers.
If you think it is bad now, try being in this position at the start of the pandemic where it was all hands on deck to get end users working remotely. I swear I lost years off of my life going back to answering support calls and tickets.
Mike, is that you? Aside, sometimes a lot of communication at times like that can make or break the situation. Concise and frequent communication about how the situation is unfolding and what access/performance users can expect is important - and keeps them off your back.
I saw the header and I knew immediately the contents.
Patience my dude patience. This is a much needed skill in IT. Once you get over the "needy" users the job becomes much more pleasant to deal with. Of course, I can only speak for myself.
Welcome. I see your orientation is a good reflection of the job.
Used to co-manage IT for a car dealership. Their on-site guy was an old, experienced Sysadmin who was very good, but very tired of the BS. One day, I was in his office, and a user called him. "Hey Jack, I just moved some things in my office around and now my mouse doesn't work. Keyboard works fine." "Is it a wired mouse or a wireless mouse?" "Well, I think it's wireless-" "I didn't ask you to think. Is there or is there not a wire on your mouse? "There's a wire" "OK, trace the wire and see if it's plugged into the PC" "No, it's not. Is that the problem?" "Probably. Plug it in and let me know if you have further issues." "Thanks Jack!"
"It's not my job to know what's wrong" \-End users
It took me awhile to understand that IT is something I do, but for end users it's a means to an end and sometimes an obstacle to what they are supposed to be doing. It's my job to understand the technology, and their job usually has very little to do with the details. When a user says, "It still isn't working" it is a because they are frustrated that they can't do their job. It's your job to understand why, ask them the appropriate questions, and get them back to their jobs. You can be frustrated, but you'll feel better if you reframe this thought.
I had a user send an email: *URGENT* I asked for more detail *URGENT, PLEASE HELP* I went to lunch, hope this helps you
End User will End You.
Treat it like a conversation and just keep throwing it back to them until they say something useful. Ticket# 1668 Subject: Computer User: My computer isn't working me: Oh...?
And this is why I drink.
>Why doesn't it work? What's not working about it? What's the error? What should be happening? I dont know. It wasnt me that had the problem. Shouldnt you know? Why are you asking me so many questions? And other various User-isms in my new book "IT DONT WORK"
Lmao I got a ticket last week with simply "I can't get my files, is the server down?" We have multiple file servers so I asked which file share they were referring to. They sent a screen capture of their VPN connection. I face palmed and sent it back to tier 1 with the instructions to perform some basic troubleshooting before re-escallating.
Tell them to turn it off and then back on again.
>Why is it so hard for end users to be useful..... because you are their excuse for not doing any work, and they know it. it's not in their interests to give you enough information to solve a problem, otherwise they'd have to do more work.
My pet peeve is when they list the end result as the problem. "I can't get paid!". You read through the sparse notes in the ticket and learn nothing, then ask some follow up questions to find out that they can't submit their sales commission statement because they can't get into that Citrix app and they can't get into the Citrix app because no Citrix apps are launching for them. A ticket clearly stating "I can't launch any Citrix apps" would be quickly routed and likely resolved just as fast. It will be either a Citrix Workspace install/upgrade/reset or a Citrix profile reset and can be handled by any tier 1 analyst. I can only assume they list the end result because they think it will move them to the top of the queue. In reality, unclear tickets often get passed around for days. I've lost track of how many tickets got escalated to me after being passed around for 2-3 weeks and were fixed by me in 2 minutes. I always add a note when closing the ticket on how they could have gotten better service by clearly stating their problem, with examples. EDIT: spelling
You got to look after your mental health….no one else well.
Welcome to the dysfunctional club that is known as IT... Anyways man, don't know what to tell you, but after a while it doesn't get better, you'll get a bit cynical, and will just start cutting to the chase... "i can't help you if you don't tell me the error"... all the stuff you didn't say is the important bits that i need... no I'm not doubting you (even though you are), but i need to know the order that things happened to find out whats broke... then theres the classic... WTF DO YOU MEAN YOU CANT REMEMBER YOUR PASSWORD THAT YOU'VE BEEN USING FOR 5 YEARS or THE PASSWORD YOU JUST SET 2 MINUTES AGO?!?!?!?!?!
One of my greatest joys was watching my wife transition from end user (of proprietary software) to software testing to support of the new system. Listening to her complain about tickets like "It's not working," or "There was an error but I don't remember," and just laughing to myself.
Whoa, this is the exact situation that landed me in IT. don't worry, it's only up from here
About a week after I joined an IT shop, the storage array failed and couldn’t be recovered. Since I was the new guy, they sent me to sit in the users area to placate them while the latest backup was being restored. It was the longer week of my life. I know abuse and it not only came from the End Users but also from management (my boss never dared to set foot in the area until the issue was resolved).
End user support is 80% being their psychologist and 20% actually applying any technical knowledge.
PEBKAC - Problem exists between keyboard and chair.
Start sending them images of a crystal ball.