Friday, January 26, 2007

The right answer

There is a Help Desk procedure wherein new branch users who are not set up in the system have a ticket open for them. Originally, we would send these users to their Regional Managers. Then we were to tell the users to call a certain support person. When she got overwhelmed by these calls she changed her phone number in The Bank address book (really) and pleaded with us not to have users call her anymore. We were to open tickets.

So, today I got one of those calls and directed the user to her Regional Manager. The Regional Manager called the support person (who didn't want people calling her). She sent the following to the Help Desk Management:

Here we go again. What does it take? This example was definately in need of a ticket. The active directory had an error in it. Had the agent/agents (they called twice) opened a ticket . . .

And so on. Having that, D****, Team Lead and Arch Nemesis sent me the following with a CC to my Team Lead, the Site Manager and the Support Person:

Would you please explain why you're not generating a problem ticket after I've sent out multiple communications instructing everyone to generate a problem ticket for anything regarding access for a branch user?

Please reply to all with your response.


His management style again shows through. He is essentially dragging me to the front of the room so that I can be embarrassed in front of everyone. Look how stupid Geis is. See? He can't do his job right. Let me just put the dunce cap on him.

So, I sent the only response I could:

I made a mistake.

I half expected more from him but I'm sure the response deflated him somewhat. I wasn't going to fall into the trap he laid for me, as he has done before. I didn't apologize, debate, refute, rationalize or otherwise make any sort of deal about it. I goofed. Period.

Later, my Team Lead sent to me:

Good answer.

He saw what D**** was trying to do and approved of my response.

*Sigh* I guess I'll have to go to the Site Manager and say something along the links of "I know there's a lot of other people who make a lot more and bigger mistakes than I did on this one. Does D**** parade them out to embarrass them by name in front of The Bank's support people? Is this appropriate to have this dirty laundry hung out in front of the client like this? Is D**** empowered to publicly humiliate analysts like this?"

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