Not An Emergency
Every office has their special users. The ones who can’t figure out anything technical, everything is an emergency, and everything has to function exactly the same or they can’t work. At my job, it is the HR lady. Since she is just HR, all her problems boil down to a printer error, Excel, Word, reboot-and-it-works type of issues, and since I am the system admin they are all my responsibility.
However, every issue she has, she comes back to IT, walks right by my desk, goes to the programmer, manager, network admin, and explains the issue. Every time they either tell her to go me or relay the information to me to fix.
A few weeks back, she had a problem with the calculations on an Excel spreadsheet. Everyone was at lunch, so she’s forced to ask me. Immediately, I say it is probably rounding up or down because it is only off by a penny. This doesn’t suffice, so she ignores me and waits until lunches are done to return.
She goes to programmer guy and like usual, he passes it to me. I email her with a breakdown showing how it is rounding. She still wants programmer guy to look at it, so my manager responds with a message saying he will get to when he can. Well, programmer guy is swamped, the new website launch is getting pushed out, her Excel “problem” gets shelved with her emails coming ever more frequent.
My manager even resends my explanation, but she wants programmer guy to look at it. This is unacceptable, so she goes to the Vice President saying we aren’t helping her. My boss sets up a meeting with the three of us for me to explain the issue. It was the shortest meeting ever because I start explaining it and our VP completely understands right away.
The VP cuts me off, looks at HR lady, and says “You pulled me into a meeting for this”?