Thursday, December 06, 2007

Too late

A user calls with a remote access issue. He had had a problem last week and on Thursday support installed the latest remote access client on his machine. Tested it OK at the office and sent him on his way. Well, it didn't work for him at home and he's calling back. I worked on some troubleshooting and, based on what I saw in the previous ticket I thought that his real problem was that he was using a slow dialup connection. I didn't think support was going to be able to do anything about that but I'd open a ticket to try.

Now, here's the kicker. . . he MUST have this resolved by noon.

Considering that it was 11:54, I told him I would escalate the issue's severity but pretty much assured him that his issue was not going to be addressed, let alone resolved, in the next six minutes.

That apparently wasn't acceptable because what he needed to do was so terribly important. He demanded to be put in contact with the Command Center. I called the Command Center and before conferencing in the user explained to the person there that he demanded to be put in touch with them. Because what he needed to do was server related, I thought that perhaps he wanted the Command Center (who's responsibility is to the servers themselves) to do something on his behalf because his remote access was down but I also explained that I thought that he just wanted his issue resolved and thought the Command Center had power proportionate to it's name that could make it happen. The tech at the Command Center thought the user was going to be disappointed.

Sure enough, when the user spoke to the Command Center and told his story, the Command Center had to say that it wasn't their responsibility to resolve remote access issues. It was the Help Desk's job.

That sorted itself with surprising rapidity and his ticket was actually submitted with four minutes left before his deadline.

So, let me get this straight. . . you had seven days, (over ten thousand minutes) available since the problem you had was supposedly resolved and waited until the 10 minutes before your vital deadline to actually test to see whether that was actually true? And then you expect support to resolve the issue, not just quickly, but instantaneously! Are you stupid or just lazy?

Well, his high severity ticket was reduced to a more normal severity level when support got around to it an hour later. In lowering the severity they indicated that he didn't deserve the high severity because he wasn't executive staff.

An hour after they support contacted him and confirmed that his problem was that he was using a crappy connection from a slow internet service provider.

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