Category: Work

Can't imagine why.

Signs of I.T. Burnout

• You wake up in the morning and think of 50 different excuses to call in sick because you just can't face another day of it.
• You no longer even feel the need to pretend to be cheerful and nice when talking to end users. You answer them with the fewest amount of words possible and possibly a grunt thrown in for good measure.
• When you sit at your desk and stare through your monitor thinking of all the other things you would rather be doing, and one of them is having a urinary catheter put in.
• You stop hearing what people are saying to you and just think about how much you would enjoy smashing them in the face with your keyboard—repeatedly—just so you can go back to staring through your monitor.
• It feels funny when you smile.

I'm so there.

Having been on both sides of the Tech Support fence, I can pretty safely say that the state of technical support from most major vendors these days is so abysmal that an actual good support experience is almost shockingly noteworthy. I try to do my best, but there are days where I simply don't give a fuck. I've already been called out for having an attitude, but thankfully the number of "You ROCK!" nominations that keep coming in for me from my end users offsets any stray comment my boss receives.  And on the other side of the fence, businesses in general have begun to recognize that the grand support-offshoring experiment that started in the late 1990s has well and truly failed. But even before the trend really got underway, tech support was hardly a glamorous experience, either for the customer or the poor phone monkey stuffed into minuscule cube, earning a hair above minimum wage.

The story is the same for customer-facing and internal help desks alike: no one likes calling them, and no one likes working them. It's a common bit of conventional wisdom that the average time it takes for a newly hired tech support worker to go from bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to suicidal and burnt-out is about 18 months; the job can be notoriously hard on the psyche and the soul. It's the very definition of Sysiphean—no matter how many times you answer the customers' questions, there will always be more customers with the exact same questions.

Repetitive tasks with no relief can be psychologically stressful. This leads to a feeling of resentment on the part of a lot of support staff, who can come to regard customers as unendingly, unerringly stupid; conversely, when confronted with a sighing, obviously annoyed Nick Burns-ish creature groaning at them, the immediate response of most customers is mistrust, reticence to comply with directions, and sometimes outright anger.

Non-IT users need to learn their computer/device better. I see too many people who still don't know the difference between Windows and Office. Granted computers etc. are getting easier to use, but end users need to at least try to learn some basic terminology besides "The Internet isn't working."

How to do this? First, make the technology easier. Apple does this the best. (And my experience with Apple Tech Support has been, without fail, exemplary.) Facebook is right behind them. Google has some good consumer offerings as well and is catching up rapidly while still keeping higher end functionality. I've personally had to deal with software that requires a process that has no documentation, takes 2 hours to install and required manual intervention by a person for most of that time. Only one question… WHY? If you can't answer that succinctly in a few words, or it sounds like "we don't have the resources to invest in that yet," you are doing it wrong. I'm talking to you, McKesson.

Second, pay tech support people more and give them some respect! Customer service is hard. Programmers can't do it and neither can engineers. They think they can, but it requires training just like any other position. We have to stop treating customer service like sweat shop labor. That's how we got the support outsourcing started because some bozo thought we could just put warm bodies on the phone to do what a computer could not. Tech Support staff are the E.R. physicians of the 21st century, yet they're still treated like janitors. Even after your system crashes and we're called upon to get it working again, we're never given the respect that little bit of saving-your-ass deserves; more often than not, we're blamed for the calamity. I'm all for putting the right person in the position, be they Indian or American, but pick people who have skills, respect them and pay them, and eventually you'll have good people wanting to go into these positions.

Finally, the best tech support has people who can think critically and logically. It's sad, but we are losing our ability to do that in the United States. Increase investment in public schools and increase time spent on logical problem solving in general. Customer service is about solving someone's problem, not just smiling and making the customer feel good about themselves. Yeah, I want the person to be friendly and personable, but if they can't take two seconds to think about my problem and make a decision… any decision, then the first two points aren't going to help at all.

After the 6,437,193rd time I've worked through your exact problem, I have an idea or two about what might be wrong. When I ask you to reboot, check a setting, or rename a backup file and restart the program, it's because these steps fix the problem most of the time. You may be honest, but approximately 56% of the callers will lie about trying a simple reboot, and the other 44% won't even have considered doing that before calling in the problem.

Speaking of lying, when I go to a PC and see a half dozen toolbars covering 25% of their browser and ask, "How did all this get installed?" the answer will be, "I don't know. It just showed up."

When I walk you three three procedures and have you check to see if the problem is fixed after each one, it's not that I'm an idiot (correlation does not imply causation). Rather, it's because your particular problem sometimes has multiple causes, and if your system is partially hosed, we can avoid some of the steps. When it's completely munged, though, we must go through the steps to fix the little problems before the big problem goes away.

I am the entire unofficial "Help Desk" for my company and to be perfectly honest, while I still try to provide good, friendly customer support to my users, I'm rapidly coming to loathe every aspect of my job. I've been at this company for a little over a year, but I've been doing Tech Support work as my sole source of income since 1997. For the ten years prior to that, it was secondary to my primary job function, so I'm certainly no stranger to the scene. My phone ringing has become like the calling of some satanic beast, here to rip out another chunk of my soul, so I finally reached the point where I turned the ringer off. I figure if it's a real problem, they'll (a) leave a message, (b) send me an email, or (c) come to my desk. What I learned early on is that with most problems, if you don't immediately run to hold the user's hand, 90% of the time they'll figure it out on their own or the problem will spontaneously go away on its own.

I'm looking for a way out of here, but I've been at this long enough to know that in this field the basic story line and personalities I have to deal with on a daily basis will stay the same no matter where I go; only the faces will change. The only saving grace to this job is that I get here a half hour before most everyone else, which means I get some time in the morning without having to see or hear from anyone and I beat the traffic going home in the afternoon. It's also insanely easy to get to from our new apartment, regardless of the weather.

A good number of the users at my company admit to being computer illiterate and they have no patience for the time it may take to troubleshoot a problem. They seem to have this idea that my job is simply a matter or pressing a button or tapping a key and everything in their world that breaks will be put back together in a heartbeat. But it's not like many real problems—problems that might require I invest a few brain cells in solving them—ever come up.

Most of my day is spent:

• unlocking accounts (Turn OFF your CAPS LOCK KEY,  you MONKEYS!)
• resetting passwords (You were out for a week and you've forgotten it? Is it really THAT hard to remember? You've been typing it EVERY day for the last three months!)
• telling people what the URL is to our web mail system
• walking them through the steps to get their email to their smartphone. (Most of these people shouldn't be allowed to have one)
• Troubleshooting or requesting service for printers (I hate printers. Why are we still printing SO DAMN MUCH?!)
• showing people how to reduce their mailbox size when they have gone over the limit (they never remember to empty the deleted items folder)
• creating PST files in Outlook so they can horde every single personal cat-video, inspirational message, and Obama-is-a-communist-Kenyan-ursurper email they have received from the beginning of time

I guess you get the idea.

Terminology is also big problem with my users. They can't tell the difference between a desktop computer and a laptop that is attached to a docking station. They don't know the difference between a computer and a monitor (your mean the TV thing?) Before I created a spreadsheet with all the hard information I would ever need to get from my users, if I asked a user for his/her computer name, I can guarantee that I'd either their employee ID, log in name, email address, the computer service tag, the model of the computer or  "It's a Dell. Does that help?"

When I ask for their Windows password, 9 times of of 10 I'll get, "Is that the one I use first thing in the morning to log in?"

Seriously.

They refer to their web browser as "The Internet" and Windows as "The Windows." Try getting a user to tell the difference between Windows XP and Windows 7. It's like trying to teach a newborn how to drive a dump truck. Same goes for Office; there's no hope when it comes to that. Hell, most of my users can't even figure out how to create shortcuts on their desktop or task bar.

And they're terrified of trying anything on their own!

They don't know what it means when I ask them for a folder path or drive path to whatever calamity they have gotten themselves into. They only know it as the "R" drive or "P" driver or "I" drive.

The company I work for is in the medical insurance business and therefore rakes in vast amounts of cash. But no matter how much myself, or the two I.T. Directors I've now had the pleasure of working for have pleaded with the holders of the purse strings, it's only very recently that they started providing basic, strictly voluntary Excel training to the staff. Until that point, they just gave these people a computer and said go to work! So whenever someone new gets hired I can almost guarantee at least 3-4 calls a day from this person, just trying to help them navigate the scary magic box on their desk.

In conclusion, Tech Support is Hell. It has been my observation over these past fifteen years that a good majority of the people who work in the field are tortured souls, and very few of us actually like this job after the initial rush wears off. Users are, for the most part, incompetent, and I often wonder how companies manage to stay in business considering this staggering level of willful stupidity. It's 2012, for chrissake! Personal computers have been a part of corporate life for the last thirty years, and yet there are workers in their 20s who still view them as some sort of incomprehensible technology that landed from another planet. The bottom line is that American businesses need to put more focus on training their employees on how to use the thing they spend 99% of their work day in front of.

Today started out—before I even left the house—with me putting my thumb through one of the flimsy styrofoam cups you get drinks in from Sonic. Iced tea all over the floor.

This forced me to stop at Starbucks on the way to work. First time I've been to this particular store, and I wasn't impressed.  Line to the door and the baristas seemed unconcerned about getting people in and out in a hurry.

I arrived at work to discover that my Windows password was no longer working. I had just changed it a couple weeks ago, so it's not like it expired, or (like a lot of the people that work here) that I'd forgotten it over the span of a 3 day weekend. It was no big deal; I went into the server room and logged into the admin workstation there as administrator and went to fire up AD "Users and Computers" so I could reset the password.  I clicked on the link and waited. And waited. And waited. Oh, it seems Flash decided to update at that very moment.  Waited some more. Machine locked up. Tried to shut down and restart. MMC wasn't shutting down.  Fuck it.  I pulled the power cord.

Once it had rebooted, I logged in—again as administrator—and went to start up "Users and Computers."

It absolutely refused.

All right, I thought.  I'll try it from our data server.

AD Tools not installed.

SERIOUSLY?

Next stop, our old mail server.  I knew the tools were installed there.

ANOTHER machine that locked up when accessing the tools.

By this time I was cursing more than halfway under my breath.

I moved onto our Domain Controller—a twelve year old Dell Pentium 3 desktop with 512MB RAM. Ten minutes later I was finally logged in and able to reset my account.

Of course, just as I was getting ready to go back to my desk, one of the most annoying, clueless users in the entire company started pounding on the server room door. When I answered he said, "I can't get into my computer. I need you to fix this NOW."

Had he tried rebooting?  Of course not. That's too HARD.

And that's exactly what fixed his connectivity issue.

I work with fucking idiots.

And the day only went downhill from there.

Because I found this hi-larious!

That's my new mantra for work, since apparently I now have an attitude.

I'm going to use Heather McDonald as my inspiration. I love her. She has one of the best fake celebrity smiles in the business. Whenever I feel a "fuck you, you stupid, willfully ignorant cow" moment coming on, I'll think of Heather on the red carpet…

Assume you're the overworked, underpaid, and totally disrespected I.T. guy at your company for a minute. Someone has just told you:

"Brandon needs a new phone number in the 801 area code for his cell phone."

What would you do?

I called Verizon and, using the automated system changed his number. This was to happen two days later at the beginning of the billing cycle.

I let Brandon know this was happening, as well as the new number assigned to his device. So far, so good.

Two days later I arrived at work to find five emails (the first one timestamped 5:45 am), and several panicked voicemails from Brandon. His phone is dead. He's heading to the airport in 45 minutes to meet one of our directors, and she has no way of getting in touch with him.

It turns out that he needed to do the *228 thing for his phone to be reprogrammed with the new phone—a little bit of information that the Verizon automated system failed to give me.

Once he did that all was well.

The following day, I got an email from Brandon asking if I could have his old number forwarded to the new one. "I've had that number for the last ten years and all my contacts know it."

Of course, when dialing that number now all they got was, "This number has been disconnected."

I told him I didn't think that could be done. We gave up that number when we transferred it.

Bzzzzzzt! WRONG answer!

In other words, "I don't understand the meaning of the word No," which has pretty much been the attitude of anyone in management regarding technology since I started doing this support crap.

Well, Brandon rattled some cages and soon the CEO's admin assistant was standing at my cube telling me she knew how to do it. "I used to do it at the law firm all the time."

Against my better judgment—because I had other fires burning just as hotly that needed attending to—I let her take care of it.

The day went from bad to worse. The admin assistant brought me back into the process at several times because she didn't have the authority to make changes on the account, and the moment I heard the Verizon rep say "deactivate white iPhone" I knew we were in trouble.  I told the rep to stop the process and that we would be back in touch once everything was sorted out. Short version: the admin managed to get the CFO's brand new iPhone disconnected (which I had just delivered that morning) and Barry's old number reassigned to the CFO's old Blackberry.

We have 20 cell phone lines on our account. All of them are in use. What the admin assistant couldn't understand was that in order to reactivate the old number (and retain the new one) one of those other phones would have to be disconnected—which we couldn't do. "They put the old number back on the account. We just have to go down to the Verizon store and get a new sim card, right?"

I got on the phone with Verizon several minutes later, this time speaking to someone for whom English wasn't her second language, and explained the situation. She told me she could get the now-disconnected iPhone reconnected back to its original number and would then disconnect Brandon's original number.

The bottom line was the company needed to add a line in order to have Brandon's old number automatically forward to his new one.

Jeezus.

The Verizon rep told me it would take about 30 minutes to get this sorted out, and since I was already on overtime and at this point wanted to go home and get as far away from this bullshit as possible, I told her to just take care of it overnight and leave me a voicemail when it's sorted. I emailed all the interested parties in this drama and told them it would be fixed by morning.

Two fatal errors occurred in this process, one that I refuse to own, and one I will take responsibility for:

1. No one bothered to tell me that his old number needed to remain active. If they had, I could've advised them that we needed to add another line.

2. I should never have let the admin assistant get involved.

I arrived at work this morning to find a voicemail from Verizon saying that everything had been sorted out.  The white iPhone had its original number restored, and that Brandon's old number had once again been disconnected. I checked the iPhone and it was working fine. I returned it to a very happy CFO as soon as she got into the office and even provided a little Apple training while I was there.

After receiving approval from the COO to add another line to our account, I called Verizon sales and—after explaining this whole sordid mess—added the line and arranged to have Brandon's old number assigned to it.  We paired it with the CFO's old Blackberry that the iPhone had replaced—correctly this time—and it worked. I set up call forwarding, tested it, and all was right in the world again.

Or, apparently not.

I got called into my boss's office this afternoon and was told I had "an attitude problem" whilst trying to get this resolved. I'll admit I was flustered, and more than a little pissed off that the admin assistant had so totally screwed things up, but somehow it was all my fault that that this happened because I (as the CEO told my boss) hadn't considered the "business consequences" and the "potential loss of thousands of dollars" because the number had been changed without anything being put in place in regards to the old number.

Please. "Thousands of dollars?" Dude have you been smoking? Never mind. This is Colorado. I already know the answer.

I'm sorry. I'm not a mind reader. I did what I was told: "Brandon needs a new phone number in the 801 area code for his cell phone."

I was so angry when I left work today I could feel my heart beating in my chest. I'm calmed down now (lots of hugs and snuggles from my Bubba when I got home helped), but one thing is abundantly clear: I know is that this job and the petty egos there are not worth having a stroke over.

After we get moved, I'm looking for a new job—in earnest. I've had enough of this batshit and am ready to be done with it. For all the complaining I did about my last job in Phoenix, it was never this bad, and now I can easily understand why my former boss at my current company walked last April.

It's funny, but with all the preparations for moving, I realized the other day that in the past whenever I've moved to a new city, my initial living arrangement—and initial job—seldom lasted more than a year. The upside to that is the second of each of those two items have always turned out great.

In another lifetime, before I stupidly heeded the advice of people who said, "You're so good at fixing computer problems, you should do it for a living," I was an architectural drafter. I'd been doing it professionally for about 19 years until one day burnout descended and I reached the point where I didn't care any more if commercial toilets were spaced at 2'-6" or at 2'-8" on center. (FYI, there are whole government agencies and regulations devoted to that very issue.)  I hung up my scales, adjustable triangles, mechanical pencils, drafting brushes and electric erasers and said, "Enough." (To be honest, at that point it was actually more of a simple matter of walking away from AutoCAD. Those other tools had been sitting pretty much unused for the better part of a decade.)

But within a few short years, I came the realization that for all my mad troubleshooting skills, my new career as a I.T. professional was really devoid of any true satisfaction. Yeah, it was fun to figure stuff out and fix the shit, but dealing with the constant whining from the willfully ignorant day in and day out has only grown more and more tiresome as time has passed.  And no matter how many times I would have to redraw something because a client didn't know what he wanted until he saw what he didn't, when I was intimately involved in the architectural field I felt like I'd accomplished something at the end of the day. When the fruits of my labors were finally built—even if they weren't my own designs—I felt tremendous pride in knowing that I had contributed to something tangible and worthwhile.

There's none of that in I.T. support. It's been my experience these past 14 years or so that you're viewed—and treated—as a necessary evil by most companies and I often describe my profession as changing diapers and making sure that no one's sippy cup is ever knocked over.

But every now and then I get the rare opportunity to put my old skills back in use. The company where I'm currently working has a workable floor plan of the main offices in Visio that we use to maintain seating charts, but they had nothing for the Colorado Springs office. One of my long-term projects was to remedy this, and my daily workload has finally slowed enough where it was practical to begin this project.

To that end, last Friday I spent the day hiding out at our satellite office, amazed that I still knew how to properly measure a building.

Even more amazing was discovering yesterday that I still knew enough AutoCAD to actually translate all my measurements into a working drawing!  It really is like riding a bicycle. As long as I didn't think about it too much, my fingers almost knew instinctively what commands needed to be entered, even if the version of the program I was using was several generations removed from the one I'd originally mastered.

And you know, yesterday was one of the best days I've had in years while at work.

I know my general architectural knowledge is a little rusty, and it did take me an entire day to create a single floor plan, but I'm toying with the idea of seeing what would be involved in getting back into architecture and abandoning all this PC troubleshooting bullshit.

Unfortunately, as long as the economy is in the toilet, there isn't enough new construction happening to make this fantasy a reality.  But a boy can dream…

It seems that every day at work has a different overriding theme. Yesterday it was printers. Today it's passwords. On password days, it's like a cloud of st00pid descends upon this office and everyone simultaneously forgets the same passwords they've been using for the last three months.

First thing this morning I had an email from user #2 telling me user #1 had been locked out of her account because it wasn't accepting her password. I reset the password to our standard default, checked off User must change password at next logon in Active Directory, and emailed the new, temporary password to #2 to pass on to #1 since #1 wasn't answering her phone. Quelle surprise.

User #2 acknowledged the email and told me she'd passed on the information. Two minutes later I get an urgent email from user #1's supervisor telling me that #1 still couldn't get in. I wrote him back, including the new password again in case she there had been some miscommunication.

Five minutes later, I get another email from the supervisor telling me that it didn't work and she had now been here for 90 minutes and unable to do any work, blah blah blah.

At this point, I got up, walked over to user #1 and noticed that she had the temporary password written down on a slip of paper—minus one character.

I looked at her after seeing this. "That's what they both told me it was."

TWO SEPARATE PEOPLE had passed on the password incorrectly, even though in both emails, I had put that password in 16 point, bold type. I pointed this out to her (loud enough that her supervisor could hear it) saying, "It helps if people pass along the correct information."

Naturally, once she typed in the correct password it let her in and prompted her to select a new one. I hung around long enough to make sure she got it changed, and then went back to my desk. I checked the emails I'd sent to verify that I hadn't left out that one character.  Nope, it was there.

Five minutes later I received an email from a different user. "I'm locked out. It's not taking my password."

I work with IDIOTS.

 

Otherwise known as one step closer to the weekend.

Sad, isn't it? This is what my life has become; simply making it through each weekday—not really giving a rat's ass about anything that happens between the time I leave the house in the morning until I get back in the afternoon—in order to just get to the next weekend.

I'm sure this isn't unique, but I feel like I'm wasting my life. Welcome to America in the 21st Century.

So much for all the opportunities the recruiter told me she had yesterday. Turns out she was only collecting resumes. The entire interview lasted less than ten minutes. "We have several things we're working on at the moment and if you're a good match for any of them I'll be in touch."

Blargh.

And she couldn't understand why I didn't want to move into the I.T. Director position.  I said, "Look, I'm a desktop tech. I love being a desktop tech. I hope to be doing desktop support until I retire." I don't expect to hear anything more from her, and frankly, that's okay. I also got in touch with another one of the recruiters I worked with last summer to let him know I was on the market again.

I didn't have quite as much luck contacting the firm that placed me where I am now. No one there was answering their phones and the emails I sent to the recruiter who handled my account were getting bounced back.

At least it was a nice day off. And I got to have lunch with my man.

 

So I'm being hired by the company I've been contracting at since August.

This is a good thing, but I'm not going to be popping any champagne corks over it.

Why? Initially I thought my boss had offered me only slightly less than what I'd been making in Phoenix. I knew asking for that amount would never fly, but this was an acceptable compromise. Sweet!

But when the head of H.R. called to confirm the amount, it was obvious that there had been a miscommunication.  What I had heard as a yearly offer (because up until this time we'd been talking in yearly terms) was actually the cents portion of an hourly salary that translated to about $7000 a year less than I was making in Phoenix.

While it's $2.50 an hour more than I'm making as a contractor, the amount they were offering was still way below the "low average" for my job description in this region.

My boss was positively verklempt when this came to light. He accepted full responsibility for the misunderstanding and supposedly went back to management and tried to negotiate a higher salary, but returned empty handed. Afterward he admitted that he'd pretty much blown this year's budget by hiring the outside network consulting firm to manage our servers and infrastructure, not anticipating when I initially came on that I'd work out as well as I did and that they'd actually want to hire me.

He said he knew I was worth far more than they were offering. He also said the COO knew I was worth far more than they were offering.  And he understood completely if I wanted to cut my losses and leave.

I told him I wasn't going to do that.

So why didn't I refuse the offer that inspired the title of this post?  Several reasons. As is obvious to anyone who's been looking for work this year, the economy sucks, and finding another job—much less one that pays what I want—right now would probably be next to impossible. It took me nearly three months to find this gig, and it was simply by sheer luck that it happened when it did. In other words, "a bird in hand…"

And as long as the Republicans are in control of Congress (or god forbid, somehow manage to capture the presidency next year) the job situation is not going to get any better. When the GOP Clown Car views gay marriage as a greater threat to the nation than the tanking economy, you know they have no intention whatsoever of doing anything to improve it.

Secondly, I hate interviewing. Based on how the process went for me numerous times last summer, I don't want to have to go through that nightmare again any time soon.

And lastly, despite the horrible commute, this really is a decent place to work. It's not a hospital, I can wear jeans every day of the week, and there's no on-call nonsense. I start receiving benefits immediately (no 90-day wait) and my boss hinted that he may be able to do something about my salary when he gets a new budget in February. Not holding my breath, but I'm willing to at least give him the benefit of the doubt.

Praise the Flying Spaghetti Monster and all of His Noodly Appendages, it finally happened.  I got a job.

Hopefully this will be a decent place, not requiring me to immediately reach for the abort button.  It's healthcare related, but it's on the insurance side of things (no hospitals involved), and it sounds more or less like what I was doing at my last position.

Speaking of my last position, I secured this gig through the same company that had placed me there those many years ago.

This is another emergency placement that supposedly has only a 30-day life expectancy, but the recruiter stressed that it could turn into something more because the client was looking for "a good fit; someone who understands the meaning of customer service." Apparently the last person they had in there was expressing her problems with the customers to the customers, instead of sharing them among the tech staff and anonymously on blogs (cough, cough).  In addition, the paperwork I signed indicated it would last through the end of September, so even if this doesn't go permanent, it relieves the financial pressure I've been feeling and will keep the wolves at bay.

Before the call came in this afternoon, I had even gone so far as to run up to our storage unit and open nearly every fucking box to find the elusive Dell laptop I had stashed away, as well as the original boxes for my camera and lenses in hopes of extracting some much needed cash via Craigslist.  Now it appears that will be unnecessary. I don't mind parting with the Dell; I knew it would be much more difficult to let go of the camera.