And believe me, next to pissing off Payroll, pissing off I.T. is the dumbest thing you can do at work. Trust me. We can make your life a living hell.
1. Be Prepared.
One of the things that i was always taught as a kid was to be prepared. This includes being prepared when you call support. There is always a couple of routine questions that are asked,
What workstation are you using?
What printer is having issues?
Nothing pisses of support quicker than waiting around while you try to find information that you knew you would need.
2. Don't be belligerent.
We don't try to be rude, but 9 times out of 10 we have a dozen other things going, at least 6 of which are more important than your icons moving around. If we get short, it's because you are wasting our time, or we have something better to do.
3. Understand that we are busy.
Unless you sign the paycheck, we will not drop whatever we are doing to make your Pandora radio play. We will get to it as soon as possible.
4. Don't submit a ticket, email to make sure we got it, and then call to make sure we saw your email.
The system works, trust us. If it doesn't we will let you know.
5. Don't try to tell us how to answer your own question.
If you know better than we do then why did you bother asking?
If we don't know the answer we will tell you.
6. If you have a problem tell us.
It is really tough, borderline impossible, to fix issues that we don't know about.
Don't bitch about it behind our backs. W don't like hearing about things through the grapevine.
7. Answer any questions that are asked.
When we respond to your ticket with a question, it's because we need to know more to help you, not because we like playing 20 questions. It's also likely that you missed #1 above. And, if you ignore us, we can't help you
Responding with "I just want it to work" * cough* CEOs * cough* is not going to help.
8. Don't ambush us.
Just because we are walking by doesn't mean we're twiddling our thumbs, looking for something to do—more often than not, we're on our way to do something. In fact, we usually will forget what you tell us fixing whatever we're on our way to work on…
9. Don't lie to us.
We'll find out that you dumped your entire cup of coffee in your keyboard one way or another. Just tell us everything up front. It will save both of us a lot of time.
10. For managers: Don't micro-manage.
Chances are we know what we are doing better than you do. It will be documented next time we have a second, and though it may not make sense you, it will make sense to another technical individual.