brought to mind by some stuff at Doc Grumpy:
Friday evening, about 5:30. Phone rings.
"This is 'X', and I have a printer issue'
Me:What's the problem?*
Describes problem, I do troubleshooting. During which it comes out that it's been acting up 'for a couple of days'. "Yeah, looks like it's dead. I'll make out a trouble ticket. They should get out there Monday; might be Tuesday, but probably Monday."
Budget matters, etc., printers don't get a 'Fix it now' status unless there's some kind of actual emergency.
"But we have 'Y' going on this weekend! It's going to be busy, we need it!"
Me: I'm sorry, we don't make priority 1 tickets for a printer(especially when the damn thing's been 'acting up' for two days and you wait until 1730 on a Friday evening to call).
"Look, we need this running." Definite irritation and "You need to take care of us" in the voice.
This chased 'round for a minute or two, him demanding I send someone out there RIGHT NOW, me pointing out "We don't do that on this kind of problem." Finally,
"I Want This Fixed Tonight."
Me: I want my hair back, but that's not likely to happen either.
Long pause, then 'click' as he hangs up.
I figured I'd be answering some "Why did you do that?" the next week, but never heard a word about it.
*I despise the overuse of 'issue'. If your printer just died, if your monitor just smoked, you don't have a 'issue' you have a damned PROBLEM
6 comments:
Having worked both ends of the tech support call, I live for stories of user idiocy, but must also say:
You will now get a call from this guy at every little hint of trouble, so that he can't be accused of putting things off to the last minute.
Also, unless there are other printers he can use, or he can go out and buy a cheap fill-in, I have to question the policy of no priority calls for printers. The rest of the system is useless if you can't distribute the results in the required form.
Actually, no further from that agency than normal; I guess the 'Don't wait 'till the weekend starts to call' message got through.
Without getting into too much detail, they had other ways of printing stuff for the weekend; just not as convenient as pushing a button on that particular pc. And yeah, there were times a printer really counted as 'need ASAP'; but the rules we were given said 'no'.
I worked with medical equipment manufacturer, and there were actual times the words 'issue', 'problem' and the like had different meanings. One might mean the piece of equipment stopped working and the doctor is pissed, the other might mean that a patient got injured by the equipment and the lawyers and the FDA are on their way.
My favorite comment to people acting like that is, "Stupidity on your part does not constitute and emergency on mine."
Shy III
I got soured on "Ohmygosh we have an ISSUE/PROBLEM!" a long time ago. Too many times of "We really need this fixed today/tonight/RIGHT NOW!" when, with a little probing, you find out it started crapping up, or flat died, oh, Tuesday or Wednesday. And they waited till Friday evening or- in some really irritating cases- Saturday to bother picking up the damn phone.
We actually banned the word "issue" in our little corner of the world. "Issues are what come out of sick people's bodies; we solve problems."
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