Once had a user manually change their ticket to Priority 1, which we used to indicate dozens of people/everyone down, because their M key only worked half the time they pressed it.
We don’t have a priority system, but users take it upon themselves to add things like 911, URGENT, and ASTAT in the title. It’s kinda fun, you can tell what rumor had been flying around the office when every ticket suddenly has the same “priority”.
What gets me is when users call up at 4:45 p.m. on a Friday about a hardware issue and think that if I put escalation 1 on it it’s going to get fixed any faster.
That’s actually something I’m quite grateful for where I work. The CEO isn’t a complete pain in the arse.
He’s actually so normal and kind of quiet when he calls up that we had to put a special tag on his account so that would flash up that he is the CEO, because from the way he conducts himself on the phone you’d assume he was just an employee.
Not really, it’s more like having a third of your nails be shoddy when you have unlimited free nails, and then deciding to make your personal level nail problem equivalent to a several thousand person no-nails at all level problem without asking for new nails in the first place.
If their job involves writing stuff, then a broken keyboard is pretty high priority. If it was just that there’s a weird visual glitch or something then I understand it not being urgent.
The 7 doesn’t work properly on my laptop which is only relevant during boot (USB keyboard deactivated) or meetings as both passwords contain a 7. I didn’t even create a ticket yet and it’s been months.
Why haven’t you? Throw it in the queue, don’t mark it as an issue that might lose the company thousands of dollars per minute, and good things can happen!
Tbf that is also kinda stupid. Because at some point the “7” key will break entirely, and if the screen keyboard option on login is disabled in Windows (I don’t know why it would be), you won’t be able to log in at all. That is a lot of risk for a 30 USD keyboard.
I would be so frustrated if someone somehow manually entered a P1 for a keyboard and it wasn’t changed immediately. Like your case, it would get escalated. Yes, a functioning keyboard is important to that user, but the priority level and urgency are tied to the organization. Nothing like the call or email saying a huge chunk of your org or end users are effectively down, only to find out Chad couldn’t type an email.
Hopefully that person was talked to and somehow disciplined. Your other comments sound like they really should have known better.
Keyboard is a primary input method, required to do most computer work, so if it’s broken, yeah, that’s urgent. Did you set up an easy method for employees to get replacement equipment on their own quickly while they wait for you? Then yeah, what do you expect them to do? Sit there with their thumb up their ass while none of their work gets done?
Sometimes I think I’m the only person in tech support that doesn’t actively hate the the people I’m supposed to be supporting and actually tries to think about it from their perspective.
The M key working half the time is not equivalent to an entire organization being down. They were in Engineering and not new, they damn well should know how our system worked lol
It doesn’t matter if they’re Steve Jobs, you’re literally paid to support them regardless. If they can’t work, and you’re ignoring them, you’re not doing your job. That’s why you plan ahead for these situations by providing quick self service answers like accessable equipment so they can keep working while you work through your ticket queue.
True, but still. This is still a policy issue. The fact that you have to wait actively for a fucking keyboard. Buy a bunch of them, also mice, because they cost nothing, and place it in a central location. If you are afraid someone installs a keylogger in them, seal the box with some company sticker that is hard to repro.
Electrician at a factory, I get called to operator’s stations all the time because “I can’t type any numbers so we can’t change products.” I have tried for 30min over the radio to direct them to press the numlock key to no avail. Please send help, I can only drink so much on my day off.
I have no problem with ignorance unless it’s deliberate. It’s the people who think they’re above troubleshooting and lie about it who are the problem people
I just had one of these yesterday. I support lottery machines over the phone, so retail employees call me if there's an issue with them
Well, countertop terminal went offline. Employee swears up and down that he's rebooted "5 times already". I ask him to power cycle the modem while we're on the phone, and he immediately replies OK. I then hear the distinct beeps of the terminal rebooting.
So I ask, "just to be sure, you unplugged and replugged the power to the small box with two antennas that says BRAND, right?" Immediate response that cut into my question: "yeah yeah yeah!" more terminal beeps
I think your ticket system should have had two labels. One for priority (how does this impact your work) and one for scope (how many people does this impact) to arrive at an urgency.
But anyway, that wouldn’t stop some users from saying it’s a continent wide M key outage stopping all work.
I once got an emergency after-hours ticket to fix a computer that was shutting off randomly. I went to check it out, and the power plug was loose. I asked the user about it, and she said she knew it was loose, but she couldn’t plug it in because her skirt was too short. No, this isn’t an intro to a porno.
I once had somebody refuse to plug a computer in because her back hurt. Okay I’m sorry about that, but I’m not sending an engineer out for that, go ask any colleague
Every ticketing system that I’ve used actually does have this! The service desk finagles it to get the desired “priority” that will make the end-user happy. We have the option to correct it once it gets to us.
I think that’s because many ticket systems implement the ITIL priority matrix??, or something. I’ve been away from helpdesk for a number of years now and only kind of rember a matrix I probably only kind of correctly described.
Our system let users pick only some of the matrix values, they couldn’t declare a high priority, high impact, high urgency, ticket on their own. Like you, we handled setting the “true” value once the ticket was moved past level 1/evaluated by someone in IT.
My coworker that sits next to me has this picture with a similar quote hanging up at his desk.
I can confirm that if you embellish your ticket to try and get us there faster, we know. We know and we will absolutely put you at the back of the list or “tomorrow” even if we have nothing to do.
I hate it even more when they just skip the entire ticket system and come directly to your desk in the hope you drop everything and help them immediately.
I always smile and tell them I need a ticket before I can help them. Then they storm out and send one some time later. Making it seem it wasn’t that urgent after all.
So you purposely refuse to do your job, don’t treat employees fairly and by the order the request was received purely out of spite, and you think that’s a virtue?
Importanturgent cc all directors to make sure you do what I want
I forgot to tell you we have a new starter they started last month. Drop everything and sort it out!
. Yeah respect is mutual I’ll stay late to help you but the moment it comes across as passive aggressive or you dictate my team’s allocation is the moment you go down the list a bit.
Embellishing the priority of a ticket isn’t being fair and is an attempt to alter the order of requests… gotta play by the rules if you want the rules to be upheld.
You don’t have to give them priority for playing up the urgency, but they suggested actively pushing the ticket to the back out of spite and avoiding the ticket when they have nothing else to do.
It really does depend on how often they do it though. If it’s once or twice then I don’t really care, but if they do it all the flipping time then they need to learn.
It’s actually inefficient from a time keeping point for them to continuously do that and for me to continuously have to alter ticket statuses back for tickets that are actively in progress, but are waiting for an engineer or a part to become available.
Them changing the status every 5 minutes actually makes more work for me and doesn’t speed the ticket up at all.
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