From: jwgh at earthlink.net (Jacob Haller) Subject: Fun with managers Date: 14 May 1999 00:14:14 GMT Message-ID: <1drrdsz.yxl2rh15in7teN@1cust254.tnt1.morristown.nj.da.uu.net> Newsgroups: alt.tech-support.recoveryOne of the things that makes leaving my current job a sad occasion is the respect that I get from my managers. Consider:
A while ago, to ensure that help mail and calls to the help phone would be answered promply, each member of the help desk was given nine hours a week during which they were to spend all their time checking help mail and answering the phone. (This is an internal help desk for a company with about 150 employees, depending how you count them.) During this time period, one is not supposed to allow oneself to be called away from the desk for any reason. All communications are supposed to be answered within four hours (though obviously an immediate resolution is not always possible).
There's a help desk station with a computer set up, but some of the help desk techs' main desks are on a different floor, so for them typically we forward the phone to their desks and they read help mail locally.
Yesterday the CEO of the company called the help desk and got sent to voice mail. Rather than leave voice mail, he called the VP of our department to complain; the VP then called our boss to complain; and finally our boss called the hapless Help Desk tech, who explained that he had gone to use the restroom and was absent from his desk for a couple of minutes. I think that this was accepted as reasonable.
Today the scenario was basically repeated: The CEO called the help desk, got voice mail, and sent the following to the VP:
once again i called the help desk and no one was there. please let me know how we will fix this asap.The VP then forwarded the message to my boss with the following commentary:
glue them to their seats!!!And my boss forwarded along the whole thing with the following commentary:
It may be painful, but twice in the same week the most important guy here was unable to get an answer from the help desk, so....To which the guy who was manning the help desk at the time responded:Starting tomorrow morning (yes [help desk person who works tomorrow] this means you) the person whose turn it is must now sit at the tracker machine. No excuse is valid - if the current person needs to go to the bathroom they must get someone to cover for them, in person - no forwarding the phone to another desk. I will be checking every day now, by calling [help desk line], by email, and by just looking. I didn't want to, but lady luck frowned on our phone coverage and now we must pay the piper.
Not that I'm bitching -- considering the possible consequences we got off easy.The same guy that wrote the above later put a jar filled with apple juice and seltzer next to the help desk station, labelling it the 'Help Desk Piss Jar'. (A term that I think has wider applicability; feel free to borrow it.)I'm sure no one took in the possibility of me being on the OTHER LINE with an end user, which is EXACTLY what I was doing at around 4:20 pm (the date of [CEO]'s message).
Moral of the story: if two people call the helpdesk at the same time, you're basically fucked.
We'll see how this plays out tomorrow. Nothing will change, is my guess, since it's easier to make our lives hell than to stand up to the big boss.
-jwgh