Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem

2025 has ended and a new year is upon us, but The Register will continue opening Friday mornings with a fresh installment of On Call – the reader-contributed column that tells your tales of tech support. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Rodney" – a serial contributor who opened his missive to On Call by sharing his …

[GlenP]

Been There...

I've been there many times over the last 40 years, sadly.

Sometimes the support person knows full well they're going through a script but they have to do so to progress the call (the Dell exploding capacitors was a case in point, I raised a call, the support person apologised 'cause we both knew immediately what the problem was but unless he checked every box on his screen he couldn't arrange the engineer).

The worst was the ERP provider at a previous employer. They had two support people, one who'd been there years and knew everything, the other only had one answer to any non-trivial support question, "You'll have to restore from the backup!" That would be bad enough now when I've got hourly database log backups but back then, on an AS/400, we only had overnight tape backups, the consequences of having to repeat most of a day's work with thousands of transactions* didn't bear thinking about. My refusal to do this usually forced an escalation to the person who knew what they were doing, he'd usually have an answer in a few minutes (generally a manual edit of some data).

*Yes, we always instructed people to make sure they could repeat any work but users are users!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Been There...

Mr 'One Answer' was earning his keep by diverting many support calls to 'go off and restore your backup'.

This left Mr 'I know what I am doing' to deal with the other calls that either were more difficult or had got past Mr 'One Answer' !!!

Not a nice way to work but not uncommon when there are limited 'real' skills available.

I would be expecting Mr 'One Answer' to come up to speed quite quickly by learning off Mr 'I know what I am doing' and working through old calls that had been solved and 'understanding' the solutions & why they worked.

If there was not, within 2 months, a material improvement in the quality of Mr 'One Answer''s calls I would be looking to replace him/her quickly with someone who wants to learn.

Bad support 'Bugs' me, I have worked on & ultimately run 'support functions' in large companies and it is a skill that is underappreciated.

Good Support people are an asset to the company and actually generate revenue by creating happy customers who buy more & recommend the company and its products to others.

:)

[GlenP]

Re: Been There...

You're absolutely right, in this case Mr 'One Answer' lasted well over a year until I think they realised having no second person was better than a useless one!

[Phil O'Sophical]

Re: Been There...

These days they'll just replace Mr. 'One Answer' by AI, and get the same effect for less money.

[Roland6]

Re: Been There...

>” and get the same effect for less money.”

I expect callers to disconnect from the premium rate support line much quicker once they realise they are being served by an AI.

[that one in the corner]

Re: Been There...

Until the AI providers start charging realistic prices (or burst and go dark).

At which point they'll have to re-hire all the Mr. 'One Answer' - and at a higher salary 'cos who is otherwise willing to work for someone who just flung them to the street the previous month?

And we will be back to not only suffering Mr. 'One Answer' but he will now be utterly smug and unsufferable because he is "obviously worth more now his true expertise has been recognised".

Abandon all hope ye who buy support tickets here.

[Korev]

Re: Been There...

I had the other way around, I supported some scientific software from a small company for years. Whenever there was a problem I couldn't solve, I'd phone and the switchboard would put me through to the head developer. I asked the product manger why they had seemed to have no one on support - he answered that if it was a simple problem then I'd have already solved it so they saved everyone's time by putting me though to the big guy. I decided to take that as a compliment.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Been There...

Did you happen to say "shibboleet" every time you called them?

[Thereneverwasaplot]

Re: Been There...

Used to work with a consultant who was quite a big deal with VMware. It was always fun when he called them and asked for an adult! Generally because he needed something fixing quick, otherwise he'd have done it himself.

[Sam not the Viking]

Re: Been There...

We had new PCs installed across the company and the provider included support for an ongoing fee. It was a poor initial set up with everyone given 'basic' privileges to such an extent that nothing could be run. I wasn't permitted to even open a file. It became apparent that the supplier was taking glee at causing modest mayhem by installing incremental permissions across the board and treating each one as a potentially billable event.

We approached a local company to investigate/comment/advise. They offered to take over the maintenance/support contract at a fair rate. We made sure we had full access and control of the system:

It saddens me to say it, but I took glee in informing the original supplier that their contract was terminated with immediate effect.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Been There...

"Mr 'One Answer' was earning his keep by diverting many support calls to 'go off and restore your backup'."

I don't think having customers implement a solution that destroyed data since the previous backup was earning his keep. It might look like that from the point of closing calls but what it would really have been earning was a bad reputation for the product.

"I have worked on & ultimately run 'support functions' in large companies "

You really thought it acceptable for support people to be giving bad answers while they were learning on the job instead of being trained?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Been There...

You misread the sentence ... 'earning his keep' is not a positive statement ... dificult to read the 'tone' in a sentence :=)

In the venacular of the region I live in, comments refering to 'earning his/her keep' usually are references to people underperforming by some distance. Must be a British English <==> American English thing !!!

I was not praising the minimal effort by Mr 'One Answer' ... anything but !!!

:)

[PB90210]

Re: Been There...

For a Brit, someone who 'earned their keep' is someone of value... someone who has gone the extra mile.

I worked in a dept prebuilding IT kit and we 'earned out keep' by ensuring the majority of onsite installs could be carried out by relatively unskilled installers. At times it would also mean translating what the project manager was asking for into a solution that had a chance of actually working... 'you ordered the wrong cables... you forgot to order microfilters'

[Terry 6]

Re: Been There...

We normally interpret "earning one's keep" as literally doing what you are paid for- and probably more if expressed correctly. i.e. "He's certainly earned his keep" about someone who's gone well above and beyond.

[chivo243]

Re: Been There...

Dell exploding capacitors! I was there, I got the T-Shirt!

GX260's!! For the Win!! There were a few 270's and 280's in that mix.

I had dozens of these 'fatboys' to "report" for repairs. After about my 6th call, I got the same support tech guy, and they told me to send the remaining Service tag numbers in a spreadsheet, and a chap from Centronic showed up with all the spare mobos to repair all of them in one go! Ditch that hideous script!!

[Hazmoid]

Re: Been There...

Had the same problem with a batch of HP desktops. We had ~200 of them and started seeing machines that would abruptly reboot and lose users work. After the first half dozen motherboards were replaced by different technicians, we called the service desk, gave them a list of all the serial numbers we had and organised for the machines to be swapped out until we could confirm that all motherboards had been replaced. We had 6 spares, so would swap them into service, hold the 6 machines until the tech could replace them and then swap over the user machines with the repaired ones.

The bonus was that the modular nature of the machines made this relatively painless and swapping a user over was as simple as taking the hdd out of their faulty machine and swapping it into the replacement machine.

[Anonymous Coward]

DIY

Back in the 1990’s I was working for a globally recognised company. My role wasn’t IT based but it required me to be very familiar with the company’s IT systems. To do my job I needed systems to do their intended jobs and I got to know many of the help desk team. Initially wanting total control themselves, they eventually realised that letting me get involved kept the bosses happy.* One consequence of this was that I became the initial (but very unofficial) first point of call for IT support in the office area I was based - ironically one that housed many of the company’s top engineers.

*In my official role, and that of others in the office, unresolved issues could lead to significant financial hits, and senior management had the refreshing (and, unfortunately, rare) approach of letting their engineers and senior staff get on with their work. It was a rule that decisions were made by individuals, not committees. Meetings were frequent - but to gather information and views so individuals had the best available information to make their decisions. It was a policy that led to the company being very successful, though changes at top in subsequent years (a result of external pressures) tempered that. They’re still in business but in the middle of the peloton, not amongst the leaders.

[Rob-T]

Re: DIY

I'm an engineer not an IT person, but I always seem to acquire a reputation as "someone who's good with IT".

In my previous job the company was split between two buildings and the IT guy was in the other one. The office I was in had some people who were... more advanced in years shall we say, and had frequent "problems" where "The tool bar just disappeared!" (they'd dragged it off the menu) or similar. When they realised I was "Someone who's good with IT" I became their first port of call and saved the IT guy tons of time constantly having to go between buildings for trivial ID10T errors.

[Antron Argaiv]

Re: DIY

Same here. In my career, I found it helpful to gain a basic understanding of fields outside of my direct responsibility. This helped me, and our support organizations. Me, because the fix, when it was possible, took a lot less time, and our support orgainzations, because, when they got a call from me, they knew I wouldn't be wasting their time.

In the late 80s, Data General switched us engineers from in-house schematic capture on DG machines, to ViewLogic on Sun workstations. Dumped on our desks, with the instructions to configure them and get them running. "Learn UNIX", they said. Luckily, we all enjoyed a challenge...and then we discovered xnetrek and Usenet! Learned just enough to be dangerous.

The "little something" to the support folks at the holidays helped a bit, as well.

[goblinski]

Re: DIY

"...some people who were... more advanced in years shall we say... ... ...When they realised I was "Someone who's good with IT" I became their first port of call...

Monumental error to let them realize it :)

As the old saying goes - "...Juliet was absolutely ok with all the old ladies in the building calling her a H behind her back when she was working nights - as long as they didn't know that she was actually a cardiologist..."

[l8gravely]

Re: DIY

What? You gotta explain this because your old saying is bollocks otherwise.

[goblinski]

Re: DIY

"What? You gotta explain this because your old saying is bollocks otherwise."

You mean it's going to be less bollocks once you understand it ??? :-D

Juliet works nights. All the old ladies in the building talk behind he back calling her a hoe - they see her leaving in the evening and coming back in the morning, so she must be meeting men.

She prefers this to having the old ladies realize that she's actually a cardiologist who works night shifts. Because if they do - they'll all be constantly on her back asking her for free medical advice.

[Ozumo]

Re: DIY

I think it's the unexplained "H" that causes the problem in comprehension.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: DIY

"Juliet works nights. All the old ladies in the building talk behind he back calling her a hoe"

She's a gardener in the Midnight Garden?

[FirstTangoInParis]

Three in one

First, plaudits. If you worked the Solaris Gold support line (or indeed the others), I doff my cap to you.

Then the bad, number 1. Trying to fix Mrs Tango’s Acer laptop with the Windows Update From Hell. “You’ll have to reinstall Windows. Look for the license key on the bottom of the laptop.” Hmm. This one came with W8, so no it doesn’t have a printed license key. I’m clearly on my own here.

Number 2, migrating from Tiscali to Talk Talk following the takeover. Tiscali had no download limits. TT tells me I’m now limited to 40 GB a month. I ask how I can monitor that. Turns out I couldn’t. The conversation spanning several sessions finally ends with “ok we’re not even monitoring you. Have you any idea how we can do that??????”

[Dave K]

Been there!

I'm sure many of us have been there in fact. I had one many, many years ago when working at a council as IT support and I encountered a Dell desktop that was showing graphical corruption - including on the BIOS screen. I tried swapping out the RAM, no joy. So, I phoned Dell's support.

The guy was obviously working from a script that included "Re-install the OS" as a troubleshooting step, no amount of trying to point out that the OS has absolutely nothing to do with the BIOS screen would get him to budge. In the end the simplest option was to say "I'll give that a try", hang up, go and fix a few other issues around the place, then phone back an hour later and say "OK, I did that and it didn't work".

Magically, we suddenly got an engineer scheduled to come out and swap the motherboard - which fixed it, fancy that!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Been there!

The answer to all the script questions is yes. Does anyone with experience actually run dell diagnostics when told?

[volsano]

rddb

This is a classic version of adversarial rubber-duck debugging back in the dial-up age.

These days we all mainly rely on AI rubber duck apps.

[breakfast]

Re: rddb

Not all of us! I still rubber duck the old-fashioned way; by writing a Stack Overflow question that carefully documents my reproduction case, seeing what the problem is and deleting the question without posting it.

[TheWeetabix]

Oh good…

It’s not just me. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve started-but-not-finished a message, asking a coworker to try and reproduce a problem only to have the solution leap out and slap me…

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Oh good…

"asking a coworker to try and reproduce a problem only to have the solution leap out and slap me…"

Many times. I think it the result of stepping back from the problem and thinking about how to describe the problem to someone else. It gets all the ducks in a neat row so you can now see the problem (and therefore the solution) more clearly.

[CA_Diver]

Re: rddb

You left out posting an incorrect answer from another account. The corrections will immediately flood your post.

[Excused Boots]

Re: rddb

Genius!

[Already?]

Re: rddb

Rubber duck? Spooky. 12 hours on from this comment I’m sat here watching an old Top Of The Pops on BBC4 from 1976 and the current song is Convoy by CW McCall, which includes numerous repeats of the phrase 'rubber duck'.

Brill. That’s finished and now it’s Guys n Dolls singing You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me, quite terribly compared to Dusty's original, which had been a big hit probably about 10 years previously.

For the US contingent TOTP was the BBC's weekly chart pop show and veered between cheesy and awfully cheesy most weeks, but we all watched it on a Thursday night. Oh to be 14 again and not 63.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: rddb

Woah, that is a blast from the past. Kris Kristofferson just turned 40 during filming, and when I watched that as a youg child on TV (I was maybe 10 ?) the trucker romantic really impressed me. Luckily I developed towards another profession and learned, soon enough, that being a trucker is everything but freedom or "King Of The Road". More like a moloch-machine controller, like the workers in Metropolis from Fritz Lang - but without the rescue option.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: rddb

TOTP got so bad eventually I could not watch it anymore ... it was causing me 'Brain Damage' !!!

Don't forget 'Pans People' et al ... dancing with candles on their heads ... lit candles, I joke not !!!

:)

[Excused Boots]

Re: rddb

Simpler times.....

[KittenHuffer]

What I really wanted .....

..... was the person who answered a support call to be able to understand the terms and language that they were likely to encounter.

I had to put a call into B(loody)T(errible) once when a modem was unable to connect across a leased line. I had hooked up a handset and could clearly hear a one Hertz click on the line.

I would have expected someone on the support desk for leased lines to be able to understand the statement "There is a 1 Hertz click on that line that is stopping the modems from handshaking". But it took nearly 10 minutes of careful explanation before the person on the other end of the line understood what I was trying to explain.

[Terry 6]

Re: What I really wanted .....

Only a slight drift off topic here.

Years ago I called out the RAC. My car was running very unevenly. It was obviously something electrical, because I could hear the interference on my radio- perfectly in time with the engine. As I accelerated it went up.

The RAC guy insisted it was something to do with the fuel lines, and kept saying "It's nothing to do with the radio" And ignoring me when I said, "I didn't say it was the radio, I said you can hear the interference on the radio". Instead he treated me like an idiot who thought the radio made the car run unevenly. And insisted on towing me to a garage.Where the following day they replaced an HT lead and charged me a fiver. Just two days of my life wasted. For something he could have tested in 10 seconds* and replaced in 10 seconds more.**

*I subsequently bought a little tester for a couple of quid. Never needed it, it never happened again.

**I complained and had an apology with my membership refunded "As a goodwill gesture".

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What I really wanted .....

100% get your pain.

I once rang up Plusnet to report a problem where the PPP session was failing to be established when the router made its first attempt to connect.

I had software in the router that gave me low level information that normally was not available on the ISP supplied router [Black Box].

(I had replaced the 'Black Box' ISP router with one of my own, it was pretending to be the ISP supplied router by setting the mac address to the mac of the router they had supplied. Using your own router was allowed BUT if you had a problem they would expect the ISP supplied router to be there and would go into 'Sloping shoulders' mode if they discovered the router had been changed.)

I could watch the whole sequence of the connection being made and the attempt to establish the PPP session failing.

I spoke to the support person, eventually, and advised them of the problem 'PPP Session failing to be established' ... there was a long silence as they 'flat lined' ... after trying to find where on the script 'that' came I was advised to 'reboot' the router etc etc etc

Eventually I got passed to someone who passed on the message 'PPP session failure' to a backroom person who understood and reset the line from Plusnets end.

[Some configuration was wrong at Plusnet or BT's end ... Solution was 'Poke it with a sharp stick' !!!]

:)

[samsungfreud]

Failover firewall fail

In the late 90's we received the first of two firewalls that were supposed to work in a failover state.

The first that arrived wouldn't power up.

I called the rep we were working with.

His response: "Oh, it's because that is the failover unit".

I knew immediately he was wrong and called his supervisor.

The response there was to immediately have another unit shipped out and

another tech assigned to drop by in person and smooth over the ill will

generated by the first tech.

We never heard from the first tech after that.

[lglethal]

Re: Failover firewall fail

"Oh, it's because that is the failover unit."

"Wait, what?"

"Yeah the clue is in the name. When the first one fails, then it's all over."

"?!?!?!"

"Maybe you were after a Backup unit."

"Hmmm... Whats the special naming thing on that one."

"Well, by the time it gets started, your main unit will be back up and running..."

[TheWeetabix]

Re: Failover firewall fail

BOFH-worthy thinking. One’s on me ——->

[Aladdin Sane]

There's a reason

They're called helldesks.

[that one in the corner]

Re: There's a reason

Bilaterally symmetrical hell.

If the guy on the desk is any good, it is hell for him to deal with the morons who keep phoning because they can't see if the power switch is on until the office power is restored.

If the guy on the desk is a dweeb, it is hell for us to get him to deal with the specific error code showing in the crash report dialogue box.

[Aladdin Sane]

Re: There's a reason

On the rare occasion I have to call the helldesk for a computer specific issue, I usually tell them all the things I've tried to fix it at the start of the call, which is 90% of their checklist.

That's also why I normally message the on site IT guy first, as he knows I'll do all the obvious things first, so if I say it's borked, it's most likely borked.

[BartyFartsLast]

KPIs, you get the service you pay for

As I often point out to manglement, setting bullshit KPIs like "close X calls per day per agent" "calls closed within x arbitrary time" for outsourced helldesks means they get a helldesk focused on entirely the wrong things and a never ending downward spiral in user satisfaction.

There's often no differentiation between "end user" and techie so those of us who are expert get the same 1st line script which, despite all exhortations, often leads us to "reinstall your operating system" and a closed call.

There are special places in hell for the entire Lenovo helldesk team who would often insist an end user rebuild their own machine with the factory Lenovo image instead of our corporate image before they will even consider progressing an incident. (And that insistence, despite our complaints to the Lenovo account manager, is one of the major reasons why we no longer buy a few thousand Lenovo machines a year.)

[Chloe Cresswell]

Re: KPIs, you get the service you pay for

"here's often no differentiation between "end user" and techie so those of us who are expert get the same 1st line script"

My normal comment is the knowledge level of a tech support call is a constant.

So $ENDUSER rings in, they get the expert.

We ring in, we get "it's my first day! script reader.

[The Organ Grinder's Monkey]

Re: KPIs, you get the service you pay for

Tech support entropy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: KPIs, you get the service you pay for

We have an external Service Desk/IT. And my lord is it a sh%tshow. At least on the Hardware side (not helped by the Win 11 transition).

I dont actually put that on the poor schlubs on the Hell Desk, and more on their management. But there are so many disconnects it unbelievable.

For example, All monitors in the firm are equipped solely with DP slots. All of the new Laptops being provided by IT have only HDMI. So you collect your new laptop, but cant connect it to your company issued monitor. Ok, you're probably thinking IT would provide a HDMI to DP Cable, or an Adaptor. Nope, every person has to individually purchase a new cable or adaptor over the purchasing system, (at a ridiculous markup, but thats another rant entirely!). Delivery time at least a week. A few departments attempted to purchase multiple cables in advance, knowing of the upcoming new Laptops and apparently got yelled at for "frivolous" spending.

Similar thing that the new graphics cards for engineering desktops which use Mini DP outlets, but IT wont supply Mini-DP to DP Adaptors.

I could also go on about the software on the new hardware - bring back the old machine with a dozen IT approved and purchased pieces of software on it. Collect the new machine, which is effectively empty. Then stand around with the Hell Desk person for 30-45 mins, whilst they manually install Teams, Outlook, and a few other standard programs and adjust a few settings. But not the full list of your old software, which you need to repurchase (process takes at least 2 days) and install on your own time. As for the standard stuff, and the settings. No they are apparently not allowed to do that in advance of pick up (you get given a specific appointment to come and pick up your hardware, so it's not like someone drops in unannounced to collect new hardware!). So really an excellent use of company time.

But thats enough rant for now... But like you said, you get the KPIs you pay for, everything else is unimportant...

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: KPIs, you get the service you pay for

Get out of there to preserve your sanity.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: KPIs, you get the service you pay for

Unfortunately, the pay is good, the project interesting, and my colleagues vary from excellent to fine. I also only have to deal with IT on a very irregular basis, so all in all its fine.

But yeah, I will be monitoring the situation as a number of the recent manglement decisions have been bloody awful. You would not believe how they managed to screw up our new Warehouse. It's over a year on, and still about 5% of items, get lost, misplaced, falsely entered into the system, or flat out stolen. But that's ok, as it comes out of SEB (Someone Else's Budget).

<Face Palm Icon>

[Tom 38]

Re: KPIs, you get the service you pay for

If you can keep your head when all about you // Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, // But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, // Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, // And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise

Then you might be a good fit for AverageNonTechBigCompany! Contact our recruitment specialists, who can tell you more about the dreary, soul destroying, and (most importantly) high paid positions available here!

[spuck]

Re: KPIs, you get the service you pay for

But not the full list of your old software, which you need to repurchase (process takes at least 2 days) and install on your own time. As for the standard stuff, and the settings. No they are apparently not allowed to do that in advance of pick up (you get given a specific appointment to come and pick up your hardware, so it's not like someone drops in unannounced to collect new hardware!). So really an excellent use of company time.

This sort of waste of time used to bother me to no end. I realized it was hurting only myself to stew over how inefficiently the powers-that-be wanted me to use my time, but then I realized: they're paying for 8 hours of my time every day, so if they want me to spend them in stupid ways, that's not my concern. But I refuse to give up my non-paid personal hours to make up the difference in the form of unpaid overtime.

Want me to spend 90 minutes of high-salary engineer time waiting for the helpdesk to figure out how to plug the now-mandatory MFA token into the USB-C port that this old laptop doesn't have? Fine. It's no more or less useless than a team meeting where we sit around rehashing what we decided or couldn't decide last week.

This week, my division had our "all-hands" meeting where the division director spent 45 minutes showing us the PowerPoint presentation that he was going to send to everyone by e-mail later that afternoon. Then they decided that 25 minutes of everyone in the division's time was best spent participating in a series of "fun" poll questions like if would rather live in a Star Wars universe or a Lord of the Rings universe.

So that's fine; I'm off to lunch afterwards, on time. I guess any actual work will wait for the afternoon. Or tomorrow, if I can't get to it before 5:00. Your call, management.

[BartyFartsLast]

Re: KPIs, you get the service you pay for

We have similar handover but that's because the dicks we outsourced our provisioning to hit a KPI by removing teams and a couple of other applications to speed up the pre-provisioning.

Our corporate security means the majority of people are unable to enrol a pre-provisioned device for another user so, on first login, we have an official process written by the team who "implemented" this bullshit with documentation that states "can take up to 72 hours before all the standard applications are installed"

So, yeah, be careful what KPIs you set because nobody likes the system we have now and regularly feed back "it was easier before" which leads to ever more fucking around by the muppets in charge who refuse to accept that their "improvements" are costing the business a fortune in lost time.

Let's not discuss the fact that our process before the bullshit that is intune meant we could handover a fully built and configured laptop to a user and have them working in less than 15 minutes but it now takes nearly an hour with no guarantee it is in a functioning state with or even a full compliment of the basic, essential business applications.

[MutantAlgorithm]

Re: KPIs, you get the service you pay for

I can't remember who but someone said "As soon as a metric becomes a target it's useless as someone will always game the system" I think it initially referred to the NHS or Police but is pretty apt anywhere...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: KPIs, you get the service you pay for

Goodhart's Law "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: KPIs, you get the service you pay for

Somebody mention the concept of 'Standard builds' ... FFS !!!

[This includes the hardware (inc cables/adapters etc)]

Build it once and prove it works ... do whole machine cloning with 'intelligent' updates to s/w keys, Hardware ID's, Asset Tags etc etc

If you really want to get clever you can have multiple builds that vary by Dept/Job Function/Permie vs Contractor etc.

The current system is so that they can charge for the time over & over for each new employee/laptop/pc/'Season of the year'/'Continental Drift' etc !!!

:)

[druck]

Re: KPIs, you get the service you pay for

You could be describing just about every defence company.

[spuck]

Re: KPIs, you get the service you pay for

The corollary: You get the behavior your measure.

Joel Spolsky wrote a great article about that in Inc. magazine back in 2008. (now behind a paywall, but a link here)

[Gene Cash]

Re: KPIs, you get the service you pay for

Holy crap. The experience he described at CompUSA, where the employee led him into a back office to check him out, and was probably a corporate sales guy scumming retail sales...

That just happened to me 2 weeks ago at a Razer store, down to the guy not knowing how to find a bag for me.

God, I hope that means Razer is circling the drain and about to go out of business. I only bought my keyboard there because I was really desperate.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: KPIs, you get the service you pay for

This gambit exists under multiple disguises :

'I can fix any problem on our kit ... IF the kit has been factory reset and is doing NOTHING' !!!

OR

'Factory reset the kit ... press the self-test Button ... if the light is Green ALL IS WELL ... What do you mean it is NOT configured !!!???'

Windoze Version:

Wipe 'Windoze' off the PC then install DOS 6.22(!!!???) ... it WORKS perfectly BECAUSE it cannot do anything 'useful' ...

(*Assuming* that you are not running purely DOS based s/w !!!)

:)

[Fred Daggy]

Re: KPIs, you get the service you pay for

As you've pointed out , BartyFartsLast, the manglement clearly don't understand KPIs.

Good ones are hard to write - but are worth their weight in gold. Bad ones just doom your company (or yourself, if you're writing them as part of next year's goals).

Understanding that "Re-install Operating System" should be a last resort, rather than a "Get out of jail free card" for the helpdesk would be a good step in understanding the customer. The customer that has paid you money for the product. In days gone by it was a not insignificant purchase - something people invested a lot of time in evaluating options. Today, prices are indicating it is more of a commodity.

Two stories "I bought a laptop from Wotan's Widgets and it broke, the support was bloody terrible" has me crossing Wotan's Widgets off the list of potential suppliers. Whereas, "I bought a laptop from Wotan's Widgets and it broke, but Support got me up and running in 2 hours" means Wotan's Widgets might get an unsolicited call to a corporate sales.

If the customer feels that the support just wants to get you off the call without a working solution, then you've lost the customer, for life. And everyone that they tell the story too. Forget about Instascam, that's the real viral marketing right there.

Its hard to find good support staff, after a while they're expensive, but they're worth it

Its hard to write good KPIs, you need to think and understand, but the time is worth it

Its hard to setup a good Support Center, it can be expensive, but it will create legendary goodwill and be worth it

Cheap out - and you get none of it. (See also Microsoft, 1976, support for the last 15 years).

[Anonymous Coward]

Help Desks shouldn’t be necessary

As someone who spent most of their paid career in QA (not IT, I should add, but in more tangible engineering areas). One of my objectives, when advising organisations, was to get senior management to recognise that getting things right before customers get their hands on their products (or receive their services) was the most cost effective approach. That didn’t mean there was no requirement for after-sales support, but every unscheduled service call should be seen as a failure that needed investigation and, in most cases, corrective actions to ensure it was a one-off.

Any company that boasted of large after-sales support teams and call-centres was a red flag to me when assessing potential suppliers. Increasing help-desk resources was (is) a sign of failure to manage. It’s become acceptable in software that there will always be bugs. I’m not saying it’s feasible to supply totally bug-free software as there are far too many variables to control (other than bespoke systems that are under single source control) but the rush to add features is leading to an ever increasing risk of user problems. One reason Apple have been successful is that the hardware and OS are under their control - not perfect, but their systems need significantly less user support (though anti-monopoly regulation, especially in the EU, is going to level up the field). Apple systems aren’t for everyone but their walled garden approach is an option (for now)for those that want it.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Help Desks shouldn’t be necessary

As a matter of curiosity how do you apply QA to the users of the products? Do they have to pass some sort of test before they're allowed to make a purchase?

[SomeRandom1]

Re: Help Desks shouldn’t be necessary

Perhaps that should be applied to many things in life - driving, financing, reproducing, etc Maybe they should be re-tested on a somewhat regular basis too

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Help Desks shouldn’t be necessary

Reproducing, certainly. There are quite is few people whose parents would ideally have been refused a licence.

[Anonymous Custard]

Re: Help Desks shouldn’t be necessary

It sounds to me like the corporate version of the military battleplan.

And we all know what happens to those on first contact with the enemy...

[D-Coder]

Re: Help Desks shouldn’t be necessary

I test my reproductive skills as often as possible.

Not in a production system, of course.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Help Desks shouldn’t be necessary

You may joke BUT in some industries this would make sense !!!

If you are too stupid to understand what you are doing and order the wrong kit/software then 'learn more' before you spend the money and expect Support to turn a Accounting Suite into a Warehouse Stock control system !!!

I have experienced people trying to 'bend' software to uses it was never intended for because the money has been spent and the requirements where never examined by someone who knew what they were doing !!!

The alternative 'fun' is buying the right software with the WRONG kit so that the software can never perform properly because it is underpowered and configured for it original primary use which is at odds with the 'NEW' requirements such as a need for backups and archiving of data to govt standards which have been ignored.

There are many many more examples of people/companies winging it because they are trying to NOT spend money !!!

:)

[doublelayer]

Re: Help Desks shouldn’t be necessary

That's fair enough for those support calls because the software has bugs and messed something up, but a lot of support calls aren't that in the first place. If people don't know how to use the software, that's at most a UI or training gap, neither of which is generally considered to be a QA problem unless they're very severe, and in many cases it's not even that. Another class is for people who have unusual requirements who have purchased ongoing access to people who can help solve their problems more quickly than building it all themselves, which is also not a thing related to software quality and is a perfectly normal support service to offer.

[cd]

Re: Help Desks shouldn’t be necessary

Worked for Applecare....LMFAO

[Marty McFly]

Re: Help Desks shouldn’t be necessary

>"It’s become acceptable in software that there will always be bugs.?

When was the last time you saw an actual beta test release?

Nope, alpha test in-house, then release. The early adopters are now the beta testers.

It used to be when beta was complete, then the code was declared production ready. Nope, rush, rush, rush to ride the feature train. Products will be released to match a marketing schedule determined by the colored pencil department.

Ship now, fix later. It is a win-win for everyone involved!

Sales & marketing get their bonus today. The developers get overtime to create emergency fixes. Support stays fully staffed to handle all the calls. Even the customer's tech staff gets extra headcount approved to roll out the frequent patches & updates. In reality, everyone is making money, and jobs are secure.

Sure, it sucks having to deal with defects....but that is what everyone gets paid to do! If the tech worked properly, many of us would not be needed long term.

It is all a giant self-licking ice cream cone. I would like to take another lick product release, please!

[Lazlo Woodbine]

Our SIMS support company are usually great, and are able to fix most issues with a single call.

Not so a few years back, when I noticed we had no timetable after Christmas.

Calls and emails batted back and forth for a few days with no solution in sight.

Until one day, whilst I was on hold, I decided to look at the Academic Year setup and noticed the Spring term was set to start on a Sunday, not Monday.

I changed the date and as if by magic, our timetable reappeared just as the help desk operative came back on the line.

I explained what I'd done and the operative let out an audible sigh and told me they could now clear the problem for a couple of dozen other schools.

It seems that adding an extra bank holiday for HM Queen's funeral had shifted the timetable, because we'd done it the wrong way. We did it the correct way for King Charles' coronation the next year...

[Anonymous Coward]

I take my hat off to you, I am so sorry you have to deal with SIMS. So glad to be away from that POS now.

[I am David Jones]

Dogbert does tech support best:

“Hello, I …”

“Shut up and reboot”

“Hey, it work …”

“Shut up and hang up”

Dogbert checks watch, “My average call time is improving”

[Bill Gray]

Link to comic.

[Bebu sa Ware]

routers' clocks were out by an hour… change to daylight saving time.

Seems a bit suspect as the routers would use UTC I would have thought.

Possibly someone had fiddled with the system (UTC) clock to get the "right" local time rather than set the correct time zone. I have seen this and it is bloody irritating once you tumble to it.

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

"We don't have Linux systems; we only support Windows"

Years ago, our university wanted to standardize IT support, so the computer science department I work in had to transfer our (very capable) sysadmins to the centralized IT department. We did insist that we keep working under Linux, and a university-standard Linux distribution was put in place, next to the standard Windows set-up used by the vast majority of the university. So far, so good.

However, the help desk was centralized as well, and where in the past I would simply call our sysadmins (or drop by their office) if there was a problem, and got it sorted without hassle, I now had to phone a help desk, where they first went through a script aimed at the standard Windows install. The first time this happened, I told the person on the other end that my machine was a Linux box, and he answered that they didn't support Linux, only Windows. I told him he was wrong, and I was running the university-standard Linux install, but he remained adamant there was no such thing. After a fairly pointless "Yes it is! - No it isn't" loop worthy of Monty Python, I threatened to file a complaint if he did not put me through to the sysadmin who installed the Linux system he said didn't exist. As I mentioned the name of said sysadmin he could hardly suggest that that person didn't exist, and the problem was quickly sorted.

All is well that ends well, I should add, as we now have a very capable sysadmin delegated from the IT department to our institute, so I do not have to answer any stupid script questions about Windows settings my machine does not have.

[SomeRandom1]

Re: "We don't have Linux systems; we only support Windows"

He probably thought you were running some dodgy shadow IT setup and so didn't want to be involved.

[phuzz]

Re: "We don't have Linux systems; we only support Windows"

And probably didn't want to pass OP along to the Linux expert because they'd then complain that they were being passed 1st line support calls.

We've all had that colleague who was 'The Expert' on a certain system, but gets grumpy if anyone tries to ask them questions about it. Of course, they're also far too busy to document anything.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: "We don't have Linux systems; we only support Windows"

I think my reply would have been along the lines of "I'll be over there directly to resolve the matter with $HeadHoncho"

[ColinPa]

ahh - that was embarassing

We had a big mainframe customer come to visit our lab, and discuss some problems they had with software that runs on many platforms.

One of the senior technical people, who develops on Windows, and had not used the mainframe said

Techie: "Change the config file, shut down your system down and restart it". That's what we tell our customers.

Customer: I dont think that will work, it will take about an hour to restart it

Techie: (very glibly) Well you should buy a faster box.

Customer: very, very, long pause

Customer: We have the fastest box. Our system come up in about 30 seconds. It takes an hour to check the connections to the 10,000 other system, and the 5000 database tables are all operational before we open it for business.

Techie : Ahhh. This was one of the situations where he wished he could just disappear.

Another long pause, before a senor managed stepped in to facilitate the discussion.

The techie was not involved with any future customer discussions

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

PTSCD

I could share stories, but I have Post Traumatic Support Call Disorder... As the one calling the expensive special support line...

I also have PTSTD, Post Traumatic Support Ticket Disorder. And PTTSD, Post Traumatic Ticket System Disorder - especially after Corsair...

[Mr Dogshit]

Erm

It's "Service Desk" actually, if you want to be ITIL® compliant.

[lglethal]

Re: Erm

"Maybe try calling the Help Desk?"

"Actually, they're not called the Helpdesk anymore. They're called the Service Desk, now."

"Huh? Why'd they change the name?"

"Well, that's because you wont get any bloody help from 'em!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Erm

I work for a US-based retail company which rejoices in its front-line help desk phone number being the "easy to remember" 877-HELP-ccc (Replacing CCC with the company's 3-character acronym.)

I have always been secretly amused that this works out to the far more descriptive 8-NO-HELP-ccc.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Erm

Bahh, missed the editing timeout. 866 not 877. Oh well, the NO-HELP part remains!

[Terry 6]

Re: Erm

Sometimes better to copy, delete, <new reply>, paste edit, repost, when that happens.

[dmesg]

Re: Erm

Just this last week I had cause to call our uni's help desk -- a student in a beginning CompSci lab session was not used to the command line and locked their account after too many failed login attempts. But what was the help desk number again? I went to open a browser on the instructor's machine to search for it, them noticed it was on the wallpaper image, and of the form xxx-HELP.

Then I remembered. I was on the IT staff some 30 or 40 years ago when they were setting up the help desk. What should the phone number be? And I suggested xxx-HELP.

[spuck]

Re: Erm

My grandfather was a farmer who raised cattle for both beef and dairy. My young eyes were opened the day I learned what it meant for him to "service" the cows to produce the next generation.

Service Desk, indeed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Erm

Internally we have a “service desk” and a “service line”. Each is a helpline for a specific service but of course neither name bothers to identify the actual service provided...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Erm

When merging a couple of networks a few years back as part of an acquisition, we spent WAY too many hours in the initial scoping meeting before we realized that the term "CORE" means very different things in a fixed network and a mobile network. Any attempts at distinguishing the two were stymied because the mobile team not only used the term "mobile core", but also "packet core" and "IP core" to describe the same thing. We ended up referring to "well, OUR core" and "that is, YOUR core" until we could agree on a term.

Also, the company that does facilities management for our offices are called COOR.

[lglethal]

Re: Erm

Cor Blimey...

[Korev]

Re: Erm

Sounds hardcore

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: Erm

Which got renamed to Help desk, then to Help line, then Service line, then first level support. Following the first rule of marketing public relations propaganda: Give it a new name. Erward Bernays was known to be one of the best.

[hairydog]

Re: Erm

Isn't 'servicing' what boy pigs do to girl pigs to make them mummy pigs?

[Anonymous Custard]

Re: Erm

All the naming discussion is giving me deja vu from my morning reading diversion...

[Scott 26]

Re: Erm

> It's "Service Desk" actually, if you want to be ITIL® compliant.

we were doing our ITIL training, and got to the point where call center vs helpdesk vs service desk was discussed.... I announced to the room, while staring directly at the helldesk manager, "so we have a call center, then?"

Icon for response, once they worked out what I had just said.

[Andy Taylor]

Having spent many years in support, the most valuable lessons I have learned is to pitch your conversation to the customer's level of experience/knowledge, to ask the right questions and never to assume that the first line checks have been completed.

More than 20 years ago I worked at a large NGO that had outsourced its IT to an external supplier. Computers were so locked down you couldn't even install a new printer without assistance from support.

They put trainees on our helpdesk and moved them to other accounts as soon as they became competent, replacing them with other newbies. The only thing you could reliably get out of them was the weather forecast for the next day or so - the helpdesk was located to the west of our office.

I eventually set my laptop up to dual boot into a copy of Windows I could actually control myself.

[Ian Johnston]

Rather dated, as will be obvious, but true:

Me: Can you let me know the VAX queue name for the printer in Room 1023, next to my office?

Helpdesk: Have you tried rebooting Windows?

[MatthewSt]

API

I had developer support for an API platform tell me to clear out my cache and cookies the other day.

If they'd have bothered to look at the attached network request they'd have seen that no cookies were sent and it was their API choking on some data.

I felt like asking them to forward on the request to someone who could spell API...

[ShortLegs]

Its not just the support desk - which tends to be synonomous with 'Helpdesk' aka 1st line support.

We pay a rather large firewall company an awful lot of money for premium support. Nothing touches 1st line, it goes direct to 3rd line; these folks allegedly are experienced, free-thinking engineers who do not work from scripts. Allegedly. On more than one occasion we have been asked to complete very basic tasks, despite this info being in the ticket, c/w with output, or not even relevant to the issue at hand.

On one occasion a problem was escalated from 3rd line to R&D. Only for our junior network admin, whom no one had told was facing a 4th line problem, went away for a while hemming and hawing and came back with a viable solution.

[Excused Boots]

"Nothing touches 1st line, it goes direct to 3rd line; these folks allegedly are experienced, free-thinking engineers who do not work from scripts.”

Well, that’s what they tell you, and may even be true for a period of time, but gradually the support company will erode that provision, they will gradually get rid of 3rd and 4th line engineers (because they are expensive, and they could get four or five outsourced, script readers working for whatever passes for minimum wage in that part of the world), you however will continue to pay top-dollar for the ‘enhanced support service’.

But, I suppose it enhances shareholder value, so all good then!

[Someone Else]

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Rodney" – a serial contributor who opened his missive to On Call by sharing his frustration with help desks that work from scripts instead of exercising expertise one's brain.

There, FTFY

[J. Cook]

I've got some doozies...

... mostly involving Citrix. We had out VAR come in to do a very specific setup involving a load balancer (Citrix Netscaler) and a security appliance made by a large company with a bridge as part of their logo. Neither of us knew the exact process to get the netscaler to do what we wanted it to do, so we called the help desk for Citrix. They kept insisting that it could do it, suggested a configuration, we tried it, it didn't work worth a hill of beans, they kept insisting, we asked to escalate, the second level techs parroted the same thing back to us, and finally we got up to one of the engineers who told us five minutes after reading through three hours worth of logs, escalations, and tries that "no, it can't do what you want it to do, it's not designed to do that."

our VAR was incandescent by the time that happened; after he got off the phone, he had some exceptionally creative entries that I added to my Book Of The Profane and Obscene. Shortly thereafter, we dumped the netscaler for an F5, which took all of 15 minutes to set up and deploy the configuration they were looking for.

Their support group also had no idea how to extend the log file drive on the appliance, because when it filled up, the UI stopped responding and the only way to fix it was to go on the machine's console and manually clear out space, and there was no facility to auto-purge old log files.

I've done the whole entire "ok, give me a minute to do that" [waits exactly 60 seconds] "nope, machine is still emitting ectoplasm and asking for the Keymaster of Gozer. NOW will you send a tech with a new mainboard??" thing with hardware support.

HPE Nimble gets a mention for "when we said we are dropping support for [product line] we mean it- no firmware updates, no documentation, and no replacement hardware from our VARs- you'll have to get replacement hardware on the grey market as refurbished units, NOS from some backwater warehouse in North Dakota that got a case of the things by mistake and manages to sell one when they find the case in the back."

For kudos, since I am naming and shaming up there, NEXSAN's support has been... magical. I called them one day in a right panic because the thing was showing multiple failed drives (due to a firmware bug) and the tech that connected with me set up a screen sharing session, pointed me at a specific web page on the machine, and un-failed the drives, bringing it all back to life. He then gave me a link to update the firmware on the device. Other times I've contacted them for hardware issues, and they were both spot on, had the replacement hardware to me within 72 hours, and also made sure we were good with firmware. (and after we let the support lapse on them, they did inform me that "no you have to buy our disks, because we do things with signed firmware that can't be duplicated; even though you are out of support, we'll cheerfully sell you replacement drives."

Cisco... gets a "meh" from me. If I have bad hardware that's provable in the SEL logs (i.e. bad memory sticks) or a failed drive on their UCS systems, as long as I upload the support bundle when I open the case, I usually (~90% of the time) get a response of "yep, it's broken, where do you want the replacement part sent". The other 10% of the time, I have to play the "reseat failed component" game.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I've got some doozies...

Your Citrix experience reminds me of my Asus router experience. I purchased a unit with the express intent of setting up QoS on it, so my backups could be lowest priority and stop choking out all other traffic. I spent several days trying to set up proper QoS (proper priority-based "traditional" QoS, not just bandwidth limiting), but couldn't see any effect - if a backup was running, it would consume 100% of the uplink and effectively prevent any other outbound traffic, even when set as lowest priority.

After several long, unfruitful calls with Asus, they were unable to get traditional QoS working either; their "suggestion" was to do bandwidth limiting. While it technically worked, it meant that my backups would NEVER be able to use the full bandwidth available, even at 4 AM with no other traffic going on.

I strongly suspect that that unit didn't really have QoS capability in the electronics, even though the settings for it were there!

[Excused Boots]

Re: I've got some doozies...

Oh I know quite a lot of people who should know better but who simply equate QoS with bandwidth limiting. I suspect you are quite right, the options for it might be there, but behind the scenes in the firmware......?

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the early 90s I worked at a large manufacturer. They outsourced all their IT and hardware support to a company that handled PCs and VAXs.

We were a research department and used top end Silicon Graphics machines.

We had probably the first virtual reality engine off the production line (500k of kit). The initial year software and hardware support was ok as it was included in the price. The second year was not, it went to the outsourcing company. They pocketed the ~100k fee ( for all our sgi machines) and did not take a support contract out with SGI. Needless to say we had a hardware failure a week before a huge demo to the board.

I rang SGI and they said sorry no contract. So I placed a call with the out sourcing company. They sent their pc repair guy round. I asked what he was going to do and he said he was going to reseat all the boards. Not the most sensible thing to do as I'd previously watched the SGI engineer fix the machine for a different fault and I'd already run the diagnostic software so knew what the issue was.

I refused to allow him entry to the lab after informing him that he should be running the hardware diagnostics before removing anything and that he had no training on these types of computers as SGI had yet to release the maintenance manuals.

The issue escalated all the way to the main board.

The out sourcing company had to pay for an SGI engineer to be flown from California with a replacement card. Cost them 60k plus the original 100k to reinstate the direct support...

We had paid the 100k for next day engineer onsite support from SGI, not for a PC repairer.

It's not as it they were not aware of the kit as I'd personally shown the out sourcing company rep' each bit of kit and told them exactly what we expected from a support perspective.

Needless to say they never pocketed the R&D hardware and software support budget again while I was there.