Ignoring The Signs
We have a pretty simple system at my IT workplace. You ask for something and you get something. With me so far? It really is that simple for the user. We have to do some crazy routing on our end depending on what that something is, but that is an entirely different story.
There is also a big button that say “click here” if you want something for someone else.
It also has a giant red warning underneath that says “Hey if you don’t use that big button right above, the something you ask for will be FOR YOU”. We even have , ARE YOU SURE YOU DON’T MEAN YOU WANT IT FOR SOMEONE ELSE?
So enter Alice, a user. Alice supports many other users. The department might get a lot of turn over because every month they get at least one new person. Or maybe they’re expanding? Who knows, not my problem. Like clockwork the second Monday of every month we get a ticket from Alice. “I asked for something for the new hire but they never got it. Please fix”.
I’m not kidding. Literally every second Monday of every month for the last year or so. Can you guess what went wrong? Let me give you a hint…it has something to do with Alice not using the giant button and not reading the two different warnings or popups. I had gotten really tired of sending Alice the same email every month. ”Please use the button to ask for something for someone else. We’ll send ticket over to finance to swap the charges”.
That email also contains very detailed step by step instructions. The rest of my team had also gotten tired of hearing from Alice, so we decided to not help this time, with manager/director backup. In fact, we came up with a drastic pan. We disabled the ability for Alice to submit tickets. She must call the help desk for tickets now.
We also didn’t forward the current ticket to finance. We sent Alice a strongly worded email that basically said “Look, you do this EVERY month. We told you HOW to do this the correct way for a year. If you still can’t figure it out, you’re on your own and all these charges will fall on you”. Attach the last 12 months’ worth of tickets. We also CC Alice’s boss.
Alice must have not noticed her boss CCed, on the email because we get a nasty email back. “WHAT DO YOU MEAN I CAN’T OPEN TICKETS ANYMORE?! AND WHY AM I GETTING CHARGED FOR IT?! DO YOU KNOW WHO I SUPPORT?! YOU WILL FIX THIS NOW OR MY BOSS WILL HEAR ABOUT THIS”. Insert other comments about how stupid the system is and how incompetent my team is and other non-professional language. Email was also largely in caps.
We didn’t get around to responding until after lunch but as it turns out we don’t need to respond anymore. Alice’s boss has apparently already responded. “I apologize for the behavior of Alice. Please don’t let her behavior affect the wonderful support you provide to our department. Ben will now be responsible for interfacing with your team to get things for our new hires. Please grant Ben the permissions Alice previously had. I’ve read through your directions you sent Alice and tried it out. It worked as expected. Ben will be using those directions to complete her work. Also please terminate Alice’s network access.
We shut down her network account with pleasure.