That's how I describe my current place of employment.
Prior to this gig, I had never worked for a government agency. Needless to say, the past eighteen months have been an eye-opener, and what stands out the most is the sheer number of societal outcasts and broken people—both mentally and physically—working here. And before anyone says, "But you work there too!" I readily admit that being here obviously puts me in that class as well. But is it societal, mental or physical? As Ben says, it's probably "Some o' Column A, some o' Column B."
That's not to say any these folks are unpleasant. They aren't. But they do tend to fall into two broad categories: those who don't give a fuck yet somehow manage to retain their jobs, and those who are absolutely anal about dotting every "i" and crossing every "t".
The two colleagues with whom I share office space and work closely—both of whom have been here forever—each come from one of those groups. One disappears for hours on end; no one seems to know where he goes, but our customers have noted he spends an awful lot of time in the parking lot on his phone. He does close his assignments, so I assume he's doing something job related during his vanishing acts.
My other co-worker has a hissy if I fail to move my magnetic dot on our in/out board to the proper column—even though there are only the three of us in this office and we can readily see each other from our desks. She has years' worth of file folders full of copies of all her completed assignments, equipment transfer forms, and department policies and procedures. If anything happens that's out of the scope of her daily routine you'd think aliens had landed.
The one common element between the two of them is that they both don't seem to have a clue about what constitutes good customer service; something that has left me shocked on more than one occasion. "We just install the software. Troubleshooting it is up to the customer," or "We don't handle [fill in the blank] hardware. They need to contact the vendor directly."
This flies in the face of a lifetime of trying to do my best work. Okay, I get that you don't handle [fill in the blank] hardware or troubleshoot software after install, but would it kill you to at least go look at the problem in case it is something that you can easily fix? Showing you at least made an effort leaves a much more positive impression than simply telling the customer in so many words to go fuck off because it's not your responsibility.
Despite the longevity of some of the workers here (one of my favorites is a guy who's worked here fifty-five years), there is also huge amount of turnover, and along with that comes a lot of knowledge lost.
Most recently (and what really prompted this post and illustrates the problem of lost knowledge) was a situation where I'd swapped out a customer's laptop. While not quite ready for official refresh, it was an older model that was being wonky to the point that troubleshooting it wasn't a good use of my resources. Her installed software list raised only one red flag—simply because I had heretofore no experience with it—but that one piece of software has become a thorn in my side.
The refresh went well. I even found the installer for this bit of software and everything was going smoothly. The problems started after I'd left and she attempted to use the software. The response I got from both my colleagues was, "We just install it. Roger (not his real name) in Applications Support configures it."
Well, trouble was, Roger had quit about two weeks earlier. His official replacement knew even less about the program than I did. To the guy's credit, he did attempt to get it working. Everything functioned normally on the new laptop under his profile, and the customer could log into any other machine in the department and have it work as well, but for some reason it refused to function with her login on the new laptop.
Since this particular customer is a private-office-with-a-door squeaky wheel who I sensed wouldn't have a second thought about getting my boss involved, in spite of what my colleagues had told me, I returned to do some basic troubleshooting to see if the problem could be resolved—going so far as to totally recreate her profile from scratch, thinking that whatever was borked would sort itself out on clean load.
Nope.
Roger's replacement stepped up and attempted further troubleshooting with the vendor, but after several days they both gave up, recommending reimaging or replacement the machine. Since reimaging would leave the customer without a way to work for 24-48 hours, I opted for replacing the entire laptop so she could work until time came to do the swap.
Well, I got the new laptop yesterday and loaded all her software except the one application in question. I took it over to her this morning so that Roger's replacement could install that once piece of software himself it to ensure it was done correctly.
But he didn't have the admin rights to do so. He also didn't even know where the installer was located!
Our software repository is a disaster. It's spread out in multiple folders across multiple servers, and even after 18 months on the job, I'm sure I still don't know all the hidey-holes where all this stuff is squirreled away. I went to the so called new "official" repository, but the version of the software I found there was ancient. I found a newer version at a different location, but as I was loading it, Roger's replacement said, "That's 6.2. We need 6.3."
"Do you know where I can find that?"
"No. [Coworker who lives on his phone in the parking lot] always installs it for us."
And with that, I turned to him and said, "We need to reschedule. [Coworker who lives on his phone in the parking lot] is on vacation until next week and I have no way of contacting him."
Needless to say, everyone was frustrated.
How can you be point-of-contact support for a software application and not even know where it's installed from?
HOW CAN YOU BE POINT-OF CONTACT SUPPORT FOR A SOFTWARE APPLICATION AND NOT EVEN KNOW WHERE IT'S INSTALLED FROM?!?!